Hydrocarbon Citizens: How Oil Transformed People and Politics in the Middle East

Analysts have long attributed the autocracy that prevails in Middle Eastern oil-producing countries to an “authoritarian bargain”: in return for generous government-sponsored benefits, the people acquiesce to autocracy. Mazaheri finds statistical evidence that this is indeed the case, drawing on data from surveys conducted by the research network Arab Barometer between 2006 and 2019 and two online surveys of citizens of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that he administered in 2018. More interesting, however, are the distinctions among his survey respondents. Both poorer people and better-educated people tend to be less enthusiastic than others about government policy; older people and women are more appreciative of government largess. It is gratifying to see surveys and quantitative techniques deployed where only a few decades ago legal restrictions and poor data made such methods virtually impossible. One can quibble with this approach—Mazaheri’s confidence in the reliability of an online survey might be misplaced when digital surveillance is widespread—but the author is admirably transparent in describing his methodology and analysis, and in doing so supports a nuanced version of the conventional wisdom