Social Dictatorships : The Political Economy of the Welfare State in the Middle East and North Africa The Political Economy of the Welfare State in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract

Why have social spending levels and social policy trajectories diverged so drastically across labour-abundant MENA regimes? And how can we explain the persistence of social spending after divergence? This books sets out to answer both questions. Itdevelops a theory about the emergence of authoritarian welfare states, arguing that autocratic leaders need both the incentives and the abilities to distribute welfare for authoritarian welfare states to emerge. The former are shaped by coalition-building dynamics at the onset of regime formation while the latter are conditioned by the external environment. At the level of incentives, broad coalitions emerge in the presence of intra-elite conflict and the absence of salient communal cleavages and, if present jointly, provide a strong incentive for welfare provision. Conversely, a cohesive elite or salient communal divisions entail small coalitions with few incentives to distribute welfare broadly. At the level of abilities, a strong external threat to regime survival is expected to undermine the ability to provide social welfare in broad coalitions. Facing a ‘butter or guns’ trade-off, elites shiflpriority to security expenditures; only fiscal surpluses from an abundant resource endowment can provide the necessary resources to avert this trade-off. To explain the persistence of social policy trajectories, the author relies on two important mechanisms in the welfare state literature: ‘constituency politics’ where beneficiaries of social policies avert deviations from the spending path in the form of systemic reforms or large-scale spending cuts; and spill-over effects to unintended beneficiaries who can become important gatekeepers against path divergence.