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[Servant Corps]

I have previously written this blog post for a certain blog I frequent, but it was not published. I really wanted it to be published so that I can receive critiques on it, because I'm not quite sure I believe this argument myself. Hence why I'm posting it here.
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"The truth is that the Arab Spring is something of a smokescreen for what is taking place in the world as a whole. Around the globe, it is democratic meltdowns, not democratic revolutions, that are now the norm. (And even countries like Egypt and Tunisia, while certainly freer today than they were a year ago, are hardly guaranteed to replace their autocrats with real democracies.)"---Joshua Kurlantzick,The New Republic
 
Joshua have made a statement that have been commonly accepted and not challenged in the West; that the "Arab Spring" (or the Jasmine Revolution, or the 2011 Arab Unrest or whatever name will be attached to these series of events) pits autocratic leaders against pro-democratic social movements. Such binaries however ignores the real existence of semidemocracies, the regimes that combine elements of both autocracies and democracies. To be fair, Joshua Kurlantzick mentions them as the "middle ground", "countries that have begun democratizing but are not solid and stable democracies", and argued that it was here that freedom declines were most pronounced, according to a Freedom House survey. But he only says that to argue that there is in fact an autocratic backsliding occuring behind the hubbub of the Arab Spring, a thesis contested by many bloggers. Nobody ever stop to consider whether certain regimes in the Middle East that had been overthrown were in fact this "middle ground"/"semidemocracies".
 
James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, in their 2002 research study on the causes of civil war, found that semidemocracies suffer more civil wars than that of non-semidemocracies, and reported that previous studies had found similar relationships of civil strife in semidemocracies compared to that of democracies and non-democracies. Fearon and Laitin argued that this is because regimes that are semidemocracies are actually "weak regimes, lacking the resources to be successful autocrats or containing an unstable mix of political forces that makes them unable to move
to crush nascent rebel groups". Previous literature in this field instead argued this was because an autocratic regime is more successful at repressing dissent rather than it actually being a proxy of state weakness. Regardless of the exact reason behind this relationship, the fact that this relationship does exist does indicate the care one must taken when calling someone an "autocrat". While it is reasonable to assume that an autocrat would lead an autocracy, it is less plausible to say the same in a semidemocracy purely because the leader of a semidemocratic country lacks the same amount of power as an autocrat (because the semidemocrat either leads an inherently weak regime or is somehow prohibited from repressing dissent as effectively as an autocrat would).
 
Therefore, I decided to check the basic assumption that autocrats did in fact fall during the Arab Spring. Using the latest version of the Polity IV database, I have examined the government of these Arab countries in 2009 (the last year that Polity IV covers): Bahrian, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen. These are the countries that, at time of post written, were hit by the Arab Spring the most. Bahrian and Syria were regimes that, at the moment, appear to have survived the Arab Spring, Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen were regimes that appear to have been successfully overthrown (which is defined as the leader of the State being de facto removed from office), and Libya is currently stuck in a brutal civil war between loyalists and rebels.
State      Government                                 Status of Regime
Bahrian   Autocracy                                   Survived
Egypt     Semidemocracy (since 2005)       Overthrown
Libya      Autocracy                                   Civil War
Syria      Autocracy                                   Survived
Tunisia   Semidemocracy (since 1987)        Overthrown
Yemen   Semidemocracy (since 1993)        Overthrown
 
About the only "autocracy" in danger of falling at this time of writing is Libya, and that is because it is currently suffering a civil war, where the rebels are receiving assistance from NATO. Bahrian is a special case, because one could argue that the regime only survived thanks to the intervention of the Gulf Cooperation Council, but it is unique due to having a Sunni ruler preside over a Shia population. A similar situation exists for Syria as well: a Shia ruler ruling over a Sunni poplation. But all semidemocracies that have suffered greatly from the Arab Spring at the moment have fallen.
 
I am not making any generalization or statement over inherent differences between semidemocracies versus autocracies, hence the "Yet" in my original post. For one, the rebels may prevail and the Libyan regime may soon collapse. But it's also because the Arab Spring is not yet over. The situation in Syria (or any other regime, for that matter) could worsen to the point where the current regime falls. Or the Spring could "spread" to other autocracies where it may have more successful in regime change.
 
What is important to realize however is that the Arab Spring have not successfully overthrown any autocratic regime yet, and at best, only overthrew regimes within an "middle ground" that weren't "democratic" but also weren't "autocratic" either. Such an realization should help to temper the rhetoric about the triumph of democratic protesters versus autocratic regimes. As of now, it's anything but.

[RedKing]

Excellent post. I'm familiar with the Fearon & Laitin piece as well as the Polity database, and I think that's an accurate model to bring up. Egypt, despite its level of political repression, was a hell of a lot more open than Syria or Iran. And now it's in a limbo state of being effectively ruled by a military junta with much of the hoped-for reforms either discarded or put on indefinite hold. It's a sad thing to see.

[Nadaka]

An autocrat that has mock elections is not a semi-democracy.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I hold that having a semi-democratic government is like being semi-pregnant. You are or you aren't. Both Egypt and Tunisia weren't. In any case, the millitary junta that holds Egypt at the moment was smart enough to stay out of the conflict to begin with, so I imagine they're aware of what will happen if they don't follow through on their promise of free elections. The next few months will tell, I suppose.

[Leafsnail]

I guess if you don't even need to bother with fake elections then you probably have a stronger position?

[RedKing]

If there's some decentralization of power and a modicum of civil society and institutions of power, then it's a semi-democracy.

Good examples would be:
Pakistan (technically a democracy, but heavily flawed with multiple centers of power)
Russia (technically a democracy, but heavily flawed with an single strong figure)
Jordan (technically a constitutional monarchy, but one of the more open and egalitarian monarchies in the region)

Egypt under Mubarak qualifies because there was some semblance of a judiciary, there were non-governmental organizations, there was a measure of decentralization of power.

You do have to look a bit deeper into the raw data though. The aggregate "polity" score is simply the democracy score minus the autocracy score, which can hide major differences.

For example, both modern Singapore and the United Kingdom from 1800 to 1836 have an aggregate score of -2. In the case of Singapore, the democracy score is 2, the autocracy score is 4. For the UK, it's democracy of 4, autocracy of 6. What you have in the case of Great Britain is a constitutional hereditary monarchy with a modicum of democratic representation. In Singapore, you have somewhat less representation, but the Presidency (despite having been unelected since 1993) is a non-hereditary position, which ranks lower on the autocracy scale.

I'd argue that the hereditary nature of the office maybe shouldn't have that much impact on the score in the modern era, although it makes sense that non-hereditary autocracies/anocracies are perhaps more prone to unrest, because they have no system of traditional succession or mandate as a kingship would. They'd also then score more towards the middle, which is in agreement with the premise that polities which score in the middle are the most prone to unrest.


The Polity Index is far from the only system that recognizes semi-democracies BTW.

[Zangi]

Interesting take on it... and it does explain some things...

I've always figured that Egypt had a rigged election or 2.... which would technically make it a democracy of sorts. El Presidente for life?