The Reformer’s Dilemma: Authoritarian Policymaking in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

When do authoritarian rulers adopt redistributive reforms, extending policy benefits beyond a circle of existing supporters? In their most dramatic form, these policy changes include major reform drives such as the Shah of Iran’s White Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, the Chinese Communist Party’s pursuit of socialism with Chinese characteristics under Deng Xiaoping, and the more recent Vision 2030 reforms advanced by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The substantive impact of these reform drives, and the more regular occurrence of smaller authoritarian policy reforms, indicates a need for theories of authoritarian policymaking that accommodate policy reform as well as the policy status quo. Existing depictions of authoritarian rule typically divide societies into two broad camps. Political insiders collectively offer regimes and rulers important resources for maintaining power, while enjoying privileged access to policymaking decisions. Outsiders, by contrast, are shut out from policymaking processes and typically on the losing end of policy decisions; rulers’ insider-provided political resources as well as repressive institutions keep outsider mobilization in check. Status quo policies reinforce these divisions and signal rulers’ loyalty to insiders. The passage of time puts pressure on the policy status quo, however, by generating new outsider constituencies, new grievances or capacity for mobilization among existing outsiders, or weakening the utility of resources provided by political insiders. Each of these developments threatens to undermine rulers’ strategies of political control. While policy reforms might signal rulers’ recognition of outsiders’ greater de facto power, any drive for reform risks destabilizing backlash or at best debilitating resistance from powerful insider constituencies. I term the resulting tradeoff—between address long-term threats of rebellion from outsiders and short-term threats of backlash from insiders—the authoritarian “reformer’s dilemma.” Existing frameworks for authoritarian policymaking provide unsatisfying explanations for how autocrats address this dilemma. Theories that emphasize rulers’ reliance on a “winning” coalition of insiders predict that rulers always defend the political and policy status quo—failing to explain documented examples of policy reform under authoritarianism. Other approaches suggest that rulers primarily respond to outsider mobilization with political reforms, offering new forms of political participation rather than direct policy concessions. Given the limits on opposition influence within such quasi-democratic institutions, however, political liberalization short of full democratization is unlikely to lead to major policy changes. Most common is the idea that rulers offer policy concessions whenever outsiders mobilize in opposition, an explanation with intuitive appeal but little direct empirical support. By contrast, I argue that policy reforms follow information shocks that signal future threats from political outsiders. A public signal of future, regime-threatening mobilization from outsiders encourages rulers to adopt policy reforms while discouraging insiders from impeding them—lest they be expropriated entirely in a regime-ending revolution. I identify a particular information shock likely to spur political action in a wide range of contexts: reference regime failure, or the overthrow of regimes that shares many characteristics with a given autocracy. Empirically, I first establish the plausibility of my theory using case studies of 21st-century policymaking in a long-lived authoritarian regime: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I draw on elite interviews with Saudi bureaucrats and business managers, unpublished dissertations by Saudi urban planners and local administrators, archival media coverage, government statistics, and polling data (including an original survey of Saudi labor-market attitudes) to establish relevant stakeholders and proposed policy reforms in two issues areas: a “balanced development” project to address spatial inequalities as well as the “Saudization” of the Kingdom’s heavily expatriate private-sector workforce. Balanced development represents a negative case for my theory—no reference regime failure, no lasting policy change. However, the overthrow of autocracies across the Middle East and North Africa during the Arab Spring uprisings (2010-2012) highlighted the potential threat posed by rising youth unemployment. This led Saudi rulers to redouble their efforts at imposing Saudization over the protests of influential business leaders, sustaining these policy changes long after the direct threat of unrest had passed—an indication of future-oriented fears rather than day-to-day observations of threats. Alternative accounts of authoritarian policymaking find little support in either case. To assess the generalizability of my claims, I test the association between reference regime failure (here, the failure of an autocracy in the same geographic region) and redistributive policy reforms in a global sample of post-World War II autocracies. Across a number of model specifications, I find that reference regime failure is associated with a substantively large and statistically significant increase in the likelihood of policy adoption. Alternative explanations, particularly the threat of unrest, do not consistently explain the adoption of new policies. This project demonstrates that policy reforms represent policy reforms represent a substantively important part of the authoritarian “toolkit” for maintaining power. It further indicates that these policies are adopted not in response to domestic demands but following external signals of future threats. This implies a need for a greater focus on political calculations and policy decisions within the authoritarian “executive”—despite the difficulties of acquiring data—relative to bargaining in participatory institutions or demands pressed by street protests.