The Middle East's Democracy Gap: Causes and Consequences

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FOUR YEARS AFTER THE LANDMARK 2002 Arab Human Development Report highlighted the yawning gap between global democracy and its comparative absence in the Arab world, that gap remains.1 Despite promises of reform by most Arab leaders, expenditure in the hundreds of millions of dollars on Arab democratization projects by bilateral and multilateral donors, and an increasingly assertive Arab media, authoritarian governments persist. By even the least demanding definition of democracy-a change of the ruling executive through a free and fair election-only Palestine and Lebanon even partially qualify.

The purposes of this article are to illustrate the extent of the region's democracy gap; …