External Support and Persistent Authoritarianism in the Middle East

Abstract

Explanations for persistent authoritarianism in the Middle East invoke a plethora of domestic and international factors. Using non-parametric machine learning techniques, which remove researcher bias in model building and detect complex interactions between variables, on a large dataset of 17 Middle Eastern countries from 1962 to the eve of the 2010 Arab uprisings, we assess a broad range of existing and novel explanations. We find that foreign aid, particularly concessional lending, is crucial for authoritarian resilience, particularly above a certain threshold, and that repression, the Cold War, and external grants have secondary predictive power. Other prominent accounts, such as oil wealth, monarchical regime type, or Islamic heritage, show little effect. We propose an explanatory framework and call for complementary qualitative research to analyze possible mechanisms. These findings advance research on the politics of foreign aid and Middle Eastern authoritarianism and raise normative questions about the unintended impact of development finance.

Keywords: Authoritarianism, Foreign Aid, Repression, Middle East, Machine Learning