- 著者
-
浜中 新吾
- 出版者
- 日本国際政治学会
- 雑誌
- 国際政治 (ISSN:04542215)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- no.148, pp.43-58,L8, 2007
A lot of dictatorship have collapsed and made a transition to democratic regimes late the Cold War. However, Middle Eastern states were never experienced with democratization wave. So that, there are scarcely any comparative democratization studies dealt with them. Today, we can understand some peculiar topics or indigenous logic of the Arab politics, because of being recently made advances in area studies of the Middle East. But we tend to think that comparative political research methods are not effective in understanding politics in the Middle East and do not help us to become familiar with it.<br>Lipset's thesis is revaluated and the most popular one that goes with relationship between economic development and democracy after Huntington's democratic third wave. Adam Przeworski and his collaborators tried to renew a modernization theory, then their works help restore confidence of general and comparative theory. However, there is still a paradox that even rich countries do not catch on the path of democratic transition in the Middle East.<br>The rentier state theory is used to explain this paradox why were not Middle Eastern countries democratized. This theory pays attention how much rent, natural resources like oil, natural gas, minerals with which states are able to ensure financial well being, gets support from many political economists. The rent also contains worker's remittance as well as official development assistance from foreign countries. So, a regime without resources may be categorized as a rentier state. A government with affluent rent does not have an incentive to liberalize own politics and societies because it needs not to impose a tax on its people, so the regime is easy to repress dissidents.<br>In this study, I formalize a model of the rentier state theory from Boix-Stokes Modernization model, and then attempt quantitative analyses. My formalized rentier model has a scope of rent seeking activity of governments with fertile natural resources. So the purpose of this research is to shed light on a general effectiveness of the theory as well as to deal with democratic transitions as time passed or not, the Large N Studies is adopt as my research design. The method of quantitative analysis is the Dynamic Probit Model, which Adam Przeworski developed.<br>The result of my study shows that enormous fuel rent tends to suppress democratic transition and promote stability of a dictatorship. But other natural resources and remittance rent have little to do with political transformation. The official development assistance dose not play a role of rent, seems to have a same effect of economic growth for democratization.