that this region is home to countries with either oil- or labor-exporting economies (Beblawi, 1987; Chaudhry, 1997).

One aspect of the SC in MENA that has been emphasized is its dual nature as a political instrument that confers entitlements to citizens while also providing mechanisms for their control (Vandewalle, 2004). In fact, it has been argued that this SC has cemented a situation referred to as an "authoritarian bargain" in which citizens trade political participation against economic security and social services (Youcef, 2004).<sup>10</sup> Indeed, from the 1950s into the 1970s, the MENA countries' development model delivered economic dividends that allowed them to reach unprecedented economic prosperity (Elbadawi, 2005). Massive public investments in infrastructure, health, education, and protected state-owned enterprises (Yousef, 2004) allowed the MENA region to perform well economically.<sup>11</sup> However, when it came to citizen participation in decision-making processes, the situation was far from ideal.

In parallel to this economic flourishing in MENA, a "governmental gap" was developing giving the countries of the region a disappointedly grim face in terms of, not only political participation, but also respect for civil liberties and government transparency (Bromley 1994; Anderson 1995).<sup>12</sup> This gap was considered to be due to the combined effect of oil, social tensions, and geopolitical considerations (World Bank, 2003). High oil revenues have allowed some governments to ease the burden of relying on socially costly taxation to implement redistribution policies and support large internal security systems that would protect them and prevent popular mobilization (Bellin, 2004). Unprecedently high levels of security and military spending have also accompanied these apparatuses that became clearly coercive. Moreover, MENA authoritarian governments have always found external support, in particular, within the superpower rivalry and the oil supply security concern (Khalidi, 2004). In fact, it has been argued that these regional factors have played a much more significant role than any others, including religion and culture, in hindering democracy in MENA (Ross, 2001).

> 10 Desai et al. (2009) provide an econometric confirmation of this authoritarian bargain hypothesis using panel data on 80 non-democratic states during the 1975-1999 period including countries of the MENA region. In the context of our study that uses data only on MENA countries, an implication of this hypothesis is the existence of a negative relationship between Participation and Provision on which our analysis provides robust evidence.

> 11 Boosted by the large oil revenue intakes of the 1960s and 1970s, the MENA region's economies reached one of the highest growth rates in the world at the 5% to 6% levels. This extraordinary growth has however not been without raising concerns, in particular, because it was often the result of a highly positive rate of capital accumulation and a negative rate of total factor productivity (Page, 1998). A good example is Algeria where the implementation of the "industrializing industries" development model (Destanne de Bernis, 1966) led to the quadrupling of the rate of physical capital accumulation whereas the total factor productivity collapsed from 1.9% in the 1960s to -0.7% in the 1970s (Yousef, 2004).

> 12 MENA countries ranked very low in two important indices that measure this gap, namely, public accountability and institutional quality with values of respectively -0.78 and -0.32 while those of the OECD countries were 1.89 and 1.38 (Yousef, 2004). This gap turned out to be even wider for MENA oil-exporters (World Bank, 2003).

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