commonly gains exceptional political influence, which they can use to entrench themselves in office. Oil-rich monarchs have been overthrown in the past – including in Libya and Iraq in the 1960s, and Iran in the 1970s – but these transitions have failed to produce democracies. This does not mean that democracy activists in Libya, Bahrain, and other oil exporters will fail, only that they face a more difficult challenge than their counterparts in Egypt and Tunisia.

16. The qualitative literature on democratic transitions suggests that countries with denser networks of civil society organizations are likely to have more successful, and more peaceful, transitions from authoritarian to democratic rule. Having a denser network of civil society groups – e.g., Latin America during the democratic transitions of the 1980s and 1990s; Indonesia in 1998-99 – seems to help resolve or deter conflict among opposition groups, and helps them build stable coalitions that can run the government after a dictator falls.

17. In the Middle East, the oil-rich countries in North Africa and the Persian Gulf tend to have weaker civil societies than the oil-poor ones, like Tunisia, Egypt, and Jordan. Oil wealth, in undemocratic states, seems to crowd out independent civil society: studies of Algeria (Moore 1976) and Libya (First 1980; Vandewalle 1998b), and Angola (Messiant 2001) have suggested that oil-funded rulers have deliberately used their patronage to prevent independent social groups from forming. One reason that Iraq fell into civil war after the departure of Saddam Hussein was that his regime had systematically crushed the independent civil society organizations that populated Iraqi society in the 1950s and 1960s.

18. The prevailing governance indicators in MENA suggest the need to unbundle governance dimensions in the region, with a view to better assessing potential political transitions and conflict potential. A key question is to provide a dynamic interpretation of the interplay between institutions characterizing state-society relationships, rents, and conflict potential.

# **_Political Typologies and Prospective Transitions_**

19. A variety of contributions have been made concerning political economy typologies in the MENA region and their relationship to observed policy outcomes in oil-dependent settings, including differentiating various types of autocracies and democracies.<sup>6</sup> In thinking about the prevailing political economies, and prospective transition challenges of MENA resource-rent dependent countries in terms of development and diversification policies, we argue that it is useful to arrive at analytical typologies through dimensions that both capture the orientation and ability of political economies to pursue more ―ideal‖ development and diversification policies leveraging resource rents. The _Rents to Riches?_ (―R2R‖) framework argues that political economy contexts and corresponding operational implications can be grouped according to two dimensions (Barma et al. 2010).<sup>7</sup> While aspects of discovery and

> 6 Eifet, Gelb, and Tallrott (2002) present a typology of five political economies (mature democracies, fractional democracies, paternalistic autocracies, reformist autocracies, predatory autocracies).

> 7 The _Rents to Riches_ typology builds in particular on Evans (1989, 1995), Olson (1993), Lal and Myint (1996), Eifert, Gelb, and Tallroth (2002), and Kohli (2004).  With respect to Eifert, Gelb, and Tallroth (2002), we argue

8