An opposition group's inclusion in or exclusion from the formal political sphere, and the SoCs within which a group acts, influence the incentives that opponents face when deciding whether or not to challenge incumbent elites. As part of their role in expressing and relieving popular dissatisfaction, included opponents are allowed to challenge the regime. Thus, they pay lower costs of mobilization than illegal opponents do. However, in return for this privilege, their demands are constrained. Legal opposition groups must balance the restrictions of incumbent elites with the desires of the popular constituencies, moderating their policy demands. They must also mobilize enough opposition to relieve popular pressure while not allowing it to create a significant threat to the incumbent regime. These elites pay a high price if they create unstable situations that political opponents from outside the system can exploit.

In contrast, illegal opponents face higher costs for mobilizing popular protest than their legal counterparts, but they are more capable of capitalizing on the increased discontent that accompanies prolonged economic crises. Unlike included opponents, illegal groups prefer to mobilize in conjunction with legal opposition groups rather than to mobilize independently. The two sets of opposition groups have some important diverging interests. Consequently, opposition elites' decisions to exploit economic crises and press political demands depend as much on the interactions between these two sets of opposition forces as they do on the relationship between each opposition group and the government.

Authoritarian leaders not only make the rules, they play by them as well. This stands in contrast to conventional wisdom, which holds that formal institutions make little difference in autocracies. When kings, dictators, or presidents in closed regimes find themselves facing down their opponents, the expectation is that anything goes. The leaders can use a variety of means to stay in power: co-opting the willing; imprisoning, torturing, or killing their adversaries; diverting public attention to external conflicts with international rivals; and occasionally promoting political liberalization. Very little is said, however, of the formal mechanisms they use, particularly the creation of various institutional structures that spell out the rules of the game by which both opposition and incumbent elites should play.

Yet, these rules matter. Incumbent elites do try to repress, appease, and divide and conquer their opposition, as we have long known. They throw some into prison, only to release them decades later; they jail others in the hope of bringing them out much more quickly as changed men (and yes, usually men) who have gained a gloss of legitimacy that only imprisonment can bring, and yet have often lost their spark; and they appease others with ministerial portfolios, fine cars, and fancy wine. At the same time, however, they also make important choices over who is or is not allowed to play the formal game – forming opposition parties, opening offices, publishing newspapers, and calling conferences.

Politics is rarely, if ever, a two-player game. Multiple opponents vie with one another, as well as with the state, over power and resources. They are motivated by competition as well as by the need for cooperation – keeping a careful eye on each other while simultaneously attempting to gain support and assistance through a combination of cajoling and compromise, threats and personal intrigue. This insight is not new; in 1588 Hurault recognized the state's ability to “divide and rule” with respect to Catherine de Medici in France. Similarly, Aristotle wrote that one of the strategies by which a tyrant could preserve his rule was to keep his subjects preoccupied with fighting each other. Clearly, determining when opposition elites are willing to mobilize the masses and make sustained demands for political change requires an examination of three factors: the relationships between opposition groups and the state, the relationships between competing opposition groups, and state elites' ability to manipulate these relations.

Yet, in the wide and disparate literature that examines “contentious politics,” the incumbents' ability to divide and rule, creating competition between the opposition groups, is not examined adequately.

This chapter explores how cost structures in the unified SoC affects the level of contestation between opponents and the ruling elites. Government–opposition relations in the unified SoC are consistent with the conventional wisdom: As governments become weaker vis-à-vis their opponents, the opposition is more likely to demand reforms. In prolonged economic crises, then, the opposition is increasingly willing to challenge the government as the crises continue. Furthermore, once moderates demand reforms, they remain willing to do so (ceteris paribus) until their demands have been met. Groups with diverse interests thus join together to put pressure on the government.

The underlying logic is simple. Opponents in the unified SoC do not expect to be repressed more severely when they join with more radical groups to demand reforms than they are if they mobilize alone. Where all opposition groups have been excluded from the system, they have little to lose; and where all have been included, mobilizing in concert with other included opposition groups does not cross agreed-upon boundaries. Rather, moderate opponents should prefer joint conflicts to independent ones. The probability that they succeed in obtaining reforms should be higher in this case, and the costs of mobilizing may be lower. Because moderates can expect their demands to be met before more radical demands (recall our discussion in Chapter 1), they should continue to escalate the conflict until their demands are met.

Most would agree that authoritarian elites attempt to manage and manipulate their political opponents. They decide whom to appease with ministerial portfolios and whom to throw into prison. In addition to using such sticks and carrots, ruling elites manipulate the opposition through SoCs. Through the establishment of institutions and the selective implementation of policies, they allow some groups to participate in the political system while excluding others. Although this has generally received only passing attention, these SoCs have critical implications for the relationships between state and opposition elites, particularly during prolonged economic crises. SoCs shape relations among different opposition groups, as well as between these groups and the government. In doing so, they help determine when and if opponents challenge governing elites.

Yet, is there a systematic, theoretically coherent way to understand the intrigues of state and opposition elites? Can the potential for incumbents to respond with payoffs or imprisonment, or for opposition elites to compete or cooperate, be defined? This chapter argues that it can be. It focuses on how incumbents create different institutional arrangements through which they influence opposition elites' choices to form coalitions and press for political change. These arrangements vary significantly according to where incumbents draw the line between legal and illegal opposition groups. This chapter will set forth a framework within which to consider government–opposition relations. It will then examine the changing strategies in Jordan, Morocco, and Egypt.

Authoritarian leaders are seldom expected to play by the rules. In the prevailing wisdom, autocracies are characterized by unique leaders with different agendas, supported by slightly broader or narrower coalitions and justified through varied institutional façades. Thus, to understand authoritarian politics, we focus on the leaders – distinguishing the personalities and backgrounds of Stalin, Mao, Peron, and Castro; we contrast the foreign and domestic policies of Nasir and Sadat, Stalin and Khruschev; and we examine the differences between personalistic dictators, military juntas, and various forms of one-party states. However, in marked contrast to studies of democracies, which carefully distinguish parliamentary and presidential systems, analyze electoral rules and even sometimes the finer points of voter registration, we largely ignore formal institutions in authoritarian regimes. Even those turning their attention once again to competitive authoritarianism or “hybrid regimes” have dismissed formal institutions, arguing that institutions “are often weak and therefore easily manipulated or changed by autocratic incumbents.”

Yet, formal institutions matter in authoritarian regimes. They do so independently of the larger “rules of the game” that characterize “regime types.” They do so with regard to political participation, and they do so even in the Middle East, a region in which institutions are perhaps voted least likely to count. Authoritarian elites use institutional rules to create and maintain very different relationships between the state and political opponents and among various opposition groups themselves.

Easy money and regrets in Kuwait

The economic historian David Landes best summed up the precariousness of the rentier state: “Easy money is bad for you. It represents short-run gain that will be repaid for in immediate distortions and later regrets.” In the case of Kuwait, what we see is a state beset by two fiscal crises: an externally imposed decline in oil rents and an internally generated fiscal collapse brought on by the crash of the Souq al-Manakh. Exacerbating the money problems were persistent regional security issues arising from the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq war. These pressures culminated in the Iraqi invasion and coalition liberation of Kuwait in 1990–1991. If the fiscal crises of the 1980s had not already laid bare state vulnerability, then certainly Iraq's invasion did so. For Kuwaiti business, the decades of the 1980s and 1990s offered great economic peril but also significant opportunity to recast its relations with political authority. How it did so and the ensuing political ramifications challenge accounts of business–state relations based solely on structural incentives.

Turning to Olson's framework, we should expect Kuwait's non-encompassing business representation to respond to exogenous economic shocks by advancing particularist, protectionist policies. No doubt there is evidence of such rent protection during crisis, but this is a limited view. The wider political and economic consequences from Kuwait's crisis and the creation of what in many respects came to resemble a new business–state coalition follow in previous trajectories and flow from institutional features absent in the Olson schema.