Freedom 1/α Price of oil?

The Gulf state of Kuwait marks a milestone, where women have become candidates in Kuwaiti parliamentary elections for the first time. While the first Gulf Arab country to have an elected parliament, Kuwait only gave women the right to vote last year. Other neighbouring Gulf countries have mixed records on democracy, ranging from none (UAE) to universal suffrage (Bahrain and Kuwait).

Democratic reforms that looked set to accelerate since the Iraq invasion have slowed down. According to Thomas Friedman, the reason may be high price of oil. Friedman, in an article for Foreign Policy claims that the price of oil has an inversely proportional relationship with the degree of freedom in oil-rich countries like Iran, Venezuela and Russia. It is what he calls the "First Law of Petropolitics," and claims to show through a series of graphs how 'one can actually correlate rises and falls in the price of oil with rises and falls in the pace of freedom in petrolist countries.'

Some of the arguments are that rising oil incomes allow authoritarian governments to prevent civil society from strenghening and to erode democratic institutions by spending more on police and internal security. A high oil price allows leaders like Chavez and Ahmedinejad to ignore what the rest of the world thinks of their words and actions. The so-called First Law of Petropolitics also explains why Bahrain, a country that has limited oil reserves, is also one of the most democratic Arab nations.

But this doesn't exaplin why countries like Kuwait, which sits on immense oil reserves, have a considerably mature democracy, or why others with little oil like Egypt, Syria and Morocco continue to lag in democratic reform. There may be some truth to Friedman's ideas, but the reasons are more complicated than a simple correlation. For one, the US's Iraq experience assures countries like Syria and Iran that they can continue the way they are without Iraq-type repercussions. In that regard, it may have been a good thing for the region for the US to have suceeded in Iraq.