From Vox: The unsexy truth about why the Arab Spring failed

In 2305 - and to a lesser extent 2306 - were discussing democracy. In passing I mention that we seem to be going through an occasional period where democratic governments are scaling back. A leading researcher of democratization calls this a period of democratic recession. You democracies are reverting into oligarchies.

- Click here for: Facing up to the Democratic Recession.

Vox attempts to explain this recession by looking at the fate of some of the government establ;oshed in the Arab Spring. The author argues that the lack of established and functioning institutions is one of the key reasons this is occurring. It helps illustrate a point we make in class about the governmental system established in the U.S Constitution. It is built up on institutions that were developed over British history. This allowed for a degree of stability, meaning they were able to survive. The countries in the middle east do not have institutions with such a history, which helps explain why they slid back into authoritarian military systems.

- Click here for the article:

In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak began preparing for revolution long before it came. In the three decades of his rule, he systematically ensured that no opposition party or civil society institution grew strong enough to challenge him. But in ensuring that no institutions were powerful or independent enough to threaten his rule, Mubarak also ensured that they were too weak to support a transition to democracy after he fell.

Mubarak stuffed the interior ministry with political loyalists rather than effective public servants, which allowed corruption and brutality to corrode public security. He turned the judiciary into a pro-regime puppet, which gave him a tool to persecute political opponents but left judges dependent and the rule of law weak. He undermined liberal opposition parties and tolerated the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood only enough to let him credibly claim to the world, "It’s me or the Islamists," using frequent crackdowns and careful electoral rules to ensure that they never got real governing experience.

The one institution that gathered strength was the military. Its role in politics expanded under Mubarak far beyond what his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, had permitted, with Mubarak using patronage to buy the military's loyalty as it grew more powerful.

. . . the conditions that Mubarak deliberately engineered to elongate his rule — an excessively powerful military, a weak opposition without governing experience, corrupt security services, hollowed-out civil society, and no effective democratic institutions — have all remained after his fall, and have undermined successive governments as much as they eventually undermined his own.

When you see that, it becomes clear that the real problem was never the degree to which individual protesters did or did not understand grassroots political organizing. That democratic transition isn't merely the absence of a dictator. Rather, it is the presence of democratic rule.

And democratic rule requires something a lot more important, if less obviously visible, than having a good-guy democrat at the top of the government. It requires the institutions of democracy: political parties capable of winning elections, politicians capable of governing, a bureaucracy capable of implementing that governance, and civil society groups able to provide support and stability to those institutions