Response Explicit in Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of Socio-Cultural Demands in Kuwait, Qatar and Oman

The concept of authoritarian responsiveness is a recent addition to authoritarian studies, itself a relatively young discipline. Emerging in the 1990s and 2000s from research on local Chinese politics, authoritarian responsiveness describes an undemocratic regime that actively monitors public debate and responds with policy changes when it judges there is enough societal pressure. Though scholarly attention has been directed to the concept, authoritarian responsiveness is still developing and its place in the discipline is still being established. This makes it an opportune time, then, to provide a deeper theorisation of authoritarian responsiveness. This paper does so by introducing the idea of ‘response explicitness’, which refers to the level of rhetorical connection an authoritarian state makes between citizens’ demands and its actions. Literature on authoritarian responsiveness often rests on an assumption that undemocratic governments responding to their citizens’ demands will want to be seen doing so. Or, with the idea of performative responsiveness, even when authoritarian regimes will or cannot respond, authoritarian officials can still have incentives to seem like they are responding. However, this paper challenges this assumption by demonstrating that there are times when authoritarian regimes can respond substantively to their citizens’ demands whilst obfuscating the fact that they have done so. Hence, the need for response explicitness and its distinction between implicit and explicit responsiveness. This distinction is important as often, when deciding how to respond to citizens’ demands, governments do not just choose what policy changes will occur but how transparent they will be about the reasons behind the change, or if government policy is even being changed. Response explicitness also distinguishes between implicit and explicit unresponsiveness. Although authoritarian regimes have incentives to disguise their unresponsiveness, they can also have reasons to be open to the fact they are being unresponsive to their citizens’ concerns. Thus, the goal of this paper is to develop response explicitness by exploring how a regime can be explicit or implicit un/responsive and the reasons behind these different approaches, in particular why: (a) an authoritarian regime may seek to be implicitly responsiveness and (b) it would want to be explicitly unresponsive. To do this, this paper explores case studies of socio-cultural contestation and regime responsiveness in Kuwait, Qatar and Oman. These countries have been chosen because the overwhelming focus on existing authoritarian responsiveness literature has focused on communist one-party states. Thus, the monarchies of Kuwait, Qatar and Oman are useful in determining the utility of authoritarian responsiveness outside of communist countries. The paper utilises data from fieldwork research carried out between January and June 2023 involving interviews with bureaucrats, activists, NGO members, academics, and ordinary citizens supplemented by other qualitative research sources, including newspaper archival sources.