Democratic contagion versus authoritarian resilience: Jordan’s prospects for change

In early 2011, the Egyptian and Tunisian calls to fight corruption, unemployment and political repression unleashed a frenzied debate amongst Jordanians about the extent to which their country would or should follow the revolutionary path. The reinvigorated, bottom-up, forward-looking Arab nationalism which swept the region from Rabat to Manama promised to initiate the kind of ‘contagion’ effect which the comparative politics literature had used to describe regional waves of democratization in other parts of the world. This paper presents a critical assessment of the strategies which the Jordanian Monarchy and its domestic and international allies employed in order to immunize Jordan as much as possible from the effects of political transitions occurring across the Arab world. It shows how the traditional mix of manipulating political institutions and processes, instrumentalizing the real or constructed differences between Palestinian and East Bank Jordanians as well as successful appeals for additional strategic rents have so far allowed the Jordanian regime to avoid making more than cosmetic concessions on political reform. At the same time, the following analysis will highlight the potential limits of this strategy in the face of an increasingly outspoken and diverse set of societal actors that demands robust action on the political, social and economic challenges which Jordan shares with many of the Arab countries that experience more profound political upheavals.