Explaining the Decay of Family Rule in Saudi Arabia

• In Event: Explaining Regime Decline and Transition

Abstract

The current king of Saudi Arabia, King Salman, became the ruler in 2015. Within two years his son Mohammad bin Salman (or MBS) had displaced two relatives in the line of succession to become the crown prince and had gone far to establish his personal control over the regime. This struck many observers as a major change in the nature of the ruling regime in Saudi Arabia. In this paper I explore the nature of this change, drawing on – and contributing to – the literature on the emergence of personalist rule in authoritarian regimes. I consider several explanations for the ability of Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) to apparently take personal control of what had been a regime characterized by multiple centers of power.

In making my argument I draw on several useful finding in the literature on authoritarian regimes, and in particular the literature on the emergence of personalist rule in regimes with a strong ruling group that, at least initially, constrains the ruler. The is a rich literature on the tension between personalism and group rule in authoritarian regimes by Beatriz Magaloni (2008), Martin Svolik (2012), Jennifer Gandhi and Adam Przeworski (2007), and Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright and Erica Frantz (2018). Many of their insights focus on regime types other than monarchies, but nonetheless I think that their conclusions have something to say about the dilemma of a crown prince who seeks to take control of a family regime.

In Saudi Arabia, the decay of family rule, I argue, occurred as a result of several factors, the most important of which is that over the past several reigns power has become increasingly concentrated in the king's court, rather than in the ministries. When his father came to power, MBS gained a great deal of authority in the king's court, authority that he could expect would evaporate when his father died. This gave MBS, whose power was entirely derivative of that of his father, a strong incentive to use his father's authority quickly and aggressively to disrupt the family regime.

In making my argument I employ a type of process tracing. I set out several distinct explanations for the decay of family rule in Saudi Arabia. I then examine the evidence for and against each of these explanations. I draw occasional comparisons, when useful, to the experiences of similarly constructed regimes elsewhere in the Gulf. While I am primarily interested in one case in this paper, the case has lessons for our understanding the ruling regimes in other Gulf monarchies and how they might change in the future. And the Saudi case provides some larger lessons for the literature on the emergence of personalist rule in authoritarian regimes.

Author

• Michael Herb, Georgia State University