CAIS Public Lecture Series | States and Social Hierarchies in Kuwait and the Arab Gulf Region

How do autocratic regimes instrumentalize ascriptive identity to maintain political power?  I argue that by enforcing status boundaries for privileged groups, status rewards act as a club good for those in a regime's coalition. To demonstrate the empirical implications of these ideas, I document, analyze, and seek to explain patterns of elite continuity in Kuwait. To do this, I establish the pre-oil wealth and "rootedness" of Kuwaiti families and connect this status to post-oil measures of social prestige. Next, I analyze survey data from 13,000 respondents from across the region to show that local "rootedness" positively impacts the ability of Arab Gulf nationals to obtain services from their governments. Taken together, my evidence suggests that ascriptive identity associated with one's family lineage impacts economic, political, and social outcomes for citizens in ways that maintain historical rank hierarchies.

Speaker:

Lisa Blaydes is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and State of Repression: Iraq under Saddam Hussein (Princeton University Press, 2018). She holds degrees in Political Science (PhD) from the University of California, Los Angeles and International Relations (BA, MA) from Johns Hopkins University.