Religious Obstacles to Democratization in the Middle East: Past and Present*

According to practically all global indices of political performance, the Middle East, which is defined here to include the Arab world plus Iran and Turkey, stands out as a poor performer. Transparency International ratings indicate that corruption is much more prevalent in the Middle East than in the OECD, the club of economically advanced democracies. The Middle East also scores low in the World Bank’s rule of law index, and in the civil liberties index of Freedom House (Table 1). There are variations within the Middle East, which are themselves intriguing. Turkey’s ratings stand roughly mid-way between the weighted averages for the OECD, to which it belongs, and the strikingly low rankings of Iran and the Arab League. With respect to the rest of the Middle East, Turkey looks politically advanced; by the OECD gold standard, it looks corrupt, misgoverned, and repressive. Turkey’s intermediate status reflects the progress it has made in recent years (Figure 1); until even a decade ago, in terms of political performance it looked more similar to Iran and the Arab League than to the OECD. This improvement in relative performance provides room for optimism concerning the future political trajectories of Iran and the Arab world. It also provides an analytical reason for lumping Turkey with Iran and the Arab world in