The article explains how several Gulf rentier monarchies have managed to create highly profitable and well-managed state-owned enterprises (SOEs), confounding expectations of both general SOE inefficiency and the particularly poor quality of rentier public sectors. It argues that a combination of two factors explains the outcome: the absence of a populist-mobilizational history and substantive regime autonomy in economic policy-making. The author concludes that it is necessary to rethink the commonly accepted generalizations both about rentier states and, arguably, about public sectors in the developing world.

No abstract

d i e g o g a m b e t t a a n d s t e f f e n h e r t o g

Theories about the politics and economics of resource-rich or “rentier” states have been around for almost four decades now (Mahdavy 1970; Beblawi 1987; Chaudhry 1997; Humphreys et al. 2007). Political scientists and economists have argued that rents have a negative impact on levels of democracy (Luciani 1987; Ross 2001), on the quality of institutions (Chaudhry 1997; Isham et al. 2005), and on economic growth (Sachs and Warner 2001). Although much debate has been conducted over these macro-correlations, far less attention has been devoted to the causal mechanisms behind them. There is still no unified theory of rentier states, and the micro-foundations of rentier systems in particular have gone largely unexplored.

The 'rentier mentality' has been a key concept in rentier state theory since the 1980s. It posits that wealth distribution by government breaks the link between effort and reward in society, thereby undermining the society's work ethic. Rentier citizens are also expected to be indifferent to collective political action, obviating the need for a strong national myth. Due to high per capita rents and late state formation, GCC countries are usually seen as classical rentier states; their citizens should evince these attitudes particularly strongly. Existing literature investigating public attitudes in oil-rich countries, however, either leaves out GCC countries or focuses on oil countries in general, with mixed results. This article brings together survey data from a range of sources to investigate rentier mentality hypotheses in the GCC more systematically. It shows that many GCC citizens do indeed evince rentier attitudes when it comes to concrete personal choices and expectations in the economic realm-but at the same time, a disproportionate share of them claim to be in favour of hard work, competition, and a small state on the abstract level. Regarding politics, levels of interest are unusually high, but this is coupled with high levels of loyalty and confidence in government. These results mean that while some aspects of rentier mentality are indeed prevalent, other attitudinal predictions of rentier state theory do not hold up. I speculate about the reasons for this.