Gulf Parliaments

Are you suspicious that all these Parliaments in the Persian Gulf don't really mean anything? In CEIP's latest Arab Reform Bulletin, Michael Herb looks at their powers and says you're probably right. Here's his concluding paragraph:

"In short, with the exception of Kuwait, these parliaments have only modest powers. Any progress toward democracy in Bahrain, Oman, and Qatar will require constitutional revisions to expand parliamentary powers while maintaining a tradition of relatively free elections. In Kuwait, the Parliament already has the power to mount a very serious challenge to the primacy of the ruling family—it could simply vote no confidence in every minister until the ruling family surrendered and allowed the Parliament to select the cabinet itself. There is no prospect of this occurring anytime soon, but it suggests that the barriers to democratization in Kuwait, unlike elsewhere in the Gulf, do not lie primarily in its constitution."