The Middle Class and Political Challenges to the Saudi Government

Almost all sociologists agree that the new middle class has played a significant role in the new social movements in terms of ideology, planning, organizing and leadership. Since the 1970s onwards, the new middle class in Saudi Arabia has grown significantly because of certain developments and modernization in communicative, economic and educational structures and alike. The main hypothesis of this writing is that since the second half of the 1980s, particularly since the 1990s onwards, this class has posed serious challenges to and sociopolitical criticisms of the Saudi government. These challenges have led, on the one hand, to the expanded political and social consciousness among people of the government's inefficiency and corruption and on the other hand to a number of political, though limited, reforms. Despite the members of groups belonging to this class in Saudi Arabia are not uniform, they share the belief in the necessity of conducting political reforms, establishing democratic institutions, serious battle against corruption, autonomy of the judiciary and separation of powers. In this paper, the main political challenges to the Saudi government on part of the new middle class, the limited political reforms that have been conducted and briefly the reasons for the limited nature of reforms are explained.