In authoritarian regimes, legitimation mechanisms via institutions of democratic decision-making are absent. Under these circumstances, co-optation commonly substitutes for democratic participation by ensuring the inclusion of strategically important parts of the population into politics. This contribution conceptualizes co-optation as a mode of legitimation employed by ruling elites to widen or strengthen their base in the face of crisis. As recent examples from the Arab world demonstrate, stability might vanish quite quickly. In order to predict such events, a way of measuring the effect of co-optation needs to be found. This contribution adds an element of responsiveness to common regime centered perspectives that highlights the success or failure of co-optation as a strategy. Without assessing the “response” on the side of the individuals or groups being co-opted, any endeavor to measure co-optation lacks a decisive element determining the outcome of the strategy. This paper looks at co-optation from a conceptual perspective and embeds it into a larger framework of legitimation under conditions of autocratic rule that takes into account different types of legitimation. The concept is then applied to an empirical case in an in-depth case study of Jordan during the first half of 2011. A brief illustrative comparison to revolutionary cases in the Arab world gives an impression to what extent the empirical findings are representative of general trends of co-optation in the region. Both from a conceptual and an empirical point of view, this paper shows that differences in the subtype of co-optation correlate with the success and failure of the strategies in that an attempted strengthening of the regime base is more likely to be successful than a widening.
