Government

Although Kuwait's government is based on its monarchy, the ruling family allowed the drafting of a constitution following Kuwaiti independence. The constitution provides for a fifty-seat national assembly. The members of the assembly are elected by the Kuwaiti population for four-year terms. However, in the first election only 10 percent of Kuwaitis were allowed to vote. Noncitizens, who formed the majority of the population, and women were not allowed to vote.

The relationship between the ruling family and the assembly has been turbulent from the start. The assembly has consistently criticized the ruling family for corruption, censorship, forbidding political parties, and insufficient attention to public services. Anytime the ruling family has considered the assembly noncooperative, the assembly has simply been dissolved. This occurred several times during the 1970's and 1980's. The lack of cooperation between the ruling family and the assembly has deflected the focus of the assembly from legislating productive laws and democratizing the country to criticizing the ruling family.

In the 1996 elections the voters, who were still limited to males over the age of twenty-one who could trace their family's residency in Kuwait to 1920 or before, elected the new members of the assembly. During the elections, 250 candidates competed for the fifty seats. Pro-royal family and progovernment candidates took the majority of the seats. This immediately caused the opposition in the new assembly to call for a crackdown on public corruption and nepotism. The crowned prince responded by appointing a cabinet, which included nine new ministers. The key positions of defense, oil, interior, and commerce and industry were given to non-Sabah family members.

In March, 1998, the government that had formed as a result of the 1996 election fell because of a no-confidence vote in its information minister, who was a member of the ruling family. However, the same government cabinet managed to remain in power by reshuffling its members. In May, Emir Jabir as-Sabah dismissed the National Assembly in a manner consistent with the constitution and arranged for a new election. Between the dismissal of the old government and the election of the new one, the emir issued a number of major decrees. In one of these, he gave full rights of Kuwaiti citizenship to women. These decrees were contested by the new National Assembly, after its election in July, 1999. The National Assembly did not succeed in overturning all of these decrees, but the role of women in Kuwait, in particular, was matter of serious controversy.

In the early twenty-first century, Emir Jabir as-Sabah, the thirteenth ruler of the al-Sabah family, remained Kuwait's head of state, despite suffering a brain hemorrhage in September, 2001. The emir had appointed the nation's prime minister, Crown Prince Saad al-Abdullah as-Salim as-Sabah, as well as the other governmental ministers. The health problems of the emir posed a serious problem for such a centralized national administration.