Do experts rationalize and legitimize authoritarian governance? Although research on expert actors in contexts of democracy and international governance is now extensive, scholarly work on their role in authoritarian settings remains limited. This article helps open the black box of authoritarian decision-making by investigating expert advisers in the Arab Gulf monarchies, where ruling elites have enlisted them from top universities and global consulting firms. Qualitative fieldwork combined with three experiments casts doubt on both the rationalization and legitimacy hypotheses and also generates new insights surrounding unintended consequences. On rationalization, the evidence suggests that experts contribute to perverse cycles of overconfidence among authoritarian ruling elites, thereby enabling a belief in state-building shortcuts. On legitimacy, the experiments demonstrate a backfire effect, with experts reducing public support for reform. The author makes theoretical contributions by suggesting important and heretofore unrecognized conflicts and trade-offs across experts’ potential for rationalizing vis-à-vis legitimizing.

中文翻译：

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国王的顾问：专家、合理化和合法性

专家是否使威权治理合理化和合法化？尽管现在对民主和国际治理背景下的专家行为者的研究很广泛，但关于他们在威权环境中的作用的学术工作仍然有限。本文通过调查阿拉伯海湾君主制国家的专家顾问，帮助打开威权决策的黑匣子，那里的统治精英从顶尖大学和全球咨询公司招募他们。定性实地考察与三个实验相结合，对合理化和合法性假设提出了质疑，并且还产生了围绕意外后果的新见解。在合理化方面，证据表明专家助长了威权统治精英过度自信的不正当循环，从而使人们相信国家建设捷径。在合法性方面，实验显示出适得其反的效果，专家减少了公众对改革的支持。作者通过提出重要且迄今为止未被认识到的冲突和权衡专家在合理化与合法化的潜力方面做出了理论贡献。