On Wednesday this week, the Emir of Kuwiat Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah appeared on Kuwaiti state television to announce that he had dissolved his country's parliament and was seeking to schedule new elections. The Emir's actions again highlight not just the fragility of pluralist political structures in the Arab world, but their ultimate hollowness.

Kuwait has, on the surface at least, been at the vanguard of moves toward political pluralisation, establishing its Parliament in 1962. However, it has lagged behind many other Arab states in opening up both suffrage and eligability for election to women only during the last elections in 2006.

The current crisis stems from tension between the Parliament and Prime Minister Sheikh Nasser al-Mohammed al-Sabah and charges against the latter of mismanagement and the mis-use of public funds. Indeed, the Kuwaiti political system has been dogged with instability since 2006 with the resignation of multiple governments.

In addition, there has been on-going tension between the majority Sunni Parliamentary bloc and members of the country's disempowered Shi'a minority that rose to the surface recently when two Shi'a members of Parliament took part in a ceremony commemorating the recently deceased Hezbollah leader, Imad Mughnieh, who was killed in Damascus in February.

Ultimately, however, what this controversry reveals is the integral paucity of political institutions in Kuwait and, by extension, through the Gulf and the Arab world. The institutions of state that are designed to ensure at least a modicum of popular particulation in the running of the country, the Parliament, is manipulated, traded, or simply dissolved when it runs up against the interests of those exercising real power.

Power and influence of real consequence is still largely exerted through patronage networks and informal institutions, what analysts often refer to as the "shadow state", with the formal, visible institutions that we see as mere window dressing. This is the issue that is at the centre of political reform in the Arab world, a need to challenge the manipulation of public interest through faux institutions and to discover a means by which to invest integrity in them.

Until this happens, even Parliamentary systems such as Kuwaits that are almost half a century old, will continue to be manipulated and exploited for the benefit of few at the expence of many.