Selective universalism in Gulf social protection: a model family analysis of citizenship stratification in Qatar and Saudi Arabia

Abstract Gulf Cooperation Council welfare states remain absent from comparative welfare regime typologies, although they combine high social expenditure with extreme within-country stratification along citizenship lines. This paper applies the Model Family Approach to Qatar and Saudi Arabia, drawing on original programme-level data collected through the Minimum Income Protection Data Collection Template. Income packages are constructed for citizen and non-citizen households across five family profiles and four earnings levels. The protocol is extended with Monte Carlo simulation ( N = 10,000), Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition of a new Citizenship Welfare Gap indicator, Theil index decomposition and principal component analysis with hierarchical clustering. For families with children, the Citizenship Welfare Gap reaches 174 percentage points of the poverty line in Qatar and 111 in Saudi Arabia. Decomposition attributes 77.2 per cent of the Qatar gap to policy exclusion, whereas 66.0 per cent of the Saudi gap reflects cost-burden differentials. Cluster analysis positions Gulf systems in a separate regime space, distinct from social democratic, conservative-corporatist and productivist groupings. The findings supply programme-level evidence for a candidate regime category, the selective-universalist rentier configuration, offered as a hypothesis for testing across the full Gulf Cooperation Council rather than as a settled classification..