Abandoned Footnotes

Engines of Sacrality: A Footnote on Randall Collins’ Interaction Ritual Chains

2013-04-14T16:49:00.002+12:00

(A review of Randall Collins’ Interaction Ritual Chains, with speculative detours into the political theory of ritual)

I have previously encouraged people to read Randall Collins’ work (his infrequently updated blog, The Sociological Eye, is typically excellent), but it is only recently that I tackled his book on interaction rituals. And despite its forbidding title, seemingly promising a work on some technical topic in the sociology of religion, this is a very good book that deserves to be more widely read, especially beyond the disciplinary confines of sociology. (The title is in part a reference to Erving Goffman’s Interaction Ritual; but while “Interaction Ritual” is a great title, easily bringing to mind the rituals of everyday life with which Goffmann is principally concerned, the addition of chains makes the topic of Collins’ book a bit obscure, even if the idea is clearly explained in the work itself).

The book presents an ambitious theory of social action based on rituals and the emotions they amplify – so ambitious, in fact, that it is likely to seem absurd at the margins, much like rational choice theory sounds absurd to most people when pushed to extremes. Skimming the reviews of the book in sociology journals one finds a mixture of admiration and annoyance at the scope of the book’s claims, combined with a desire to put the theory in its place: interaction ritual chain theory cannot explain this or that phenomenon, or it exaggerates the importance of interaction rituals at the expense of meaningful communication or strategic action. But I tend to prefer theories that are ambitious and fruitful even if ultimately wrong, so I will not dwell overmuch on the book’s shortcomings here.

The basic ideas of the theory are deceptively simple, drawn more or less in equal parts from Durkheim, Goffman, and Mead. Collins starts with the idea of a situation of co-presence, or really any physical gathering. A situation of that sort turns into a ritual when those physically present focus their attention on specific people, objects, or symbols, and are thereby constituted as a distinct group with more or less clear boundaries. This obviously includes religious rituals, but also a vast number of interpersonal interactions, ranging from informal small-group conversations and sexual acts at one end to academic lectures, workplace meetings, conference presentations, political rallies, sports events, and other large-scale physical gatherings with a joint focus at the other end of the scale. With a bit of conceptual stretching one can even include here private rituals (e.g., praying alone, having a solitary cigarette or a cup of coffee before working or after working), with only one participant (these are treated by Collins as secondary rituals, where the focus of attention is on the symbols and objects whose meaning and value is produced in primary social rituals); and one may also wish to treat situations of joint focus but no physical co-presence – mediated interactions, in short – as rituals (though Collins claims, for reasons that will become clear below, that rituals without physical co-presence are far less likely to succeed qua rituals). As should be obvious, the word “ritual” is here being used in a very capacious sense, without reference to the “ceremonial” aspects of many of the activities that we would normally call rituals, or to any hard and fast distinction between the “sacred” and the “profane;” Collins stresses that he wants us to see ritual “almost everywhere” (p. 15). I have no particular problems with this; “ritual”, like “game”, is a family resemblance term. The more interesting move comes when we ask what a ritual is for.

A ritual, for Collins, is basically an amplifier of emotion. (I pause to note that an amplifier of emotion is not necessarily a generator of emotion, though it is not clear whether or not Collins sees any important distinction here). We are literally “pumped up” by a successful ritual – we experience a buzz, exhilaration, enthousiasmos, “collective effervescence.” A great lecture, a sports spectacle in a vast stadium, a great concert, a fire-and-brimstone sermon, the rituals of solidarity among small military units; these interactions motivate us, that is, they set us in motion, send us on our way to act beyond the immediate confines of the group situation (to read the book discussed in the lecture, follow the news of your sports team or music band and wear the team colors, proselytize for your sect, attack the enemy, and perhaps also to do the crappy jobs necessary to gather the material resources to do all of these things). Not every ritual is successful, of course (and not every ritual is equally successful for all participants, even when the ritual is generally successful – more on this point later); some ritual situations bore us, sending our attention wandering, and we end up feeling drained and depressed: think of a boring meeting at your workplace, or an awful lecture:

These rituals are demotivating; as Collins puts it, they sap our “emotional energy.”

Emotional energy (EE) is the all-purpose term Collins uses to talk about the emotions and moods that motivate (anger, righteousness, joy, pride, etc.) or demotivate us (depression, sadness, etc.). A successful ritual generates and amplifies motivating emotions, while an unsuccessful ritual does the contrary. Perhaps Collins’ most controversial claim is the idea that we are basically EE “seekers”: much (all?) of our social activity can be understood as a largely unconscious “flow” along the gradient of maximal EE charge for us, given our particular material resources and positions within the “market” for ritual situations (the set of ritual situations available to us). Our primary “motivation” is the search for motivation; or more precisely, motivation (our “motive power”) is simply a result of emotional amplification in ritual situations, so that we are propelled along “chains” of situations where we achieve high levels of EE and avoid situation chains where the contrary is the case. Thus, our ordinary “interests” cannot be understood apart from the ritual situations which shape and indeed construct them as genuinely motivating values; whether a person cares specifically for material goods, knowledge, or the welfare of some particular group depends on the ritual chains in which they participate and the way these rituals affect their emotional energy. As Collins puts it, “[h]uman behaviour may be characterized as emotional energy tropism. Social sources of EE directly energize behaviour; the strongest energizing situation exerts the strongest pull” (pp. 181-182; he adds that “individuals do not experience such situations as controlling them; because they are being filled with energy, the feel that they [are in] control … When EE is strong, they see immediately what they want to do.”).

In keeping with the “energy” metaphor, Collins argues further that rituals charge symbols, objects, and persons with value (or, in the case of unsuccessful rituals, drain them of value) that then circulate in other rituals (in “chains” of interaction rituals) and in “private” settings (in secondary rituals). Consider a powerful symbol for some group, like the cross. Its power as a symbol – its concentration of meaning and value, and thus its ability to motivate action – is directly related to the success of the rituals in which it is a central focus of attention (church services, prayer rituals, etc.); and it is more powerful for those who participate in these rituals regularly and who are themselves closer to the focus of attention. For these people, the cross becomes an increasingly powerful reminder of their bonds to one another, a genuinely “sacred” object whose violation can engender anger and around which other norms (prescribing forms of display, handling, material sacrifices, etc.) can also develop. At the same time, the cross obviously does not have the same motivating power for everyone (certainly not for every nominal Christian); its ability to awaken emotional reactions in people outside the ritual situation depends on how it circulates in the various “ritual chains” of people’s lives (whether it is something worn, referred to, exchanged, displayed in painting or art, etc.), and it decays with distance to the rituals that imbue the cross with value.

Thus, once an object or an idea (a “symbol” for short) is “charged” by rituals, it can serve to temporarily reinforce the identities of group members and motivate them to act in accordance with what they take to be the group’s values (defending the symbols that are central to the group’s rituals, for example), even when the group is not gathered together. By the same token, symbols will be inert for those who do not participate in the rituals that invest them with value and meaning; the value and meaning (or more precisely, the motivational potential) of any symbol is always relative to particular groups and their rituals. And, crucially, anything can become a powerful symbol for some group, given a sufficiently successful ritual: a copy of Aristotle’s Ethics or Marx’s Capital, particular places or animals, the image of a person like Hugo Chávez (a charismatic person being simply a person who has been charged with emotional energy in interaction rituals, though we can also think of people who are especially skilled at producing successful interaction rituals), the expression of particular opinions (e.g., the idea that global warming is a hoax or that shape-shifting lizards rule the world); the key point is that these objects and symbols both reinforce the bonds between group members and store reserves of motivation that people can draw on outside the immediate context of the ritual.

Stated more incautiously than I think Collins would, rituals are what I would call engines of sacrality: they produce sacred things the way a generator might charge a battery. There is no room in the theory for a distinction in kind between the sacred and the profane; a sufficiently powerful ritual can make anything that is a joint focus of attention into a sacred object, its sacrality merely the measure of its emotional charge for a particular group. And because rituals are omnipresent in human life, sacred objects and symbols are also omnipresent. (From this point of view, the idea that the modern world is especially “disenchanted” is basically a myth, though I suppose it is possible that rituals in the modern world are more “fragmented” – there are a multiplicity of symbols that become charged with emotional energy and value rather than a relatively small set of such symbols, including the symbol “god”). Or, as the South Indian poet Bavasanna once put it (as quoted by David Shulman):

The pot is a god. The winnowing fan is a god. The stone in the street is a god. The comb is a god. The bowstring is also a god. The bushel is a god and the spouted cup is a god.

Gods, gods, there are so many there’s no place left for a foot.

Though Collins does not say this, this view implies that ritual is prior to belief: belief “in” a cause, or a leader, or a god, or anything of the sort is primarily attachment to particular symbols of group membership that have been charged with value by powerful rituals, and should tend to decay in the absence of rituals “recharging” these symbols. (Collins suggests that a week is a good estimate of the half-life of the emotional charge of most symbols; hence the weekly services of churches or the weekly frequency of many intimate rituals, for example). Moreover, motivated reasoning should be ubiquitous, as indeed it seems to be; for the most part, we do not reason our way to most of our important beliefs, but acquire these through participation in communities with their interaction rituals (which may not look like obvious rituals; note that as long as we are participants in a successful interaction ritual, our focus is on the things the ritual is about, not on the ritual itself). Sociologists time and again find that many (most?) people join social movements before they acquire clear beliefs about issues; we then justify these beliefs ex post and defend them against perceived threats. And when a particular belief becomes entangled with an identity – when it becomes, in other words, a focus in some chain of successful interaction rituals, circulating as a marker of membership in some group– it then becomes more or less immune to rational argument. This is not to say that we cannot on occasion reason our way to various positions; but solid “belief” (in the sense that people most people have in mind when they say that they believe “in” something, ranging from Christianity to socialism) needs a lot of help from interaction ritual chains (understood as repeated, focused interactions that charge certain symbols with value). Belief without ritual and community is typically a fickle thing, discarded just as easily as acquired.

But how do successful rituals manage to amplify emotion and produce sacred objects and symbols? Here Collins draws a picture of human beings as homo saltans. Emotional charge or motivational energy is built up from entrainment: the micro-coordination of gesture, voice, and attention in rhythmic activity, down to tiny fractions of a second. Think of how in an engrossing conversation the partners are wholly attuned to one another, laughing and exhibiting emotional reactions simultaneously, keeping eye contact, taking turns at precisely the right moments, mirroring each other’s reactions; or how a sports event, a sermon, or a concert produces emotional energy through the rhythmic synchronization of the fans or congregants in call and response, or simply in dance. Or consider sexual acts, to which Collins devotes a long and very interesting chapter. Emotional amplification works everywhere through physical resonance; as we become progressively attuned to the physical activity of others, individual emotions (which are, after all, rooted in physical dispositions) come to be shared and amplified. (Consider the difference between listening to a recording of comedian in the privacy of one’s own room and listening to a comedian live while in a room of people laughing; or the fact that one can feel the need to cry when one is surrounded by people crying).

(We might even say that patterns of micro-coordination are the building blocks of macro-coordination: the larger circuits of collective action are nourished by the smaller-scale rituals of collective micro-activity. Though we are not there yet; we have not yet seen how to translate the micro-coordination characteristic of successful rituals to the patterns of macro-coordination that produces what we normally call power).

Reading these parts of Collins’ book on how successful rituals depend on high levels of emotional entrainment brought to mind some very old passages from Plato, who among the great philosophers is perhaps the one most keenly aware of the significance and power of ritual in this sense. Plato’s entire theory of education, for example, is premised on the idea that successful character formation depends on ritual chains that focus attention on the right sorts of symbols and are built up from precise attention to rhythmic elements; character education is inseparable from participation in “musical” rituals, and lack of participation – or the inability to become fully attuned to the rhythms of these rituals – can therefore weaken character. We are situational beings, requiring constant reinforcement of our character through ritual. As the Athenian Stranger in the Laws puts it, using rather more elevated language:

these forms of child-training, which consist in right discipline in pleasures and pains, grow slack and weakened to a great extent in the course of men's lives; so the gods, in pity for the human race thus born to misery, have ordained the feasts of thanksgiving as periods of respite from their troubles; and they have granted them as companions in their feasts the Muses and Apollo the master of music, and Dionysus, that they may at least set right again their modes of discipline by associating in their feasts with gods. … [A]lmost without exception, every young creature is incapable of keeping either its body or its tongue quiet, [653e] and is always striving to move and to cry, leaping and skipping and delighting in dances and games, and uttering, also, noises of every description. Now, whereas all other creatures are devoid of any perception of the various kinds of order and disorder in movement (which we term rhythm and harmony), to men the very gods, who were given, as we said, to be our fellows in the dance, have granted the pleasurable perception of rhythm and harmony, whereby they cause us to move [654a] and lead our choirs, linking us one with another by means of songs and dances; and to the choir they have given its name from the “joy” [chara] implanted therein. (653c-654a, Bury translation, slightly modified).

Or, as Collins puts it, more prosaically, “[i]n general, “personality” traits are just these results of experiencing particular kinds of IR chains.”

Collins follows four basically theoretical chapters (describing the interaction ritual model of social action and providing evidence of how rituals amplify and generate emotion) with five more applied chapters: on “private” thinking and its sources in interaction rituals (technically this is a “theory” chapter, though it felt more like one of the applied chapters), sex and the generation of sexuality in interaction rituals, situational stratification (class, status, and power), tobacco rituals and anti-rituals (which provoked at least one outraged response arguing that Collins is basically an apologist for tobacco companies), and a chapter on the production of “individualism” in the modern world. Not all chapters are equally successful (I liked the tobacco and situational stratification chapters best); and though Collins’ range of scholarship is wide, there is a tendency to look primarily to evidence from the USA and Britain and universalize it rather too quickly.

Rather than describe in detail these specific applications of the theory (though more on “power” in a minute), let me instead speculate a bit on how one might use these ideas to think about politics. Here are a number of potential topics that seem like they could benefit this framework, in descending order of epistemic certainty (later topics I’m less sure about).

Cults of personality. I’ve mentioned before that I think cults of personality emerge from interaction rituals. Not all of these interaction rituals will be successful, but it is enough if some of them do produce true believers – people for whom the leader is a sacred object (hardcore Chavistas, Red Guards, etc.) who can then act as norm enforcers and provide a core of supporters enhancing the mobilization of emotion in various settings. Collins’ theory also suggests that, as in many “power rituals”, the “frontstage” performance of worship does not imply anything much about behaviour outside of the ritual context (“backstage”), especially for those people who are at the margins of the ritual and are not energized by its performance. (The world is full of people who feign compliance and drag their feet, in Collins’ presentation). Indeed, the theory tells us precisely where to look for “preference falsification”: among marginal participants in forced rituals, especially low-status group members for whom the ritual is draining rather than motivating, and who derive their sources of motivation from other rituals (e.g., private “niches” of deep friendship in socialist countries before 1989, church services and other intense ritual situations, etc.)

More interestingly, I take it that the theory points to what we might call the “social construction of charisma.” Charisma for the most part does not precede successful rituals, but is built up by them. The charismatic leader is the person who both becomes emotionally energized by being the focus of attention in successful rituals, and is in turn charged as a sacred object by ritual participants. Thus, though some people will of course be more skillful than others at using ritual situations to amplify collective emotion (and hence will be more likely to be considered “charismatic” leaders), the mere fact that someone can compel attention may often be sufficient to produce an aura of charisma, especially if the rituals are otherwise successful (one thinks here of in retrospect fairly uncharismatic leaders like Stalin or Kim Jong-il). I suspect that more skilful producers of charisma are precisely the people who seem to have the knack for putting together already charged symbols produced in everyday interaction rituals into larger narratives and symbols leading to them; Chávez was a master of this art, effortlessly associating himself with “the people.” (By contrast, his chosen successor, Maduro, is not yet a sacred object, charged in an endless series of interaction rituals, since he has not yet been the focus of attention for long in successful interaction rituals; this appears as a lack of charisma, though it could yet change).
The mobilization of social movements. Along the same lines, we could understand the way in which social movements are built up in terms of chains of interaction rituals (Collins himself describes one case by looking at growth of social movements against tobacco). Movements grow as charged symbols come to link a larger set of groups whose rituals for the production of solidarity (WUNC displays, to use the terminology of the late Charles Tilly) are sufficiently compatible. (I think also here of Ernesto Laclau’s ideas about how the “people” in populism – its master symbol – is constituted by linked “chains of demands” – charged symbols that circulate among and link otherwise disparate groups).

The lens of ritual also emphasizes the tremendous importance of physical mobilization; ritual is far more powerful when people are physically together and aware of each other’s reactions. Movements that depend on “social” media can hardly match the power of movements that are forged in physical co-presence. Marches, campaign rallies, etc. are not important because they provide information, or even because they are costly signals of commitment (though they are sometimes that) but because they concentrate and amplify emotion, motivating people to keep going in sometimes quite difficult circumstances. (You don’t go to a campaign rally to learn a candidate’s position, but to show solidarity and renew your commitment to a cause or a person).

More generally, the lens of ritual provides a way of thinking about power as the capacity to mobilize or disrupt collective action rather than as the capacity to enforce orders in micro-situations or to produce calculable consequences in the world. Power in this sense is produced in micro-rituals of solidarity and cemented by strong emotional experiences that circulate in the form of charged symbols (like common experiences of war; hence the strength of political parties forged in warfare as against parties held together only by patronage). Collins mostly discusses power in terms of deference rituals or the ability to produce calculable consequences, but the theory he offers can provide resources for thinking about the sources of collective action more generally.
The (relative) insignificance of ideology. Taken in its strongest terms, Collins’ theory seems to suggest that ideology is generally unimportant. Whether a symbol acquires socially motivating value depends much less on its “generalized” meaning than on its place within chains of interaction rituals; we are not generally the dupes of rhetorical framings and persuasive strategies except in the context of successful ritual situations. (Collins notes, for example, that most advertisement seems to be unsuccessful at actually persuading people to buy products, and is mostly intended to preserve attention space against competitors). From this perspective, the decline of labor movements worldwide, for example, may owe less to any ideological changes (“persuasion” and “manipulation” taken in a very broad sense) than to (intentional or unintentional) changes in the conditions for the ritual production of solidarity. Chris Bertram recently mused on the occasion of Margaret Thatcher’s death that UK society used to be socially more class-differentiated (there were strong institutions where class solidarities and roles were produced) but is now less so (since these institutions have vanished), despite very low levels of economic mobility and higher levels of economic inequality; many people now “feel” that there is more equality. From the interaction ritual perspective, these changes are not the result of the working class becoming simply convinced of lies due to clever persuasive strategies by elites, but of the less central place of rituals and symbols reinforcing class solidarity in their lives. This is in turn due to any number of causes: laws that made labor unions more difficult to organize, structural changes in employment patterns, the decay of rituals of deference, the emergence of rituals focused on celebrities that cut across social class, etc.
The (near) impossibility of deliberative democracy. I confess that the interaction ritual perspective makes me feel pessimistic about the prospects for anything like genuinely deliberative democracy. Deliberation is itself a ritual situation, but one that seems particularly fragile and unlikely to produce strong commitments, unlike many other political rituals, since it is premised on disagreement. The basic building blocks of political solidarity – all the rituals inadvertently sacralising various opinions as tokens of membership – seem to cut against the possibility of successful deliberation except in very rare circumstances. But this is something I would need to think more about.
The ritual origins of civilization. From reading Peter Watson's “The Great Divide: History and Human Nature in the Old World and the New” I take it that the conventional wisdom in anthropology today seems to be that “civilization” (or perhaps better, cities) did not emerge from agriculture; the first cities are ritual centers, and precede the development of agriculture. Though this idea (including the fact that much early religious practice seems to have also depended on the chemical amplification of experience through hallucinogens) seems to fit within the overall perspective of the theory, I don’t quite know what to make of it yet.

All in all, for me this was one of those books that changes the way I see things; everyday situations – a committee meeting, a lecture, a political event – suddenly appeared in a new light, and even everyday problems – habit formation, how to give an interesting talk, etc. – seemed to benefit from the insights Collins' perspective provides.

[Update: fixed some typos]

The Sun was once New

2013-04-10T10:41:00.001+12:00

Here's a bit of interesting speculation I'd never heard before, from Peter Watson's "The Great Divide: History and Human Nature in the Old World and the New". According to Watson, "the second most common myth on earth" is the myth of the "watery creation" of the world:

The chief theme of this myth is the separation, usually of the sky from the Earth. This story is found in a band stretching from New Zealand to Greece ... and it invariably has a small number of common features. The first is the appearance of light. As it says in Genesis, 1:3: 'And God said, let there be light: and there was light.' Nearly all cosmogonies have this theme, where it is notable that neither the sun nor the moon is the source of the first light at Creation. Rather, the first light is associated with the separation of heaven and Earth. Only after heaven and Earth have separated does the sun appear. In some traditions in the east the light is let in because the heavy substance of the clouds that envelop the Earth sinks down to the ground, and the light, clearing the clouds, rises to become heaven. (pp. 23-24).

What might account for the wide geographical distribution of this particular myth? Watson's suggestion is that myths of watery creation represent collective memories of the eruption of the Toba supervolcano about 71-74,000 years ago, just as the first human beings were arriving in South Asia. This was probably the most powerful volcanic eruption in the planet in the last two million years, and it precipitated a global volcanic winter for years, including a prolonged period (at least several months) of complete darkness in some areas. The eruption nearly wiped out the human race; various estimates suggest that the total human population on Earth declined to perhaps 3,000-10,000 individuals afterwards, though of course all such numbers are highly uncertain. (We live, still, "by geological consent, subject to change without notice;" but that consent was nearly withdrawn then). And the myths of watery creation provide a fairly good description of how the aftermath of the eruption would have been experienced:

The 'separation' myth is a not-inaccurate description of what would have happened over large areas of the globe, in South East Asia, after the Toba eruption and the volcanic winter that would have followed ... Sunlight would have been cut out, the darkness would have been "thick" with ash, the ash would gradually have sunk to the ground, and, after a long, long time, the sky would gradually have got brighter, lighter and clearer, but there would have been no sun or moon visible perhaps for generations. There would have been light but no sun, not for years, not until a magical day when, finally, the sun at last became visible. We take the sun for granted but for early humankind it (and the moon, eventually) would have been a new entity in the ever-lightening sky. Mythologically, it makes sense for this event to be regarded as the beginning of time. (p. 25)

The sun was once new.

The book is full of much other interesting but sometimes hard to assess speculation about human prehistory, including fascinating pages about flood myths (the most common of all myths; as a Platonist, I am reminded of these passages), which appear to represent collective memories of enormous floods 14,000, 11,000 and especially 8,000 years ago caused by the melting of gigantic ice sheets. (The story is a bit complicated, but apparently 8,000 years ago the Laurentide ice sheet started to melt in such a way that the water was "dammed" by an ice plug at the Hudson Strait. When the plug broke under the pressure of the meltwater, sea level would have increased by "20-40 centimeters" more or less instantaneously, according to Watson, and the shift in the distribution of such a huge mass of water would have triggered gigantic earthquakes and tsunamis as the crust of the Earth essentially "bounced"). There are also discussions of the connections between the domestication of dogs and the discovery of fathers (it is not altogether clear that the link between males and conception was made until it was observed in dogs, which have a much shorter gestation period than women; we might say that dogs, in a sense, created the idea of fatherhood), of the different rhythms of root agriculture (common in the Americas) vs. cereal agriculture, and many other things. Perhaps the oddest claim is the idea that a number of important differences in "religious" practice between the New World and the Old before 1492 can be traced to the fact that more than 85% of all known psychoactive plants on Earth are found in the Americas. (When read in context and tied to a number of other differences between the old world and the new, the claim makes a great deal of sense, but the jokes about stoned Americans write themselves).

The Normativeness of Democracy

2013-02-12T00:15:00.000+13:00

(Contains some work in progress, baroquely complex graphs to illustrate the obvious, rank speculation, and half-baked argument. It also continues this series on the quantitative history of political regimes).

Almost every country in the world publicly acknowledges the “normativeness” of democracy today. Democracy has become a sort of universally invoked standard, even though people vehemently disagree about its meaning. How do we know this? For one thing, almost every country in the world describes itself as a “democracy” in its constitutional documents. Using the data collected by the Comparative Constitutions Project, we can see that as of 2006, only 20 of 184 countries with some kind of written constitutional document did not describe themselves as democratic:

Fig. 1 Countries that do NOT describe themselves as democratic in their constitutional documents

This understates the universality of the norm. As we can see above, many of the countries that do not explicitly mention the word “democracy” in their constitutional documents are countries whose public culture nevertheless asserts and assumes that they are long-standing democracies - a judgment typically confirmed by democracy indexes like the Unified Democracy Scores. (There is in fact a slight negative correlation between the current or the long-run degree of democracy, as measured by such indexes, and whether or not the country calls itself a democracy; almost every country in the map above is represented by a blue dot, which indicates that observers generally regard them as democratic).

At any rate many of the countries that do not describe themselves as democracies in their constitutional documents have constitutions dating back to a time where the word “democracy” didn't carry the positive associations it does today, like the USA and the Netherlands; and some nevertheless use words that are effectively equivalent to the word “democracy” today, even if in the past their usage differed, like the word “republic”. Thus the USA constitution guarantees a “republican” form of government to every state; Singapore and Yemen explicitly describe themselves as “republics” in their constitutional documents, and Yemen asserts its adherence to a principle of “political and partisan pluralism”; the Japanese constitutionstates that “sovereign power resides with the people” and that “government is a sacred trust of the people, the authority for which is derived from the people, the powers of which are exercised by the representatives of the people, and the benefits of which are enjoyed by the people;” Jordan stresses that its monarchy is “parliamentary;” the Netherlands, Belgium, Monaco, Denmark, and Norway all describe themselves as “constitutional” monarchies; and of course almost all of these constitutions guarantee some form of universal suffrage. Indeed, of the countries listed above, only the absolute monarchies - Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Brunei - really refuse to pay any lip service to the norm.

Moreover, the assertion of “democracy” in constitutional documents is almost always accompanied by the assertion of the classical “liberal” norms: freedoms of speech, expression, religion, association, press, and the basic equality of all people. The constitutions of the most repressive countries all proclaim such freedoms. Let's take the basic freedoms of association, speech, religion, and assembly, as well as the norm of equality before the law. Almost every constitutional document in the world (over 90%!) asserts all five of these; and among those countries that don't, most proclaim their allegiance to at least four of these. Only two countries (New Zealand and Libya!) failed to mention any of them as of 2006:

Fig. 2 Constitutions missing one or more "liberal" freedoms as of 2006

In the case of New Zealand, this is basically an artifact of the choice of “constitutional document” coded by the Comparative Constitutions Project - the New Zealand Constitution Act, last revised in 1986, is a purely structural document, setting out the powers of parliament and the governor general and describing various other institutions, while other documents, including the Treaty of Waitangi, play a more important role in setting out the important normative commitments of the country. (Many people would anyway say that New Zealand does not have a written constitution; the Constitution Act is simply one part of the constitutional law of the country, and possibly not the most important part). In the case of Libya, the post-Qaddafi interim Libyan constitutional declaration, article 14, explicitly asserts all of the freedoms that the Qaddafi 1977 amendment to the 1969 “provisional” constitution failed to mention. (Interestingly, the 1969 Libyan provisional constitution did mention some of these rights, but they were apparently excised from the 1977 revision).

I find this striking. The old saw about how “even the constitution of the Soviet Union” proclaimed freedom of the press, expression, association, and the like was not only true of the Soviet Union; it is true today of practically every country, however repressive; indeed, many of the countries that fail to expressly list such rights and freedoms in a constitutional document nevertheless affirm them in their public culture. (Note that all countries not listed in the graph above explicitly assert all five liberal freedoms in their constitutional documents, whenever such documents can be identified, which is almost everywhere today; North Korea, for example, affirms all of them). Yet it is obvious that the mere affirmation of these principles does not imply that they are honored in any way shape or form, and in some places the assertion can only be taken as mockery. If we take the UDS score as a very rough measure of how likely it is that these rights are honored in practice, with higher (“more democratic”) scores indicating more likely respect for these liberal freedoms, then we are forced to conclude that there is basically no correlation between expressing normative support for such freedoms in constitutional documents and actually protecting them.

This might seem unsurprising; a cynic might say that I've only rediscovered the obvious impotence of constitutional restraints in the absence of supportive social and political realities. But it is nevertheless interesting, to my mind, that there is such a widespread need to assert these particular normative commitments, even as they are routinely violated, or interpreted in such radically restrictive ways as to render them politically meaningless. Among authoritarian elites, only the House of Saud and the Sultan of Brunei appear to have the courage of their convictions; everyone else hides behind a banner of rights and liberties.

Nevertheless, only some rights within the larger universe of potential normative claims are universally asserted; if we take a look at the full list of rights that the CCP codes - ranging from freedoms of expression, opinion, and association to the right to bear arms or be granted asylum to socioeconomic rights like the right to own a business, to strike, to healthcare, or to a specific standard of living (about 64 in total) we find a small core of liberal rights that basically everybody asserts (plus a right to own property, in uneasy balance with a right of the state to expropriate it, typically with compensation) and a larger penumbra of other rights, different sets of which are asserted by various sets of countries. In the graph below, each word represents a particular rights provision tracked by the CCP project, surrounded by colored dots representing the countries whose constitutions contain that provision. (A list of all of these provision is available in the codebook here). The number near the word represents the proportion of countries that assert the provision (for example, 90% of all countries assert a commitment to protect freedom of association, “assoc”, in their constitution); the color of each dot shows the UDS score of the country as of 2006, where blue indicates “more democratic” and white indicates the dividing line, more or less, between democracies and non-democracies.

Fig. 3: Rights and countries, fireworks mode

(You come here for the intellectual fireworks, right? There, some fireworks). A perhaps more rational (but less fun!) way of visualizing the same data is this:

Fig. 4: Proportion of constitutions affirming particular rights

(Click to enlarge. Red lines indicate where 50% and 80% of the constitutions of the world explicitly affirm a particular provision; the color of the dot represents the average UDS score of countries that endorse a particular right. It was interesting to note that the right to bear arms appears to be unequivocally endorsed by only about 1.5% of the world's constitutions - the USA, Mexico, and Guatemala).

We might thus say that the “liberal” rights and the associated idea of democracy appear to have a good claim to represent a sort of global “overlapping consensus” in Rawls' sense - rights that are publicly accepted for diverse reasons in very different societies- and may serve as a basis for normative judgment everywhere. (Incidentally, this the case not only for public constitutional documents, which may be thought to be elite-imposed and not always faithful reflections of the normative aspirations of the broader society; though this requires another post, public opinion in most countries also seems to overwhelmingly support democracy and many “liberal” ideals [ungated], at least in the abstract, even if it is not always clear what this actually means in practice. Talk, of course, is often cheap, and abstract support for democracy and liberal freedoms does not necessarily translate into genuine concern for them.) Other rights, however, are still objects of normative struggle at a global level; they are not universally accepted.

But though there is much less consensus about these other rights, it is nevertheless striking that public affirmation of any set of these rights is not obviously clustered in particular societies either. It isn't always clear why a society chooses to “constitutionalize” a particular right, and publicly affirm it in its highest legal document; but whatever the case, democracies and non-democracies are about equally likely to endorse a given right in their constitutional documents. As we see above, the average UDS score of countries endorsing any particular right is pretty much the average level of democracy in the sample, at least for provisions endorsed by, say, more than 10% of the world's constitutions.(We can also see this by noticing that of the fireworks above are especially red or especially blue, save for rights explicitly endorsed by very few countries, like the right to bear arms - USA, Mexico, Guatemala - or the provisions specifying that law contrary to religion is void). Furthermore, there is no correlation between the number of rights provisions endorsed by a constitutional document and either the contemporary or long-run level of democracy, as measured by the UDS score or the cumulative UDS score. In fact, constitutions in general seem to be fairly similar to one another; and to the extent that particular sets of constitutions cluster together (grouping together countries that affirm similar sets of rights) these clusters do not correspond to obvious cultural, political, or other groupings.

One way to see this is as follows. (Please indulge my taste for complicated graphs). We take the list of rights and duties coded by the CCP and calculate the matrix of “distances” between them - essentially, we calculate how similar each constitution is to each other along that set of dimensions, using the Gower similarity coefficient, where 1 means the two constitutions are exactly alike (they affirm the exact same rights) and 0 means they are completely dissimilar. We can then use this distance matrix to plot the world's constitutions as a network and visualize their clustering patterns; highly similar constitutions should cluster together (they are less “distant” from one another). And indeed, we can see some patterns (community discovery algorithms suggest the graph below has about 4 big components when we include all links), but these patterns do not correspond to any obvious groups, like democracies or dictatorships, or poor and rich countries. Indeed, the groups obtained in this way can seem downright perverse, placing, say, Germany and Egypt closer together than Germany and the USA:

Fig. 5: Network of similarities among constitutions (rights provisions only, 85% similarity and up)

Or, alternatively, take a random constitution from a democracy (as measured by an UDS score in the top 33% in 2006) and a random constitution from a dictatorship (as measured by an UDS score in the bottom 33% in 2006) and they will share, on average, about 60% of all rights provisions tracked by the CCP project (and about 80% of the basic liberal democratic freedoms of assembly, association, etc.); take two random dictatorships or two random democracies and they will share similarly about 60% of their rights provisions (and 80% of the basic liberal freedoms). The same is true if you look at the “duties” provisions of constitutions - e.g., whether the state has a duty to provide work, or citizens a duty to work or serve in the military. Or, indeed, any other set of provisions tracked by the CCP; it seems difficult to find any dimension - descriptions of executive power, electoral provisions, etc. - along which the constitutions of more or less democratic societies, or societies in different regions, or at different levels of development, appear to be systematically different (any two random constitutions are about 65% similar, taking all dimensions together). In other words, the normative self-presentation of societies whose power structures are widely different (at least as measured by standard indexes) is pretty much identical; if I'm right, you could not systematically say much about the kind of power structures in a society by looking at its constitution.

(At this point, this thought goes through my head: “Are my methods unsound? I see no method at all, Mr Marquez”)

What might explain this “normative convergence”? The point, it is worth emphasizing once again, is NOT about the effective enforcement of constitutional norms; I take it for granted that such norms -specifically, the norms granting individual rights to citizens, of whatever kinds- are only spottily effective in most places, even in many “democratic” countries, though I think it is reasonable to assume that countries conventionally held to be democracies (as measured by the UDS) will tend to enforce whatever rights appear in their constitutions slightly more effectively than the average non-democracy (if perhaps not much more effectively, and with many exceptions). I'm interested, instead, in the “normative mimicry” on display here, and the process through which some norms achieve near-“fixation” in the population, despite what we might call their fictional status in many cases.

Now, before you accuse me of being willfully obtuse, I am aware of the obvious explanation: modern societies, the story goes, required a new “basis for legitimacy” after the breakdown of traditional forms of legitimacy. Norms of popular sovereignty and individual rights come to replace earlier “legitimizing” norms; and so all regimes now “legitimize” their power by appealing to these norms. But I'm not sure that this doesn't simply restate the problem. Why these particular norms and not others? And why would appeal to “fictional” norms - norms that are known not to have any substance on the ground, so to speak - legitimize anything (in the sense of increasing the baseline level of support for a structure of domination)? It's not that there are no answers to these questions; it's just that the appeal to legitimacy is question-begging if what we are trying to explain is how the norms became dominant in the first place, even when they have minimal impact on what happens in day to day life.

There are more and less “optimistic” stories one could tell about this process. An “optimistic” story could say that there was a sense in which the norms of liberal democracy and its associated freedoms became increasingly appealing to people throughout the world over the last two centuries, while alternative norms became less so. (One might here appeal to increasing literacy, capitalist development, the breakdown of local solidarities, etc. to explain the formation of modern subjectivities; whole libraries have been written on these topics). Normative change outstripped social change; and every political regime now feels compelled to pay at least lip service to these “new” norms, if only because not mentioning them exerts some negative pressure on their survival prospects, perhaps by making those subject to it needlessly dissatisfied. By the same token, this story might continue, the mere existence of the norm puts pressure on governments to live up to their highest commitments, and enables dissatisfied people to coordinate their claims; thus Chinese activists, for example, have (on and off) appealed to the party to enforce China's own constitutional norms guaranteeing basic freedoms of speech, association, etc., and perhaps eventually they will get somewhere. Accordingly, even if normative change feels insignificant at first, it can be utterly momentous in the long run - like a force that exerts only a slight pressure, but does so continuously over the very long run and so ends up accelerating a great mass to huge velocities.

While this story is probably not entirely incorrect, it seems to me that the problem here is that for a norm to have any kind of ability to raise the baseline level of support for a political structure, it needs to be not only widely recognized as a normative standard, but credibly asserted by those in power; and many of these norms are not. (It seems absurd to me to think that the mere assertion of freedom of speech in the North Korean constitution can possibly fool anyone who doesn't already want to be fooled for other reasons, to take only an obvious example). Moreover, it seems clear that many of these norms are liable to lose their force as they become globally dominant simply as a result of adaptation on the part of groups adversely affected by them. There was a time, for example, when it was a matter of live controversy who should be admitted to the franchise, whereas nowadays most adults everywhere are enfranchised, even if their votes are utterly meaningless, since powerful groups have adapted to the mere existence of elections (if not necessarily to the possibility of actually fair elections). Similarly, it may be that as legal freedom of speech becomes increasingly unlikely to genuinely threaten powerful interests, the more easily it comes to be accepted as a global norm. Successful adaptation by groups that are disadvantaged under particular norms reduces their propensity to produce conflict; and the global dominance of a norm can thus mean either that it is ripe for struggles to give it substance (let's turn the fake democracy into a real democracy) or that it has been hollowed out, and live conflicts have relocated to other normative arenas (the right to healthcare, or to a standard of living, or to bear arms, or to enforce one's religion on others, etc., rather than suffrage, etc.).

There are also other complications. Suppose that particular norms become entangled with markers of status; to be a “proper” country, with a “proper” constitution involves asserting some of the norms that powerful countries profess to affirm. As long as the norm is merely one of the marks of status tied to a specific collective identity, it can be asserted by most people in an entirely fictive way. The norm then appears as a sort of ornament, one aspect of a collective identity expressing “far” values, while being ignored or rationalized away in concrete situations. (The modern USA is “the land of the free” to most of its citizens irrespective of particular facts about freedom in the USA; and the idea that Venezuelans have “the best constitution in the world” is entirely unaffected, for most Venezuelans, by the fact that it is routinely ignored). On this view, it is precisely higher-status countries that have the most freedom to mention or not to mention particular norms, which is more or less in accord with some of the data above, though I have not checked properly; and “new” norms should come from relatively peripheral countries with leaders intent on raising their status (e.g., Venezuela, whose constitution is chock-full of rights and institutional innovations, however unenforced). (Incidentally, we know that in fact many “democratic innovations” first emerged and were developed in peripheral countries, not major powers). The power of the norm comes here less from the content of the norm - as in the optimistic story - than from its association with other markers of status. I suspect similar things happened in the more distant past; as James C. Scott notes in The Art of Not Being Governed, the symbols of absolute monarchy were often adopted by peoples who had hardly “states” at all: every two-bit chieftain claimed to be a universal emperor.

The global dominance of “democratic” norms in this "fictional" sense complicates our efforts to make sense of events like the Arab revolutions. Were these revolts “for” democracy? People sometimes argue that the revolts were not “for” democracy insofar as many protesters didn't make “democracy” their principal demand; instead, people wanted jobs, respect, dignity, and many other things. But we need to take into account the fact that the Arab republics explicitly endorsed democracy - the Qaddafi constitution made a huge deal of its participatory democratic character, for example - yet the norm was without substance. The revolts have sometimes attempted to give substance to the norm, but sometimes they have chosen different, more contested normative terrains - over the role of religion in public life, for example - where a norm is not yet universally accepted. This does not mean that “democracy” was not valued; it may mean merely that it was not always understood as something that required normative defence, or as a terrain where fighting over meaning was likely to lead to any interesting places, since everyone already agreed on democracy as the standard, though they disagreed in how exactly to give substance to it. Anyway, more of this would become clearer if we had a better sense of how it came about that these “liberal” rights became so dominant as normative fictions - when and where they first became publicly affirmed throughout the world. But I've run out of steam, and this post is already long enough. More later on the more vexed question of “culture” and democracy, perhaps…

Code for replicating the graphs in this post (plus some additional stuff) is available in this Gist (five files, including one with auxiliary functions and some geocoded country codes). You will also need access to the public CCP data.

The Deification of Hugo Chávez

2013-01-18T23:18:00.002+13:00

I normally don’t write much about Chávez or Venezuelan politics here. I find it emotionally complicated for a variety of reasons; and at the end of the day, I have no particular grounds to suppose that my take on Venezuelan politics is any more insightful than that of any moderately informed Venezuela-watcher. Nevertheless, recent developments have collided with my interest in cults of personality and related phenomena to make me want to write about the topic.

To recap: Chávez has been very sick with cancer. On December 10, he went to Havana for an operation, where he has been “battling severe complications” since. The Venezuelan government has not released any clear information about the nature of the cancer, the complications, or Chávez’ condition; rumours of all sorts are rife. What is clear is that the normally loquacious Chávez is sick enough that he is not able to address Venezuelans through any medium, or even to sign the letter that postponed his own inauguration. (Sure, he apparently signed this decree. But there are grounds to doubt that he personally signed it, not least the fact that the document was signed “in Caracas,” where he is not currently located. At any rate, the very fact that people are debating whether or not that signature constitutes a proper “proof of life,” as if we were in some kind of bad kidnapping movie, says all that needs to be said about the situation).

Yet during this time many observers have noted that public displays of loyalty and adulation for Chavez seem to have gone into overdrive, to the point where serious scholars like Margarita López Maya are speaking of the “deification” of Chávez. There are videos in heavy rotation on state TV where Chavez exclaims that he “demands absolute loyalty” because “he is not an individual, he is an entire people,” or where people provide testimonials of their gratitude for Chavez and identify themselves with him (“yo soy Chávez”; more videos here). PSUV militants issue statements declaring that they are the sons and daughters of Chávez, and that they owe everything to him. Large numbers of ordinary Chavistas publicly tweet their loyalty and concern for Chávez’ health, referring to him as “mi comandante” (my commander) and thus emphasizing their subordination and absolute loyalty. An alternative “red” tv station posts a supposed image of Chávez’ supernatural apparition during a Christmas mass (I’m not 100% sure that one is not a joke; if it is, it’s hard to tell, and many people in the comments seem to have taken it seriously, if only to express disgust with iguana.tv for making chavismo appear ridiculous). And of course the government staged an entire “inauguration” ceremony where thousands of chavistas “took the oath” for the absent Chávez, symbolically embodying him.

All of this is on top of the already omnipresent Chávez imagery in the Venezuelan public sphere, much of which had already been pushed very far into the hagiographic weeds during the recent election (check out the images of youthful Chávez for a striking example); and let’s not even mention the Chávez knickknacks and souvenirs (red berets, T-shirts, Chávez dolls, posters, etc., many created in apparent violation of a decree banning the use of Chávez’ face without authorization), all of which predate the latest surge of adoration by some time.

The displays of loyalty have been particularly abject among top leaders of the PSUV: Nicolás Maduro, VP and currently “presidente encargado,” claims to be loyal to Chávez “más allá de la vida,” even beyond death, and Elías Jaua (just appointed foreign minister), Tareck El Aissami (Aragua state governor), and Disodado Cabello (National Assembly president) have all said similar things. Their statements tend to depict Chávez as father, teacher, and leader, a man whose guidance has led them to the true values of Christianity, socialism, Bolivarianism, humanism, and concern for the people, stressing the speaker’s utter dependence on him for everything that is valuable in their identity.

What we have here, in short, seems to be a clear case of “flattery inflation,” where an already high level of public adoration is suddenly pushed into the stratosphere. (Indeed, the cult of Chávez seems to have recently displaced a bit the cult of Bolívar that has otherwise been the hallmark of the last 14 years). Moreover, all of this is occurring in the absence of the man and, most interestingly for our purposes, in a relatively open public arena, where there is plenty of social support for people who dislike Chávez and want to express their views. (Remember, about 45% of Venezuelans voted against him in the last presidential election, and perhaps half of them are committed anti-chavistas who cannot stand him; the love Chávez awakens in some has its counterpart in the visceral hatred he produces in others). There may be mild social pressure to praise Chávez in some contexts (I’ve heard stories along those lines, though the pressure to praise only appears to be significant whenever you want to enjoy the perquisites of power or receive economic benefits from the government, e.g., if you are applying for a government job; and there is some limited evidence linking overt opposition to Chávez with loses of benefits and opportunities in the recent past), but there is really nothing in Venezuela that is comparable to the kind of social pressure people experienced in China during the cultural revolution to signal their loyalty to Mao, or still experience in North Korea to praise the Kims. Most “grassroots” praise of Chávez seems sincere, and can even coexist with criticism of his government. So what is going on here?

López Maya takes a stab at the problem by using that rickety Weberian warhorse, legitimacy, which I’ve criticized a number of times: the cult has been turned up to 11 in order to legitimate Maduro’s leadership. I’m not trying to pick on López Maya here; there is nothing especially wrong with saying, in the context of a short newspaper interview, that the recent surge of adulation aims to “legitimate” (“secure” or “cement” might be equally appropriate) Maduro’s shaky grasp on power (especially since the opposition disputes the legal basis for his authority), but it hardly explains much. After all, it’s not as if turning up the level of adulation can change the minds of most anti-chavistas; and it’s not even very plausible to argue that all the hagiographic statements about Chávez by top leaders can persuade the uncommitted that Maduro really is the genuine leader of the country. Moreover, though the government has clearly orchestrated some of the increased displays of loyalty (through the use of state media to broadcast images of people expressing their identity with Chávez, for example), others are definitely coming “from below,” even if they are responding to cues provided by government officials and PSUV leaders.

Here’s how I think one might produce a more complete explanation. (General disclaimer: I am far from Venezuela, have no special insider knowledge of anything, and my sources are likely biased and incomplete, so take everything I say here with large dollops of salt). Let’s start with the top chavistas: why might people like Maduro or Jaua be going to such lengths to show their complete devotion to the absent Chávez? Putting aside character-based explanations – e.g., that they are spineless sycophants, or that they are genuinely passionate about Chávez, however much these things may be true– the main driver of flattery inflation at the top of the PSUV right now seems to be precisely that the absence of Chávez makes it difficult for committed militants to evaluate the credibility of loyalty signals.

Most observers have noted a division – the extent and nature of which is a matter of some controversy – between what we might call the radical and the not so radical wings of Chavismo (left and right chavismo? ), conventionally associated with VP Maduro and National Assembly president Cabello, respectively. With Chávez incapacitated (and likely soon dead, given the probable nature of his illness), a struggle is underway to define the future of the chavista movement and the aims of the “revolution.” Under the circumstances, no top leader of the PSUV can afford to be seen as anything less than abjectly devoted to Chávez; anything less would instantly destroy their credibility with those who matter for their political future (not the median voter). This sort of competition for the loyalty of committed Chavistas is likely to lead to an escalation of displays of loyalty in the absence of an umpire – Chávez – who can credibly arbitrate between potentially disparate goals and visions of socialism or revolution. (We do not need to assume cynicism on the part of anybody here, though of course we should not categorically rule it out either; there is much corruption at the top of the PSUV). Moreover, it is precisely those who are most formally powerful – e.g. Maduro – who have the most to gain from encouraging the adulation of Chávez; because they control the formal levers of power, they are in the best position to punish even minor deviations from prescribed orthodoxy. (Maduro is thus kind of in the Lin Biao position here). The key here is that the signals are meant primarily not for the median, uncommitted voter, but for committed chavistas, who may not agree on everything but agree on the immense importance of Chávez for the movement.

But why is Chávez so important to the movement? (One could raise the more general question: why do single leaders seem to become so important for self-consciously egalitarian, socialist movements?). The usual explanation is that Chávez is a highly charismatic leader; but if charisma is understood as some kind of intrinsic property of Chávez, this again explains nothing. Chávez is charismatic not because he has some magic power that makes people love him – it is always worth remembering that a significant proportion of Venezuelans don’t like him much at all, present company included – but because he has been particularly skillful at using “interaction rituals” that draw on deeply rooted Venezuelan cultural narratives to create and fashion new identities that resonate with socially marginalized groups. He is, above all, a master weaver of stories that resonate broadly with many (but not all!) people. (What is an identity but a role one plays in a grander narrative? To create an identity one only needs the right sort of story). Or rather, the charisma of Chávez is a kind of magic (take it from the expert on the subject!), understood as the skill to manipulate cultural symbols to produce new identities and collective action; and it depends on ritual, theatre, and in general the ability to command attention and tune in to emotion.

But now that he is absent, these identities are threatened; and we might expect people who feel “chavista” to expend more energy re-asserting their identity in these circumstances, especially in response to cues coming from Chávez’ top followers. Part of Chávez’ genius has been his ability to instill a sense of permanent threat in his followers: to be a chavista is to feel like an underdog, under attack by the combined forces of international capital, despite the fact that the government controls enormous oil resources and nowadays exercises effective hegemony over the media; with Chávez gone, the sense of threat is even greater. We might summarize this simply by saying that identity polarization leads to inflationary demands on loyalty signalling; and identity is at this time highly polarized in Venezuela.

[Update, 19 January - fixed minor typos]

Endnotes

2012-12-21T11:38:00.001+13:00

It's the summer solstice here in Wellington, which always feels like the end of the year to me. The longest day should end the year, in my view. Calendar reform now!

At any rate, it feels like as good a time as any to look back at the year. The readership of this blog has grown a bit over the last year, and some posts garnered significant attention, for which I am quite grateful; it is nice to be read, and responses have been thoughtful and useful. Thanks for reading!

The posts on cults of personality seem to be particularly popular; this year one of the old posts on the subject got picked up on Hacker News, for example, which led to thousands of new views. My own personal favorites this year (if I may say so) were my review of Daniel Leese's book on the Mao cult and the post on the triumph of universal suffrage, which also seem to have been relatively popular. I might also single out the "Complexity of Emotion in Authoritarian States" post (which sort of belongs to last year, when Kim Jong-il died), the post on Charles Tilly's poetry and models in the social sciences, the post on ancient and modern "mixed constitutionalism," and the post on reversed systems of suffrage censitaire and Rawls' difference principle, about which I'm still trying to figure out what I actually think. I didn't write as much this year as last year - it's been an exceptionally busy time at work - but I am reasonably happy with most of the things I wrote, some of which have led to papers in progress. (And, I published a book! Yay!)

But enough of that. In the spirit of celebrating the holidays, here is some cool reading material:

John Quijada and Ithkuil, the language he invented (via +gwern branwen). An awesome story on language creation as a work of art.
Jaguars fall, everyone dies (via +Andrew Hunter). Here's how it begins:

The world probably won't end on Friday, but it's still a good time to remind yourself that Mesoamerican eschatology is really really neat.

The Aztecs believed that the creator-god, Ometeotl, created four main gods for the four cardinal directions. These four gods tried to create the world, but it was too dark and they kept screwing up and dropping stuff into the Great Void, where it was eaten by Cipactli the Crocodile Demon With Extra Mouths Upon Every Joint And Teeth Protruding From Her Entire Body.

The gods realized they had to get their act together. They slew the Crocodile Demon and placed the world atop her body. They created mankind out of ashes. And they elected Tezcatlipoca, God of Darkness And Killing Everybody, to become the sun so they could see what they were doing a little better.

But - and this is what happens when you don't have a God of Staffing Decisions - the God of Darkness made a predictably terrible sun. The stories say he was "only half a sun", although they don't specify whether they mean only half the desired brightness or literally semicircular. In any case, Quetzalcoatl, God Of Niceness And Maybe Not Killing Everybody All The Time, knocked Tezcatlipoca out of the sky, took over as Sun, and did by all accounts a much better job.

It gets better. (Also contains some interesting speculation about why the Aztecs might have developed such a cosmology).

Chaos and Governance has an interesting series of posts about Ernest Geller's "Plough, Sword, and Book." Geller is unjustly neglected; few people today can do that kind of "big history" as well as he was able (and write so clearly).
+Kevin Vallier over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians has been arguing against the idea of a "Property-Owning Democracy" in Rawls. Even if you disagree, Vallier's discussion is clear and enlightening; for the other side of the argument, see Martin O'Neill and Thad Williamson on John Tomasi's "Free Market Fairness," who also make many good points. I think parts of this discussion could be bypassed by understanding the difference principle as a principle of maximal accountability to the worst off in society; but I'm working on a paper on that.
Foucault's Appreciation of Neoliberalism: on a conversation between Gary Becker, François Ewald, and Bernard Harcourt on Foucault's "The Birth of Biopolitics" (where Foucault engages in depth with Becker's work!). Becker: "I don't disagree with much of it" [!]. It seems to me that the term neoliberalism has mostly ceased to be a useful analytical category; it is now mostly a term of opprobrium, which it was not in Foucault's work.
Scott Wentland and Peter C. Stone have an interesting paper that anticipates and explores in detail the idea of randomizing electoral constituencies (to simulate a sort of Rawlsian "veil of ignorance") that I mentioned here. (Thanks to Prof. Wentland for bringing it to my attention!). Here's the abstract:

Legislators depend upon their respective electoral districts for reelection. As a result, they face incentives to advance the interests of their constituencies, even when those interested are at odds with the wider interests of the country as a whole. These incentives generate logrolling, pork barrel projects, and other effects that are potentially detrimental to the national interest. Any solution to these problems would have to align the interests of legislators more closely with the national interest. This paper explores one possible proposal for accomplishing this aim. The proposal would require candidates seeking legislative election (or reelection) to run in different districts for primary and general elections. While a candidate would be at liberty to seek nomination by a particular party in any district she chooses, once nominated she would be required to face the candidates of other parties in another district selected at random. The result would be that legislators would make decisions behind what we call a veil of randomness.Our paper describes such a rule, including its philosophical and economic underpinnings, and subsequently demonstrates how the rule changes each politician’s preference function to align with a more universal interest. It concludes by reflecting upon the lessons of this proposal for the project of institutional reform.

Tom Slee has a series of posts explaining the ideas behind his new and excellent paper on Identity, Institutions, and Uprisings. The basic idea - about which I hope to write more in the new year - is that cascade theories of uprisings should be enriched by incorporating a model of identity formation. Tom uses this to generate some striking insights about how institutions can act as havens for dissent and uprisings are driven by identity polarization. (Full disclosure: I commented on an earlier draft of Tom's paper).
And finally, your end-of-the-year extremophile blogging:

Much tougher than you are

Bacteria having a great time in the anoxic brine of the (formerly) ice-sealed Lake Vida in Antarctica. (Living la vida loca?)

Have a good holiday season, whatever you may celebrate.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: More on Benevolent, Malevolent, and Unconstrained Regimes

2012-12-15T10:43:00.001+13:00

(Quick graphical follow up to this post on malevolent democracies and benevolent autocracies; part of this series, asymptotically approaching 2. For discussion of the measures of physical integrity, regime types, democracy, and executive constraint used here see the previous post. Because I just can't help myself).

After finishing the previous post, a clearer way of presenting the idea of a "benevolent" regime occurred to me. Essentially, we can classify all regimes along two dimensions: the degree to which the executive is constrained by formal institutions, and the degree to which the state (directed by the executive) engages in killing, political imprisonment, torture, and so on. Using the CIRI data on the protection of physical integrity rights, the Polity IV measure of executive constraint, and the DD measure of political regimes (by Cheibub, Gandhi and Vreeland) we then get the following four-fold classification:

Benevolent regimes are on the upper left hand quadrant: here, rulers are formally unconstrained but nevertheless have, on average over the last 30 years, respected the physical integrity rights of their subjects. These tend to be relatively wealthy, as we can see, and many of them are absolute monarchies: the Qatar of al-Thani (2001-2008), the Oman of Sultan Qabus ibn Sa'id (1981-2008), Swaziland under various monarchs, Bhutan under Sigme Wangchuk (I've labeled the top 5% of the regimes by the benevolence measure, though they may be hard to see, and some are missing from the plot because they don't have GDP data). But many of them are poor countries (even if their GDP figures are occasionally inflated by oil discoveries, for example) and frankly a bit surprising: Gabon under Bongo (1981-2008), Burundi under Buyoya (1981-1991), Malawi under Banda (1981-1993), for example. All of the latter were rulers who consolidated their power long before 1981, I think; so perhaps with a longer dataset we would get somewhat different results. But still, it is worth noting that "the good" are sometimes long-established autocrats.

The bad are typically regimes that hold elections and have formally constrained executives, but where public opinion and the political class is indifferent or even supports violating the rights of various groups of people: Colombia, India, Israel, Indonesia, all make appearances here, as well as South Africa under Apartheid and Peru during the Sendero Luminoso years. The constraints have stopped working with respect to particular groups - poor peasants in Colombia, native peoples in rural areas in Peru, people who are thought to be associated with separatists in the Philippines, Palestinians in Israel.

The ugly are the usual suspects: your typical unconstrained, megalomaniacal dictator, like the regimes of Gaddhafi in Libya, Kim Jong-il in North Korea, Milosevic in Serbia, Mobutu in Zaire, Marcos in the Philippines, Galtieri in Argentina, al-Bashir in Sudan, Hoxha in Albania, Taylor in Liberia, and so on. It's the dismal roster. Interestingly, Buyoya of Burundi appears again here (1996-2000) among the unconstrained - a striking illustration of the fragility of mere benevolence.

The constrained are the boring regimes - not without problems, to be sure, but about as well-functioning as we usually get. (Though some, of course, may note that constrained regimes "internally" does not mean that the regime will be constrained "externally"; as I mentioned in the previous post, threats to the state seem to turn constrained regimes bad).

Here, just for the hell of it, is a list of countries ranked by their average degree of benevolence; the boxes tell you were how much their "benevolence" has varied over time, and the dots are the outliers - years where their benevolence has strayed far from the mean:

Fig. 2. Regime rankings by benevolence. Dashed lines identify the USA, Venezuela, and New Zealand

We can see at a glance that "benevolence" is mostly a phenomenon of autocracy, though a few democracies have above-average levels of it; and that malevolence is mostly a democratic phenomenon. Yet benevolence among autocracies varies a bit more than among democracies; your average benevolent despot is not extremely reliable, perhaps. (Note also how Burundi is represented at the top and the bottom of the scale, with two different regimes). It is mostly countries in the middle of the distribution that have consistent records of protecting rights, though they are not unblemished.

Here a final picture ranking countries by their average levels of protection of physical integrity rights (thickness of the line represents democracy level; color represents level of protection - darker blue is better; each colored line shows changes from 1981 to 2008):

Fig. 2: Ranking of countries by avg. levels of physical integrity protection, showing changes during the 1981-2008 period. Dashed lines identify the USA, New Zealand, and Venezuela

New Zealand has done very well during this period (by this measure at least), but the USA ranks 35 out of 167, with a big dip at the end of the period, and a spotty record (note the light blues in earlier years); and Venezuela's state has been going bad since 1989, with the Caracazo. More dictatorships appear at the bottom of the scale, but also many democracies. Interestingly, the end of the cold war seems to have produced improvements in the protection of rights in very few countries; at a glance, only Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Albania stand out. But New Zealand is only in the middle of the benevolence ranking; it does well because its constraints have worked, not because its rulers are unusually benevolent, though perhaps its constraints have worked because public opinion has been reasonably enlightened, and public opinion has been reasonably enlightened because it has faced no big conflicts in the recent past.

(Some messy code that produces these and other graphs is here).

Of Malevolent Democracies and Benevolent Autocracies: A Very Short Quantitative History of Political Regimes, Part 1.9325

2012-12-13T01:11:00.001+13:00

(Continues my occasional series on the history of political regimes, part 1.9325. Lots of charts and graphs and a slideshow, using the Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) human rights dataset and the Political Terror Scale.)

About a month ago, Reed Wood over at the blog Political Violence @ a Glance expressed doubts that there had been much if any meaningful improvement in the extent to which states engaged in torture, beatings, etc. over the past three decades. Neither the Political Terror Scale (measuring the degree to which states engage in torture, political imprisonment, or political murder) nor the Physical Integrity Index of the CIRI dataset (which measures more or less the same thing in a somewhat different way) show any improvement over the last three decades or so, despite the fact that (as we have seen here, here, and here in much greater detail) the world is a more "democratic" place today than three decades ago:

Figure 1. Global mean of the CIRI Physical Integrity Index, 1981-2010 (higher means more protection of physical integrity rights, on a 0 to 8 scale)

Figure 2. Global mean of the Political Terror Scale, 1976-2011 (higher means more state use of torture, murder, and other physical integrity violations, on a 1 to 5 scale)

Figure 3. Global mean of the polity2 score, 1976-2011 (higher means more democratic, on a -10 to 10 scale)

If anything, a slight worsening trend in the extent to which states engage in torture, killing, and so on is detectable here, despite the increase in democracy over the same period. This piqued my curiosity; what is going on here? And what has been the relationship between political regimes and the protection of basic "physical integrity" rights, historically speaking?

Neither the CIRI dataset nor the Political Terror Scale are ideal for answering these questions in sufficient depth; for one thing, their data collection starts just after "peak authoritarianism" in the mid 1970s, and hence misses much of the consolidation of authoritarian regimes in the 50s and 60s. Moreover, it is very likely that the lack of improvement we see above is at least partly an artifact of better reporting and a broader understanding of what counts as a violation of physical integrity by the state, as Anne Marie Clark and Kathryn Sikkink argue in a forthcoming piece. But they can still help us understand broad correlations between political regimes and the malevolence (or restraint) of the state.

Using the CIRI data and a typical measure of democracy (the Polity IV scale, discussed here in more detail), the first thing we note is that, though the overall trend in the protection of physical integrity rights is negative across all regime types, democracies have had on average a better record than other political regimes over the last 30 years:

Figure 4: Trend lines for physical integrity rights by regime type. "Democracy" is defined as a polity score greater than 6; "Autocracy" is defined a polity score lower than - 6. Each point represents a country-year; points are jittered to avoid some overplotting.

Though we see dictatorships that appear not to engage in torture, killing, and so on, in every year, as well as democracies that do engage in such practices, on average democracies score about 2 points higher in the CIRI Physical Integrity Rights index than autocracies and "anocracies" (the Polity IV term for various hybrid regimes; the picture does not change if we use the Political Terror Scale instead). Since the CIRI index is additive over four measures of state malevolence - extrajudicial killings, disappearances, political imprisonment, and torture, each of which is scored as 0 if the violations are judged to be frequent and widespread, and 2 if they are judged not to have occurred during a particular year (see here for more details) - we could say that democracies on average have committed one fewer crime than autocracies over this period. (Democracies: statistically less criminal than autocracies for over 30 years!). Indeed, nearly 80% of all regimes that receive a perfect 8 in the CIRI index are democracies, while nearly 75% of the regimes that receive a 0 in the index are autocracies or anocracies:

Figure 5: Distribution of regimes accross CIRI index categories. 8 means a high level of protection of physical integrity rights; 0 means widespread violations. "Interruption" includes Polity categories for breakdown of central authority, foreign occupation, and transitional forms.

Moreover, it is also worth noting that the average difference between democracies and autocracies has not changed at all over the entire 30 year period, even as both democracies and autocracies seem to be becoming worse (i.e., more likely to engage in torture, killing, etc.). To me, that looks like prima facie evidence that the lack of improvement in these indexes is at least partly a reporting artifact, though other stories are possible. For example, suppose that the least malevolent autocracies are most at risk of turning into democracies. But they do not immediately become "high quality" democracies; political competition restrains states slightly better than before, but still not well. As more countries become democratic, the average malevolence of both democracies and autocracies should increase - in the first case due to the influx of low-quality democracies into the population (dragging the mean down) - and in the second case due to the exit of less-repressive autocracies from the population. I don't know that this story is correct, but it's worth considering, and some of the trends I discuss below are consistent with this relationship. In particular, if the story is correct, we should see a (slight) strengthening of the correlation between measures of democracy and measures of physical integrity over time - and in fact we do see this.

At any rate, the correlation between democracy and a lower average level of state malevolence remains striking, if perhaps unsurprising given common ideas about democracy. But couldn't it be the case that the correlation is built into the measure of democracy we are using here? Though the Polity IV measures are basically institutional (conceptualizing democracy as a variety of political competition, without assuming much of anything about whether or not democracies are more or less malevolent state forms), it may still be the case that they assume too much. Perhaps coders tend to give "nice" regimes higher scores; some of the political competition categories in the Polity IV index are notoriously opaque. Yet the correlations are the basically the same if we use the most minimal measure of democracy we can think of (the dichotomous DD measure, discussed here, which defines democracy as a regime where the leadership of the state is selected through competitive elections and nothing else):

Fig. 6: Distribution of democracies and dictatorships across CIRI scores. Dichotmous measure of democracy from the DD dataset by Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland.

As before, it looks like most "benevolent" states (those scoring high in the CIRI index of physical integrity protection) are democracies, and most "malevolent" states are dictatorships (or more precisely, regimes where the political leadership is not selected via competitive elections; whether we want to call these regimes "dictatorships" is basically a question of nomenclature). (Results are basically identical if we use the PTS). But there remain a good number of elective regimes who score very low on the index, as well as a good number of non-elective regimes that score high on this index. Let's call the former malevolent democracies and the latter benevolent autocracies. What can we say about them?

Consider first the distribution of CIRI scores across regime types (using the DD measures of regime types):

Parliamentary democracies (59 of them in the dataset, nearly 1000 country-years in total with data on physical integrity protection) and mixed presidential/parliamentary democracies (36 of them, about 500 country-years) are the clear winners here - the least overtly criminal regimes over the past 30 years. Monarchies, however, (14 of them in the dataset, for about 300 country-years) did quite well; few of them appear to have engaged in any significant malevolence during the 1981-2008 period (and most of it was concentrated in Nepal, Morocco, and Saudia Arabia during this time). Indeed, the mean level of "physical integrity rights protection" in monarchies is nearly as high as in parliamentary democracies, and higher than in presidential democracies, which have been the worst of the democratic regimes. Civilian dictatorships appear just as likely to be "good" as to be "bad," and military dictatorships are the worst of the bunch. No non-democracy (monarchic or otherwise), scores a perfect 8 average for the period, whereas some democracies do (mostly small places like Iceland or Tuvalu, or very new democracies that have not yet have time to besmirch their records), though of course a number of democracies score very low too. (The rankings of regime types don't look any different if we use the PTS instead of the CIRI index).

Perhaps more interesting is to look at the most benevolent autocracies and most malevolent democracies over the period. The color of each glyph in the map below represents the average level of the CIRI index for the years for which data exists; the size of the glyph represents the number of years with data (ranging from 1 to a maximum of 30); and the shape represents the average Polity2 score over the 1981-2010 period, split into three broad categories: circles represent countries that have been mostly democratic over the last three decades; triangles represent countries that have been mostly "anocracies" (hybrid regimes); and squares represent countries that have been mostly autocratic. So if the correlation between regime type and the protection of physical integrity rights were perfect, we would expect squares in the map below to be red, circles to be blue, and triangles to be light colored. Red circles thus represent malevolent democracies, and blue squares benevolent autocracies (I've labeled the most malevolent democracies and the most benevolent non-democracies below):

Fig. 8. Average levels of physical integrity protection, 1981-2010, by regime type as defined by the Polity IV score

The top benevolent non-democracies by this measure (average CIRI index greater than 6, average polity2 lower than -6) are a mixed bunch: Suriname, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Gambia, Benin, Gabon, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Taiwan, Singapore, and Fiji. Among these, Oman[!] has the best overall record, with an average CIRI score of 7.17, better than the USA average for the period. Some of these regimes are basically electoral but noncompetitive regimes, such as Singapore; others democratized substantially during the period in question, though reports of torture or political imprisonment appear never to have been common even during more authoritarian times, or were concentrated at the beginning of the period (Taiwan, Poland, Hungary); and others are rich gulf monarchies (Oman, UAE, Qatar). Perhaps the most surprising cases are Gambia, Benin, and Gabon, none of which appear to have engaged in much direct political violence against their own citizens (at least none that was noticed by the State Department or Amnesty International, the ultimate sources for the CIRI index), despite being very poor countries. Happy autocracies, pace Tolstoy, are not all alike.

The top malevolent democracies by this measure show more commonalities: El Salvador, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Israel, and India. These are almost all countries that faced or face substantial internal conflicts - the FARC insurgency in Colombia, Kashmir and Nagaland in India, the conflict with the Palestinians in Israel, conflicts with Kurds and between the secularists in the military and more religious civilian forces in Turkey,very sharp class conflicts in Venezuela, Brazil, and El Salvador. "Internal" threats to the state turn democracies bad. Just look at the CIRI graph for the USA for the period, and check out the dip after 2001 for further evidence:

Fig. 9. CIRI index of physical integrity rights for the USA, 1981-2010

And all this time the USA received a polity2 score of 10 - the highest possible.

Obviously, these overall judgments have to be taken with a grain of salt; as the cases of Poland and Hungary show, the cutoff for the dataset may mean that more repressive periods are excluded from consideration, or it may mean that they are included when there has in fact been a qualitative break in the nature of the state. Furthermore, there may be other factors that are related to the level of physical integrity protection; the level of economic development, inequality, and the rate of economic growth all come to mind, among many other possibilities (some of which are explored below).

One may think that the key factor ensuring that the regime is not criminal is the degree of executive constraint, not the whole degree of democracy. So let's define a benevolent regime as a regime where the executive is highly unconstrained but nevertheless does not act in a criminal way (though it could do so with impunity) and a malevolent regime as one where the executive is so constrained but nevertheless is not prevented from killing, torturing, or imprisoning for political beliefs at least some of its citizens, perhaps because the people who constrain the executive are complicit in its criminality. Now, Polity actually includes a measure of executive constraint, which is highly correlated, but not perfectly, with the CIRI index. (Better, in fact, than the overall democracy measure). We can then ask: are there truly constrained malevolent democracies? Or truly unconstrained benevolent autocracies? Using the DD measure of regime type and the polity measure of executive constraint we can produce an independent "index of benevolence" (essentially, we multiply both, after reversing the exconst measure, and take the square root) - higher is more benevolent, with a median of 4:

Average degree of benevolence/malevolence, by country and regime type (as measured in the DD dataset)

As we can see, democracies are typically constrained but not benevolent; almost all of them score lower than the median of benevolence. The top 10 "benevolent" regimes are all non-democracies (except for Bhutan for a few years, which is a hard case), and we have to go down to Mali to find a regime coded as democratic by DD that also had a relatively unconstrained executive and a reasonable record of not torturing, killing, or imprisoning its citizens. By the same token, most dictatorships overperform a bit; their records are better than the degree of executive constraint would lead one to expect.

The top 10 benevolent autocracies by this method are similar to the ones identified above. Many are absolute monarchies - Qatar, Oman, Swaziland; constrained, perhaps, more by tradition and culture than by formal institutions, as Victor Menaldo has argued (ungated). Some are expected, though still puzzling (why so restrained?): Singapore, Hungary during the last decade of the communist system. Others are very unexpected - many very poor African autocracies - Gabon, Benin. At the other end of the scale we find that malevolence (executive constraints plus torture and imprisonment) is almost always a democratic phenomenon; India, Israel, Colombia, and Jamaica bring in the bottom of the table. When unconstrained dictators do these things it's expected, but when democracies do it it's malevolent.

A temporal view may be interesting too. In the slideshow below, the size of each dot represents the actual level of protection of human rights, the color of each dot represents the naive deviation from the expected level of protection of human rights given the polity score, and the shape of the dots represents the regime type. So red dots are more malevolent than expected given the polity score of the country and blue dots more malevolent, while white dots are at the expected level of human rights protection. The measure for the deviation here is not empirically derived - it's not the residual of a regression of the physical integrity index on the polity score - but normative; a democracy with a perfect polity score that does not engage in torture, killing, and so on is not "benevolent" but merely doing its job properly, whereas a completely unconstrained dictatorship with a polity score of -10 that does not engage in torture, killing, and the like of political opponents is being "merely" benevolent. Hence dots representing democracies with a score of 10 never look blue on the map, and dots representing dictatorships with a score of -10 never look red. I've labeled the countries that have the largest deviations from a simple naive relationship between polity2 and the level of protection of physical integrity.

(Best viewed in full screen by clicking on the link on the lower left corner). Note how the period starts with a lot of benevolent autocracies (including a large number of African countries whose polity score belies the relative benevolence of their states by this measure) and democracies that generally respected human rights. As the nineties come along, there are many new democracies that "underperform"; from a blue and white world (with an even split between benevolent autocracies and democracies that do their job), we come to a world that is mostly pink (with many new and underperforming democracies), consistently with the selection hypothesis mentioned above. Things then take a sharp dive in the aftermath of September 11; most democracies - including most established ones in North America and Western Europe - become more malevolent in the years after 2011. In some cases we can easily point to the specific events that turn countries red in the map: the Sendero Luminoso years in Peru in the 1980s, the Caracazo in Venezuela in 1989, the endless conflict with the Palestinians in Israel. But though many countries in the map appear as benevolent autocracies or as malevolent democracies for short periods, most countries seem to settle to their expected level; both benevolent autocracy and malevolent democracy seem to be fragile, though benevolent autocracy is more common than malevolent democracy.

It is also worth looking at how the relationship between democracy and human rights protection varied over this period. We simply fit a simple linear model regressing the Physical Integrity Index against the Polity2 score for each year, and look at how the coefficient for the polity2 score has changed over time:

Fig. 11: Coefficient of polity2 in the model PHYSINT ~ a*polity2 + b estimated for each year. Shaded areas represent the 95% confindence interval for a.

The picture is suggestive of a structural break in the relationship between democracy and state malevolence with the end of the Cold War. States that had apparently been more autocratic than their record of benevolence suggested suddenly found their expected level of democracy, consistent with the hypothesis mentioned above. But not every country has benefited from increases in democracy. Among countries where we observe changes in their level of democracy in this period as measured by the polity2 score only about half of them (56% or so) seem to have experienced changes in the level of state malevolence that are in the right direction. In other words, it is only in about half the cases in the sample that increases in democracy are (statistically) associated with greater state benevolence (and vice-versa: decreases in democracy are statistically associated with greater state malevolence); in the other half, increases in democracy are associated with greater state malevolence (and vice-versa), though the magnitude of the association appears to be small in most cases:

Fig. 12: Magnitude of the relationship between polity2 and CIRI, per country, 1981-2010. Lines show 95% confidence intervals for the polity2 coefficient

In countries to the left of the red line, increases in democracy were associated in this period with more state malevolence (or vice-versa, i.e., increases in autocracy with more benevolence); in countries to the right, increases in democracy are associated are associated with more state benevolence (as we would naively expect). The striking thing here is how little of a pattern there is; though there are some slight regional associations (democratization appears to have been more correlated with state benevolence and vice-versa in the Americas than elsewhere), and some events are not captured by the graph above (for example, the change in democracy levels and state benevolence among the successor countries of the Soviet Union; this could be done, but I'm not up to it right now), no obvious associations jump out. A better test, perhaps, would look for changes in the degree of executive constraint (indeed, it looks as if changes in executive constraints do have a positive effect on a larger proportion of countries - 63% in my sample instead of 53%); but whether or not political regimes are associated with state malevolence and benevolence, other factors must be swamping much of their influence. Consider, for example, GDP per capita:

Fig. 13: GDP per capita (from the PWT) and the Physical Integrity Index, by regime type (as measured by the DD dataset)

As we might expect, in every regime type except for military dictatorships state benevolence is correlated with income per capita; the state is usually tamer in richer countries, though military dictatorships seem to get more malevolent the richer they are, even as they also become sparser as income increases. Or consider inequality (a much more striking picture):

Fig. 14: Inequality (measured using the UTIP data) and the Physical Integrity Index, by regime type (as measured by the DD dataset)

The malevolence of the state seems to be exquisitely sensitive to inequality in democracies, in contrast to non-democracies; the less repressive regimes are almost all on the upper left hand quadrant. This makes sense in light of the Acemoglu-Robinson story about the relationship between inequality and regime types: democracies enable class conflict, and hence the state is more likely to get more repressive as that conflict intensifies, whereas a dictatorship has "settled" such conflicts - arrived at some repressive equilibrium that is not especially sensitive to inequality. But of course other stories are also possible (not least that the data on inequality is not great); this is not a test of anything. It is also plausible to speculate that as the world became both more democratic and more unequal over the past 30 years, we would have seen a generally flat trend in the mean CIRI index; rising inequality would have cancelled out the effects of rising democracy.

Finally, consider economic growth:

Fig. 15: The Physical Integrity Index and per capita gdp growth, by regime type (as measured by the DD dataset)

I confess that I found this picture surprising: I thought there would be an association between low levels of economic growth and greater repressiveness, but apparently not.

We could put this all together in some more complex model. But a structural break seems to remain; adjusting for gdp per capita does not change the picture in figure 11 much, though adding inequality softens the relationship a bit. At any rate, it seems as if the old idea of checks and balances is at least somewhat vindicated by the evidence of the last three decades: constraints matter, and don't count on benevolent autocrats.

(Code for all the graphs in this post is available here; as usual, it's very messy. You will also need this file of codes, plus the Penn World Table data, the CIRI dataset, the Political Terror Scale, the Polity data, the DD dataset, and the UTIP inequality dataset).

[Update 13/12/2012 - minor wording changes for the sake of clarity]

[Update: a quick graphical followup to this post here]

“Ten thousand melodies cannot express our boundless hot love for you”: the Cult of Personality in Mao’s China

2012-10-26T15:23:00.001+13:00

(6,500 words on Daniel Leese’s fascinating book Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China's Cultural Revolution [Cambridge University Press, 2011], by someone who is no expert on Chinese history, but has lots of non-peer-reviewed theories about cults of personality. Thanks to Andrew Ivory for the book recommendation, and to my colleague Jason Young for conversation on the topic and help with the Chinese characters.)

Longtime readers of this blog know I am fascinated by the phenomenon of cults of personality. (Click here for some of my previous posts on the subject). In fact, I’m working on a paper on the subject and gathering data on the prevalence of cults and cult-like phenomena in the 20^th century, so I was of course delighted to hear about this book. It did not disappoint: Leese’s book is everything a scholarly monograph should be. It is deeply learned, thoroughly researched, and well written; and the story it tells is fascinating. Not the least of its merits, from my perspective, is that it provides supporting evidence for some of my own pet ideas about cults of personality, though it also has led me to rethink and nuance others.

The idea of a “cult of personality” is in some ways a peculiarly modern one. Practices of “leader worship” were of course not unknown in the past; one might almost say that they were basically the default way in which peoples related to leaders in “pre-modern” state societies, from the recognition of Egyptian Pharaohs as god-kings to emperor worship in China, and from the cults of Hellenistic monarchs and Roman emperors to the sacralisation of monarchs in Medieval Europe. But such cults could only become a theoretical and political problem in the context of societies which claimed to be socially or politically egalitarian, as most societies do today; it is only against a background expectation of relative equality that the practice of leader worship appears as an aberration, in need of special justification or explanation. And this problem was especially acute in communist societies, where even formal terms of address had been consciously engineered to express the idea of equality (“comrade”), yet nevertheless appeared to be embarrassingly plagued by forms of leader worship.

It is thus no accident that the term itself (“cult of personality”) came into wide circulation at around the time of Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” of 1956, which condemned Stalin’s “cult of the individual.” The pattern is unmistakable; we can see it, for example, in the books indexed by Google in a variety of languages. So, for example, in English:

Figure 1: Frequency of "Cult of Personality" and related terms in the English corpus of books in Google

Or, more emphatically, in Russian:

Figure 2: Frequency of "Cult of Personality" and related terms in the Russian corpus of books in Google

In Chinese the pattern is somewhat more muddled (there are some weird artifacts if we look at mentions of the term before 1940), perhaps because the Google corpus is less reliable for Chinese texts, and perhaps because of the simplification of the Chinese script that was happening around the 1950s makes it difficult for us to capture all the mentions of “cult of personality” in books published before and around the mid-20^th century. Yet the basic shape of the usage curve is still there, showing the impact of Khrushchev’s speech, though it decays faster and rebounds more than in English or Russian, for reasons that are not immediately clear:

Figure 3: Frequency of "Cult of Personality" in the simplified Chinese corpus of books in Google

Leese’s book takes the Chinese response to Khrushchev’s speech as the starting point for its story. The speech could not but be seen by Chinese leaders as a poke in the eye, especially Mao’s, whose cult bore some resemblance to Stalin’s, even if it had diminished in intensity in 1956 relative to the late 40s. (In fact, the Chinese Communist Party had generally prevented excessive open flattery of Mao during the early years of the People’s Republic, with his consent; later “excesses” lay in the future). And by forcing them to respond and to justify or change their practices, the speech also threatened to produce shifts in power within the CCP. Nevertheless, as we shall see, the speech ended up providing an unexpected impetus to the further development of the Mao cult.

Leese argues that the cult first emerged during the later years of the Chinese civil war as a mobilizing device. It was consciously promoted by the top leadership of the CCP (not just Mao) in reaction to the growing cult of Chiang Kai-shek on the Guomindang side, and seen even by people who had doubts about overly personalizing Marxism as a way to unify the party against their enemies. From this point of view, the cult appeared as a form of what Leese calls “branding” (not my preferred term); and it was specifically nurtured within the party through the practice of “group study” of party history, which presented a mythical narrative of the Long March under Mao’s “correct” leadership. At this stage the cult thus served both to marginalize certain factions (e.g., the group of Soviet-trained cadres around Wang Ming, who had Stalin’s favour) and to motivate party and army members in the continuing struggle with KMT forces; to the extent that the cult also mobilized non-party members, it would have done so mainly through general propaganda campaigns, an arena where it had to compete with similar publicity by the KMT, at least in contested “white” areas. With the victory of the CCP these mobilizing and unifying functions of the cult became less important, though the party of course continued to control the public display of Mao’s image, and the cult could still be used as one of the instruments of centralization employed by the CCP (e.g., against Gao Gang in 1953-54, who developed his own regional cult in China’s north-east and was eventually purged).

This is not to say that there was no demand “from below” for cult practices. Since the CCP was in part a huge hierarchical patronage machine with few formal mechanisms for promotion, signalling loyalty through praise – sending congratulatory telegrams to Mao, for example, even when these were discouraged by the CCP leadership – was a useful means of career maintenance and even advancement. (You want to be the one local committee that does not send congratulatory telegrams? How is that going to look?). But praise of the top leaders was tempered both by the fact that it was embedded in a larger discourse where Stalin, not Mao, was the pre-eminent leader of the communist world, and by the fact that the top leadership of the party seems to have consciously discouraged extreme praise, perhaps because it feared (not unreasonably, as it turns out) concentrating power in Mao’s hands. The cult thus appears here not only as a mobilization device pushed from the top, but as the unintended consequence of loyalty signalling by lower levels of the party, which tended to keep the overall level of flattery relatively high, and inflationary pressures steady; and it was clearly fuelled, though not fully explained, by the undoubtedly high popularity of the party and the prestige of Mao as its leader during the early 1950s.

The death of Stalin, Khrushchev’s speech, and other political developments disrupted this initial equilibrium, in which the expression of loyalty to Mao had not yet crowded out all other signals of loyalty to the party and the revolution, and had not yet colonized public space to the extent to which it did during the Cultural Revolution. For one thing, the death of Stalin had the effect of displacing foreign leaders from their pre-eminent position in public displays, leaving Mao to monopolize an ever larger and more central share of public space. Leese’s book describes for example the faintly comical difficulties experienced by local cadres when trying to organize parades and other festivities after 1953; the question of whose portraits and what slogans to display, and in what order, was evidently of great importance to them (a faux pas could be harmful to one’s career prospects, I suppose), and yet directives from the Centre became ever more confusing. Indeed, a directive of April 1956 essentially declared that no guidance would be provided to local party committees regarding whose portraits to display and in what order during public events. Eventually the confusion seems to have been resolved in the obvious way: portraits of foreign leaders were no longer handed out to marching crowds at official events.

The effects of Khrushchev’s speech on the cult were at first more negative. On the one hand, the CCP’s initial response to it fed into a process of liberalization of the public sphere which had begun somewhat earlier. (Leese interprets the directive relaxing control over the display of symbols and portraits as part of this process). Criticism of the cult and other forms of “dogmatism” was aired in high places, and support for collective leadership expressed. At any rate, the party was (with good reason) confident in its popularity at this time, and prepared to relax its control over the public sphere. Leese thus takes the “Hundred Flowers” campaign of 1957 to be a (botched) attempt at genuine liberalization, though Mao himself later described it as a trap, a way to “lure snakes out of their holes.” As time went on, however, both Mao and groups within the party came to think that liberalization had gone too far: cadres became demoralized and confused (which contradictions were good and which were bad? Why had so many bad things happened since Khrushchev denounced Stalin?), critics started attacking the party and even Mao directly, and Mao’s prestige suffered:

The failure of the rectification campaign [the “Hundred Flowers” campaign] led to a self-generated crisis of faith in ... the CCP’s governance, and the responsibility was clearly to be placed on Mao. He thus faced two “credibility gaps”: The campaign had tarnished his image as omniscient helmsman of the Chinese Revolution among party members, and the campaign’s indecisive enactment led non-party members to question his authority over the CCP (p. 63).

(More worrying, perhaps, was the fact that the failed rectification campaign had opened the doors to criticism of Mao by senior party figures like Peng Zhen and Liu Shaoqi, though Leese does not make much of this.) At any rate, the problems with the rectification campaign prompted Mao to take greater control over the propaganda apparatus and to sharpen the distinction between “good” and “bad” criticism in a way that left Mao more or less in control of determining which views fell into which category. By early 1958, at the beginning of the Great Leap Forward, Mao had even formulated a distinction between a “correct” cult of personality (indicated by the term geren chongbai 个人崇拜) and an “incorrect” cult (indicated eventually by the term geren mixin 个人迷信). The distinction sidestepped the theoretical problem raised by Khrushchev’s criticism of cults by redefining “good” cults as a worship of “truth,” but it was transparently driven by Mao’s understanding of the cult “as an extrabureaucratic source of power that did not rely on its recognition within the party elite” (p. 69). In other words, if there had to be a cult, Mao indicated that it better be his as the representative of “truth,” or at least of those people he could approve of, regardless of party views. As Mao said, quoting Lenin, “it is better for me to be a dictator than it is for you.” (Much later, Mao told Edgar Snow that Khrushchev’s failure to develop a cult had led to his eventual purge by Politburo members, which shows that he thought of the cult as a useful device to prevent challenges to his position from within the party). Moreover, the cult seemed to Mao a good instrument for promoting a “lively, emotional climate” that would motivate people to take a “great leap forward” toward communism, just as the cult had served to motivate party members and soldiers during their struggles against the KMT.

The articulation of the distinction between a “correct” and an “incorrect” cult, however, opened the door to flattery hyper-inflation. As Leese notes elsewhere:

... with the validation of a correct cult it was not necessary any more to ‘praise the king the whole time, but, so to say, without explicit praises’, as Paul Pellisson, court historian of Louis XIV, once wrote. During the early years of the PRC, praise of Mao Zedong in public discourse had by and large been curbed with Mao’s consent. But after March 1958, references to the Party Chairman and his thought witnessed a huge upsurge in the media, although in comparative perspective the excesses were dwarfed by the Cultural Revolutionary rhetoric.

Cadres wishing to prove their loyalty could now stop worrying too much about the question raised by Khrushchev of whether cults of personality were compatible with Marxism-Leninism, and hyperbolic praise of Mao and his latest “line” soon became a necessary instrument of career maintenance and advancement within the CCP, though at the beginning such praise was still carefully defined as praise of the “truth” (which just happened to be embodied in the person of Mao and his works).

The praise soon came into conflict with reality, however. The burst of flattery encouraged by Mao led to a flood of “completely fictive numbers of both agricultural statistics and cultural artifacts in order to signal adherence of the provincial cadres to the Party Centre” (p. 73). But the great famine of 1958-59 could not be hidden by mere propaganda; for those affected by the catastrophe, the evidence of the senses was of course in direct contradiction with the claims of Mao and his flatterers, which challenged Mao’s prestige and credibility and offered opportunities to disaffected people within the party. This challenge was the most serious yet to Mao’s position, in part because the famine fomented dissatisfaction within the People’s Liberation Army, whose soldiers could not be fully isolated from reports coming in from family members about the situation in the countryside. (Not even the Central Bureau of Guards, the unit in charge of guarding the leaders of the party, was immune to unrest). Soldiers were asking: is “Chairman Mao ... going to allow us to starve to death”? (quoted in p. 96). Even more seriously, Marshal Peng Dehuai, who had enormous prestige within the PLA, became severely critical of Mao’s policies. This was an intolerable challenge to Mao’s position, who feared a coup; and though Peng was eventually purged (with dire consequences for the Chinese population, since Peng’s public criticism led Mao to stubbornly stick to policies that the party had been quietly about to correct, according to Leese), the need to regain control over the army was pressing. Lin Biao (the youngest PLA Marshal) proved the man for the job.

For one thing, Lin was not shy about praising Mao, and knew how to wield the charge of insufficient adherence to Mao Zedong thought against his enemies within the party and the military. In fact, he was able to shift the norms prevailing at the top of the CCP so that “adherence to Mao Zedong thought” became the sole criterion of loyalty. In practice, this meant that any statements critical of Mao – uttered at any time in the past – could be used as incriminating evidence of disloyalty, and used in factional disputes which nearly destroyed the party, and served to purge many people at the top.

There is a puzzle here, however: as Leese puts it, “[i]t seems difficult to explain why Liu Shaoqi and other CCP leaders watched and presided over the demise of the Beijing party leadership” since the criteria of loyalty promoted by Lin Biao “could be applied to nearly anyone” by those “wielding the power of interpretation” (p. 126). Why didn’t they resist this shift? Leese gestures vaguely towards Mao’s entrenched “legitimacy” as an explanation of the CCP leadership’s passivity in the face of what was, after all, a concerted attack on their position, but I don’t think this rickety Weberian catch-all term helps us very much to understand what happened here. My sense is that under the conditions of pervasive distrust at the top of the CCP, contradicting Lin carried higher risks individually (though ~~greater~~ lowered collective risks) than supporting him or staying silent (which nevertheless increased collective risks); but this was not so much because Mao was especially legitimate among the top leadership (whatever that means) but because the party was too publicly committed to him for objectors to feel confident that they could count on the support of others if they went out of their way to argue against the cult. (By the same token, they could be pretty certain that others would use their words against them).

Interestingly, though Lin knew how to signal his unconditional loyalty (in costly, even humiliating ways sometimes) he seems to have had no special love for Mao himself. On the contrary, he seems not to have liked Mao much, and to have promoted the cult in part as a way of protecting himself from the treacherous shoals of politics at the apex of the CCP; he had seen (in Peng Dehuai’s case) how even the merest hint of criticism could be turned by Mao (and others) against the critic, with severe repercussions, and was determined to avoid a similar fate. Leese quotes a 1949 private note of Lin’s on Mao’s political tactics: “First he will fabricate “your” opinion for you; then he will change your opinion, negate it, and re-fabricate it – Old Mao’s favourite trick. From now on I should be wary of it” (p. 90). By 1959 Lin was adept at anticipating Mao’s position and changing his opinion as soon as he sensed that the old opinion was no longer operative.

Lin used the cult not only to protect himself from the vicious “court politics” of the CCP, but also to discipline the army and tamp down dissatisfaction among the soldiers. The main tool he used to accomplish this objective was similar to the original forms of “group study” that had been used at the very beginnings of the cult, except more narrowly focused on Mao’s writings and more ritualized. The “lively study and application of Mao Zedong thought” was in practice reduced to learning to recite and use quotations from Mao’s works as persuasive tools. But the particulars are fascinating; what Leese describes is in effect the conscious construction of what Randall Collins calls an “interaction ritual” (really, go read Collins – it’s enormously interesting stuff!) that shifted the “emotional energy” of the troops and the party and increased their cohesion (Leese speaks of “exegetical bonding,” which is quite a nice description too).

Contacts between the troops and their families were monitored, but they were not necessarily directly censored. Instead, reports of distress in the countryside were turned into “teaching moments” that extolled the necessity of staying the course and blamed unfavourable weather or the deviations of local officials from the correct line. Elaborate performances making use of all kinds of media – big character posters, theatre, films, poetry, etc. – recalled the “bitterness” of the past (before the communist triumph) and extolled the “sweeteness” of the present (though, as one official noted, “most comparisons of the present sweetness referred back to the period of the land reform, whereas remarks about the Great Leap Forward were “inclined to be abstract and without substance”,” p. 102), while presenting examples of communist martyrs for emulation. The focus was on generating emotion by “remembering hardships” and then channelling that emotion against the enemies of the communist project to achieve bonding. The combination of peer pressure, genuine emotional experiences, and threats of discipline for recalcitrance was clearly powerful, yet the party was aware of the dangers of people merely “acting as if” they believed. Indeed, advice from high up indicated that “cadres were not to insist on formalities such as the weeping of participants as demonstration of their sincerity” (p. 100). But the very fact that such advice had to be given at all probably shows that lower-level cadres did insist on such performances just to be safe.

There were also campaigns to emulate “soldiers of Mao Zedong thought,” which essentially meant soldiers who displayed the sorts of self-sacrificing qualities that the party thought desirable. Here the cult served, it seems to me, as a means by which certain kinds of status competition were encouraged (the heroes of Mao Zedong thought, like Stakhanovite workers in the Soviet Union, received media attention and other rewards), and hence provided a positive incentive to adopt the “correct” sort of identity and behaviour, complementing the negative incentives provided by peer pressure in group study sessions or other collective interaction rituals. And as elsewhere, status competition that is made to depend on the credibility of loyalty signals appears to lead to inflationary pressures on flattery.

From the army, the more intense forms of the cult spread to the broader population over time, accelerating as the Cultural Revolution started. Leese tells the story of the creation of the “Little Red Book,” for example, which was printed more than a billion times between 1966 and 1969:

Image from wikimedia commons

The Little Red Book was at first confined to the army, but demand for it outside its confines was soon enormous. For one thing, political study campaigns in the countryside (which increased in the 1960s) required a focal text to mobilize people properly, and the Quotations provided one. But, as Leese astutely observes, the main thing that the Quotations offered was the “possibility of empowerment for non-party members” (p. 121). Though Leese does not put it this way, the book seemed to provide access to the “code” that enabled people to act more or less safely within the highly unpredictable environment of the early cultural revolution; and the party enabled this demand by basically diverting the resources of the “entire publishing sector” to printing Mao’s writings, “at the expense of every other print item, including schoolbooks” (p. 122). Pace Leese, I think it is a bit misleading to speak of the work’s “popularity”; the work was popular, if that’s the word, because it was becoming essential for everyone to show some familiarity with (read: be able to recite quotations from) Mao’s writings. Indeed, as Leese documents later in the book, during the early cultural revolution Red Guards would set up “temporary inspection offices” on the streets and harass pedestrians about their knowledge of Mao’s works, like the “vice police” in some countries today; this sort of atmosphere helped the cult to grow.

Other rituals were of course important to the spread of the more intense forms of the cult outside the army. The eight “mass receptions” of the Red Guards in 1966 were the most spectacular of these, though in some ways the least interesting (to me). Though the Red Guards became a sort of vanguard in the spread of the cult throughout Chinese society during the cultural revolution, the actual number of people who participated in these receptions would have been quite small relative to China’s total population, most of them impressionable young students who took the advantage of free train travel to get involved in something bigger than themselves. Under the circumstances, it is unsurprising that many of them reported ecstatic experiences on seeing Mao (who didn’t make any big speeches or direct them in any particular way), which in turn cemented their identities as Red Guards; this sort of “interaction ritual” seems likely to produce this sort of outcome fairly reliably, independently of any characteristics of the supposedly “charismatic” figure (consider what happens at your typical K-pop or J-pop concert). The more interesting point for me was about the role that free train travel and accommodation played in encouraging the cult in 1966; for some people, at least, participation in the “exchange of experiences” must have been a great opportunity to see China and engage in rebellious activity with relatively low risk. (As Leese remarks, “many students displayed much more revolutionary fervor in distant places than at home, where they had to consider other interests involved,” p. 139).

As the cult spread and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution deepened, however, the party lost control over its symbols. Leese refers to this as the period of “cult anarchy;” I would compare it to the point at which monetary authorities lose control of the money supply, leading to runaway hyperinflation. Different factions of Red Guards started using Mao’s image and words in incompatible ways, and new cult rituals emerged from the grass roots, sometimes from the enthusiasm of the genuinely committed, sometimes seemingly as protective talismans against the uncertainty and strife of the period. Everybody appealed to Mao to signal their revolutionary credentials, but there was no longer anyone capable of settling disputes over the credibility of these signals. Mao himself wasn’t much help; whenever he spoke at all, his messages were often cryptic and didn’t really settle any important disputes. The cult was now a “Red Queen” race of wasteful signalling, rather than a carefully calibrated tool of mobilization or discipline, driven by a complex combination of genuine desires to signal loyalty and identity and fears for one’s security. (Leese notes that failure to conform to the arbitrary protocols of the cult put people at risk of being sentenced as an “active counterrevolutionary” and documents many cases in which minimal symbolic transgressions resulted in incarceration or even death).

By 1967, for example, statues of Mao first started to be built, something that CCP leaders, and Mao himself, had discouraged in the past, and still officially frowned upon. The statues were typically built by local factions without approval from the central party, and they were all 7.1 meters high and placed on a pedestal that was 5.16 meters high, for a total height of 12.26 meters. (26 December = Mao’s birthday, 1 July = the Party’s founding date, 16 May = the beginning of the cultural revolution. People arrived at this precise convention for the statues without any centralized direction, merely through a signalling process). Later “Long Live the Victory of Mao Zedong Though Halls” were built on a grand scale, again without approval from the central party. Billions of Chairman Mao badges were produced by individual work units competing with each other, which were themselves subject to size inflation (“[a]s the larger size of the badges came to be associated with greater loyalty to the CCP Chairman, … badges with a diameter of 30 centimetres and greater came to be produced,” p. 216); Zhou Enlai would grumble in 1969 about the enormous waste of resources this represented. Costly signalling demands kept escalating; some people took to pinning the badges directly on their skin, for example, and farmers sent “loyalty pigs” to Mao as gifts (pigs with a shaved “loyalty” character).

New rituals and performances emerged too: Leese discusses the “quotation gymnastics,” a series of gymnastics exercises with a storyline based on Mao’s thought and involving praise of the “reddest red sun in our hearts,” and more bizarrely perhaps, “loyalty dances,” (picture at the link) which, like the quotation gymnastics, was “a grassroots invention” designed to physically signal loyalty, and which spread “even to regions where public dancing was not part of the common culture and thus led to considerable public embarrassment” (p. 205). People wrote the character for “loyalty” everywhere and developed new conventions for answering the phone that started by wishing Mao eternal life. One of the most bizarre and interesting stories in the book concerns “Mao’s mangos:” the story of how some mangos that Mao gave to a “Propaganda Team” became relics beyond the control of the Central Party. Let me quote from Adam Yuet Chau’s article on the mangos as relics (Past and Present (2010) 206 (suppl 5): 256-275), which has a much better summary than anything I can manage:

On 5 August 1968, Mao received the Pakistani foreign minister Mian Arshad Hussain, who brought with him a basket of golden mangoes as gifts for the Chairman. Instead of eating the mangoes, Mao decided to give them to the Capital Worker and Peasant Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team … that had earlier been sent to the Qinghua University in Beijing to rein in the rival Red Guard gangs. Two days later, on 7 August, the People’s Daily, the official news organ of the Communist Party-state, carried a report on the mango gift that included the following extra-long headline in extra-large font: ‘The greatest concern, the greatest trust, the greatest support, the greatest encouragement; our great leader Chairman Mao’s heart is always linked with the hearts of the masses; Chairman Mao gave the precious gifts given by a foreign friend to the Capital Worker and Peasant Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team’.

Yuet Chau then quotes an eyewitness:

Mao gave the mangoes to Wang Dongxing, who divided them up, distributing one mango each to a number of leading factories in Beijing, including Beijing Textile Factory, where I was then living. The workers at the factory held a huge ceremony, rich in the recitation of Mao’s words, to welcome the arrival of the mango, then sealed the fruit in wax, hoping to preserve it for posterity. The mangoes became sacred relics, objects of veneration. The wax-covered fruit was placed on an altar in the factory auditorium, and workers lined up to file past it, solemnly bowing as they walked by. No one had thought to sterilize the mango before sealing it, however, and after a few days on display, it began to show signs of rot. The revolutionary committee of the factory retrieved the rotting mango, peeled it, then boiled the flesh in a huge pot of water. Mao again was greatly venerated, and the gift of the mango was lauded as evidence of the Chairman's deep concern for the workers. Then everyone in the factory filed by and each worker drank a spoonful of the water in which the sacred mango had been boiled. After that, the revolutionary committee ordered a wax model of the original mango. The replica was duly made and placed on the altar to replace the real fruit, and workers continued to file by, their veneration for the sacred object in no apparent way diminished.

Here’s a picture of one of the mangos, from Stefan R. Landsberger’s fantastic collection of Chinese Cultural Revolution posters; the poster is based on a photograph taken very shortly after the gift of the mangos:

Figure 5: "The great leader Chairman Mao's treasured gift to the Workers' Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams of the capital - a mango" (1969). From Stefan R. Landsberger's collection.

“Mango fever” then spread throughout the country:

In order to share the honour with workers and the revolutionary masses elsewhere, more replicas of the mangoes were made and sent around the country. All over the country welcoming parties were organized to receive the mangoes, and many work units enshrined the mango replicas for the masses to view in order to partake in the Chairman’s gift. Mao badges with the platter of mangoes and posters with revolutionary messages illustrated with the mangoes began to appear; a cigarette factory in the city of Xinzheng in Henan Province began producing a line of mango-brand cigarettes (still in production today); a film was made on class struggle using the Mao mango gift as a key symbol in the story line. In the months following Mao’s giving of the mangoes a mango fever descended upon China.

It’s worth noting that mangos were very rare in China at the time; few people would have seen one, so they were more likely objects of curiosity than one might have expected. A detail from another 1969 poster gives some of the flavour of the mango processions (though actual pictures of these events, one of which is included in Leese’s book, show the mangos inside covered reliquaries):

Figure 6: Detail from poster "Forging ahead courageously while following the great leader Chairman Mao!" (1969). From Stefan R. Landsberger's collection.

As Leese notes, most of these inventions (the mango rituals included) were not authorized by the CCP Centre, and many of the supposed leaders of the cultural revolution (e.g., Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing, and occasionally even Mao himself) tried to curb their practice, or at best only grudgingly authorized them after the fact. From their perspective, these “grassroots” practices and rituals were objectionable because they could not be controlled directly by them.

But it would be a mistake to think that because these practices were not directed from the top, that they were therefore genuine expressions of love for the Chairman. Motivations were of course various, and one does not want to preclude positive affect by definition– those who adopted the identity of “Red Guards” probably thought of themselves as sincerely in love with Mao, for one thing – but whatever people’s motivations may have been they were clearly dominated by the need to signal loyalty against a background of others who were also furiously trying to signal loyalty for their own manifold reasons. The clearest evidence of signalling behaviour is in fact the uniformity of the language used to flatter Mao (“down to the level of single phrases” over thousands of texts p. 184: "boundless hot love," "the reddest red sun in our hearts," etc.); the language of flattery was a code to be mastered, not a way of expressing deeply held emotions, as Leese rightly sees.

This is not to say that flattery was never sincere or reflective of great love for Mao; but its escalation came from the Red Queen race aspect of the situation, not from some deep well of emotion or from awareness of Mao’s charismatic qualities. And this Red Queen race was reinforced by the presence of a small core activist group – the Red Guards at first - that was quite capable of inflicting punishment, directly or indirectly, on those who did not conform. At any rate, as Randall Collins says: “Sincerity is not an important question in politics, because sincere belief is a social product: successful IRs [interaction rituals] make people into sincere believers.” But lose the rituals, and you easily lose the group identities and emotional energy that drive action; sincere belief is rarely an independent driver of action.

It is also unsurprising that such “grassroots” loyalty signalling would tend to draw on various traditional scripts for demonstrating reverence or support, including scripts connected with the veneration of relics in Buddhism (as in the case of the mangos) or other forms of religious worship; the signal has to be recognizable to arbitrary others, and only religious scripts have sufficient universality for this purpose. Similarly, some of the manifestations of the cult (painting loyalty characters all over one’s house) can only be understood in terms of what I would call “magical thinking” – the use of words and objects to ward off evil pre-emptively. (But, unlike other forms of magical thinking, this stuff worked!). There is, in short, little need to appeal to tradition, “feudal” remnants, collective backwardness, or superstition to explain any aspect of the cult, contrary to the standard accounts of the cult offered by communist party theoreticians (and many people today).

This post is already long enough, but it is worth noting that the party seems to have tried to regain control over cult symbols by ratcheting the ritual level up – making the cult protocols more arbitrary – to foster unity in the factionalized atmosphere of the Cultural Revolution. The degree of ritualization was astonishing; Mao quotations came to be used in the most banal exchanges (answering the phone, buying produce, etc.); work units were required to “ask for instructions in the morning” before a portrait of Mao; etc. But the disciplinary function was clear: “[d]eviations from the prescribed routines were regarded as disloyal behaviour and thus potentially engendered drastic consequences” (p. 199). Once direct control over the symbols of loyalty was re-established, the party could move to gradually control flattery inflation and even engage in some controlled disinflation.

Though Leese does not put it this way, his overall story suggests that the Mao cult went through about six different stages, each of which can be distinguished by its own distinctive “inflationary” drivers on flattery of Mao. The first stage can be characterized as one of “controlled inflation,” lasting from the initial building up of the cult in the late 1930s and early 1940s to Stalin’s death, more or less. At this time, the cult was fostered by the entire party leadership and served primarily a mobilizing function, though the party was careful to prevent excessive praise of Mao; we might say that the initial cult building project shifted the base level of flattery upwards, but did not yet produce powerful inflationary pressures on the growth of flattery. The second stage, lasting from Stalin’s death to the failure of the “Hundred Flowers” campaign, more or less, can be characterized as one of slight flattery “deflation.” At this time, a number of events, including Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, prompted a certain amount of liberalization directed from above that led to a slight lowering in the level of flattery and a relaxation of inflationary pressures. With the failure of the “Hundred Flowers” campaign, the cult enters a stage of “sustained inflation,” and control over the cult shifts to Mao and his close associates, who promote it primarily for disciplinary purposes. This stage lasts until the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, when they lost full control over the symbols of the cult. At this point (stage four) we have “runaway inflation”, driven by the need to signal loyalty in factional struggles and avoid punishment. By 1971, however, the party had regained some control over cult symbols, Lin Biao had fallen from grace, and the party engaged in some flattery deflation, helped somewhat by the death of Mao in 1976. (Interestingly, there was not a great deal of spontaneous public grief at the time; as Leese notes, most people were probably rather cynically disenchanted with Mao by then. The old rituals of the cult had lost their emotional power). Finally, one may add the resurgence of something like a posthumous Mao cult after 1989. Here cult practices are driven by many motivations – “disillusionment, nostalgia, renewed national pride, the incorporation of religious traditions, and commercial interests” (p. 262) lifting the background level of flattery from its nadir in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but incapable of sustaining runaway flattery inflation in the absence of encouragement from the CCP Center, which can’t live with Mao, and can’t live without him.

A few general lessons may perhaps be drawn from this story. First, cults of personality basically never emerge from the spontaneous expression of emotion by a population, despite what dictators may have you believe. They are primarily tools of political control within networks of patronage relationships, as Leese rightly sees (hence, in practice, much more likely to emerge in highly authoritarian contexts). I have compared them here to the tools of monetary policy in the economic realm, insofar as they affect the average level of effort invested in signalling loyalty to a ruling group or person (the “flattery level”); but, as with monetary policy, cults can miscarry – in which case uncontrolled flattery inflation may result. Second, their effects are not produced by mere propaganda; interaction rituals are required to produce genuine emotional energy within specific groups, increase cohesion, etc. But the cult does not depend on the genuineness of anybody’s sentiments to work; it depends on the possibility of producing certain kinds of emotional pressures through group rituals. (As an aside, we lack a good “high pressure” political science and psychology; too much of our political science and psychology assume “low pressure” environments. But cults are high pressure phenomena, and attempting to understand them by means of the stories and concepts we use in low pressure environments is apt to lead us astray). Finally, the rickety Weberian apparatus of “legitimacy” and “charisma” is basically irrelevant to the explanation of cults. Leese’s book is mercifully free of those terms, except for the occasional sentence claiming that so and so’s actions “legitimized” this or that; but most of these can be safely ignored (all the sentence can possibly mean is “increased support”).

All in all, this is an excellent book – highly recommended if you are interested in the topic, though it does assume a great deal of background knowledge of modern Chinese history.

The Dictator's Dilemma, Mao Edition

2012-09-25T08:25:00.003+12:00

Mao Zedong to Ho Chi Minh, June 1966:

I advise you, not all of your subjects are loyal to you. Perhaps most of them are loyal but maybe a small number only verbally wish you "long live," while in reality they wish you a premature death. When they shout "long live," you should beware and analyze [the situation]. The more they praise you, the less you can trust them. This is a very natural rule.

From Daniel Leese's fascinating book Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China's Cultural Revolution (p. 168), which I hope to review here soon.

The Great Norm Shift and the Triumph of Universal Suffrage: A Very Short Quantitative History of Political Regimes, Part 1.825

2012-09-11T17:13:00.000+12:00

(Continuing an occasional series on the history of political regimes. Lots of charts and graphs, and one slideshow, using the Political Institutions and Political Events dataset by Adam Przeworski et al., which is a fantastic resource for people interested in this topic. And I like pictures!).

People sometimes do not realize how total has been the normative triumph of some of the ideas typically associated with democracy, even if one thinks that democracy itself has not succeeded quite as spectacularly. Take, for instance, the norm that rulers of states should be selected through some process that involves voting by all adults in society (I'm being deliberately vague here) rather than, say, inheriting their position by succeeding their fathers. In 1788 there were only a couple of countries in the world that could even claim to publicly recognize something remotely like this norm. Most people could not vote, and voting was not generally recognized as something that needed to happen before rulers could rule; rulers could and did claim to have authority to rule on other grounds. Norms of hereditary selection structured the symbolic universe in which political competition took place, and defined its ultimate boundaries for most people (at least those who lived in state spaces). Yet by 2008 there were only four or five countries in the world that did not publicly acknowledge universal voting rights:

(You can watch the slideshow in full screen or view the individual maps separately here.)

Each map in the slideshow displays three pieces of information, all taken from the PIPE dataset (see the data and methods note at the bottom of this post for more information about the dataset and the process used to generate the maps, including some R code): the type of class and gender franchise restrictions in place in a particular country for a particular year (the number inside each bubble, and the color of each bubble); whether other franchise restrictions are recorded (such as restrictions on voting by priests or the military; this is the border color of each bubble); and whether the franchise expanded or contracted on any particular year (the shape of the symbol). The first digit of each number inside the bubbles always indicates the type of class restrictions in place at the time, ranging from 0 (no suffrage), 1 (estate representation) to 7 (no class restrictions at all); the second digit indicates the type of gender restrictions in place, ranging from 0 (no female suffrage at all) to 2 (equal suffrage rights for men and women). Thus "7" means "manhood" suffrage (all adult males can vote, without property qualifications, so long as they are not disqualified by "other restrictions"), and "72" means universal suffrage (all adults can vote, without property qualification). The code "SN/O" means either that the franchise is determined at a subnational level and hence no single set of class and gender restrictions applies throughout the territory (as in the USA for the 19th century), or that there is an at least partly elected assembly but no franchise information is recorded (this is mostly the case for colonial legislative assemblies before independence in African countries).

The maps start out very sparse; only a few countries in the world recognized an electoral norm in any form at the beginning of the 19th century, though I'd wager that a few of the early adopters, even in class restricted form, are not very well known: Haiti in 1804 (before most of Europe), most central American countries by the 1820s, all Latin America by 1830. The first country in the dataset to adopt full "manhood" suffrage is Greece in 1844 (before France in 1848); the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian empire apparently had some form of class restricted female suffrage by 1861, though New Zealand of course was the first to achieve true "universal" suffrage. (Which is cool). Japan had a form of class-restricted suffrage by 1889, and Iran had full "manhood" suffrage by 1914, along with most of the Balkan countries, followed shortly by Iraq and Turkey, the latter of which achieves universal suffrage by 1930, before Uruguay, the first Latin American country to get there (in 1932).

The most striking thing the animation shows, to me, is how complete is the shift between the world of the 18th century, where politics was structured around norms of hereditary selection, and today's world, where politics everywhere is structured around electoral norms. We can see this at a glance by just looking at the relative frequency of franchise restrictions:

Figure 1: Franchise types worldwide, 1788-2008

The magnitude of the shift is staggering. The number of countries that do not recognize a norm of universal suffrage is tiny: less than 6% of all countries. And about half of these have universal male suffrage anyway; the half that makes no concessions to the suffrage norm at all - or for which no information is available in the dataset, but is safe to assume have no suffrage at all - consists of the few remaining absolute monarchies. No big country, save for Saudi Arabia (which is not that big), rejects the principle that rulers should be selected via elections (even North Korea enshrines the principle in its constitution!). Universal suffrage is about as close to a cultural universal today as these things get. (And, incidentally, it was not a particularly European practice even early in the 19th century, as we see in the slideshow above).

To be sure, the fact that a norm is publicly recognized - is enshrined in constitutions and given lip service in other ways - does not mean that it is actually very meaningful. The "legitimacy" of the norm, to use a word I dislike very much, does not mean that the norm will be followed, or that it will affect power structures to any significant extent. (Incidentally, the same was true of norms of ascriptive selection in the European middle ages, a subject I would like to return to later; for all its symbolic influence, general belief in heredity as a principle of selection did not mean the norm was generally respected). Universal suffrage does not mean democracy.

It is true enough that the meaning of the norm of universal suffrage varies with the context; the fact that all adults could vote in the Soviet Union or Libya had different political implications than the fact that all adults can vote in New Zealand or Venezuela. But it is still striking that there is now so little political conflict over the principle of universal suffrage, which was once new and terrifyingly radical. That there was at one point a real conflict over the norm - over whether it was the right norm, and who should be allowed to vote - is shown in the frequency of suffrage contractions in the 19th century. Here we can see the traces of large-scale class conflict being played out precisely over the meaning of the norm of voting. Of the 39 franchise contractions unambiguously recorded in the dataset, the vast majority (71%) happened in the 19th century, most in Latin America, a testimony to the fierceness of conflict over the norm at the time:

Figure 2: Expansions and contractions of the franchise, 1788-2008, all countries

(Franchise contractions are the pinkish bars at the bottom).

Figure 3: Franchise changes by region, 1788-2008, all countries

Franchise contractions were often quickly counterbalanced by franchise expansions, as we can see in the slideshow above; the rich never held the normative advantage for long (even if they, of course, held the power). Interestingly, it looks that as overt class restrictions on the franchise disappeared, certain other kinds of restrictions became more important, though the dataset seems patchier here, and it does not include every other restriction we can think of (like felon disenfranchisement). Overt class conflict over the meaning of the norm of voting in the 19th century yields to other forms of conflict: anticlerical conflicts, military-civilian conflicts, ethnic conflicts, territorial conflicts, all of which leave their traces in the constitutional changes recorded in the dataset. (Female enfranchisement comes in two waves, one early in the 20th century and another in the 1950s; the second wave at least seems to have involved no significant male-female conflict, but instead resulted from party competition, as Przeworski documents more fully in this excellent paper). There are even a couple of cases - Kenya in the 1950s and the Soviet Union for a couple of decades after 1918 - where the voting system explicitly disenfranchised the propertied (a real-life antecedent of the voting system I described theoretically here); the advantage in the conflict over the meaning of the norm had swung so radically to the poor that this was even thinkable, though these experiments didn't seem to have had much of an impact for the later development of the norm. Nevertheless, most of the more noxious "other" restrictions on the franchise have also disappeared today, even if restrictions on military personnel voting still remain in a a couple of places:

Figure 4: Other restrictions on the franchise, 1788-2008, all countries

Latin America again stands out as an outlier in the extent to which its political conflicts were waged in the normative terrain of the franchise: who is excluded, and who is included, has been a much more contested issue there than elsewhere. And most Latin American "other restrictions" have been about the place of the military, reflecting a longer history of tensions between civilian and military powers there (code 6 indicates restrictions on voting by military personnel).

Figure 5: Regional distribution of other restrictions on the franchise, 1788-2008, all countries

Still, one might think that countries may recognize universal suffrage constitutionally, but fail to hold elections, or fail to hold elections for meaningful offices, or elections that allow for opposition. Yet as the number of countries with suffrage has increased, so have the numbers of at least partly elected legislatures with real powers (the figure refers to lower chambers with genuine legislative competences; mere advisory councils, elected or appointed, as in Saudi Arabia, don't count):

Figure 6: Composition of legislatures around the world, 1788-2008

In fact, only a few countries around the world fail to have today any kind of at least partly elected legislature; and even those "partly appointed" legislatures seem to be mostly elected anyway (I use data for 2000, which is more complete for some reason- but the numbers are not likely to have budged much since then):

Figure 7: Composition of legislatures around the world, 2000

(North Korea has the dubious distinction of holding elections but having no meaningful legislature). And along with elected legislatures, we see a corresponding increase in the frequency of elections worldwide:

Figure 8: Number of elections in the world per year, 1788-2008, all countries

In fact, we may be reaching "peak election": there are about 0.35 elections per year per state (counting only national legislative and presidential elections), which is what one would expect from typical electoral cycles of about 3-4 years if every country in the world held elections:

Figure 9: Number of elections per year as a proportion of the number of states in the world

Interestingly, the maximum number of elections relative to the number of states in the state system was in 1920! And as we might have guessed from the information in this post, "peak authoritarianism" in the 1970s was also the nadir of elections relative to the number of countries in the state system. But even then, there were lots of elections. Elections where opposition was NOT allowed were in fact almost as common then as elections that opposition was able to contest:

Figure 10: Number of elections per year with and without political opposition

Both types of election, those with and without opposition, are old; "single party" elections are not the invention of the communist regimes of the 20th century. Yet the open banning of opposition parties - the attempt to stamp out opposition completely - seems to have been more common wherever norms enshrined in constitutions were openly disregarded:

Figure 11: Presence or absence of opposition according to whether or not a constitution is "in force"

Though note, again, how during peak authoritarianism in the 1970s we see the highest number of cases where constitutions explicitly banned political pluralism of any kind. Incidentally, these were mostly in Africa and Asia, as well as in the communist states of Europe; in many Latin American dictatorships (e.g., Brazil) opposition was not completely banned, at least not all of the time.

Figure 12: Regional distribution of states with and without political opposition

So the switch towards a norm of universal suffrage has been accompanied (disregarding peak authoritarianism in the 1970s) by a switch towards a norm of political competition; in fact the number of states without opposition seems to have averaged about a quarter of the total, regardless of franchise type, and is quickly decreasing.

Figure 13: Proportion of states with and without political opposition by franchise type

I am not saying, of course, that states that allow some political opposition are "democratic" in any strong sense. (I am coming to dislike the word). Political competition is restricted in many ways around the world, some of them quite subtle, and some of them less so. But it is striking that the normative shift over the last two centuries does seem to have increased the competitiveness of political life, if nothing else, in ways that have not been reversed over the span of two centuries. One can look, for example, at the number of elections where the incumbent party remains in power after the election, regardless of whether or not they "won" the election (I'm telling you, this dataset is fantastic); and here the trend is inexorably towards greater competition, even if elections are still mostly won by incumbent parties around the world. But whereas elections in the 19th century produced incumbent victories between 80 and 90% of the time (or rather, resulted in opposition parties actually taking power only between 10-20% of the time), elections today result in incumbents leaving office nearly 40% of the time:

Figure 14: Electoral outcomes per year, 1788-2008, all countries

So the normative shift is real and reflected in a number of different aspects of political competition. In general (with some exceptions), the longer a history of elections, the lower the degree of incumbent advantage. In this graph, the length of the bar represents the number of elections recorded in the dataset, and the color represents the type of outcome; red indicates an opposition party was able to take power after winning the election (an "alternation" in power, in the language of Przeworski):

Figure 15: Electoral outcomes per country

(The black lines identify the USA, New Zealand, and Venezuela, the three countries that have been "home" to me, all of them countries with long histories of elections, and from where most of the readers of this blog come). Another way of viewing this information is by plotting the percentage of times the incumbent has won an election per country:

Figure 16: Proportion of elections where incumbent party remained in power per country

The USA stands out as a country where incumbent advantages have historically been low - more so than many other places with long histories of democracy; only the Netherlands and the UK, among countries with comparably long histories of elections, have had lower degrees of incumbent advantage. And the regional patterns are perhaps as one would expect. Think of the "green" in the following map as places where it has historically been safe to be an incumbent in an election:

Figure 17: Political competitiveness in elections worldwide, 1788-2008

Incumbent advantage has historically been lowest in the richest parts of the world, though there are some obvious outliers, and the correlation does not indicate any form of causation, even if theory does lead us to expect that the degree of incumbent advantage would be negatively correlated with long-run growth (a test I have not performed, but may later).

Finally, it is worth noting that most people seem to have become more, rather than less, enthusiastic about participating in elections since the 19th century. As the number of people capable of participating and actually participating in elections has increased with changes in the franchise...

Figure 18: Ratio of the number voters in legislative elections to total population

(Each dot represents the ratio of voters to the total population in a particular election in a given country; some very low ratios are due to boycotts).

Figure 19: Ratio of participating voters to total population, by franchise types

The proportion of eligible voters participating has increased, not decreased:

Figure 20: Voter turnout per year, 1788-2008, all countries, in elections with and without opposition

(Each dot represents an election in a given country; turnout is calculated as the ratio of participating voters to the proportion of actually eligible voters).

Figure 21: Voter turnout in legislative elections, 1788-2008, with and without opposition

Turnout nevertheless has varied quite a bit by country:

Figure 22: Voter turnout in legislative elections per country, all years

(Turnouts greater than 100% represent either problems with reported numbers of participating voters, or the fact that more people voted in some elections than were actually eligible according to franchise rules. Interestingly, the USA has always had lower turnout rates than a lot of other countries; and high turnouts do not appear to have ensured good governance. It is also worth noting that the highest turnouts have all been in elections without opposition, where voting is a form of signalling, and is encouraged by coercive mobilization, even if it makes no difference to the outcome).

In sum, we seem to live in a golden age of participation, even as elections are often thought to be disappointing, and voting irrational. Elections are the great ritual of the age, though they certainly don't make as much difference as most people seem to think. The aggregate effect of all this electoral activity seems to be mostly, if marginally, positive; yet elections have not reduced injustice or inequality as much as early proponents of universal suffrage had hoped.

It is nevertheless striking that conflicts that were once fought on the terrain of the norms concerning suffrage and elections have shifted to other terrains; the norm is no longer the object of live struggle. And if elections and universal suffrage did not make as much material difference as its proponents had historically hoped, they nevertheless seem to have ultimately accomplished a great "redistribution of status." It is no longer possible to signal unequal status by depriving people of the vote. We seem to have all become democrats at least in the sense that most people everywhere all publicly recognize the norm that all adults are equal citizens who all should have one vote, even if that norm is routinely violated or made meaningless still in many parts of the world.

Data and methods note
First, a thank you to Adam Przeworski for making available the PIPE dataset here. Like most very large-scale historical datasets of political data, the PIPE dataset misses some things, given the patchiness of the historical record (the dataset only aims at full completeness from 1917 onwards, though it does try to go back to the inception of representative institutions in every country still existing today), and some starting dates are a bit arbitrary (for example, the United Kingdom only enters the dataset in 1800, and has franchise information starting only in 1832, with the first Reform Act). Judgments about institutions are sometimes difficult to make. But in general, this is great data.

I nevertheless had to clean it up a bit to create the maps and graphs in this post. I first cleaned up the country names and fixed a few other minor things using Google Refine, added capital cities and their latitude and longitude (mostly using the cshapes R package by Nils Weidmann), added franchise data for Russia (which was missing), and then calculated a number of variables. The record of all this data wrangling is available in this repository, in the file Processing PIPE.R (and the Google Refine JSON extract). The code for the graphs is available in the file Final graphs.R. The code might change as I clean it up; right now it is essentially one big hack.

[Update, 12 September: Fixed some typos and minor stylistic problems]

[Update, 16 September: Code for processing PIPE now greatly simplified - see repository]

Impossible Political Systems: Further Adventures in Rawlsian Constitutional Design

2012-08-24T23:52:00.001+12:00

I am somewhat amazed, now that I think of it, that no “serious” political philosopher I know of has ever proposed an electoral system like the one I proposed in this post last week, where individual voting power is inversely proportional to income. (By all means enlighten me if anyone has proposed something like it; I would be delighted to know. I’m pretty certain that among the many forgotten pamphleteers of the 19^th century someone must have come up with a similar idea but I don’t have the knowledge to locate these potentially existing antecedents). This probably means that it is a bad idea (and judging by the few reactions I got, most people think so); but if it is a bad idea, I would like to explore in more detail the reasons why it is bad, since it is not obvious to me that a system like that would not meet Rawls’ principles of justice.[1] (And I sort of would like to see a few more responses).

A recap: I suggested (more or less tongue in cheek) that Rawls’ difference principle could potentially be met by a political system where everyone has a vote, but the formal value of your vote declines the more you earn. There are a number of different ways of achieving this, but the most interesting (at least to me!) version of this system is the following.

We divide voters into n income (or wealth) equal classes (or quantiles). Voters in the first (poorest) class have median income y and a single vote each, whereas voters in the nth (richest) class have median income a_ny (that is, the median income of the richest class is a times the median income of the poorest class) and 1/a_n^x votes each, where x is a number between 0 and 1 that determines the extent of the “disenfranchisement” of high income voters. “Income” here is post-tax, post transfer income.[2] The value of a person’s vote thus depends on their income class; more specifically, it is inversely proportional to the ratio between the median income of their class and the median income of the poorest class. For n > 1, if x = 0 then every voter has one vote, and the system reduces to the normal “one person, one vote” system; if x = 1 then the extent of rich voter disenfranchisement is strictly proportional to the average income of their income class, so a voter in the k_th income class would have 1/a_k votes.

A numerical example may be useful. Imagine that this system had been in place in the USA in 2008, with x = 1 (so the value of the votes of the richer classes is strictly inversely proportional to their income), and n = 10 (so there are ten classes of voters). According to the Luxembourg Income Study, the income ratio between the bottom and the top decile of the income distribution in the USA in 2010 was 6.154 (so a₁₀=6.154). In this imaginary political system, in other words, the poorest decile of the income distribution would have had about six times the voting power of the highest decile. About 75% of these people voted democratic in the 2008 congressional elections, according to the American National Election Study, whereas only about 33% of the people in the highest income decile did so. A very quick and dirty simulation (see code and explanation here) suggests that if this system had been in place in 2008, the Democratic party would have won about 62% of the two-party vote (61% if we assume turnout rates would have stayed the same, with poorer voters voting at lower rates than richer voters), rather than the 54% that it actually won – an 8% difference, which one imagines would have been translated into somewhat different policies. A system like this would thus have amplified the influence of the bottom decile of the income distribution (and of the lower half of the income distribution generally), though of course parties would have behaved very differently in the new environment, so the example is merely illustrative. (A simulation for New Zealand is a bit harder to do given our different electoral system and my inability to use the NZ Election Study, but I’d love to see one).

Note that we could in principle consider systems where x > 1 or x < 0, though I doubt such regimes would pass Rawlsian muster. If x is much greater than 1, the votes of the richer classes are discounted very quickly: with a small number of classes (say n = 4) we then get a “dictatorship of the proletariat”; with a larger number of classes and a very large value for x, we get basically a simple dictatorship of the very poorest people in society. Similarly, if x > 0 and the number of classes is small, we get a régime censitaire, where the rich have more formal voting power than the poor (like the Roman republic of Cicero’s time); if x is much smaller than -1 and the number of classes is large we simply get a dictatorship of the richest people in society.

Note also that if n = 1 then the system reduces to the usual "one person, one vote" system; for n = 2 voters below the median income each get one vote, while voters above the median income each get votes, where a₂ is the ratio of the average income of voters above the median income to the average income of voters below the median income; and so on. The smaller n, the more abrupt differences in voting power are (though they are ultimately less steep), whereas the larger n, the more gradual and steeper the differences in voting power. So, for n = 2, the superrich end up with the same voting power as the middle class, and the lower middle class ends up with the same voting power as the very poorest, though the poor and the lower middle class end up with more voting power than the upper middle class and the rich; for n = 100, the superrich end up with much less voting power than the middle class, but the middle class in turn ends up with less voting power than the very poorest, even though voters in adjacent income classes end up having similar voting power. If n is high but x is close to zero we have smooth differences in voting power but a small gradient, so that rich and poor end up having similar voting power per person but there are many small gradations. All of this would be easier to show in a simple interactive simulation (a Mathematica notebook, perhaps?) with a couple of sliders for n, x, and some choice of potential income distributions, but that is beyond my ability to do right now; for now, all I can offer is some R code here if people want to play with various choices of parameters.

So how should we choose the parameters n and x? Current voting systems in democracies at least pay lip service to the idea that each elector is formally equal, i.e., that n should be 1 and x should be 0, even if in practice the value of some voters’ votes is larger than the value of others. (In elections to the US senate, the million or so Montana citizens have about 37 times the voting power of the 37 million or so California citizens, a ratio that is much higher than the ones contemplated in the numerical example of this system above. this is an approximation - I should look up the actual numbers of voters, not just the populations - but it will do for a ballpark figure). But would a person choose these exact parameters for an electoral system from behind a veil of ignorance? Rawls himself notes that one must evaluate political institutions by their tendency to produce just outcomes (they are forms of “imperfect procedural justice,” like jury trials); and it is not clear that n = 1 and x = 0 yield the most just outcomes. And the advantages, from a Rawlsian point of view, of choosing larger values for both n and x seem considerable.

Most people (including Rawls) would say that the rich have more influence than the poor in politics, influence that is disproportionate to their numbers (though not everyone thinks this is a bad thing). The reasons are obvious. Standing for elections costs money, and the need for financing campaigns from moneyed private interests may push certain issues to the forefront of the public agenda, and make others invisible. The rich can lobby representatives more easily, and have more ability to coordinate and spread their ideas than the poorest. In the USA, Martin Gilens has argued that the views of the poor have almost no influence on the actions of their representatives when these views diverge from those of the rich. To be sure, not all of these things are necessarily negative. The ability of the rich to lobby can be construed as an informational subsidy to legislators. If the rich are better informed than the poor, policy that is nonresponsive to the views of the poor might be of better quality by some measures. But it is difficult to deny that political inequalities exist; the question is whether they are arranged to the benefit of the worst off. If they are not arranged for the benefit of the worst off, then it is possible that changing the values of n and x, i.e., giving more formal influence to the poorest, would serve as appropriate compensation for their economic inequality.

The thing about a system where n > 1 and x > 0 is that the value of any one person’s vote changes as society becomes more or less equal. Regardless of how many classes we choose, and what value we give to x, the more income-equal the society, the more equal the value of the vote of rich and poor, and in a perfectly income-equal society everyone would have exactly one vote. By the same token, the higher the level of inequality, the higher the value of the votes of the poor relative to the votes of the rich, and as inequality increases, the more political power the poor gain. x thus represents a kind of “sensitivity parameter”: the higher its value, the more sensitive the political system will be to inequality.

Moreover, a system like this would bypass debates about which economic policies actually reduce inequality or produce the most benefits for the worst off, i.e., which policies would meet the “difference principle” (assuming, of course, that the difference principle is the right principle of justice for socioeconomic matters; and it may not be). It makes no assumptions about which kinds of economic policy actually do help the poor; if laissez faire improves their position, then the poor would be in the best position to approve of it; and if some other policy worsens their relative position, then the poor would get a right of “first refusal.” (As inequality increases in a society, the poorest would gain more and more formal political power). In the spirit of the difference principle, the rich are thus allowed to benefit from (economic) inequality so long as the poor approve (with x and n setting the “approval parameters” of the system). Thus, the higher the level of inequality, the more disenfranchised the rich become, and the greater the compensation to the poor in the form of political inequality (benefiting the worst off the most), which in turn might enable them to change those policies. Of course, if your political theory does not depend on Rawlsian assumptions, this point might leave you cold; but even utilitarians might see potential benefits here. (And your choice of x and n might say something about how much a person is willing to give up for the sake of economic equality).

Now, there are many potential problems here. The rich might underreport their income. (Though this should only be a serious problem if n is large). The poor might choose policies that are not in the interest of society as a whole. (But so can the rich; the question is whether, on average, granting more political power to the poor would result in more just decisions). They might redistribute property. (Which would result in their losing political power as economic inequality decreases). If we start tweaking n and x who knows where we might end up. (We could end up with political systems that grant more political power to the rich). Loss of formal political influence by the rich might have unanticipated consequences in the form of additional corruption and so on. Formal distinctions in voting power are an affront to the equality of citizens, and offend our sense of fairness. (True, though people take very large inequalities in elections to the US senate, for example, completely in stride. Also see next point). Perhaps the most important objection to a proposal like this, which Jay Ulfelder raised in conversation on G+ when I posted the original idea, is that politics is not only about economic issues; it is also about many other issues, which we evaluate from the point of view of equal citizenship. Issues about religion, civil liberties, etc. should not be subject to the predominant influence of one social group; they concern all as equal citizens.

I grant that this is a powerful objection to a scheme like this. But here’s a refinement that bypasses or at least mitigates it. Imagine a bicameral legislature. The lower chamber is selected through an electoral system like the one described above, where x = 1, and n = 10, for example. We could call this the “Chamber of the Difference Principle.” The upper chamber, by contrast, is selected through an electoral system of universal equal suffrage (x = 0, n = 1), perhaps including some of the “random constituency” ideas I discussed in an earlier post to ensure the representation of suitably general interests. We could call this the “Chamber of Equal Citizenship.” Determining the exact relationship between these two chambers is beyond the scope of this post; but the (Rawlsian) idea would be that these two chambers would represent the two standpoints from which we evaluate social institutions, and work together to produce law and policy.

Now, I myself don’t know for sure whether to take this idea seriously. I lean toward thinking that a system like this is not only too shocking to our normal ideas of fair representation to be ever politically possible, but is likely to have some bad unanticipated public choice consequences. So I don’t know where I would set x and n, if not at 0 and 1, even if I’ve half convinced myself that higher values for both would be somewhat desirable. But I would like to know where others would place these values. Do you think that voting power should be inversely proportional to income? If you’ve read this far, it would be great if you could answer this poll.

[1] Rawls does say in section 36 of ToJ that the political constitution of the just society would honor “the precept of one elector one vote” as far as possible; but he could be wrong about that, even by his own lights; and anyway a Rawlsian could argue that departures from the one elector, one vote precept are justified in nonideal situations (as Rawls himself does). Furthermore, Rawls does express concern about maintaining the “fair value” of political liberty under conditions of economic inequality, a problem which this system would potentially eliminate.

[2] This is mathematically equivalent to a system in which the members of the richest income class each have one vote, and members of the poorest class each have a_n^x votes; it doesn’t matter which description we use, except that in the second x should perhaps be called an “empowerment” parameter (for the poor) rather than a disenfranchisement parameter (for the rich).

Legitimacy as the Solow Residual of Political Science

2012-08-22T11:04:00.001+12:00

Jay Ulfelder kindly points his readers to my (recently updated!) working paper on “The Irrelevance of Legitimacy” in a recent post where he expresses doubt about the explanatory usefulness of the concept of legitimacy. As long-term readers will know, I am entirely in agreement with Jay when he says that

We appeal to legitimacy when we need to explain the persistence of political arrangements that defy our materialist predictions, and when those arrangements do finally collapse, we say that their failure has revealed a preceding loss of legitimacy. In statistical terms, legitimacy is the label we attach to the residual, the portion of the variance our mental models cannot explain. It is a tautology masquerading as a causal force.

It occurs to me that “legitimacy” plays more or less the same role in political science that “technology” sometimes plays in economics. Both are residual concepts that provide an illusion of understanding but do not actually explain much. In economics, talk of “technology” often obscures the fact that we don’t have a very good general theory of what explains economic growth, as Matt Yglesias noted a couple of weeks ago:

Economists have shown that modern economic growth can't be accounted for merely by growth in the size of the labor force or by accumulation of additional capital. You need to add a third element into the mix. This element is sometimes called "total factor productivity" and sometimes called "technology," but it represents a statistical discrepency, not an inquiry into independently identifiable properties of technological growth. It's like Molière's doctors explaining that opium puts people to sleep because of its virtus dormitiva.

If the discrepency were small, this might not be a big deal and we'd say that economists had shown that capital accumulation is the key to economic growth. But it's not small. What's been found is that economic growth is largely unexplained. Using the word "technology" as a label for the discrepency makes it sound as if the issue is much better understood than it really is.

Technology is here the “Solow residual:” all the different mechanisms by which economic growth occurs that are not accounted for by simple measures of labor and capital utilization. But there are many such mechanisms! Education, changes in political institutions and property rights, the invention of new machines and business methods, new forms of economic organization, changes in social roles, norms, and culture, etc. all can contribute to economic growth beyond increases in labor supply and capital accumulation; but only some of these mechanisms correspond to what we normally think about when we say “technology,” and forgetting this is likely to lead to incorrect inferences. Moreover, we do not actually know which of these mechanisms is the most important in general, and hence which government policies would be most likely to increase growth.

Similarly, “legitimacy” is the label we typically use in political science for all the factors that sustain social order or norms beyond obvious coercion and material incentives. We all agree that the persistence of norms and social order cannot be fully (or even mostly) explained by crude material incentives and obvious coercion; but by subsuming all these “other” factors under a single label we miss the fact that they are really quite various. Collective action problems, rational conservatism, signalling conventions, emotional attachments, habits of discourse and conceptual blinders, identity and affiliation entanglements, sophistry and propaganda, even sincere beliefs in the rightness of the norms or forms of social order in question (for a detailed examination of these mechanisms, read my paper); all of these mechanisms can contribute to their maintenance, and only some of them are close to the folk model of “legitimacy,” in which norms persist because in some sense those subject to them "like" them or at least "accept" them on their own terms. (A model that I take to be false in most relevant cases). Moreover, to the extent that we are interested in changing particular social norms or forms of social order, we will do better to think in terms of how particular mechanisms sustain these norms, rather than in terms of “legitimacy.”

More Rawlsian Thought Experiments: An Inverse Income Voting System

2012-08-17T15:16:00.003+12:00

(For some unknown reason, re-reading Rawls stimulates my weird idea generator. Another politically impossible proposal here, presented as a thought experiment)

[Update 25 August 2012: see the more detailed discussion of this proposal here]

Thinking about the difference principle today, it occurred to me that most of the discussion on the topic tends to be overly focused on the economic institutions that would ensure that the least advantaged group in society would fare best. Yet the difference principle is not restricted in its application to economic inequalities; in fact, the principle specifies that inequalities of authority and political power must also be justified to the worst off group in society: “[t]he second principle applies, in the first approximation, to the distribution of income and wealth and to the design of institutions that make use of differences in authority and responsibility” (§11, p. 53, emphasis mine). Is a standard democratic system – with its panoply of elections, constitutional protections, and so on –justified in those terms? Rawls seems to assume so, even though standard democratic institutions entail clear inequalities in authority and responsibility which are not obviously to the maximum benefit of the worst off.

Moreover, to the extent that Rawls discusses the connection between political and economic inequalities, he tends to think of the direction of causation as going from economics to politics. Unjustifiable political inequalities in authority and responsibility (as, for example, when the rich have undue influence in the political process) would be remedied, in his view, once objectionable economic inequalities are taken care of, which seems reasonable enough; after all, he notes, such inequalities are correlated with one another (§16, p. 83). With low levels of economic inequality, widely dispersed ownership of the means of production, and a healthy dose of public campaign finance, Rawls argues, whatever differences in authority and responsibility political institutions would still produce would be justifiable to the least advantaged (cf. §13, p. 71, §36, p. 198).

But why wait until such inequalities are fully remedied? Imagine that instead of the standard, one person, one vote system, we had a voting system where the poorest person with any income got 1 vote, the person with twice the income of the poorest person got ½ a vote, and a person with 20,000 times the income of the poorest person got 1/20,000^th of a vote. “Income” here includes any government transfers; people with no income would have 1 vote, just as the poorest people with any income. The specific value of the vote would be linked to the income records on file with the national tax agency, and no one could vote who was not linked in some way to the tax system. We might use broad categories instead of specific incomes – say, people making less than $10,000 a year get one vote, people making up to $20,000 half a vote, and so on; and of course we might decide that a different weighting of votes is required. [Update: it occurs to me that using the median income would be easier to set up. For example, voters below the median income each get one vote, voters between the median and twice the median get half, and so on.] Whatever the case, poorer people would have more formal influence than richer people.

In a fully income-equal society, everyone would have 1 vote; in an extremely unequal society, the very poorest would have the most political influence. High-flying hedge fund managers with extremely high incomes likely would have an infinitesimal vote, though they would of course still have many means of exercising influence. After all, elections cost money, and the rich are more able to run for election and lobby legislators. But the idea is that the least advantaged groups would have compensating advantages, as politicians would have to cater to the greatest mass of votes; yet these advantages would diminish as transfer payments increased, or society became more equal. Note also that the specific value of a person’s vote would fluctuate throughout their lifetime, being very high when the person is very young or very old, and very low during their peak earning years. (The system might work kind of like an automatic means test for politically distributed benefits, baked right into the political structure).

Would there be anything wrong with this system, from a Rawlsian point of view? Everyone can still vote and run for office, so the first principle of Rawls’ theory - the principle guaranteeing the equal basic liberties - is not overtly violated; and it seems to me that the inequalities of authority and responsibility produced by this system are more clearly justifiable to the worst off group in society than the inequalities produced by a standard democratic system. For one thing, it provides the least advantaged in society with the fair value of their political liberties in a direct, unmediated way that complicated systems of campaign finance cannot match. Moreover, a political system along these lines bypasses the theoretical discussion about which economic system would best produce outcomes in conformity with the difference principle; different proposals can be tried, and if they worsened the lot of the least advantaged, the poor would gradually acquire sufficient political clout to overturn them. (In theory, this is compatible with pure libertarian laissez faire, so long as such laissez faire actually does improve the condition of the least advantaged group).

Like any oddball proposal, this is very likely a bad idea. (I can imagine all kinds of bad incentives to underreport income, for example, and I’m not sure it would fit with the well-entrenched idea that having an equal voice is a mark of respect of equal citizenship.) But I’m curious: are there specifically Rawlsian grounds to reject this sort of system? (I'm sure there are other grounds). And what are the obvious problems I’ve missed in here? Does this lead to a sustainable politico-economic equilibrium, or simply to an intensification of class conflict?

[Update 2, 20 August 2012: fixed some minor typos. Also thought of some further refinements. Suppose we divide the income distribution into N equal quantiles. The voters in the lowest class have one vote, and the voters in the highest class have (1/(N^x)) fractional vote, where x is a parameter determining how extreme the disenfranchisement of the rich is. When x=0 everyone has one vote, as today; when x=1, the disenfranchisement is strictly proportional to class position, so the each person in the nth quantile has 1/n votes; but we could set x between 0 and 1, leading to a range of different weightings of formal influence for the poorest depending both on the number of "classes" and on the extent of disenfranchisement with income. With few classes and low x, the system is close to our own; with many classes and large x, there is a very steep disenfranchisement curve. What values of these parameters would be chosen behind the veil of ignorance?]

Musical Chairs, Veto Constituencies, Accountability Juries, and other Random Ideas: Further Thoughts on Randomizing Electoral Constituencies

2012-08-13T11:46:00.001+12:00

(Attention conservation notice: some more thoughts on this proposal, which gained a modest amount of internet attention in the last couple of days – see Dylan Matthews here, Matt Yglesias here, and Evan Soltas here).

Having slept on it and seen a few responses, I am not yet convinced that the proposal I sketched in the post below would actually be a bad idea (though it probably is!). The basic idea is that the electoral constituency or electorate – the group of people who “selects” the legislator – should be separated from the accountability constituency or electorate – the group of people who “disciplines” the legislator¹ – in such a way that neither the legislator nor the electors would know in advance who the latter group would be. Such a system would (in theory) mimic some of the structural features of a Rawlsian “veil of ignorance,” so that legislators could not tailor their appeal to any particular group of people but are instead incentivized to speak and act in ways that can be publicly justified to any group in society. But there are a variety of ways of accomplishing this, as I hinted at in the original post. Some of these are very close to current practice; others are not so close. I want to consider here in detail a few of these variations:

“Musical chairs” representation. This is the simplest form of the proposal. (My original idea was in fact closer to option 2 below, “random veto constituencies,” though it seems to have been quickly simplified into this form, which is at any rate simpler and more elegant). Under musical chairs representation, non-incumbent candidates can run in any constituency they choose, but incumbent candidates running for re-election are randomly assigned a constituency shortly before the election date (say, a month or so earlier). The random constituency can be their original electoral constituency (let’s call this the “initial” constituency). We do not need to imagine that the incumbent draws any constituency with equal probability; a system where the incumbent has a higher probability of drawing his/her initial constituency could strengthen the incentive to do the kinds of constituent service that a lot of people seem to find valuable.

More formally, let’s say there are N constituencies or districts in the system; come election time, incumbents can draw their own initial constituency with probability p, where p > 1/N, and any other constituency with probability (1-p)/(N-1). (More complicated assignments of weights are of course possible). When p = 1, the system works identically to current practice – the incumbent always draws his own constituency; when p = 1/N, the incumbent can draw any constituency with equal probability. We might thus think of p as a measure of “localism” in the system. The lower p, the more the re-election seeking politician will need to act in ways that can be publicly justified to any constituency in the country, but he will of course have less incentive to do constituency service or to represent his locality. p can also serve as a measure of incumbent advantage; the higher p, the higher the advantage, all other things equal.

What might be the benefits of a system where p < 1? By facing the possibility of having to compete for re-election in a constituency other than the one where he has been originally elected, a politician would of course need to avoid acting in ways that can incur disapproval beyond his constituency. But he would still have incentives to represent his constituency, pace Dylan Matthews. For one thing, the chance of drawing his initial constituency is nonzero, and a reputation for serving the constituency one is representing would still be a valuable asset in a race in a different district. Indeed, they might still be able to too easily promise to extract rents on behalf of local interests, as Evan Soltas notes, though I imagine it would be harder to promise this credibly when they don’t know which district they would be representing in the next election. At any rate, promises of local rents aren’t the only criterion by which electorates judge the suitability of candidates, and this system would weaken the appeal of these promises. Moreover, while a district or electorate could insist on electing candidates with purely local appeal, these would, I suspect, tend to be one-term wonders, as would “extreme” candidates. Assuming the distribution of voter preferences is not itself polarized for other reasons, the system would tend to moderate polarization over time as candidates strategically target the “modal” constituency to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the strength of their convictions and their level of risk aversion.

Elections might nevertheless become more competitive under this system, since p < 1 implies a lower level of incumbent advantage, which might be a good thing (more competitive elections tend to be associated with more public goods provision, though this varies depending on the kind of competition). More importantly, as Matt Yglesias notes, the forms of public justification themselves would shift. An incumbent US congressman who defended agricultural subsidies in Iowa during his term, for example, would need to do so in terms that would resist potential sceptical examination by an electorate in New York. And one should not discount the satisfaction electors would get from giving a sound thumping to a politician they find particularly obnoxious but would not, under current practices, normally be able to defeat. (Soltas’ objection that it “weakens accountability structures to have your performance judged by someone else than whoever installed you” is I think overstated; electors judging the performance of a non-local candidate can always opt for the local challenger, or judge the non-local candidate on the basis of his/her record on issues or national significance, as they often seem to do anyway, and as is perhaps appropriate for candidates to a national legislature). Nevertheless, it is probably safe to say that in the aggregate this system would not produce large shifts in policy from the status quo; after all, many mixed-member proportional systems (New Zealand!) try to achieve similar balances of “national” and “local” concerns, even if they use somewhat different mechanisms and have somewhat different effects on the forms of public justification.

Random veto constituencies. My original proposal tried to preserve local representation in a slightly different way. Perhaps the simplest form of it is the following: non-incumbent candidates are elected according to the vote totals in the constituency they are running, but incumbent candidates are subject to a veto in a randomly selected constituency (assigned shortly before the election). In essence, the challenger must win only in the local constituency, but the incumbent must win in both the local and the randomly selected constituency. If the incumbent loses in the randomly assigned constituency but wins in the local constituency, the challenger takes power; hence the idea of a veto. The system could make allowance for extremely popular incumbents, so that getting, say, 60% of the vote in their local constituency means that they only have to get 40% of the vote in their randomly-assigned constituency, and getting 80% of the vote in the local constituency means they only have to get 20% of the vote in the randomly assigned constituency. (Again, the chances of drawing a particular constituency could be suitably weighted to favour nearby constituencies, for example).

It seems to me that this system would have most of the advantages of the previous one while preserving the possibility of strongly-rooted local representation. Races remain local, but politicians cannot act in ways that have a strong probability of being disapproved of elsewhere in the country; and incumbent advantage is strongly diminished. Nevertheless, it seems possible that a system of vetoes could create a lot of ill-will; I’m sure people in say, rural South Carolina, would not relish having their choices of representatives vetoed by people in San Francisco or vice-versa. So it does not seem politically sustainable in the long run, even if it would enable the schadenfreude of spectators to see politicians having to justify themselves to hostile electorates beyond their home turf (a benefit that is not to be underestimated; see Jeffrey Edward Green’s The Eyes of the People for a full academic defence).

Accountability juries. One problem with the proposals above is that they favour geographical units of representation at the expense of other possibilities. While randomization of such geographical units may have some benefits, certain interests are never going to be well represented on that basis. One could, however, modify the idea of veto constituencies so that the veto would be exercised by juries selected on the basis of some non-geographical criterion. For example, imagine that before each election, we drew five juries of 500 people each selected on the basis of income – the first jury being composed of 500 people randomly selected from the first income quintile, the second from the second, and so on. Each incumbent candidate is then randomly assigned, shortly before the election, to make his/her case before one of these juries; you could be assigned to speak before a jury of the poor, or before a jury of the rich, but you would not know which one in advance. We could have weeklong, televised trials, perhaps presided over by special investigating magistrates, in an echo of the “audits” Ancient Athens subjected its officials to at the end of their terms. The jury could then vote (perhaps with some suitable supermajority requirement) on whether or not the incumbent should be allowed to run for re-election (in that election; no permanent disqualification is envisioned). The possibilities here are, of course, much more various: how we would organize such juries, run the trials, and so on would be crucial questions. I suspect a system like this would shift policy more radically, but I like the idea of having representatives having to justify themselves to randomly selected constituencies that do not have a geographical basis.

Anyway, I’m sure there are huge problems with all of these proposals, which I don’t expect to be political reality any time soon; this is more a thought experiment than anything else. I would nevertheless be interested to hear what some of these problems are, or what alternatives people can come up with.

Rawlsian Legislatures: A Modest Proposal

2012-08-10T16:45:00.000+12:00

(Attention conservation notice: various harebrained schemes I cooked up preparing for a seminar on Rawls that appear to structurally mimic ideas about a “veil of ignorance.” Of purely theoretical interest.)

[Update 13 August: see also my further thoughts on these proposals here].

John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice famously introduced the idea of an “original position,” a hypothetical situation in which citizens would come together behind a “veil of ignorance” to select principles of justice that can regulate their common life. There are different ways of understanding the OP, but one useful way – which Rawls himself favoured later in life – is to imagine that the “contracting parties” in the original position are not the members of society themselves, but rather their representatives. Each of these representatives – modelled as rational negotiators – is then supposed to bargain for the best possible “deal” acceptable to the citizens they represent on the terms of cooperation in society, but without knowing which specific set of citizens they represent. This is supposed to ensure that the negotiating parties will only agree on principles that would be acceptable to all citizens as “free and equal.” Leif Wenar in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes the basic point well:

The original position is a thought experiment: an imaginary situation in which each real citizen has a representative, and all of these representatives come to an agreement on which principles of justice should order the political institutions of the real citizens. Were actual citizens to get together in real time to try to agree to principles of justice for their society the bargaining among them would be influenced by all sorts of factors irrelevant to justice, such as who could appear most threatening or who could hold out longest. The original position abstracts from all such irrelevant factors. In effect the original position is a situation in which each citizen is represented as only a free and equal citizen, as wanting only what free and equal citizens want, and as trying to agree to principles for the basic structure while situated fairly with respect to other citizens. For example citizens' basic equality is modeled in the original position by imagining that the parties who represent real citizens are symmetrically situated: no citizen's representative is able to threaten any other citizen's representative, or to hold out longer for a better deal.

The most striking feature of the original position is the veil of ignorance, which prevents other arbitrary facts about citizens from influencing the agreement among their representatives. As we have seen, Rawls holds that the fact that a citizen is for example of a certain race, class, and gender is no reason for social institutions to favor or disfavor him. Each party in the original position is therefore deprived of knowledge of the race, class, and gender of the real citizen they represent. In fact the veil of ignorance deprives the parties, Rawls says, of all facts about citizens that are irrelevant to the choice of principles of justice: not only their race, class, and gender but also their age, natural endowments, and more. Moreover the veil of ignorance also screens out specific information about the citizens' society so as to get a clearer view of the permanent features of a just social system.

In Rawls’ view, the veil of ignorance can also play a role in the selection and evaluation of constitutions and laws. While the representatives of the citizens in the OP are supposed to select principles of justice in complete ignorance of the citizens’ class, gender, plan of life, and even the general features of their society, the veil can be “lifted” gradually to allow the representatives to agree on how these principles apply to more concrete institutions. This is what Rawls calls the “four-stage sequence”:

After agreeing on the two principles and a principle of just savings, the parties then proceed further through the four-stage sequence, tailoring these general principles to the particular conditions of the society of the citizens they represent. The veil of ignorance that screens out information about society's general features is gradually thinned, and the parties use the new information to decide on progressively more determinate applications of the two principles.

At the second stage the parties are given more information about the society's political culture and economic development, and take on the task of crafting a constitution that realizes the two principles. At the third stage the parties learn still more about the details of the society, and agree to specific laws and policies that realize the two principles within the constitutional framework decided at the second stage. At the final stage the parties have full information about the society, and reason as judges and administrators to apply the previously-agreed laws and policies to particular cases. When the four stages are complete the principles of justice as fairness are fully articulated for the society's political life.

Re-reading Rawls recently while preparing to teach a class, it struck me that it would be possible to mimic some of the structural features of this interpretation of the veil of ignorance in actual legislatures.

The simplest way to do this, it seems to me, would be to divorce electoral constituencies from accountability constituencies. Suppose legislators are elected in a relatively large number of small single-member constituencies (I’m thinking of a small place like New Zealand, where electorates are small, but one could imagine more complex schemes elsewhere). They go to a Parliament or Congress and negotiate laws as best as they can. At the end of their term, however, they must justify themselves to a randomly allocated constituency (not necessarily the one in which they were elected), which decides whether or not they can run for re-election. (A variant: the accountability constituency [also?] has the power to impose a financial penalty on the legislator if it finds the justifications for its actions lacking). The trick here is that the constituency that can hold the legislator accountable is not known in advance, either to the electors or to the elected MPs. If Rawls is correct, this should encourage elected legislators to negotiate “fair” legislative proposals –legislative proposals that are broadly acceptable to all in society.

An example may help. Imagine the electors for Wellington Central elect Grant Robertson their MP. At the end of his term, the Electoral Commission randomly assigns him a different constituency. Say he draws Auckland central, for example. Robertson then has to go to Auckland Central to defend his record in parliament; let’s say he’s given one month to make his case. Auckland Central then holds an “up or down” vote deciding whether or not he can run in the next election. If he’s voted down, he cannot run in that electoral period (though he may run in later periods – no permanent disqualification is envisioned here); otherwise, he gets to run again, if he so wishes, in Wellington Central.

One can easily imagine all kinds of problems with this system. (Consider the possibilities for strategic voting; and I’m sure the pros could come up with all kinds of ways of gaming this system). But I’m having way too much fun thinking about it to worry about these inconveniences right now. For example, imagine accountability constituencies that are functional or income-based rather than geographical. Legislators could be elected in standard geographical constituencies, but then randomly assigned to income-defined constituencies to make their case for being allowed to run for re-election. We might imagine that large “juries” of people from specific income quantiles could be empanelled, and MPs randomly assigned, at the end of their terms, to make the case for their policies to one of these juries in week-long trials. The juries then decide whether or not the MP is to be allowed to run again. Or imagine we got rid entirely of electoral constituencies. Instead, people would vote on the abstract composition of the legislature (expressing their preferences not only about the party composition of the legislature, as in closed list PR systems, but perhaps also their preferences about the level of education or income legislators must have, what percentage of legislators must be women, of a particular race, etc.). Political parties are then tasked to fill a legislature with these characteristics, but the legislators must then, at the end of their term, justify themselves to a randomly assigned constituency, which has the power to impose fines (and perhaps to award prizes).

Ok, so what’s the benefit of this, you may ask? If Rawls is correct, the fact that legislators would not know in advance to whom in society they would be held accountable would mean that they would be inclined to act in ways that are “publically justifiable” to all, including the “least advantaged.” What do people think?

Mixed Constitutions vs. Mixed Economies (or, Ancient and Modern Liberalisms)

2012-08-06T22:25:00.000+12:00

(Attention conservation notice: Inspired by a student’s comment a while back, this has languished in my drafts folder. Contains speculative intellectual history, implausible connections between ancient and modern concepts, and self-promotion; nevertheless, I thought it would be worth trying out the argument)

The ancient Greco-Roman idea of the “mixed constitution” is usually taken to be the ancestor of modern (post 18^th-century) constitutional ideas about “checks and balances” and the “division of powers.” This is fine as far as it goes; the early modern writers who first proposed and defended these latter ideas in a systematic way – people like Harrington, Locke, and Montesquieu, for example – seem to have been influenced to some degree by Greek and Roman theories of the mixed constitution. They used these ideas as one of the lenses through which they interpreted British constitutional practice of the 17^th and 18^th centuries; and there is certainly a sort of family resemblance between the ancient idea about the need for “mixture” in a constitution and the modern idea that a constitution should implement some checks on state power through the functional division of authority among different “branches” of the government.

However, as many people have noted, ancient ideas about the mixed constitution are in many ways quite different from modern ideas about the need for a functional division of authority to prevent abuses of state power. Even the guiding metaphors are different: “mixture” and “separation” denote contrary ideas. But perhaps more importantly, it strikes me that ideas about the mixed constitution played a role in ancient Greco-Roman political discourse that is very different from the role that ideas about “checks and balances” came to play in modern political discourse, and that is in fact surprisingly similar to the role ideas about the “mixed economy” – an economy that incorporates both market mechanisms and government intervention – play in contemporary political thought. I don’t mean this as a claim about intellectual history: ideas about the “mixed economy” today clearly owe nothing to ancient ideas about the mixed constitution. I mean it as a claim about the conceptual place of ideas within particular discourses or debates. Let me try to explain.

As I argue in much pedantic detail in a piece I published last year somewhat misleadingly entitled “Cicero and the Stability of States” (History of Political Thought 32(3): 397-423 [gated, ungated] – the first half is a survey of ideas about the mixed constitution in Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius), ancient ideas about the mixed constitution have two strands.

On the one hand, there is a concern with domination by powerful people and groups. Here the idea of the mixed constitution serves as a model of the “constraints” that should be imposed on the powerful to prevent tyranny, and in this sense it plays a very similar role to ideas of “checks and balances.” However, whereas modern discussions about the separation of powers tend to emphasize the need for a functional division of the tasks of government (into legislative, executive, and judicial activities, for example) to prevent abuses of state power, ancient discussions of the mixed constitution tend instead to emphasize a social division of power among significant social groups to prevent its monopolization (a group “becoming” the state, so to speak). The “simple” or “unmixed” regimes are precisely those regimes where one social group – the rich, the poor, military leaders – monopolizes power (for good or ill; the unmixed regimes are not always considered bad, but they are always considered fragile for a variety of reasons); by contrast, the “mixed” regimes are precisely those where power is “shared,” or, metaphorically, these are the regimes which "mix" the monopolistic regimes so that no social group has uncontested dominance over the others.

To put the point very roughly, I suspect the modern emphasis on separating power goes hand in hand with an emerging consciousness of “the state” as a distinct unified institutional actor that can develop interests that are independent of those of other significant social groups (including dominant groups), and hence is concerned with the institutional mechanisms that can limit its ability to act in dominating ways; ancient political thought, by contrast, has no such consciousness of a “state” as distinct from the social groups that exercise political power (most Ancient Greco-Roman societies had nothing like a state in the Weberian sense of the word anyway), and hence is more concerned with the compromises that various groups need to make to share power stably in ways that are beneficial to all. This is only an imprecise sketch of a complex history, of course. After all, early modern liberal political thought was often also concerned with the problems posed by the domination of one social group over another; 19^th century debates about suffrage are full of fears about what would happen if the poor were allowed to directly elect representatives and hence dominate the state, for example. And 17^th and 18^th century notions of “estate representation” do fit in quite naturally with ancient ideas about mixed constitutions. Yet I am tempted to speculate in a vaguely Marxist way that ancient Greco-Roman political thought was more attuned to the permanent class conflicts of agrarian societies than early modern liberal thought, perhaps because the latter in part grew out of reflections on the management of confessional or sectarian conflicts in which the state was never merely a class agent, unlike the former.

At any rate, this concern with “sharing” power among significant social groups leads to a second strand of thought about political “mixture.” Here the idea of the mixed constitution serves as a model of the compromises that are possible and necessary between groups whose conceptions of justice – their conceptions of the appropriate distribution of the “benefits and burdens” in the community, their ideas about the appropriate level of hierarchy and equality in the organization of society, and so on – differ systematically according to their positions in society. For example, both Plato and Aristotle (and to a lesser degree other extant writers) suggest that the poor and the rich develop conceptions of justice that have a certain “bias” towards their own structural position: while the poor or the people tend to develop a conception of justice that emphasizes their equality as citizens, and hence the need for an equal distribution of power and authority in the community (expressed most radically in the lotteries of Athens), the rich or the elite tend to develop a conception of justice that emphasizes their inequality – their distinctiveness – and hence the need for an unequal distribution of power and authority (expressed in the demand for closed oligarchies and in justifications that claim the right to rule for those who contribute the most to the community, or those who are wisest, or have the most military virtue). Conflict between major social groups is not simply a clash of naked self-interest (at least not always), but rather appears as a contest between rival moralized conceptions of hierarchy, equality, and fair distribution.

For these Greek (and later Roman) writers, the key theoretical problem thus turns out to be how to bridge these divergent conceptions of justice for the sake of political stability while also promoting as far as possible various other important goods – freedom, independence, the effectiveness of the community as a fighting force, social solidarity, prudent decisionmaking, etc. How can political power be shared so that these contrasting conceptions of justice can all find some place in the community without monopolizing the whole, while maintaining a viable, even flourishing society in other respects?

This problem is complicated both by material factors (extreme inequality makes it difficult to bridge the conceptions of justice of significant social groups, in the view of most of the extant Greek writers who talk about this problem) and by the fact that these group-relative conceptions of justice, however faulty, cannot be fully “educated away.” That is, whatever the truth of the matter about justice is (and Greek and Roman thinkers thought this was an answerable question) it is simply not possible to consistently convince people in structurally different positions that their conceptions of justice are incorrect. (At best, education can soften the edges of those differing conceptions of justice, but not transform them consistently). The “mixed constitution” is then an attempt to describe how one might give all these different conceptions of justice – or different ideas about what is valuable, or what gives people title to rule – some place within the polity despite the fact that they are partially incorrect (because one-sided) and hence in some ways damaging to the community, and despite the fact that they cannot be "corrected," while not wholly sacrificing other important values. In Plato, for example, the test of a well-organized mixed constitution is that it balances the characteristic values associated with “democracy” (where the poor or the many are dominant) and “monarchy” (a synecdoche for all regimes where small elites are dominant) so as to promote philia (social solidarity), eleutheria (freedom and political independence) and phronesis (prudent decisionmaking). Let me quote myself:

The Athenian Stranger [the main speaker in Plato’s Laws] suggests that a constitution can achieve these three objectives by “mixing” in the right proportion the values traditionally associated with monarchy, especially Persia, and the values traditionally associated with democracy, especially Athens (693d). “Monarchical” values emphasize subordination and status hierarchies, and thus enhance the coordination of action necessary to effective military power, i.e., the kind of power that ensures eleutheria as political independence (694a). But if they are over-emphasized, they disrupt both the solidarity and affection (philia) between rulers and ruled and the ability of information and insight to flow to the rulers (phronesis; 694a-b), increasing the city’s vulnerability to external forces and diminishing the ability of rulers to actually rule for the common good (697d-698a). By contrast, “democratic” values emphasize personal autonomy and equality, and thus enhance the solidarity and affection between rulers and ruled as well as the flow of information throughout the city, which makes the city able to defend itself intelligently at least so long as it can coordinate its actions through its laws and rulers even against vastly superior forces (cf. 698b-699d). But if they are over-emphasized, the city loses both its ability to recognize and defer to actual expertise (and hence loses intelligence; cf. 701a) and the ability to coordinate properly that submission to laws and rulers provide. It thus disintegrates into “every man for himself” (cf. 699c-d), again making it vulnerable to external forces.

Properly constructed institutions will ensure that the citizens will be properly submissive to the laws and the rulers (indeed, that they will “fear” and “revere” the laws and the rulers, cf. 698b), but will also grant enough personal autonomy and ensure enough status equality to ensure that phronesis flows through the city and rulers and ruled share enough affection for each other. Such a constitution will “weave together” the “mother constitutions” of monarchy and democracy (693d) in the sense that it will induce a measured combination of their characteristic values capable of simultaneously ensuring solidarity and affection between rulers and ruled, intelligence in the actions of the city, and the preservation of its political independence. (moi, pp. 403-404)

Though “liberalism” as such did not exist in the Ancient Greco-Roman world, the idea of the mixed constitution thus seems to me to be designed to deal with problems similar to those that have motivated much modern liberal thought: how to deal with intractable conflicts of value (about justice, in this case) when no significant social group can be assumed to have a monopoly on the truth (the philosopher does not count as a social group, even if she does have the truth about justice) in a relatively peaceful way. But ancient mixed constitution thinking (at least the mostly Greek variant of it before Cicero that has come down to us), unlike classical liberalism, tended to see these problems in the context of deep-seated, ineradicable distributional conflicts; and as such, it seems to me, it played a role in political thought similar to the role the idea of a “mixed economy” plays today.

Modern economic debates about the role of the state in the economy are obviously never merely technical debates; they usually invoke, either implicitly or explicitly, different conceptions of justice and fairness, and different answers to the question about the kinds of power that partisans of these conceptions of justice and fairness ought to have in society. (Consider: "taxation is theft" vs. "you didn't build that"). They are debates about what is the right distribution of burdens and benefits in society, and draw on deep-seated intuitions about desert, property, and the like that appear to vary among distinct social groups. The idea of a mixed economy then serves as a model – varying in detail depending on its particular proponent, of course – of the appropriate distribution of social power among partisans of different conceptions of distributive justice, including both a description of the kinds of constraints that should be imposed on powerful social groups (e.g., how democratic states should constrain markets and vice-versa) and a description of the kinds of compromises that partisans of particular ideas of fairness or justice must make while still promoting efficiency (the modern equivalent of the Platonic “prudent decisionmaking” or phronesis), common identity (the modern equivalent of the Platonic philia), and personal autonomy (the modern equivalent of eleutheria).

Proponents of a mixed economy of course disagree about the specific institutions of that would instantiate it properly, just as Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero had different views about proper mixture in a constitution. My point is more about how the abstract model of the mixed economy seems to serve as a reference point for attempting to find pragmatic compromises among social groups with ineradicably different views concerning distributive justice and enduring, if unbalanced, forms of social power (numbers vs. economic power, for example) even if we think that some of these views are correct (or more correct than others). We might say that like the mixed constitution in antiquity, the mixed economy today serves as a standard description of the second best.

Update 7 August: fixed some oddities of grammar and missing words.

New Book: A Stranger's Knowledge: Statesmanship, Philosophy, and Law in Plato's Statesman

2012-07-10T11:15:00.000+12:00

Due to a vaguely superstitious reluctance to make an announcement until I had the final physical copies in my hands, I neglected to announce here the recent publication of my first book, A Stranger's Knowledge: Statesmanship, Philosophy, and Law in Plato's Statesman (Parmenides, Amazon). But I now have physical proof that the book is truly available!

(And it's reasonably priced, too, for an academic monograph).

My interest in Plato's Statesman may seem odd to regular readers of this blog, given that it has morphed into a blog on dictatorships, cults of personality, democratization, and the like. But this blog first started (years ago) as a home for orphaned footnotes that were excised from the book's first draft (click on the archives around 2007 to find some of them; it has taken me a long time to get here). Plato also remains the most prominent, interesting, and challenging defender of the rule of knowledge against the rule of the people, so my turn to the study of nondemocracy is perhaps not so surprising; and the many years I spent working on my interpretation of this puzzling dialogue have continued to nourish my thoughts in unexpected ways (e.g., my series on epistemic arguments for conservatism).

The dialogue, at any rate, is an exquisite puzzle, which is probably what attracted me to it in graduate school in the first place. A conversation between an unnamed "stranger" from Elea and a young and pliable mathematician named Socrates (not the Socrates of most of the dialogues, who witnesses the conversation but, aside from a short prologue, never says a word), the dialogue purports to be part of a trio of conversations set right before the famous trial of Socrates, each of them concerned with defining a different figure: the sophist, the statesman, and the philosopher. But though the Sophist exists, the Philosopher dialogue does not exist (and it is likely that it was never intended to exist); instead, the Sophist is placed in fictional continuity with the Theaetetus, Plato's most important dialogue on knowledge. The conversation itself is delightfully weird. It is full of strange distinctions and odd conclusions (including an elaborate joke about human beings being "featherless bipeds" or "two-legged pigs," which was apparently fodder for ancient pranksters like Diogenes the Cynic), dead ends and mistakes that are extensively discussed and acknowledged within the conversation itself, a long and detailed digression on the art of weaving, and a complex myth about a great "cosmic reversal" of motion in which human beings are depicted as being born from the earth in old age and living their lives in reverse. All of this leads to an ambiguous defense of the rule of law as "second best" and a characterization of the genuine statesman as someone whose main concern is the timing of existential decisions for the polity as a whole, in apparent tension with Plato's classic discussion of the "philosopher king" in the Republic.

The puzzle lies in trying to make sense of how all of these disparate elements (which draw explicit attention both to their ill-fittingness and their fittingness) fit together as a single pedagogical and theoretical exercise; and the book is my attempt to provide a solution to this puzzle that makes sense of the dialogue not merely as a methodological discussion (as most scholars argue) but as a work of political philosophy that is decisively concerned with the question of what "political knowledge" could even mean. I may say more about my answer to this question later (though, as with most Platonic dialogues, most of the fun lies in trying to understand the movement of the conversation rather than in the answers to which the conversation arrives); buy the book (or tell your friendly academic librarian to buy the book) to find out the full version.

Democracy and development since 1950 in one chart

2012-05-21T20:29:00.002+12:00

My previous post, in one chart:

(Click here for larger size).

Bubbles to the right are more democratic countries, measured using the Unified Democracy Scores; bubbles to the left are more autocratic countries. Note how the left side of the graph has much more volatility, even within single countries, as expected; the bubbles move up and down like crazy. By contrast, on the right side of the graph everything oscillates more sedately. (Try following Lebanon, for example; you can also zoom in to particular regions of the graph). For another interesting view, change the color to "regime type" and set the Y axis to plot GDP per capita (rather than GDP per capita growth). (Change the scale to "log," too, for a clearer view).

(Data on economic growth from the Penn World Table.)

A Very Short Quantitative History of Political Regimes, Part 1.75: Democracy and Development

2012-05-17T22:04:00.001+12:00

(Statistician General’s warning: no significance tests or confidence intervals were harmed in the writing of this post. Appropriate model assumptions not guaranteed. Do not use without consulting a trained and licensed statistician.)

I haven’t done one of these posts on the history of political regimes in a while, but I am preparing something for a class on the topic of the relationship between political regimes and economic development, and figured it’s a nice addition to the series. Besides, it is always a good time to put up pretty graphs on this blog.

What is the relationship between political regimes and economic development? The basics of this relationship in the post-WWII era seem pretty well understood: basically, the richer the country, the more likely it is to be “democratic” (in the sense I’ve discussed here and here, where democracy is conceived as a system of normatively regulated competition for control of states including the usual paraphernalia of elections, freedoms of speech and assembly, etc.), though the reasons for why this is the case remain disputed, and there are obvious and significant exceptions to this pattern. Conversely, the academic literature suggests that democratic regimes have a slight and indirect long-term development advantage, though the evidence for this claim is much more controversial, and there is no consensus on how this particular advantage operates, if it exists at all (for a meta-analysis of studies on this topic, see here).

Here I want to look at how the relationship between development and democracy has changed over the past 60 years. For our purposes in this post I am going to use the Unified Democracy Scores developed by Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton. These scores basically aggregate the information contained in nine other democracy scores – Polity IV, DD, Freedom House, and six other lesser known indexes – in such a way as to indicate the “uncertainty” associated with particular country ratings. The score for a given country ranges between around -2 and around 2, with higher numbers being “more democratic.” A score of “zero” can be interpreted as a cut-off between more or less “open” regimes and more or less “closed” regimes, though we could also use three breaks, with regimes at one end of the distribution being clearly “dictatorships,” regimes at the other end being clearly “democratic,” and regimes in the middle being “hybrid” regimes of various kinds – competitive authoritarian, tutelary democracies, democratizing monarchies, etc. As an example, here are the scores for the year 2008, split into three quantiles to indicate

these broad regime categories:

Unified Democracy Scores, 2008

(The length of each horizontal line is the 95% confidence interval for the score; in general, small democracies at the top of the scale have more uncertain ratings, while dictatorships at the bottom of the scale have narrower confidence intervals, indicating less disagreement about the classification of dictatorships than about the determination of the level of democracy beyond a certain point). A three way split works quite well: the countries in red are the more obvious dictatorships, while the countries in blue are more clearly democratic, and the countries in green have the sorts of problematic hybrid regimes that are difficult to classify with certainty as either wholly democratic or wholly undemocratic.

Using those breaks, here is what the distribution of regimes looks like since the 1950s:

Distribution of regime types since 1950

Fully closed regimes had their peak in the late 70s and early 80s, but the end of the Cold War pushed many of these to at least hold elections, as we saw in this post. But how has this distribution evolved in terms of income per capita? Consider this plot:

Income per capita per year and regime type

(GDP data from the Penn World Table). Each circle shows the median income of the particular regime type for a given year, where the size of the circle is proportional to the number of regimes that fall into that category. The lines show a lowess fit for the overall trend growth of income for each particular regime type. I interpret the story the graph tells as follows.

The median income of democratic regimes has been higher than the median income of both hybrid and fully authoritarian regimes since at least the 1950s, and the gap has in general widened, not narrowed, even as the number of democratic countries has increased. (From this graph we cannot tell, however, whether the gap has widened because democratic countries have grown faster, or because non-democratic countries that grew fast turned into democracies; from the graphs below, we may infer that it was a mixture of both). The gap was highest during “peak authoritarianism” in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when most poor and newly independent countries were either hybrid regimes or dictatorships, but it stopped growing after the end of the cold war, when a number of relatively poor countries became democratic.

Interestingly, whereas before the end of the cold war the median hybrid regime was also richer than the median dictatorship, this pattern is reversed after the end of the cold war. Full authoritarianism proved almost impossible to sustain in poor countries without the patronage of the major powers or natural resource wealth; for the most part only relatively rich dictatorships, or dictatorships that retained a special relationship with a major non-democratic country, survived, whereas most poor countries today have some sort of hybrid regime. Thus in 2008, the list of full dictatorships included Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Myanmar (Burma), Qatar, Libya, Swaziland, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Laos, China, Eritrea, Cuba, UAE, Oman, Equatorial Guinea, Sudan, Iran, and Syria. (Not all of these had GDP data in the Penn World Table – North Korea, for example. Note also that some of these regimes have large levels of uncertainty associated with them – the list could very well have included Brunei, for example, instead of Iran; but the basic point does not appear to change if we switch some of these around. I haven’t really checked, since this is only a blog post and checking requires some actual programming, but one could check by drawing new samples of democracy scores from within the distribution Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton generate. That’s the fun thing about the UD scores. It is also worth noting that some of these regimes appear to have survived the end of the cold war only because they had unifying enemies – Eritrea, Cuba, and Iran come to mind; fear can be just as stabilizing as wealth.)

What about growth? Is any particular regime type consistently associated with economic growth? Here’s what it looks like when we plot the relative growth performance of different regimes in every year since 1950:

Economic growth by regime type per year

(Click for a larger version). Each circle represents the median growth rate for the regime type indicated by the color; the size of the circle is proportional to the number of regimes in that category for that year. The lines show a lowess fit of the trend growth rate of each regime type; the shaded areas represent automatically generated 95% confidence intervals. (Many caveats apply. See warning above). Any year where the blue circle is higher than the red or green circles is a year where the median democracy did better than the median hybrid regime or the median dictatorship.

As indicated by the width of the confidence intervals around the red and green lines, dictatorships and hybrid regimes have had more variability in economic performance than democracies since at least the 1950s: more growth “miracles” and “disasters,” often in the very same country. (See this paper by William Easterly for the actual scholarly version of the argument). To the extent that we can ignore these confidence intervals and focus only on the trend performance, democracies have not always done better than these other regimes. In the early post-war era it seems that dictatorships did better (though most did about as well as democracies), but then decolonization came along and the growth performance of dictatorships basically cratered. Indeed, the 80s, when the so-called “third wave” of democratization began, was also (not coincidentally perhaps?) the time when the “growth gap” between democracies and hybrid and dictatorial regimes was at its widest. Ominously, the last decade has seen a reversal of this pattern, which explains much of the (not very well thought out) commentary about the rise of the “Chinese model.” (Democracies, in particular, seem to have been much more strongly affected by the financial crisis that started in 2008 than either dictatorships or hybrid regimes, though all regimes appear to have been affected to some extent). Yet we should not make too much of this; even in the last decade, democracies did basically the same as the other regimes, judging by the overlap in confidence intervals – their responses seem not to have been too obviously wrong relative to the responses of authoritarian countries (many of which benefitted from high oil prices). And we should remember that the median per capita GDP of democracies is already much higher than that of dictatorships or hybrid regimes; if we ought to be worried about anything, it is about the effects of bad economic performance on hybrid regimes, which could potentially lead to a reversion to more authoritarian forms of government:

Economic growth by regime type per year

I have purposely refrained from making any big claims about a general relationship between regime type and economic performance. From the evidence above, it seems that there has not been a great deal of difference between different regimes, except in the 80s. But instead of throwing away information by breaking the democracy scores into categories, we could try to look at what the relationship between the raw scores and growth rates looks like in general. Here’s my idea (please tell me if this doesn’t work; there are probably a million problems with it I haven't thought about). For every year, we estimate a simple linear model of the form growth = a*democracy_score + b*log(gdp_per_capita) + c + error. We then plot the coefficient a for each year; when this coefficient is positive, the more democratic the country, the better its performance for that year, adjusting for its existing level of economic development, and when the coefficient is negative, the opposite is true, i.e., the less democratic the country the better its growth performance for that year (many caveats apply). When we do this, we find that more democratic countries had a clear growth advantage only between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, and that advantage seems to have been lost in the 1990s, even reversed:

Growth advantage of democracy per year

(An even simpler model, not controlling for the existing level of economic development, gives a broader democracy advantage, extending back to the 1960s, but not a radically different picture.) It is worth noting that these relationships are different in different regions: the “democracy advantage” calculated using this method has been negative in East Asia, South Asia, and Western Europe for the period 1950-2008, and zero or positive just about everywhere else:

Growth advantage of democracy per region

Interestingly, Polynesia, East Africa, and Central Asia have had some of the largest “democracy advantages”: the more democratic the regimes have been there, the better their growth performance. Looking at entire continents, the broadest democracy advantage by far is in Africa (and it is positive in all).(Many caveats apply: for example, there isn’t a lot of variability in the democracy score in some of these regions, like in Australia and New Zealand, and the calculated coefficients aren't always significant).

Anyway, more could be said, but it’s late and I need to move on. Any thoughts on how to further this sort of analysis? All code needed to replicate these plots is available here; you will need to download the Unified Democracy Scores and the Penn World Table separately. You also need this file of country and region codes.

~~[Update, 18 May: fixed a small mistake in the last two plots. Results don't change, though the Polynesian "democracy advantage" is now more pronounced]~~

[Update 2, shortly after: I take it back. It was fine the first time, though it doesn't make much difference.]

Educational software I wish existed: StackExchange for teaching in the Humanities and Social Sciences

2012-05-05T11:59:00.002+12:00

Here’s an idea I’ve been mulling over for the past week. (Mulling over enough to have spent many hours in an abortive attempt to create a prototype. But even simple web application programming seems to be a nontrivial problem that requires more time investment than I can muster right now). I have a large bank of questions for some of the courses I teach. These are mostly essay questions (short and long) of varying degrees of complexity, that ask students to make arguments, provide evidence, point to real-world examples, etc. I usually select the questions for final exams or other forms of assessment from this pool; a student who could answer all of them well would have essentially mastered the content of the course.

I would like to have a web application that draws on this pool of questions to do this:

In “quiz mode” a student would either select a question or be served a random question from the pool, and then he/she would answer it. They could then move on to a different question, for as long as they wished. (Perhaps the questions could be served in such a way that students can vote for the questions they most want answered, as in Google Moderator). The software would also allow the students to rate both the quality of their own answers (how good they think their answer is) and/or their level of confidence in their answer (how certain they are that they have a good answer), as well as the level of difficulty of the question. Their answers and ratings would go into a database; as they accumulate, the instructor could see which questions are rated as “hard” by students, or display characteristic problems, and focus teaching efforts there.
In “rating mode” students would either select a question or be served a random question from the pool, which they would view along with any (anonymized) answers from themselves, other students in the course, or even the instructor. They could then vote on which answer is best (if there is more than one answer) or rate the quality of existing answers. Perhaps they could also comment or edit existing answers if they want to add something to them, or feel a correction is in order. As these ratings accumulate, students would get a better sense of what counts as a good or a bad answer (assuming the “wisdom of crowds” works its magic; the courses I have in mind for this sort of application have around 100 students, which seems like it would be enough).
In “asking mode,” the application would allow students to submit questions, which then would go into the pool and could be answered by other students in the class. (Administrators could edit the questions for clarity or reject questions that are not sufficiently related to the topic of the course).
The application could even have something like the reputation management features of the StackExchange family of sites. Students who answer questions would gain reputation “points,” so long as their answers are rated relatively highly (fewer points for unrated or lower-rated answers); asking questions or rating answers would also get them some reputation points, though fewer. (For purely illustrative purposes, imagine that asking a question nets you 2 reputation points, so long as it is not rejected by the instructor, rating an answer nets you 1 point, and answering a question nets you between 5 and 10 points, depending on how highly rated your answers are). Perhaps these reputation points could be translated into actual grade points at the end of the term in accordance with some appropriate formula, though that would depend on the design of the course.

As I imagine it, an application like that would offer students extensive practice in writing, especially if combined with say, a requirement that they answer at least one question every week (in fact, this system could displace one of the traditional two essays we ask students to complete in many courses). It would also help them practice the entire material covered in the course: since the questions for the final exam would be drawn from the pool (or be very similar to some of the questions there) students who use the tool would be essentially studying for the final every time they use it. (“Quizzing” yourself is one of the most useful study techniques available, and the system would be designed so that you would get relatively quick, and eventually accurate, feedback on your answers, without the instructor having to grade hundreds of essays). And I (the instructor) would in turn get feedback on how well they understand the material, as well as on what aspects of the course they are having difficulty with.

What do people think? What problems would you foresee emerging with a system like this?

As far as I can tell, nothing quite like that exists, though in some ways this would be like a private version of StackExchange, seeded with a pool of questions on some specific course topic and open only to people taking the course. Google Moderator has some useful features, and I’ve been thinking about using it as a study tool for students in my course this term, but it would not be fully integrated with the rest of the assessment in the way I would want. Or is there something out there that I’m missing? How difficult would it be to develop the system I've described above?

The Kantian Logic of Democratization: A Footnote on Levitsky and Way’s Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War

2012-04-28T08:20:00.001+12:00

(A review of Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way’s Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War, Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Most political regimes in the world today allow for some form of electoral competition. As we saw in this post, towards the end of the cold war most stereotypical “dictatorships” (where competition by non-official parties was de jure forbidden and political control over the public sphere was nearly complete) began to give way to regimes in which control over the state depended in some way on winning real electoral contests. International pressure from Western powers, the breakdown of the Soviet Union, and popular protest all contributed to this outcome.

Yet elections, as anyone will tell you, do not equal democracy. Most of these “electoral” regimes – places like Zimbabwe, Russia, Romania, Armenia, Georgia, Ghana, Guyana, Kenya, Macedonia, Madagascar, Nicaragua, and many other countries - featured genuine political competition, with fiercely contested elections (unlike the meaningless “elections” held in many communist countries before the end of the cold war), organized oppositions which often held substantive legislative or subnational offices and could occasionally even win presidential or parliamentary elections (unlike in de jure one party states), and at least some islands of media independence (unlike the situation in many genuine dictatorships); but such competition was neither free nor fair by any reasonable standard. Incumbents persecuted or harassed their political opponents by legal or illegal means, intimidated or bought the media, packed supposedly “independent” judicial institutions with their supporters, used state resources without restraint for campaign purposes, and even occasionally fraudulently stole elections through good old-fashioned ballot stuffing and vote falsification in efforts to secure their position.

Consider a few examples. In Ukraine in the 1990s, “businesses that financed the opposition were routinely targeted by tax authorities” and in Ghana similarly “entrepreneurs who financed opposition parties “were blacklisted, denied government contracts, and [had] their businesses openly sabotaged”.” In Taiwan, the KMT used to outspend its opponents 50-1 in elections, and in Russia the Yeltsin campaign spent “between 30 and 150 times the amount permitted the opposition in 1996.” In the Peru of Fujimori, private television stations “signed “contracts” with the state intelligence service in which they received up to $1.5 million a month in exchange for limiting coverage of opposition parties.” (All quotes from Levitsky and Way, pp. 10-11). Everybody knows about the selective prosecution of potentially threatening “oligarchs” in Russia (like Mikhail Khodorkovsky) for tax reasons, not always without some justification (after all, they probably did not get rich by following the rules), but the tactic is common, though with local variations according to context (see, e.g., the Anwar Ibrahim case in Malaysia). Libel and defamation suits, especially, are the tool of choice for shutting down critical forms of media: according to Levitsky and Way, in the nineties newspapers in Croatia were sued for libel more than 230 times; in Cameroon at around the same time the use of defamation suits forced the closure of several newspapers. (We pass over in silence the use of libel or defamation suits in Cambodia, Belarus, Russia, and many other places as a way to intimidate opponents and silence critical voices). Sometimes media restrictions even get a decent veneer of justification, as when the Chavez government in Venezuela refused to renew the “over the air” license of RCTV, an opposition-leaning TV station, in 2007 for having supported the coup against his government in 2002. All of these actions are of course made easier if the government takes care to pack supposedly “impartial” or “independent” institutions (constitutional courts, electoral commissions, and so on) with government supporters (see, e.g., Venezuela and Malaysia). Finally, there are the more obvious tactics to suppress political competition, to be used when all else fails: beatings and imprisonment of opposition members by security forces (ask Morgan Tsvangirai and many other Zanu-PF opponents in Zimbabwe), old-fashioned ballot box stuffing, and vote falsification (in Serbia under Milosevic, Ukraine under Kuchma, and many other places).

Rather than thinking of these regimes as somehow imperfect or transitional democracies, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that we should see them as authoritarian regimes in their own right. Levitsky and Way call them “competitive authoritarian” regimes (a term they coined in a widely cited 2002 article), and tell the story of their emergence and the reasons why some of them managed to more fully democratize but others did not in a recent book (Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War, 2010). The book is a pretty impressive research achievement; the bibliography alone is 110 pages long, and it can serve as a good introduction to the post cold war politics of the 35 different countries they study.[1]

Now, I’d prefer to speak not so much of authoritarianism, democracy, and democratization (at this point at least) but of transformations in the prevalent varieties of political competition in the world. Modern “democracy,” on this view, is merely a system of normatively regulated oligopolistic political competition for state power, which does not sound particularly inspiring, except when we consider how hard it seems to be to achieve even that. In the post cold-war era full political monopolies have tended to decay into systems of unregulated political competition (“competitive authoritarian” or “party hegemonic” regimes) where rulers can often get away with the murder of their political opponents (literally and figuratively); only some of these systems of unregulated political competition turn into modern “democracies,” where rulers cannot so easily get away with murder of their political opponents. So the key question is: how do normatively unregulated systems of political competition turn into normatively regulated ones? How do we move from political systems where rulers “play dirty” by exploiting their control of the state (and oppositions do the same, if they win) to systems where they can’t get away with that, or at least not that easily? (The converse question is also important, though not the focus of Levitsky and Way’s book: why do systems of normatively regulated political competition sometimes break down, leading to regimes where rulers can get away with murder?). The problem is not so much about political turnover (ruling parties do occasionally yield power in competitive authoritarian regimes, even though this typically requires mass protest and other forms of extralegal action as well as winning elections) but about what can shift the kind of political competition that is enabled by a regime.

Levitsky and Way’s answer to that question is relentlessly structural – protest and opposition action plays little role. It is also reminiscent of an old argument in Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” (hence the title of this post; more on that later). In brief, they argue that neither Western pressure nor domestic opposition action by itself is capable of inducing democratization (at best, such international and domestic pressure can produce “electoralization,” not democratization: electoral turnover within normatively unregulated forms of political competition); it is only when domestic and international pressures for democracy are consistently amplified by social and economic links with Western democracies that elites in these regimes will consistently invest in credible ways of enforcing the norms of political competition (e.g., genuinely independent electoral commissions and judicial systems, a press that is not constantly pressured by the government du jour, etc.).

Let’s start with the obvious international pressures for democracy (or political competition, really). Since the end of the cold war most Western powers (at least the powers Levitsky and Way are interested in, the USA and the EU) have adopted an explicit “democratization” agenda, in which they have used various incentives to promote electoral regimes of varying credibility. The effectiveness of these pressures, however, varies with what Levitsky and Way call “leverage,” i.e., the influence Western governments are able to bring to bear on other regimes to make their politics more competitive. Western leverage is greatest for small, aid-dependent countries (like many African countries), and smaller for larger economies (like Mexico or Malaysia). It is larger when democratization is the primary issue on the foreign policy agenda of Western powers (as in many Latin American and Eastern European countries in the 1990s and early 2000s), and smaller when competing issues (like terrorism or other security concerns, especially since 2001) trump democratization (e.g., in the middle East, but also in places like Serbia and Croatia during the Balkan wars), or when other powers are able to provide support to authoritarian rulers (e.g., Russian support for Belarus in the early 1990s, and Chinese support for Burma or North Korea today). It is larger when governments can offer carrots as well as sticks, and smaller when only sticks are available (so the European Union had high democratizing leverage over those countries that were thought to be credible candidates for membership in the EU, but had less leverage over those countries which were unlikely to become members).

Levitsky and Way emphasize that Western pressure for democratization is very often quite superficial; Western powers are easily satisfied if the target government conducts more or less “clean” elections, and sometimes not even that. And they are not always especially consistent; only salient events, like elections, tend to engage them, whereas more ambiguous actions like politically motivated prosecutions or the abuse of state resources for election purposes can pass off uncriticized. (Incidentally, as this neat new paper by Simpser and Donno argues [gated], high quality election monitoring can have unintended bad consequences, pushing competitive authoritarian rulers to use practices that are generally bad for normatively regulating competition, like muzzling the media or packing the courts as a way of getting approval for “clean” elections on election day; too much focus on the quality of elections can thus worsen the quality of the surrounding institutions via strategic adaptation on the part of incumbent rulers).

Leverage is really helpful for democratization only when it is reinforced by what Levitsky and Way call linkage. By this Levitsky and Way mean the whole range of social and economic ties between Western democracies and competitive authoritarian regimes. These may include trade and migration links, the circulation of elites through American and European universities, various forms of communication across borders, and so on. A high density of these ties helps produce consistent pressure for democratization (or rather, for enforcing norms of fair political competition) by amplifying the effect that even minor violations of the norms of political competition have on foreign and domestic publics, creating transnational constituencies for democracy, and providing incentives for elites in competitive authoritarian states to invest in the credibility of the institutions for monitoring violations of these norms. It is only when linkage is high that foreign pressure really becomes expensive for domestic elites in competitive authoritarian regimes, and not only in purely financial terms; when every suit your government brings against its political opponents produces an endless stream of NY Times articles, cancellations of visits from dignitaries, visa troubles, and in general international opprobrium from their peers and colleagues in Europe or the USA, adherence to the norms of political competition starts looking like a good deal.

Linkage gets you not only an official EU protest over the treatment of Yulia Tymoshenko, it gets you a headline like “Europe Protests Ukraine’s Treatment of Yulia Tymoshenko” in the NY Times, the promise of an investigation by the Ukrainian government, and Joachim Gauck cancelling his travel plans to Kiev. I’m sure similar treatment of a Malawian opposition politician would not have rated anything close to the same reaction. (And Ukraine, in Levitsky and Way’s scheme, only rates medium, not high, levels of linkage). Linkage creates lobbies that constantly bring violations of the norms of political competition to the attention of Western foreign ministries and legislatures, and it creates elite constituencies interested in preventing such violations in the first place; it makes Western pressure consistent and predictable. This is why it was so hard, for example, for Vladimir Meçiar to get away with relatively small violations of the norms of political competition when he briefly ruled Slovakia in the 1990s, and why it seems unlikely that Viktor Orban will be able to consolidate a truly competitive authoritarian regime in Hungary today. By contrast, when there are few regular ties between a competitive authoritarian regime and Western democracies, foreign pressure is erratic and constituencies for enforcing norms of political competition are weak, regardless of the level of leverage. High leverage and low linkage produces at best electoral turnover (i.e., it pushes incumbents out when they lose an election) without genuine transformations in the norms and institutions of political institutions (the opposition is likely to be just as bad as the government in its treatment of the press or its abuse of state resources), which is precisely what Levitsky and Way think happened in many African countries in the 1990s and early 2000s.

A parallel argument works for domestic sources of pressure, though I think here Levitsky and Way muddle the presentation of the issues a bit. They want to argue that domestic pressure is usually not that significant for either democratization or even electoral turnover (in contrast to some recent scholarship, which emphasizes the importance of protest and opposition strength). So they emphasize that what really matters is the strength of states and incumbent party organizations: when these are “strong,” protest doesn’t get you very far. Milosevic survived enormous levels of mobilization as long as his security forces held together, whereas in Madagascar or Haiti the state could barely control the territory, let alone prevent relatively small opposition forces from overthrowing the government (in Haiti, an “army” of about 200 rebels). But, as Levitsky and Way sometimes seem to acknowledge, the interesting question is not so much about turnover but about the fairness of the norms of competition; and here all the work is done by linkage, not state or party strength or opposition pressure. Only high levels of linkage, in their view, induce either victorious oppositions or incumbent governments to invest in credibly enforcing norms of political competition; in its absence victorious oppositions do not behave much better when in power than the governments they displace.

I also think that to speak of “state” vs. “opposition” strength is to reify the fluid character of these things. One can agree that oppositions win power in competitive authoritarian regimes where states and incumbent party organizations splinter (as in the so-called “color revolutions” in the early 2000s), i.e., transfer their loyalty to the opposition or remain neutral, but this hardly means that opposition efforts don’t matter much: successful opposition efforts are typically geared towards inducing such transfers of loyalty. The more interesting point Levitsky and Way make has to do with why some states and parties are so resilient in the face of opposition challenges – think of ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe, holding together in the face of generalized economic collapse and a well-organized opposition movement. Why? Levitsky and Way point to the role of non-material incentives: whereas parties and states that are held together only through patronage (the ability to distribute jobs and benefits) tend to break down in the face of opposition pressure or economic crisis, security forces and parties that were forged in war or insurgency (in Armenia or Zimbabwe, for example), or are otherwise held together by some salient identity in addition to patronage (communism, ethnicity, etc.), tend to require far more pressure, indeed generational change, to break down. (This also works for regimes that are not competitive authoritarian but simply monopolize political competition: Cuba, China, Vietnam, etc.).

There is something “Kantian” about the story Levitsky and Way tell in this book. In Perpetual Peace Kant argues that a “federation” of Republican peoples can spread “if a powerful and enlightened people” that makes itself into a Republic serves as “a fulcrum to the federation with other states so that they may adhere to it and thus secure freedom under the idea of the law of nations. By more and more such associations, the federation may be gradually extended.” This process does not involve a change in human nature; as Kant says elsewhere, “from the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” All it requires is the growing interdependence of peoples, which eventually come to acquire interests in the preservation of republican norms and the maintenance of peace, and which thus make these republican “cores” grow outwards, slowly. Similarly here: norms of fair political competition only spread and become powerful through a process that involves a growing level of interconnectedness across borders. The idea is simultaneously optimistic – electoralization plus growing connections to the core (“globalization”?) make the zone of normatively regulated political competition grow ever outwards – and pessimistic – regimes that are “far” from this core will have fragile and generally unregulated forms of political competition regardless (this suggests pessimism about, for example, Mali). (Though they do not make much of this, their story also suggests that policies that prevent the growth of linkage – like the “embargo” on Cuba – are about the worst possible policy to encourage democratization). Of course, this story also assumes that political competition in the core does not decay, perhaps through processes that rob it of its importance – think of the growth of the national security state in the USA, or the ways in which the great recession has affected most European democracies. But Levitsky and Way tell it pretty convincingly, with masses of qualitative evidence; I learned a lot from this book.

[1] Albania, Armenia, Belarus, Benin, Botswana, Cambodia, Cameroon, Croatia, Dominican Republic, Gabon, Georgia, Ghana, Guyana, Haiti, Kenya, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Mexico, Moldova, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Peru, Romania, Russia, Senegal, Serbia, Slovakia, Taiwan, Tanzania, Ukraine, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. All of these countries are classified as “Competitive Authoritarian” in 1990-1995; by 2008, two of them had become “fully authoritarian” (Belarus and Russia), and 14 had become “full democracies” by Levitsky and Way’s accounting. (One additional country, Nicaragua, first democratized and then became a competitive authoritarian regime again by 2008). Their cases do not include countries that became competitive authoritarian after 1995, or which were “party hegemonic” regimes in 1995 (too little competition; e.g., Singapore, in their view, though I suspect this case would be problematic for their theory) but might have become more open since then. They also do not include countries in which unelected offices are the most important ones, even if there is a significant electoral component (e.g., Morocco, Iran) or under foreign occupation.

Charles Tilly's Poetry, and the Use of Models in the Social Sciences

2012-04-11T16:24:00.001+12:00

In a 1991 review essay discussing several books by James C. Scott, the late Charles Tilly gets cranky with rationalistic explanations of behaviour, in verse ("somehow I find the point easier to make in verse"):

Rationalists imagine life as lightning chess,

each individual respecting well-known rules,

instantly sketching alternative scenarios

that start from possible moves, comparing

their merits, and choosing the wisest means

to maximize the probability of victory,

only to see that the opponent is playing

the selfsame game. In such a caricature,

few of us can recognize the improvisations

of our cluttered lives. Are we inadequate?

Let's find a betaphore, a better metaphore,

for the expedients by which we rush through

the traps and troubles of an ordinary day.

We resemble kayakers, knowing the long stream

in which we ride, more or less, but never sure

when its course will bend, speed up, narrow,

or thrust us upon rocks and splintered trees

savage storms have hurled into the streambed.

In fast white water we often cannot tell

whether we will founder, flip over, crash

into the bank, or hurtle against obstacles

within the current. When the river slows,

we become sentient driftwood, silently gliding

at the pace of swans. Or we dig our paddles

into the depth - one side, then the other

in order to propel our own course past fish,

past tributary brooks, past fields of flowers.

The riverbanks exist, our boat exists, we exist,

the current's force exists, the boulders exist,

and yet we improvise, combining these elements

in quick inventions, and sometimes run aground.

Still, life as a surging kayak ignores the fact

that makes the race worth running: the sociability

that ties us to other humans and their poor proxies

dogs, cats, and faded photographs - in strands

of gold, or silk, or steel, or yet barbed wire.

Metaphor gives way to metonymy, for our true model

could be walking through crowds, alone or in pairs,

silent or in earnest conversation, at once scanning

faces and facades, feet moving in two-four beats,

signaling our approach with glances and swaggers,

knifing between oncomers who seem separate or separable.

We follow those pioneers who find an open path

across the traffic, follow even when another path

would be shorter, or faster, or easier on the feet.

We spot a penny on the sidewalk, a gown in a window,

or a broken hydrant while the interior monologue hums,

the exterior dialogue swirls, the frantic tinkering

of every day continues. A cameraman above shoots film

and charts human beings as molecules in a channel,

lawfully accelerating and slowing according to density,

flowing symmetrically around those talkers who stop

precisely in midpath, walkers miming viscous fluids

whose laws they do not know. Meanwhile we pedestrians

dream, improvise, weave, stumble, curse, above all, hope.

("Domination, Resistance, Compliance... Discourse," Sociological Forum 6(3), p. 602). To which my first reaction was: WTF? Also: is this the only use of a poem to make an argument in sociology or political science? Are there others? (James C. Scott apparently promised a poem in "his next review" of Tilly's work - does anybody know if the promise was kept?).

I don't have a lot to say about the quality of the poem - let's say it's better than some, but it's no Dante. (I like the "strands of gold, or silk, or steel, or yet barbed wire" image, for what it's worth - it brings to mind other "strands of gold" images in ancient poetry and nicely reframes them). As for the points Tilly is making - roughly, that most problems of everyday life are computationally intractable, so we "satisfice," and that our intrinsic sociality affects the patterns of social action that we observe - they strike me as unobjectionable in the abstract. But I get the feeling Tilly misunderstands the purpose of models in the social sciences. (I say this with some trepidation - it is far more likely that I am wrong about this than that Tilly misunderstood anything).

As Kevin A. Clarke and David M. Primo have argued in a recent book (and article) models are maps of phenomena. (David Schmidtz has made a similar claim with respect to theories of justice, and I think both draw on the work of the philosopher Ronald Giere). And the most accurate maps are not always the most useful, though it is important that maps be sufficiently similar in some relevant respect to the phenomenon they image for them to be useful. To this I would add that models are also toys ("toy models") and analogies ("metaphors" - Tilly alludes to this in the poem above). They enable certain kinds of rule-constrained "inferential play" (as toys) and disclose or conceal connections to other phenomena (as analogies or metaphors). (They are rhetoric too, qua metaphors, and hence serve persuasive purposes). But let's stick with the map imagery right now. Consider, to use an analogy Clarke and Primo point to, two maps of the London Underground:

From Knightsbridge.net

From A Welsh View

Is any of them more "correct"? They are certainly useful for different purposes: they provide different forms of orientation with respect to the tube, and each of them has characteristic failure modes when used for other purposes (to which they may not be well suited). The first map is useful for people who are actually using the train - it helps you visualize the transfers you will need to make, as well as the approximate number of stops left until your destination. But it is not a very good guide to actual distances, and it does not provide any information regarding the urban or natural context of the stations. The second map, while being a more accurate description of the physical organization of the underground and of the urban and topographical context of each station, is much less useful to commuters, who are likely to find it too "busy." Neither of them, it is worth stressing, is a perfectly "accurate" representation of the tube, though both are "similar" to it in some significant respect, enough so that we can speak of them as "representations" of the underground.

Similarly with social science models: economists and (some) political scientists tend to prefer more "abstracted" maps of particular social contexts (like the first map above), since they tend to use such maps for purposes that would not be served by the more apparently "accurate" models that may be favored by sociologists or anthropologists or (other) political scientists (like the second map below). The major methodological disputes in the social sciences thus tend to be (sometimes covertly) about the legitimacy of the purposes for which these maps are used (and only secondarily about whether any particular map does serve any given purpose, though that sort of debate does happen too).

In the poem above, for example, Tilly seems to be saying that the "chess" map of the rationalists (which would surely include economists) is not a good map for making sense of social action because we are not like that. (It is interesting that Tilly also seems to allude to the physicist's map, which depicts social action on the analogy with fluid dynamics, whose laws the fluid particles do not understand but which also makes no reference to individual psychologies, unlike the economist's map). But the "chess" model - the model of rational agents - is not generally a description of our psychology, though it does describe a psychology that is in some respects similar to our actual psychology and in other respects dissimilar. To the extent that rationalistic models of human life are useful (and they may not be, certainly not for every conceivable explanatory purpose) they are not useful because they describe our psychology accurately (though they will be more useful the more the similarities to our psychology in the model are relevant to the explanatory purposes to which it is put), but because they may provide insight into how human action can aggregate into larger patterns (e.g., how markets can sometimes produce efficient outcomes, or how conventions can be self-enforcing), or make certain kinds of predictions (e.g., about when certain norms break down), or identify potential puzzles about social action, or even simply to point to long-term forces pushing social systems in certain directions rather than others. The resulting picture of human action will tend to look (to the anthropologist or the sociologist) like a stick-figure drawing, but that is precisely the point, at least so long as the stick-figure drawing tells us something about human action that is difficult to see in the hyperrealistic map of the anthropologist or the somewhat broader frame of the sociologist.

Social explanation at its best is the art of selecting the right map for orienting ourselves towards some question. In some cases, that map better be quite detailed; if I am interested in getting a real feel for how people distant from me live, or how they can be motivated to rebel against injustice, I am often better off consulting the anthropologists' map than the economist's map. But in other cases, the thickly descriptive map just gets in the way of the particular type of understanding I may be seeking. Even given a certain kind of question, however, some maps will still be better than others. (Some maps give bad directions, or have inconvenient lacunae). In economics, for example, it seems that maps with explicit microfoundations are worse for predictive or policy purposes than maps without such microfoundations, though "microfounded" maps are not thereby useless. In political science, detailed understanding of the politics of particular countries is not necessarily very useful for predictive purposes, though it is certainly very useful for many other purposes. And further problems arise, of course, because fights about methods are also fights about resources and status. The theoretical pluralism of "multiple maps for multiple purposes" tends to break down when certain mapmakers are marginalized, or when there is a perception that particular kinds of maps are being used for purposes to which they are not well suited while serving to attack the status of makers of alternative maps. Somehow I find it easier to make this point in haiku:

maps are different

but mapmakers are prickly

and love their maps best

(Ok, not a very good haiku. I'm sure you can do better.)

The Limits of Protest in Complex Societies

2012-04-05T13:48:00.001+12:00

(I’ve been invited by the Society for Philosophy and Culture here at VUW to host a session of their Symposiumon “Protest” on 5 April. I have taken this as an opportunity to try to figure out what I think about protest in general, and to speculate wildly on a bunch of related themes. Also, a riot of mixed metaphors)

Dissatisfaction with the social and political world can take many forms – everything from resignation and escape to covert resistance and sabotage to full-blown collective action. It is only sometimes that such dissatisfaction expresses itself as what we have come to understand as protest: collective public action that aims for social or political change. The past year has seen a great global wave of protest movements, among which the Arab Uprisings and the Occupy Wall Street movement are only the most well known. But what can protest accomplish in highly complex societies? What are the limits of protest?

Protest takes many forms: the repertoire of protest is large, and is constantly being re-invented in local idioms and adjusted to local circumstances. Some protests make clear “demands” on specific authorities; others enact their dissatisfaction in more or less spectacular ways, or refuse to speak with one voice. Some forms of protest are meticulously planned and organized; others happen spontaneously, taking advantage of very temporary circumstances, and are as much of a surprise to participants as to the putative targets of the protest. Protesters have pursued all sorts of goals, from the liberatory to the repressive. Yet all protest is ultimately a form of voice (in contradistinction to exit, in Albert Hirschmann’s famous scheme). And voice generally has two dimensions: an instrumental dimension, and an expressive or communicative dimension. (I am tempted to say: there are locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary dimensions to protest, but that would complicate things needlessly).

Instrumentally, protest is (roughly) a form of coordinated public action that uses diverse tactics to put pressure on specific institutions to address particular problems or issues in more or less specific ways. (We should understand the tactics of protest very broadly: "symbolic" action - including, for example, sharing a video or wearing certain clothing - can be part of the repertoire of protest.) From this perspective, the success of protest is measured by the degree to which it forces these institutions to respond to the problems or issues in question in accordance with the claims or values articulated by protesters. Protest can (sometimes) do this because it can signal changes in the support of members of political coalitions within particular institutions, or in the commitment of important actors to support these coalitions; it can turn the attention of powerful actors within institutions towards the problems raised by participants in protest; it can communicate information about potential solutions acceptable to influential coalition members; and in general can shift public discourse in ways that frame the concerns of the protesters in favourable ways. These are not the only things that protests can do, but they are the main things that matter for the instrumental success of protest. (For example, protest can sometimes directly create or destroy institutions, but in general it is best to conceive of protest as acting on institutions rather than generally creating or destroying them. More on this point below.)

Consider the protests in Egypt that forced Mubarak from power. How did a relatively small proportion of the population occupying in a mostly nonviolent manner a variety of public spaces succeed in overthrowing a ruler who had been in power for over 30 years and was apparently backed by the USA and a professional military force? The protests did not threaten him physically; rather, they provided the opportunity for members of Mubarak’s coalition of influential supporters to reconsider their support of the old dictator. The very costly signal of commitment given by the crowds assembled for 17 days at Tahrir (and elsewhere), bringing the country to a halt, probably made the upper echelons of the army recalculate the costs and benefits of standing with Mubarak (and having to potentially direct soldiers of uncertain reliability to massacre the assembled crowds). The protests further focused the country's attention budget on a single, specific issue (who should be in control of the state) and framed the problem in a way that was favorable to protesters. Finally, the fact that the protestors had articulated a clear, unifying demand (Mubarak must go) made it possible in turn for the members of Mubarak’s coalition to respond in ways that would defuse the protest. Yet though this was no mean achievement, it is obvious that 17 days of concentrated mass action (with longer roots - there was a lot of preparatory work before those 17 days) are hardly sufficient to completely reconstitute the institutions of the Egyptian state, not just shifting elite coalitions. I do not mean to imply that many people believed that they would, though some of the rhetoric coming from participants and supporters of the Egyptian uprising sometimes gave that impression; only that we need to understand the fundamental limitations of protest as an instrument of social and political change.

I can think of at least three important limitations. The first is perhaps the most obvious: though, as I noted above, the protest repertoire is large and protesters constantly innovate (the Egyptian protests succeeded in part because of innovative ways of deceiving the police, building up a movement, and identifying promising political opportunities), they are in a race with other actors who are not sitting tight. Develop a tactic that exploits a vulnerability in the political opportunity structure – like the “Occupy” tactic we have seen spread in the past year – and opponents on the other side of the issue will often enough develop something that, if it doesn't entirely counteract the effectiveness of your tactic, will certainly render it less effective. Revolutionaries are creative, but dictators can be too. Technology can give a temporary advantage to one side rather than another, but these advantages rarely last: Facebook and Twitter can help protesters organize, but they can also help opponents track protesters down and infiltrate them. Among the only generalizations that we can make with any certainty is that during the last century "nonviolent" tactics (of which there is an enormous variety) seem to have worked better (and produced better ultimate outcomes) than "violent" tactics to produce political change even in highly repressive contexts. (We are talking here about protest from a purely instrumental point of view; non-violent protest may well be normatively justified in other ways). But in the long run, I suspect the advantage remains resolutely with the defence: states and large institutions typically have resources that allow them, if nothing else, to wait you out or overpower you, as long as those at the top can learn from the mistakes of others.

To be sure, resourceful and creative protest organizers can create new opportunities, while lumbering institutions are sometimes slow to react. As in "regular" warfare, raw numbers and luck sometimes count for more than tactics. But there is no known protest method that can systematically grow a movement and be invulnerable to all counter-tactics, no “nuclear bomb” ensuring unconditional institutional surrender. In the long run, all protest tactics can be counteracted by some counter-tactic, and every counter-tactic in turn will be likely rendered ineffective eventually; hence the advantages of second-comers (Egypt) where protest movements can learn from first-comers who demonstrate the viability of particular protest methods (Tunisia), but the disadvantages of late-comers (Syria) where regimes have observed ways to foil these tactics. More importantly, there is no protest tactic that can ultimately reconstitute the whole of society if only enough people joined in - no grand general strike that can put an end to the system once and for all. Great social movement protest campaigns are thus typically hard slogs, not lighting victories; they can last many years (indeed, the uprising in Egypt had roots in movements going back a decade or so, and many failed actions through which a movement was built and much was learned), and at the end of the day they only steer the great ship of state slowly in one direction rather than another. (The image of the ship of state is very old - as old as Plato in Western political thought - but it can still serve as a useful analogy for social and political change: if society is like a supertanker, significant political change requires immense energies to turn it around even a little, but too much pressure - civil war, etc. - occasionally breaks the ship and sinks it, spilling the toxic waste all over the place.)

The second important instrumental limitation of protest is also pretty obvious, and has to do with the scarcity of the most important resource that voice requires to be effective: time (or, more specifically, coordinated time). Protest works to focus attention; it concentrates the diffuse and uncoordinated dissatisfaction of many into a unified chorus, and amplifies this dissatisfaction in ways that attract the attention of publics that might share some of these dissatisfactions, and of political coalitions that can act to change the circumstances giving rise to them. But in the short run, the attention budget for all issues of interest is limited; attention can be shifted, not created, since we are a finite number of human beings who live only a finite amount of time. So protesting X means not protesting Y; and protesting X means not doing A, B, and C, at least for the duration of the protest. There is always some other pressing issue that loses out in the competition for attention, some other problem that could be plausibly argued to be more important: to protest is to make a claim about the proper priorities of an institution. (But how could we know?).

Of course, sometimes X and Y can be subsumed under Z: instead of protesting the gender gap in pay or racism in some particular institution, people protest inequality in general, or capitalism, or the system. But insofar as the effectiveness of protest depends on its ability to shift support within political coalitions, it should be more effective when the "solution" to a problem depends on shifts within one or a few such coalitions (e.g., when it is a matter of of dumping a dictator) than when it depends on untangling multiple coalitions in complex networks of institutions (e.g., when the problem is to democratize an entire society). The best protest can do for more complex problems is to trigger shifts in public discourse ("put things on the agenda") that in turn may catalyze forms of deliberation and "social cognition" capable of generating useful ideas about how to unravel these knots (without resorting to the classic Gordian solution with its attendant violence). And here the communicative or expressive dimension of protest also plays a role: a protest brings forth a public and induces a conversation within it, even if the conversation often leads in directions neither planned nor approved by the protesters.

Here it is also worth noting a difference between protests and institutions. Institutions as it were "store" coordinated action and constantly regenerate it as they use it for specific purposes (but they can squander it if they use it for purposes for which they are not well designed); a protest, by contrast, is always in danger of exhausting its fuel supply. A protest discharges its forces like a battery or perhaps a capacitor; an institution is more like a generator, capable of powering complex circuits of action for longer periods of time to act on complex problems. This is why it makes sense that protests are often directed at institutions, but also why their effects can be so ephemeral. Long protest campaigns can at best transform movements into institutions, continually regenerating the possibility of protest as coordinated action (consider classic human rights institutions like Amnesty International). But instrumentally effective protests will normally tend to simplify and narrow the focus of collective action – to paper over differences of opinion and interest among participants and focus on specific, clearly articulable and above all simple messages that economize on the "coordination energies" necessary to keep the movement together, like the demand that Mubarak step aside; and they will become less effective as the problems they tackle increase in complexity (involving more tangled coalitions of people) and their potential solutions impact participants in more complicated ways. Local protests about issues that are of concrete significance to participants and where key political coalitions are well known will thus tend to be more effective than protests about global, diffuse and complex problems where it is not even clear which political coalitions should be the targets of action (e.g., protests about global warming).

This is connected to the third important limitation of protest. Effective protest tends to run on simple moral narratives, because human beings tend to be energized to act collectively by simple moral narratives, and protests that do not articulate simple moral narratives will ceteris paribus mobilize fewer people; but the world does not run on simple moral narratives (especially not modern complex societies with many only vaguely visible and poorly understood interdependencies). Protest is often very effective for making dictators leave power, but it is only marginally useful for ensuring that a constitution makes sense, and it is much easier to coordinate large numbers of people to do something about "bad guys" than to coordinate them in ways that will make a lasting difference to complex problems. (There is probably an evolutionary reason for this). Consider the example of the Kony #2012 video: a simplistic moral narrative was able to mobilize millions of people in symbolic solidarity against a bad guy (and perhaps shift the agenda within powerful institutions), but it is highly unlikely that such action will produce lasting and significant positive change where it matters most (though in the best case it may get people involved with local groups in Northern Uganda, and perhaps to learn more about complex problems).

None of this is to say that because protest has limits, it should not be used. Far from it! Social change of any kind is hard; but protest, as a form of voice, is only one potential method of change. (Various forms of exit are also important; and the parallel building of institutions - starting a new society in place of the old - is also a time-honored way of acting in the world). Moreover, protest should not be viewed only in instrumental terms. Protest at its best opens up public spaces of appearance, where people can experience the joy of acting together, as Hannah Arendt put it. It is expressive as well as instrumental, and there is nothing wrong with that: protest can be a tactic and a party.

[Update 4/6/2012: minor typo fixes]

[Update 2, 4/7/2012: fixed errant pronouns, link]

Crowdsourcing a Democracy Index – 2012 edition

2012-03-27T14:16:00.000+13:00

It’s that time of the year again – time to crowdsource a democracy index.

First, a bit of context. Last year, I had the idea of using the Allourideas pairwise comparison software to crowdsource a ranking of countries by their degree of “democracy” in 2010. I asked students in my Dictatorships and Revolutions class to set the ball rolling, and then posted the link to the widget here, allowing anybody to vote. Surprisingly, in just a couple of months of voting the results were interestingly close to standard indexes of freedom or democracy: the crowdsourced ranking had a correlation of 0.84 with Freedom House’s widely-used ratings of political and civil liberties for 2010, and the basic crowdsourced ranking was generally plausible (see this post for further analysis of these results) . In fact, by now the correlation has increased to 0.86 (8556 votes total), which is about as good the correlation between Freedom House and Polity IV (0.87).

I am interested in seeing if this kind of crowdsourced measure can be used as a sort of quick and dirty index of democracy. To be sure, crowdsourcing the construction of an index of democracy in this way is usually not a good way of generating reliable social science data. For one thing, the exercise does not impose any restrictions on how the concept of “democracy” should be understood, which means that it implicitly aggregates all kinds of different ideas about democracy, weighting them by the degree to which larger numbers of people consider them important. (It takes a “democratic” approach to concept formation, you might say). But it does have the virtue of being cheap (total cost: about $0, compared to over US$500,000 annually for the Freedom House “Freedom in the World” report, and $120,000 annually for the Polity IV project), aggregating the dispersed information of large numbers of people from all over the world, and making it possible to generate various measures of “uncertainty” around the crowdsourced estimates. So I want to repeat the exercise, and produce a democracy ranking for 2011:

(Click here if you can’t see the widget above. Vote as many times as you'd like, and don't worry if you have to use the "I can't decide" button).

In theory, the more votes, and the more diverse the voting population – the more people from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the rest of the world – the more informative the results should be. So please vote early and often, and share!

I am also interested in which dimensions of the complex concept of democracy people tend to weigh more when making these sorts of comparisons. Do people put more weight on the presence or absence of elections, for example, than on economic equality? You can help me to figure this out by using the widget below to rank various dimensions or components of democracy in terms of their importance to you (or adding your own):

(Click here if you can’t see the widget above. Vote as many times as you'd like, and don't worry if you have to use the "I can't decide" button).

The “seed” dimensions of democracy for these comparisons are taken from a recent piece by Michael Coppedge, John Gerring, et al. (“Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy”, Perspectives on Politics 9(2): pp. 42-62; ungated here) that is very much worth reading if you are interested in the issue of how to measure democracy. But I make no claim that these are the only dimensions of democracy that matter; if people have other ideas, you can add them in (I will need to approve any suggestions, though). You are also welcome to discuss in comments the kinds of considerations that you used to make distinctions between countries, or any other considerations that might improve the usefulness of this sort of exercise.

Enjoy, and please share!

The Irrelevance of Legitimacy - now as a working paper!

2012-03-22T18:23:00.000+13:00

Sorry for the recent silence. I've been busy with administrative tasks, the beginning of the term here in the Southern hemisphere, and indexing a book. I've also been working on a paper: "The Irrelevance of Legitimacy":

The concept of legitimacy plays an important explanatory and normative role in political theory and political discourse. The idea is typically used both to explain the stability of a political order by pointing to acceptance of discursive justifications for that order, and to evaluate its normative appropriateness by comparing the conditions of the actual acceptance of discourses of justification to the conditions of their rational acceptability. The normative and explanatory roles of the concept of legitimacy are linked insofar as actual acceptance of justificatory discourses is usually taken to be (defeasible) evidence for their rational acceptability. I argue here that legitimacy (in the sense of acceptance of discursive justifications for political order) is generally irrelevant for the explanation of political stability: if anything, stability explains legitimacy rather than the other way around. Stability is in turn best explained by the way in which signals of commitment are generated through collective action, not by pointing to the individual acceptance of discursive justifications for political order. I illustrate the inadequacy of explanations of political order in terms of legitimacy by examining the phenomenon of cults of personality in totalitarian regimes, and raise some questions about the normative utility of the concept given its explanatory irrelevance. (Link to download).

I'll be presenting a shortened version of this paper at the Midwest Political Science Association meeting in Chicago on April 13.

Most of the arguments in the paper will be familiar to readers of this blog; in fact, many began life as blog posts (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here), though the paper ties them together and explicates them more carefully. Responses to these posts convinced me that there was something there worth researching more fully and discussing in more detail, and I want to thank readers and commenters for feedback and encouragement. Comments on the paper are also welcome; it is still work in progress (the final section, in particular, still needs a great deal of work, but every part of the argument could be tightened and subject to careful scrutiny, and will likely change a great deal before the paper gets submitted to actual peer review).

The main ideas of the paper were motivated by my dissatisfaction with the Weberian dictum (almost a cliche at this point) that power needs to be legitimated in order to endure. Though relationships of domination are often embedded within justificatory discourses, my view is that we cannot in general explain the stability of such relationships by pointing to the genuine acceptance of such justifications by the subordinate. (As I note in the paper, Weber himself seemed to be aware of this point, if inconsistently; he notes that all that matters for the stability of relationships of domination is that the claim to legitimacy be taken as valid, not that it be believed, and these are two very different things). To say that power needs legitimacy in order to endure is at best to say that power needs credible commitments in order to endure, and discourses of justification typically provide the language in which such credible commitments are expressed and measured; they are the form, not the cause of the stability of power. The title is nevertheless a bit of an exaggeration; a more appropriate title might have been "the limited relevance of legitimacy," since I admit that there are some conditions (primarily cases where exit or voice constraints on a relationship are minimal) where appeals to legitimacy have some explanatory and normative force, but I decided to go for broke. Anyway, I would be grateful for any feedback. Enjoy!

Your irregularly scheduled blogging will resume shortly.