All posts in category Authoritarian Rule

Dart-Throwing Chimp Does TEDxTbilisi

Last month, I traveled to Georgia (the country) to give a talk at the second annual TEDxTbilisi. In that talk, I used stories about shoddy infrastructure to explore the gap between conventional theories and my own understanding of the things that cause authoritarian regimes to persist and then collapse. Called “Why Dictators Build Stuff that Crumbles,” my script was basically a mash-up of a couple of blog posts from the past year: one of nearly the same name, and another on why political activism over threats to public health and safety presents authoritarian regimes with special dilemmas.

The event was terrific—full house, great venue, good refreshments—and the small army of volunteers it took to make TEDxTbilisi happen did tremendous work. To readers of this blog, I’d especially recommend these four talks:

* Dato Gogigchaishvili, a Georgian television host and producer, gave a really smart and funny talk that probed the truth and limits of cross-cultural comparisons.

* Rusudan Gotsiridze spoke beautifully and humorously about gender roles through the lens of her own experiences as the first female bishop in Georgia.

* Educators and parents will appreciate the talk by Mark Rein-Hagen, a professional game designer, about learning through playing.

* The theme for TEDxTbilisi this year was “crossroads,” and Donald Rayfield capped the day with a great talk about Georgia’s long and difficult history as a place squished in between other, more powerful states and empires.

Honestly, preparing for the event was a lot harder than I’d expected. Having a blog where I regularly try to present social-science ideas to a broader audience made the initial task of identifying a relevant topic and drafting a script easier than they might have been. That part, I actually enjoyed. Much harder for me were committing the talk to memory and rehearsing it enough so that it (hopefully) didn’t look and sound too canned.

I’m sure the memory and delivery parts are easier for some people than others, and I suspect they get easier when you do them routinely. They were new to me, though, and I put a lot of hours into it over the two weeks before the event, reading out loud and then practicing versions of the talk. The closer I got to the trip, the more of my intellectual processing power it seemed to absorb. I was a lousy creative thinker that last week, and once in that home stretch I completely whiffed on a phone call I was supposed to make for work, something I never do. Having been through this once, I’m much more impressed with the people who make that kind of performance look natural and effortless than I used to be.

Finally, I gotta say, the process was exhausting. I am a creature of habit who rarely travels for work and almost never travels overseas. My TEDxTbilisi trip was a five-day blast with opening and closing legs of 24-hour travel to and from a city eight time zones ahead of home. During the three days I was in Tbilisi, the combination of jet lag, noise and cigarette smoke in the hotel, caffeine withdrawal, and anxiety about the impending event meant that I slept poorly. I used to race a lot as a runner and then a cyclist, and one of the big rules of thumb in those worlds is to stick to normal routines as much as possible before important races to keep the stress down and energy and focus up. Here, I’d basically done the opposite, shaking up everything I normally do. If I’d had my druthers, I’d have taken my first crack at this kind of thing under less stressful circumstances.

Of course, in real life you take what you can get, and in TEDx Tbilisi I got a great opportunity. If hope you enjoy the talk.

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by dartthrowingchimp on May 15, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Authoritarian Rule, Democratization, Development, Protests and Popular Uprisings
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on May 15, 2013

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A Case Study in the Limits of Generalization in Comparative Politics

If you’re here because you’re interested in comparative politics, you ought to go chug yesterday’s rich post on Nate Jensen’s blog about what legislatures in authoritarian regimes do and then chase it with Tom Pepinsky’s addendum on his own Indolaysia blog. Nate solicited thoughts on this topic from some of the best minds in the field, including Tom, and you can learn a lot in just a few minutes of reading.

What struck me in reading those posts was the sharp tension in comparative politics between the general and the specific. Nate’s question has been a focal point for comparativists for nearly a decade now, and the arc of that inquiry it has inspired should be familiar to anyone who works in this field.

  1. A particular case or new line of deductive theorizing suggests an intriguing puzzle.
  2. Some solutions to that puzzle are tabled in the form of broad conjectures.
  3. Patterns are found in cross-national data that seem to confirm those conjectures. (Note, though, that the preceding two steps do not necessarily occur in that order).
  4. The field buzzes with the promise of a new covering law, the Holy Grail of political science. Conference panels abound.
  5. People with expertise in specific cases start to nibble at that law, identifying permutations or exceptions in the parts of the world they know. By the time they’re done, there’s practically nothing left.
  6. Distracted by the next big puzzle, the field fails to notice what just happened.
  7. The policy community discovers the covering law and incorporates a few of its prescriptive implications (“Consociationalism good! Presidential systems bad!”) into current practice.

Okay, so those last two may be a little mean spirited, but you get the idea: there’s some meta-irony here. The quest for covering laws keeps serving up failures, but the quest itself ends up following a recurring pattern.

On the specifics of how institutions shape politics, I think Nate’s virtual round-table also provides a nice reminder of the limits of functionalist theories of institutionalism. Functionalist theories see institutions as intelligently designed solutions to specific political and economic problems. For any formal political institution, we should be able to work backwards from the fact of the institution’s existence to the problem it was intended to solve and then show in practice how the institution’s origins support that line of reasoning. Voilà.

The problem is the disconnect between the assumed version and the reality of how institutional arrangements come into being. In some cases, historical institutionalists have mustered compelling evidence to show how the original institutional innovation was deliberately and successfully designed to solve a specific problem in a specific case. Most of the time, though, the backstory on how a particular institution actually came to exist in any instance chosen at random looks rather different from that first instantiation. And when a functionalist theory gets the “how” part wrong, it’s going to get the “why” part wrong, too.

Scott Desposato’s contribution to Nate’s post on legislatures in authoritarian regimes provides a nice case in point: Brazil. That country’s 20-year, military-led authoritarian interlude didn’t proactively decide to create a legislature as a way to credibly commit to the protection of its subject’s property rights or to craftily divide its opponents. Instead, it inherited an elected legislature from the democratic regime it toppled, which inherited its basic contours from the colonial metropole that built it. If the Brazilian junta can be said to have made a choice here, it was the decision not to demolish an extant legislature, but that choice surely had as much to do with inertia and the expected costs of such a destructive act as it did with the anticipated benefits of keeping an elected legislature around.

These path dependencies are less problematic for softer versions of institutionalist theory that emphasize the marginal and contingent effects of specific institutions under a variety of conditions, as I think Jennifer Gandhi does in her award-winning book on political institutions under dictatorship.

Even there, though, the layers of contingency pile up pretty quickly. Institutions that seem to function a certain way in a certain set of cases for a certain period of time start to do different things or simply become less relevant as the economic, social, and technological context changes around them, and as wily humans looking for an edge keep innovating. For example, in an era of ubiquitous and instant communication, the information-gathering and opposition-moderating functions that authoritarian legislatures are sometimes said to serve may now be satisfied in other ways, as Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Molly Roberts suggest in a widely-cited paper on the selective censorship of China’s Sina Weibo social-media platform.

So where does that leave us? I think the opening line of Barbara Geddes’ contribution to Nate’s blog post sums it up nicely:

Autocratic legislatures play different roles and serve different functions in different dictatorships.

In other words, “It depends” is about as close to a covering law as we’re going to get.

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by dartthrowingchimp on December 13, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Authoritarian Rule
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on December 13, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/12/13/institutionalist-theories-and-the-limits-of-generalization-in-comparative-politics/

How (Not) to Bring Democracy to China

Over at Foreign Policy, Yasheng Huang’s got an essay up called “The Key To Bringing Democracy to China” that’s so much wrong, I’ve just got to respond.

Huang’s argument is this: You won’t get China to democratize by making moral claims about human rights, because, for cultural reasons, those arguments don’t resonate there. To sell China’s pragmatic elites on democracy, you need to convince them it’s in their country’s best interests to democratize. The way to do that is to explain all the practical benefits democracy will bring.

On why liberal claims about universal rights won’t resonate in China, Huang writes:

The reason is a deep gulf of values. The Chinese have a utilitarian concept of “rights” — that they should advance the greatest good for the greatest number of people — in contrast to the Western view of rights as protections against encroachments on the disenfranchised few.

And on what would work better:

It’s time for the United States to pivot to a new approach toward influencing China’s political future: explaining that democracy produces concrete benefits such as balanced growth, stability, and personal security — even for top Communist Party officials. This performance-based argument will resonate with many of China’s economic and intellectual elites and may have a chance to influence the thinking of Xi Jinping and his fellow top officials.

What’s the problem? For starters, the national essentialism. “The Chinese have”?!? There is no way that the 1.3 billion people living in China today are all utilitarians, just as there’s no way all “Westerners” are liberals. Yes, there are central tendencies in social norms and values that cluster in time and space, but this level of essentialism is just silly.

From experience, I’m also deeply skeptical of claims that democracy won’t come to a particular place because it’s incompatible with the local culture. This exceptionalist claim has been made at one time or another about practically every state, religion, or region right up until the point when democratization happened there—and sometimes beyond. Latin American countries wouldn’t democratize because Catholicism. African countries couldn’t democratize because primitive tribalism. Asian countries wouldn’t democratize because Confucianism. Middle Eastern countries wouldn’t democratize because Islam. Well, whaddya know? It’s 2012, and we’ve now got democratic regimes in every one of those previously impervious bastions of backwardness. With a track record as poor as that, the cultural-compatibility theory of democratization should be taken out behind the barn and put down once and for all.

Finally, the idea that China’s political elites can be convinced to democratize because democracy brings social benefits is premised on a misunderstanding of how and why regime change actually happens. Generally speaking, authoritarian regimes survive because they produce real benefits for the elites who run them, and because it’s risky and hard for the rest of the people stuck living under those regimes to get organized to overthrow them. Every once in a while, though, enough people can overcome those steep odds and get sufficiently organized to compel elites to allow citizens to start picking their rulers. If they’re slow on the uptake, those elites might lose their shirts and maybe even their lives in the process. If they’re more nimble-minded, those elites will usually manage to protect most of their property and privileges, even as they (begrudgingly) accept the formalities of equal citizenship and open political competition. What they won’t care so much about under either scenario is how everyone else is doing.

The core problem with Huang’s salesmanship is that it conflates public and private goods. The “balanced growth, stability, and personal security” Huang sees as democracy’s selling points are all more or less public goods; access to them can’t be closed off, and their benefits would be widely shared, regardless of who produces them. By contrast, the wealth and status that Chinese elites enjoy now are private goods. Access to them is tightly restricted, and the more widely they’re shared, the less valuable they become. Crucially, their existence also depends on maintenance of the current system. If the Communist Party fragments or gets toppled, the private goods the Party now offers will disappear, and today’s elites will be forced to scramble anew for the privileges the current system was designed to produce. One guy’s corruption is another’s gravy train.

Under these circumstances, it’s hard to see why China’s elites would be persuaded by talk of the public benefits democracy might bring. To me, this jawboning strategy seems a bit like trying to sell a Prius to Ferrari driver by talking about how much less pollution it makes. As far as I can tell, the only way to sell democracy to any particular batch of authoritarian elites is to convince them that they and their families and friends will personally suffer if they don’t hurry up and get out of the way, and that outcome is often only weakly related to the public goods Huang lists. If you’re wondering just how weak that relationship can get, just take a gander at Zimbabwe or Angola.

Oh, and by the way: U.S. policymakers have been talking to autocrats about the economic benefits of democratization for years. Like, decades, even. If it hasn’t already convinced leaders in China—and Russia, and Saudi Arabia, and Cambodia, and…well, you get the picture—I’m not sure why it would suddenly start to work now.

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by dartthrowingchimp on November 20, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Authoritarian Rule, Democracy Promotion, Democratization
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on November 20, 2012

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Pathways to Political Pluralism in China

As the Communist Party of China (CPC) performs its decennial transfer of power at its 18th Congress this month, hints of a looming economic crisis have many China watchers talking about prospects for political reform. In a nice piece by Edward Wong in Saturday’s New York Times, we hear journalist and historian Yang Jisheng say that, “In the next years, [China] should have a constitutional democracy plus a market economy.” Acknowledging the steep odds against that happening, however, Yang then suggested a kind of mid-range alternative: “To break one-party rule right now is probably not realistic, but we can have factions within the party made public and legalized, so they can campaign against each other.”

I don’t follow Chinese politics closely enough to know how common calls like this are, but I do know the history of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe well enough to say that I think the path to reform through routinized competition within the ruling party is unsustainable and therefore highly unlikely.

What Yang foresees echoes the idea of “socialist pluralism” that Mikhail Gorbachev first floated in 1987 as part of his strategy for reinvigorating the Soviet system. As Archie Brown describes in The Gorbachev Factor, when Gorbachev initially used the term “pluralism,” he was not talking about opening the door to new political movements or even to competition within the Communist Party; he was just talking about allowing more voices to be heard in Soviet newspapers. Importantly, this crack in the edifice of Soviet censorship was not motivated by a liberal belief in the inherent value of free speech. Instead, the turn toward openness, or glasnost’, followed an instrumental logic that saw a freer flow of information on a narrow range of approved topics as the best way to check the stagnation and corruption that Gorbachev and his sympathizers saw as the sources of the USSR’s economic malaise.

Of course, the reform process quickly began to spin out of Moscow’s control in some corners of the Union, and by 1990 Party leaders were looking for ways to regain a handle on the situation. That quest led to open talk of political pluralism, with three options on the table: 1) a formal end to one-party rule and steps toward real multipartism; 2) a continuation of one-party rule, but with open competition allowed among factions within the party; or 3) a crackdown that would, in effect, attempt to roll politics back to the status quo ante.

Well, the progressives within the Party chose Door #1, and their reactionary rivals then banged on Door #3 in the form of the failed August 1991 coup that finally and ironically finished the USSR off. The fact that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) didn’t mess around with formal intra-party competition before opening Door #1, however, tells us something about those factions’ assessments of the sustainability of open pluralism in a one-party system.

I happen to think they were right. The logic of political competition dictates that today’s losers want to become tomorrow’s winners. To do that, they need to increase the relative strength of their coalition—relative, that is, to the faction that has just defeated them. When you’ve lost the fight within the existing pool of people whose preferences affect that outcome, one of the best ways to strengthen your coalition is to expand that pool.

In closed authoritarian systems like the USSR’s or China’s, there’s plenty of room for expansion, and the faction that loses today can try to mobilize or connect with movements outside the party who can help tip the balance in their favor. A ratchet effect ensues that eventually and inevitably extends the process beyond the wall that separates the ruling party from the rest of society. When that happens, a revolutionary situation develops, and the dominant faction is forced to choose between capitulation or retrenchment by force. Recognizing this logic from the start, party leaders usually choose between suppressing competition or stepping aside with as much of their dignity (and fortunes!) as they can take. Tottering leaders occasionally try for the middle ground, but those attempts tend to collapse quickly, and those collapses aren’t always kind to the departing rulers.

In the Soviet Union, this ratchet effect occurred in some of the 15 republics before it spilled into the open at the center. As early as 1988, pro-reform factions in some of the republican Communist Parties were tolerating and even encouraging emergent environmentalist and nationalist movements whom they saw as potential allies in their struggle for power against their more conservative leadership. Those encouraging signals, in turn, helped those movements stage protest events that swelled from dozens or hundreds of participants in 1987 and 1988 to tens and even hundreds of thousands by 1989.

Well, we—including the Communist Party of China—all know how that worked out. In China today, the pool of potential allies for reformist factions within the Party is large and growing. Citizens increasingly fed up with industrial pollution, land grabs, lax regulation, official corruption, and cultural repression comprise an array of proto-movements to whom losing factions in a more openly competitive system might turn.

Under these circumstances, I would expect the CPC’s leadership to try to retain control as long as it can, and then to craft as lucrative an exit as possible. The halfway house Yang proposes wouldn’t stand for long, and it’s hard to imagine party elites thinking otherwise and burning their resources trying to prop it up.

So how does China get to political pluralism? I can’t say exactly, but my guess is that it will be more disruptive than the incremental change Yang describes. As someone who studied the Soviet Union as it came undone, I think I have some idea of the cognitive process that produces that kind of prediction. We can see where pluralism would inevitably lead, but we can’t fathom the powers that be stepping aside without a fight, so we imagine hybrid forms that would seem to split the difference. Those hybrid forms, however, reflect a linear model of political change that very rarely occurs in nature, and I doubt China will be an exception to that rule.

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by dartthrowingchimp on November 12, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Authoritarian Breakdown, Authoritarian Rule, Democratization
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on November 12, 2012

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What a China Corruption Story Says About the Perils of Authoritarian Corruption in the Modern Global Economy

Yesterday, the New York Times dropped a bombshell of investigative journalism on the Chinese Communist Party, reporting that the family of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has amassed something like $2.7 billion in wealth in recent years, mostly through insider dealings. That a top Party official has profited from his position of authority is hardly surprising—”Man who is shocked at Wen Jiabao family fortune discovered in Chinese village,” the Onion-style China Daily Show headline blared—but the scale of the family’s fortune and the speed of its accumulation is breathtaking.

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese government promptly blocked access to English- and Chinese-language versions of the New York Times web site and mention of the newspaper on Sina Weibo, China’s über-popular micro-blogging service. The article happened to drop in the middle of delicate transition period in China’s political leadership, and what it suggests about the state of that country’s political economy isn’t pretty. As the Times piece dryly noted,

Untangling [the Wen family's] financial holdings provides an unusually detailed look at how politically connected people have profited from being at the intersection of government and business as state influence and private wealth converge in China’s fast-growing economy.

I’m not a China pro, but I am interested in forces that drive the persistence and collapse of authoritarian regimes. For me, one of the most intriguing aspects of this story is what it suggests about change over time in the difficulty of concealing the patronage and rent-seeking that typically underpin the political economy of authoritarian rule. NYT reporter David Barboza was able to piece together this remarkable picture of the Wen family’s wealth by reviewing corporate and regulatory records in the public domain. I’m sure the trail wasn’t easy to follow, but it was at least possible because the entities involved operate in a global marketplace that demands a certain degree of transparency. These wheelings and dealings are the currency that buys loyalty in many autocracies, but they are rarely laid so bare.

What Barboza’s story underscores for me is the Faustian bargain the Chinese Communist Party has made with the global economy. In exchange for foreign capital and hungry markets and safe harbors for Chinese wealth, China would play by rules that could gradually erode the opacity on which the authority of its political class depends. Among other things, it would produce and file the kinds of records that made the story on the Wen family’s wealth possible.

Importantly, Barboza’s story is not unique. We’ve seen similar stories from other authoritarian regimes in recent years. In May, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Khadija Ismayilova described how Azerbaijan’s “first family” had profited handsomely from a $134-million construction project related to the Eurovision contest that country hosted this summer—revelations made possible, in part, because of anti-corruption law Azerbaijan adopted in 2004 to help attract badly needed foreign capital. The 2011 revolution in Tunisia that marked the start of the so-called Arab Spring was apparently sparked, in part, by public furor over U.S. government cables detailing the craven corruption of President Ben Ali’s family—cables that were pushed into the public domain by Wikileaks.

I don’t mean to suggest that globalization and the Internet and all things new and shiny have made it impossible to sustain authoritarian rule. The roster of dictatorships that persist in the face of revelations like these—Azerbaijan, Zimbabwe, and Equatorial Guinea, to name just a few of the most obvious cases—proves otherwise. I do think, however, that these entanglements are marginally increasing pressures on these regimes that can hasten their demise. As Barboza’s story about the Wen family illustrates, this Faustian bargain has worked out quite nicely for many authoritarian elites so far, but Mephistopheles’ powers of concealment do seem to be weakening. And this, among many other things, may help to explain the recent acceleration of the long global trend toward more democratic government.

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by dartthrowingchimp on October 26, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on October 26, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/what-a-china-corruption-story-says-about-the-perils-of-authoritarian-corruption-in-the-modern-global-economy/

Episodes of Democracy and Autocracy: A New Data Set

To look for patterns in the occurrence of transitions to democracy and democratic breakdowns around the world over time, we need reliable observations of where and when those events have happened. Most statistical analyses of democratic transitions in the past 15 years have used either Polity or the Democracy-Dictatorship (DD) data set to do that. As part of my work for the Political Instability Task Force (PITF), I developed yet another data set on episodes of democratic and authoritarian government in countries worldwide with populations larger than 500,000. The results of that work—I’m calling it the Democracy/Autocracy Data Set (DAD)—are now publicly available on the Dataverse Network, a data-sharing platform operated by Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science.*

Like DD, DAD sorts cases annually into two bins: democracies and non-democracies.  Countries are identified as democracies when they satisfy all of several criteria, like items on a checklist. Cases that fail to satisfy one or more of those criteria are identified as non-democracies. Those criteria are meant to be indicative of four broader conditions essential to democracy:

  • Elected officials rule. Representatives chosen by citizens actually make policy, and unelected individuals, bodies, and organizations cannot veto those representatives’ decisions.
  • Elections are fair and competitive. The process by which citizens elect their rulers provides voters with meaningful choice and is free from deliberate fraud or abuse.
  • Politics is inclusive. Adult citizens have equal rights to vote and participate in government and fair opportunity to exercise those rights.
  • Civil liberties are protected. Freedoms of speech, association, and assembly give citizens the chance to deliberate on their interests, to organize in pursuit of those interests, and to monitor the performance of their elected representatives and the bureaucracies on which those officials depend.

Conceptually, these conditions are very similar to the ones used in constructing the DD data set. So why bother doing it all over again? The impetus to re-invent this particular wheel came from concerns I had about the effects of a couple of ancillary rules the makers of the original DD data set used to make decisions about ambiguous cases. As I saw it, those rules systematically skewed the resulting data in ways that are especially problematic for the kind of survival analysis those authors and many others have done with them. I won’t belabor the issue here, but interested readers can find more on the subject in this paper of mine on SSRN.

DAD was designed with survival analysis in mind, so it includes duration of current status, indicators of change from current status, and running counts of past events of both types (transitions to and from democracy). Importantly, those running counts include episodes before 1955, so at least that portion of the data set is not left-censored. Unlike DD, DAD does not differentiate within the two bins among types of democracy and dictatorship. Also unlike DD, however, DAD does track times to first alternations in power within democratic episodes—by individual chief executive and by ruling party/coalition—and it differentiates among democratic breakdowns by their form: executive coup (a.k.a. consolidation of incumbent advantage), military coup, rebellion, or other.

As a kind of bonus, DAD also includes annual data on each countries’ participation in a host of regional and global intergovernmental organizations and treaty regimes—data I used for this paper, which looks at the effects of international integration on prospects for transitions to and from democracy. Those data are also available as a standalone data set through ICPSR (link).

For other published or publicly available research I’ve done with DAD, see here, here, here, here, and here.

Based on my experience working with Polity, DD, and Freedom House’s Freedom in the World data, I can say a little bit about how the various sources compare to one another. In its calls on which regimes are democratic, DAD is closest to Freedom House’s annual list of electoral democracies. DD is generally more cautious than DAD, identifying as dictatorships some cases where DAD sees (usually short-lived) spells of democratic government that ended with a consolidation of incumbent advantage. Polity runs the opposite way, identifying as more democratic than autocratic many cases where DAD sees an autocracy (e.g. Russia and Armenia today).

At present, I am not planning to update DAD. Still, I hope it’s a useful resource and welcome comments and criticisms. Again, you can find the data set and supporting documentation on the Dataverse Network.

* This research was conducted for the Political Instability Task Force (PITF). The PITF is funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The views expressed herein are the author’s alone and do not necessarily represent the views of the Task Force or the U.S. Government.

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by dartthrowingchimp on September 18, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Authoritarian Breakdown, Authoritarian Rule, Democratic Breakdown, Democratic Consolidation, Democratization, Statistics, Transitions to Democracy
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on September 18, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/09/18/episodes-of-democracy-and-autocracy-a-new-data-set/

ISO Revolution, Organized Opposition Not Req’d

In a recent piece for Think Africa Press, freelancer Peter Dörrie surveys politics in Burkina Faso and concludes that the authoritarian elites who’ve held power there for the past 25 years are unlikely to let their grip slip before or by way of elections due in 2015.

The reason for this pessimistic view is simple. There is no opposition movement in Burkina Faso capable of harnessing the disillusionment and frustration of the general population. Most opposition leaders have either been co-opted by Compaoré at some point in their career or have proven themselves unable to rally significant support. Moreover, large parts of Burkinabé society still follow the judgements of their ‘traditional’ rulers who have essentially been bought by Compaoré with political and economic incentives. What remains of the political opposition is fractured and unwilling to cooperate.

I don’t want to pick on Dörrie, whose analysis is always thoughtful and well researched, and whose conjectures about Burkinabé politics sound reasonable to me. I do, however, want to use his piece as the jumping-off point for some ideas that have been rattling around in my head for a while about the relationship between organized oppositions and prospects for political revolutions.

Dörrie’s essay is hardly the first piece of political analysis in which I’ve seen the idea that an opposition needs to get organized before a revolution can occur.  Recently, it’s also popped up a lot in analysis of post-election protests in Russia and of the potential for radical change in China.

This idea makes sense in a Newtonian model of politics, in which causes must clearly precede effects and change is thought to unfold in distinct sequences that repeat themselves across many cases. As someone who’s probably made this argument myself at one time or another, I’d say the mental narrative goes something like this: By definition, revolutions occur when challengers topple rulers by extra-legal means. For that to happen, a challenger has to exist and be strong enough either to defeat the ruler’s defenders or to dissuade them from fighting back. In all but the weakest states, that kind of strength requires sustained, large-scale organization. Ergo, the odds of a revolution occurring are substantially lower in societies with disorganized oppositions than they are in ones with well-organized challengers, and the organization of a formidable opposition movement is an early milestone past which all revolutions must travel.

But what if the world doesn’t really work like that? Having watched a bunch of these things unfold in real time, I am now convinced that it’s more useful to understand revolutionary situations as an emergent property of complex systems. One of the features of complex systems is the possibility of threshold effects, in which seemingly small perturbations in some of the system’s elements suddenly produce large changes in others. The fragility of the system as a whole may be evident (and therefore partially predictable) from some aspects of its structure, but the timing of the revolutionary moment’s emergence and the specific form it will take will be impossible to anticipate with any precision.

In this version of politics, the emergence of rival organizations is as likely to be a consequence of the system’s failure as a cause of it. In fact, that particular cause/effect distinction might not make sense at all. When surveying authoritarian regimes to contemplate which ones are most susceptible to revolutions, we may be better off thinking of the development of new political organizations and the breakdown of old authority patterns as two aspects of a single, many-faceted process in which the former doesn’t have to precede the latter and sometimes even may not occur at all.

Looking at some of the cases from the so-called Arab Spring, I think it’s clear that authoritarian regimes rarely collapse in the tidy sequence our Newtonian models lead us to expect. In Tunisia, where Ben Ali’s regime had successfully suppressed the organization of any independent opposition for many years, politics swung from the routine to the revolutionary in a matter of days, and upstarts had to scramble to organize for elections after Ben Ali was already gone. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood had built itself into a large and capable organization in spite of a steady diet of state repression, but the Brotherhood played only a modest role in the unrest that led directly to Mubarak’s ouster, which probably could have happened without it. In Libya, a loose assemblage of local militias managed to topple and kill longtime ruler Moammar Ghaddafi with a helpful shove from foreign countries, but many of those militias only sprung up and got organized as the conflict intensified, and to this day they remain disorganized and even combative at the national level.

From this quick survey, we can tell that a linear and sequential mental model of authoritarian breakdown isn’t very useful for predicting or explaining what actually happens in many real-world cases. The presence of an uncooperative opposition that can get and stay organized in spite of state repression probably is a useful marker of some near-term potential for regime breakdown, but that doesn’t mean that the inverse is also true. In the non-Newtonian politics of the real world, we should not mistake the absence of a formidable opposition for a sign of the regime’s resilience, and we should sometimes expect to see new political machines scrambling to organize as or only after regimes fall apart, too.

7 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on September 7, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Authoritarian Breakdown, Authoritarian Rule, Complexity Politics, Democratization, Protests and Popular Uprisings, Revolutions
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on September 7, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/09/07/iso-revolution-organized-opposition-not-reqd/

Prospects for Political Liberalization in North Korea

Foreign Policy‘s Democracy Lab has just posted an essay of mine on why the odds that North Korea might undergo a “thaw” of sorts in the next few years aren’t so bad. The top-line judgment:

Improbable does not mean impossible. Maybe this time really will be different. The U.S.S.R. wasn’t supposed to loosen the screws, and then it did. The Burmese junta was supposed to have battened down the hatches when it crushed the Saffron Uprising in 2007, and look where we are now, just a few years later. Although the safe money’s still on continuity in North Korea, there are sound reasons to believe the chances for political liberalization in the near future are improving.

Those “sound reasons” have to do with trade-offs inherent in the political economy of authoritarian rule, a topic I also discussed on this blog last fall in a post about Burma. Dictators want to preempt or squash domestic political threats, but they don’t like having to pay so much for security, and all that monitoring and repression trips up their economies, too. Those dilemmas mean that dictators might sometimes decide to relax repression when their opposition is weak and their economies are languishing, as is the case in North Korea today.

If you’re interested, please take a look at the piece in FP and let me know what you think. For more academic treatments of this topic, check out the 2007 conference paper on which I based my essay and this article by Georgy Egorov, Sergei Guriev, and Konstantin Sonin from the November 2009 issue of the American Political Science Review.

6 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on September 5, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Authoritarian Rule
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on September 5, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/09/05/prospects-for-political-liberalization-in-north-korea/

Why Dictatorships Build Stuff that Crumbles

In a recent essay for Foreign Policy, James Traub gazes longingly at “the astonishing building and infrastructure projects that have propelled the growth of China’s cities—bullet trains, highways, ports, and giant manufacturing complexes.” He acknowledges that China’s urban development model is “brutal,” but he contends that “the new Chinese cities will be more effective than Western ones at generating wealth, as well as at the basic urban business of moving people rapidly, cleanly, and safely from here to there. And they will be new!”

We read this trope about authoritarian states as tough but effective modernizers a lot, but the real story is more complicated. The same day Traub’s essay appeared in Foreign Policy, the New York Times ran a story about a 330-foot section of bridge in the Chinese city of Harbin that collapsed just nine months after it was built, killing three and injuring five. As the story notes, this was the sixth major bridge collapse in China in the past year, and the high-speed trains that seem to inspire so much envy abroad have suffered similar safety problems.

We hear echoes of these stories from other dictatorships. In the 2000s, Angola was one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies, and a lot of people were stunned to hear not long ago that money is now flowing from Angola into its former colonizer, Portugal. In a New York Times op-ed on Wednesday, Rafael de Marques Moraes describes how that country’s oil-rich regime has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade on massive construction projects that have literally fallen apart not long after they were completed.

The…roads, hospitals and schools began to crack as fast as they were being built. Luanda’s General Hospital had to be shut down in June 2010, when bricks started to fall from the walls, threatening it with imminent collapse. Newly tarred roads were washed away after one rainy season.

If dictators are supposed to be so good at building things, why does so much of what they build fall apart?

The explanation we often hear about the persistence of authoritarian rule in China or Angola or Russia or any number of other non-democratic regimes focuses on the relationship between rulers and citizens at large. Modernization theory leads us to expect countries to become more democratic as their economies grow and their societies become wealthier, more urbanized, and better educated, but, as China shows, that doesn’t always happen.

So, in a kind of addendum to modernization theory, we’re told that these transitions have been forestalled by an implicit social contract between rulers and subjects. The regime supplies an improving standard of living and the infrastructure on which it hangs, and citizens stay quiet in return. Instead of producing the predicted pressures to reform, economic growth conveys “performance legitimacy” on the authoritarian rulers who oversee it, at least temporarily, and the transition to democracy is deferred until the economy slumps and that bargain comes undone.

If performance legitimacy is the pillar on which authoritarian rule depends, then these collapsing bridges and melting roads are major screw-ups, and they really shouldn’t happen. In fact, performance legitimacy could be part of what keeps authoritarian regimes alive, but it’s certainly not the whole story. As Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, and Morrow highlight in their work on the logic of political survival, another and arguably more important set of exchanges is routinely occurring between political leaders and the smaller circle of military, business, and social elites on whom their rule more directly depends.

In this version of the world, it turns out that massive infrastructure projects are not just about supplying public goods to keep citizens happy. They are also—maybe mostly—about giving cronies ways to launder big loans that are really more like political payoffs than social spending. By spending large portions of those loans on improving real estate they’ve often seized from hapless citizens, the cronies get to inflate the value of their assets while distributing shares of the loot to a bunch of people on whose support their influence depends.

If authoritarian rulers were serious about upholding a social contract with their citizens, they would write strong building codes and establish effective inspection regimes that would protect these big investments. But they don’t. Instead of trying to make their citizens happy, dictators spend their money on monitoring and repression meant to keep angry citizens down. They aren’t benevolent but brutal modernizers constructing a better future for their grateful subjects; they’re mafia bosses oiling the machinery that keeps them alive and well fed. These guys aren’t investing in public well-being; they’re investing in political loyalty.

In democracies, where journalists can snoop around, bureaucrats can blow whistles, and politicians can routinely lose their jobs if most voters don’t like what they’re doing, elected officials have stronger incentives to supply public goods, and that includes things like making sure the infrastructure they build doesn’t fail. In this environment, you’re more likely to hear stories like this one from my home state a few days ago, where a major commuting artery was shut down for a day because workers saw unusual movement in a bridge span and state inspectors needed time to check it out.

From this perspective, it’s easier to see that the absence of mass mobilization in these regimes owes more to the challenges of organizing collective action under the thumb of a powerfully repressive regime than to any lack of motivation. China has reportedly experienced tens of thousands of protests and riots each year for years, and anti-government demonstrations have recently swelled in Angola as well. Clearly, not everyone’s signing on to this supposed social contract.

The fact is, these regimes survive in spite of all this unrest, not because unrest is absent. The major barrier to change isn’t citizen satisfaction. Instead, it’s the repressive state that makes it extremely difficult for frustrated citizens to transform all of those atomized events into the kind of broad and sustained movement it takes to push a deeply entrenched set of elites off of their well-defended perches.

15 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on August 31, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Authoritarian Rule, Protests and Popular Uprisings
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on August 31, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/08/31/why-dictatorships-build-stuff-that-crumbles/

A Short Post on the Long Game in Russia

While the recent trial, conviction, and incarceration of Pussy Riot have refocused Western attention on the sham that is “managed democracy” in Russia, the long game rumbles on. Two recent developments warrant some attention as portents of political change on a time scale the 24/7 press rarely discusses.

First, the opposition continues to get organized. On the eve of the Pussy Riot frenzy, an assemblage of opposition groups announced plans for an online election this October. If all goes according to plan, voters will choose a Coordination Council that will try to hash out some of the differences among Russia’s fractious opposition groups and lead a more effective campaign against the “power vertical.” To enhance its validity and heighten the contrast with politics as usual, the intra-opposition election will be publicly audited by experienced observer groups.

Second, Putin’s popularity continues to decline. According to a recent survey by the highly respected Levada Center, the president’s approval rating has slipped to 63 percent, about where it stood in the wake of December 2011′s scandalous elections. More telling, though, were the answers to a question about who respondents would like to see in the president’s post six years from now. On that score, only 22 percent named Putin, while 49 percent said they would like to see a new face as head of state.

In contrast to Joshua Foust, I’m not convinced that the elevation of Pussy Riot to Western cause célèbre is a bad thing. The group’s plight certainly isn’t novel, and some of the reactions of their case have been misguided or downright laughable, but the spectacle of the trial and the absurdity of the trio’s sentences may have helped sharpen many outsiders’ understanding of just how authoritarian the Russian regime really is.

At the same time, I can’t help but think that the Pussy Riot frenzy has basically been a distraction from the long game on which democratization in Russia really depends. This episode is to Russian politics what the scandal of the week is to the American presidential race: a momentary digression from a process that actually turns on deeper, slower-moving processes which are harder to see and less exciting to talk about.

The fact is, international outcry and diplomatic squeezes will not end Putinism. This regime will not come undone without serious pressure from its own citizenry. Of course, it’s hard to generate this kind of pressure—and, more important, even harder to sustain it—against a president who’s widely liked with an opposition that’s disorganized. Those two variables still tilt in Putin’s favor for now, but the developments highlighted above suggest they are trending against him.

6 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on August 24, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Authoritarian Breakdown, Authoritarian Rule, Democratization, Protests and Popular Uprisings, Transitions to Democracy
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on August 24, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/a-short-post-on-the-long-game-in-russia/

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