All posts in category Democratization

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.

1 Comment
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

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/dart-throwing-chimp-does-tedx-tbilisi/

A Brief Exchange on Coups in Africa

When I got up this morning, I had an email in my inbox from Patrick Mathangani, a writer for Kenya’s The Standard. He said he was researching a story on coups in Africa, had found my blog and piece for Foreign Policy on the subject, and wondered if I’d answer a few questions. I thought some of this blog’s readers might be interested in that exchange, too, so here are Mr. Mathangani’s questions and my replies.

In your 2013 forecast, 22 of these countries are in Africa. Checking through data over the years, the continent appears to have had more than its share of coups since the 1950s, perhaps explaining why coups have been seen as an African problem. Your analysis appears to confirm this. What’s your view on this?

I don’t think coups are an African problem so much as they’re a problem of poor countries with weak states, and Africa happens to have more than its fair share of those. We’ve seen the same pattern in every other part of the world, just at different times in history. Latin America, for example, suffered lots of coups in the 1960s and 1970s, but the incidence dropped off sharply in the past couple of decades as most countries in the region got less poor and more democratic—and, crucially, after the Cold War ended and the U.S. and USSR stopped sponsoring or supporting coups in the region as a way to scratch at each other.

I expect we’ll see the same decline in the frequency of coups in Africa as more and more countries get into positive spirals of development. We’ve already seen a decline in the post-Cold War period, probably due to the end of those superpower proxy struggles, and I’m guessing that current patterns of economic growth and democratization will solidify that shift just as they did in Latin America and Europe before.

What, in your view, makes Africa such fertile ground for coups?

I think my answer to number 1 goes about as far as I can on this question. I’m sure there are other aspects, too, but I’ll leave those to the regional pros to address.

This year, we’ve had two distinct political events in Africa that show a sharp contrast and mixed fortunes for the continent’s push for good governance. These are a seamless transition in Kenya, and a coup in CAR. What do these portend for Africa’s future and struggle for democracy?

As William Gibson supposedly said, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” To me, Kenya looks like a state that’s on the edge of that virtuous cycle of development I mentioned earlier, while CAR still isn’t even really a state in the conventional sense.

It’s interesting to see Tanzania, Kenya’s neighbour, at number 22 in your list. Tanzania has been relatively stable, why does it land on the model?

Tanzania ranks relatively high on the list because in spite of its reputation as a stable democracy, it’s got the basic features that have historically been associated with the occurrence of coups. Most notably, it’s got a high infant mortality rate relative to most of the world, political institutions that combine features of democracy and authoritarianism, and sharply polarized politics.

Now, it’s worth underscoring that the risk of a coup attempt in any one country in any given year is generally very low, even in the countries toward the top of those rankings. There are usually only a handful of coups and failed coup attempts worldwide each year, so the best prediction for even the highest-risk countries will almost always be that no coup will occur. If the forecasting models are working well, then all or nearly all of the coup attempts we do see will occur in the couple of dozen countries at the top of the annual rankings. Those rankings most definitely do not mean that we should expect to see coup attempts in all of those countries, and that certainly goes for Tanzania, too.

3 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on April 16, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Coups, Democratization, Development, Forecasting
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on April 16, 2013

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/a-brief-exchange-on-coups-in-africa/

Comparative Politics, Meet Complex Interdependence

On the IPE@UNC blog a few days ago, Kindred Winecoff compellingly argued that much of the theory-testing done in international relations (IR) and international political economy (IPE) in recent years rests on the false assumption that outcomes across cases are independent of each other. Paraphrasing here, he points out that “almost all” of the big theoretical traditions in IR and IPE—neorealism, liberal institutionalism, and Marxism among them—identify ways in which outcomes across cases are strongly interdependent, but the research designs we usually adopt to test those theories implicitly assume they are not. In other words, “in the typical case, our empirical design does not match our theoretical structure.”

I think he’s right, and I think the same can be said of theories of political development, which is really most of what comparative politics is about. Two cases of current interest illuminate how it’s really impossible to understand persistence and change in national political institutions without thinking about how those institutions are embedded in a larger global context.

Let’s start with Myanmar. Conventional theories meant to apply to the reforms occurring there focus our attention on domestic processes, like socioeconomic modernization or economic inequality, as the likely impetus behind these changes. At best, though, these processes are structural conditions that have shifted little in Myanmar in recent years, and at worst they’re close to irrelevant. Myanmar is currently experiencing a rush of “modernization,” but much of it’s happening as a consequence, not a cause, of the regime-initiated liberalization. Any effort to understand why this liberalization is occurring now has to consider the growing fears of Burmese elites about their dependency on China, the bite of U.S. sanctions, and the opportunity costs of remaining isolated in a global economy that sees the country as an untapped trove and under-served market. If you try to estimate the effects of income or education or inequality on these trends in a model that ignores these wider forces, you’re probably going to get a misleading result.

Or take Bahrain. It’s impossible to explain the start of the popular uprising in Manama in the spring of 2011 without talking about diffusion, and it’s impossible to understand the outcome (so far) without looking at the material and diplomatic support the monarchy receives from powerful patrons—support that is itself rooted in those patrons’ regional geopolitical (counterbalancing Iran) and global economic (oil) concerns.

If you want to get really silly, imagine trying to infer the effects of income or oil wealth or inequality on the propensity for democratization from a data set composed only of Panama and Iraq. Talk about omitted-variable bias…

I don’t mean to imply that of scholars of comparative politics are oblivious to these issues. Interpretive studies of political development often reference international forces, and over the past 20 years, we’ve increasingly tried to incorporate these ideas into our statistical models as well. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s thoughts on linkage and leverage are an example of the former. Other studies have nibbled at the problem by looking for evidence of diffusion in patterns of democratization, or at the marginal effects from participation in international organizations and other treaty regimes. Studies on the relationship between oil wealth and the survival of authoritarian regimes also lean in this direction, although it’s telling that newer research suggests that these effects really aren’t about oil per se so much as the specific role that commodity has played in a particular (and likely fleeting) realization of the global political economy. Dependency theory also operated at this level, although the results were a bit cartoonish and the long-term predictions have now been proved flat wrong.

What’s still missing from comparative politics, I think, is the one-two punch of theories that are more explicitly systemic combined with methods that suit those theories. Right now, we’ve got little bits of each, but nothing that really brings the two together. We’re stuck in a complex adaptive system that doesn’t really distinguish between national and international, political and economic, human and natural, and our theories of stability and change in political institutions should take that whole more seriously.

Instead of thinking of the international environment as something we incorporate into our models by tacking one or two covariates onto the tail ends of our country-level equations, we should think more carefully about country-level institutions as middle-range manifestations of processes occurring in a global system. The simplifying assumption that states are separable units certainly has its uses, but we shouldn’t conflate that utility with causal relevance. Like maps, all models are simplifications, but those simplifications aren’t useful if they ignore the very causes they’re meant to locate. That’s true in a metaphorical sense, but as Winecoff calls out in the blog post that sparked this ramble, it’s also true in the more literal sense that badly misspecified models produce unreliable results.

I’ll wrap this ramble up by noting that the “development” metaphor itself helps illuminate the problem, and might even contribute to it by reinforcing a certain frame of mind. In many fields of study, “development” is a process that happens to individuals and follows a certain arc. It connotes directional growth and maturation, and it has a beginning, middle, and end. When we apply this metaphor to politics—comparing “fledgling” and “mature” democracies, for example, or talking about the “international community” as if it were something like a gathering of people in a room—we get stuck in a rut from which it’s hard to see the other, arguably richer, aspects of that world.

2 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on February 21, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Complexity Politics, Democratization, Development, International Relations
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on February 21, 2013

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/comparative-politics-meet-complex-interdependence/

Of Subservient Peasants and Economic Booms

Here is a sentence I never thought I would see in 2013:

Peasants, many of whom still long for absolute rule, remain remarkably subservient.

That’s from a new bit in Foreign Affairs called “Booming Bhutan,” part of a five-part series looking at the fastest-growing economies in the world in 2012.

I know only the vaguest outlines of Bhutan’s recent history, but I’m instantly suspicious of any claim that a large group of people longs for absolutism. As the article describes, Bhutan has experienced a lot of political and socioeconomic disruptions in the past decade, and many of those changes have directly not benefited the small farmers who comprise a substantial share of the country’s population:

Karga Lama, a journalist who has covered Bhutan, wrote to me that he wonders whether “people at the grassroots [are] really enjoying and benefitting from the process of democracy, or [if] the few people at the upper echelon of political structure [are] taking the cream.” Indeed, 40 percent of the population are still subsistence farmers, crowded on the country’s small portion of arable land. Seeking better opportunities, many young Bhutanese are moving to Thimpu, the capital, but few are finding gainful employment. Cheaply constructed commercial and residential buildings have been erected to house new inhabitants and the city is losing its unique architectural character. Traffic jams and petty crimes have also become more frequent.

I read that passage and I think: Maybe it’s not “absolute rule” these “peasants” long for but the relative assurance of the life that came before these developmental push of the past 10 years. I think of pensioners in the former Soviet Union who are often described as yearning for tyranny because they vote for the Communist Party and talk wistfully about the benefits they enjoyed in the old days. A distaste for uncertainty about one’s ability to produce or afford food and shelter should not be conflated with an affirmation of all aspects of an old order that predictably delivered those things. Maybe it isn’t absolutism these farmers want so much as freedom from the intrusions of the developmental state those “few people at the upper echelon of political structure” are attempting to construct for their own aggrandizement.

More generally, I wonder about the premise of the series of which this essay is a part. You see this kind of “best practices” logic a lot in writing about development—find the cases that are doing something you’d like, see what’s making them tick so you can try to replicate or emulate it elsewhere. In the case of economic growth, though, this approach is almost always going to be misleading. Economic growth is measured as a percentage, and as Charles Wheelan writes in Naked Statistics,

Percentages don’t lie—but they can exaggerate. One way to make growth look explosive is to use percentage change to describe some change relative to a very low starting point.

The countries at the top of the IMF’s 2012 list nicely illustrate this principle in action. According to the IMF, the five fastest-growing economies in 2012 were Sao Tome and Principe, South Sudan, Guinea, Bhutan, and Mongolia. What does that set of cases tell us about the causes of exceptionally rapid economic growth? Just start from a low baseline—in other words, be poor—and possess copious natural resources that are currently in high demand! (In Bhutan’s case, that natural resource is hydropower,which it sells to its power-hungry neighbor, India). Or, if you’re not especially poor now, you can always knock output down and set yourself up for a nice rebound effect with a civil war and state collapse, like #8 Libya did. Lessons learned, indeed.

1 Comment
by dartthrowingchimp on February 2, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Democratization, State-building
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on February 2, 2013

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2013/02/02/of-subservient-peasants-and-economic-booms/

Advocascience

I think comparative politics has a bigger problem with conflicts of interest than scholars who work in this field generally acknowledge. I don’t think the problem can be eliminated, but I imagine that talking about it more can help, so that’s what I’m going to do.

When you hear the term “conflict of interest,” you probably think of corporations paying for studies that advance their commercial interests. I know I do. It’s easy to see why studies on the effectiveness of new drug therapies or the link between pollution and cancer, for example, warrant closer scrutiny when they’re funded by firms with profits riding on the results. You don’t have to be a misanthrope to believe that the profit motive might have shaped the analysis, and there are enough examples of outright fraud to make skepticism the prudent default setting.

That’s not the only conflict that can arise, though. What I think many scholars working in comparative politics don’t appreciate as much as we should is that it’s also possible for political values and advocacy to play a similar role, and to similar effect. When a researcher’s work deals with issues on which he or she has strong moral beliefs, that confluence can hinder his or her ability to identify and fairly weigh relevant evidence. Confirmation bias is hard to overcome, especially in studies that rely entirely on an author’s interpretation, as many qualitative studies do. The problem is even more intense if the researchers’ personal life is interwoven with her work. Certain conclusions may be more palatable or appealing to people with certain values, and it can be professionally and personally damaging for researchers to report findings that suggest the work their friends and colleagues are doing may not be all that useful, or may even be counterproductive.

The example I know best comes from one of my primary research interests, comparative democratization. Some of the best-known and most respected researchers and organizations in this sub-field routinely engage in advocacy through op-eds, policy briefs, and meetings and speaking engagements with advocates and development professionals. One of the leading journals on this topic, the Journal of Democracy (JoD), is published for the National Endowment for Democracy, a U.S. government-funded organization that supports the U.S. government’s efforts to promote democracy around the world. In contrast to conventional academic practice, most submissions to JoD are commissioned by the editors, and they aren’t formally peer-reviewed.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but for the past 20 years or so, the main themes to emerge from research on this topic are that democratization has all kinds of ancillary benefits—peace, wealth, and freedom from terrorism, to name a few—and that the kinds of the things the U.S. government and the advocates it supports generally do to advance democratization are helpful. In other words, scholars’ studies often reach conclusions that affirm the value of U.S. policy and their own advocacy, which is intimately connected to their personal beliefs and relationships.

That happy alignment doesn’t automatically invalidate those studies, of course, but I think it does warrant closer scrutiny than it now gets. I have great respect for many of the people working in democratization studies, and I happen to share their moral convictions that democracy is the best form of government and that every human being deserves citizenship. Still, let’s be honest: we feel better when we believe our research is helping people we admire change the world for the better, and we’re more likely to get that positive feedback when our findings validate the work those people are already doing. The effects of this feedback loop on the questions we ask, the designs we adopt to answer them, and the conclusions we reach may not be trivial. I think we should talk more about it, both in a general way and whenever evaluating specific pieces of research.

It would be unfair and probably unethical of me to conclude without pointing out that similar issues arise when scholars do consulting work, as I have for the past 15 or so years. Even if a client asks for as fair and objective a study as possible, interpersonal and financial concerns can shape the design of the analysis and interpretation of the results. For example, if you’re paid handsomely to develop a system to forecast event X, you have a financial interest in saying that you can indeed forecast event X and that you can do it well. We can ameliorate this problem by being as transparent as possible about our funding, data, and methods, but we can’t eliminate it, and we’re usually not the best judges of our own motives. Contract research like this occupies a pretty small space in comparative politics right now, so I don’t think this is having much effect on the field at the moment, but I think it’s important for me to note it, given the career path I’ve taken.

9 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on January 27, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Democratization
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on January 27, 2013

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2013/01/27/advocascience/

Do Elections Trigger Mass Atrocities?

Kenya plans to hold general elections in early March this year, and many observers fear those contests will spur a reprisal of the mass violence that swept parts of that country after balloting in December 2007.  The Sentinel Project for Genocide Prevention says Kenya is at “high risk“ of genocide in 2013, and a recent contingency-planning memo from Joel Barkan the Council on Foreign Relations asserts that “there will almost certainly be further incidents of violence in the run-up to the 2013 elections.” As a recent Africa Initiative backgrounder points out, this violence has roots that stretch much deeper than the 2007 elections, but the fear that mass violence will flare again around this year’s balloting seems well founded.

All of which got me wondering: is this a generic problem? We know that election-related violence is a real and multifaceted thing. We also have works by Jack Snyder and Amy Chua, among others, arguing that democratization actually makes some countries more susceptible to ethnic and nationalist conflict rather than less, as democracy promoters often claim. What I’m wondering, though—as someone who has long studied democratization and is currently working on tools to forecast genocide and other forms of mass killing—is whether or not elections substantially increase the risk of mass atrocities in particular, where “mass atrocities” means the deliberate killing of large numbers of unarmed civilians for apparently political ends.

Best I can tell, the short answer is no. After applying a few different statistical-modeling strategies to a few measures of atrocities, I see little evidence that elections commonly trigger the onset or intensification of this type of political violence. The absence of evidence isn’t the same thing as evidence of absence, but these results convince me that national elections aren’t a major risk factor for mass killing.

If you’re interested in the technical details, here’s what I did and what I found:

My first cut at the problem looked for a connection between national elections and the onset of state-sponsored mass killings, defined as “a period of sustained violence” in which “ the actions of state agents result in the intentional death of at least 1,000 noncombatants from a discrete group.” That latter definition comes from work Ben Valentino and I did for my old research program, the Political Instability Task Force, and it restricts the analysis to episodes of large-scale killing by states or other groups acting at their behest. Defined as such, mass killings are akin to genocide in their scale, and there have only been about 110 of them since 1945.

So, do national elections help trigger this type of mass killing? To try to answer this question, I thought of elections as a kind of experimental “treatment” that some country-years get and others don’t. I used the National Elections Across Democracy and Autocracy (NELDA) data set to identify country-years since 1945 with national elections for chief executive or legislature or both, regardless of how competitive those elections were. I then used the MatchIt package in R to set up a comparison of country-years with and without elections within 107 groups that matched exactly on several other variables identified by prior research as risk factors for mass-killing onset: autocracy vs. democracy, exclusionary elite ideology (yes/no), salient elite ethnicity (yes/no), ongoing armed conflict (yes/no), any mass killing since 1945 (yes/no), and Cold War vs. post-Cold War period. Finally, I used conditional logistic regression to estimate the difference in risk between election and non-election years within those groups.

The results? In my data, mass-killing episodes were 80% as likely to begin in election years as non-election years, other things being equal. The 95% confidence interval for this association was wide (45% to 145%), but the result suggests that, if anything, countries are actually somewhat less prone to suffer onsets of mass killing in election years as non-election years.

I wondered if the risk might differ by regime type, so I reran the analysis on the subset of cases that were plausibly democratic. The estimate was effectively unchanged (80%, CI of 35% to 185%). Then I thought it might be a post-Cold War thing and reran the analysis using only country-years from 1991 forward. The estimate moved, but in the opposite of the anticipated direction. Now it was down to 60%, with a CI of 17% to 215%.

These estimates got me worried that something had gone wacky in my data, so I reran the matching and conditional logistic regression using coup attempts (successful or failed) instead of elections as the “treatment” of interest. Several theorists have identified threats to incumbents’ power as a cause of mass atrocities, and coups are a visible and discrete manifestation of such threats. My analysis strongly confirmed this view, indicating that mass-killing episodes were nearly five times as likely to start in years with coup attempts as years without, other things being equal. More important for present purposes, this result increased my confidence in the reliability of my earlier finding on elections, as did the similar estimates I got from models with country fixed effects, country-specific intercepts (a.k.a. random effects), and interaction terms that allowed the effects of elections to vary across regime types and historical eras.

Then I wondered if this negative finding wasn’t an artifact of the measure I was using for mass atrocities. The 1,000-death threshold for “mass killing” is quite high, and the restriction to killings by states or their agents ignores situations of grave concern in which rebel groups or other non-state actors are the ones doing the murdering. Maybe the danger of election years would be clearer if I looked at atrocities on a smaller scale and ones perpetrated by non-state actors.

To do this, I took the UCDP One-Sided Violence Dataset v1.4 and wrote an R script that aggregated its values for specific conflicts into annual death counts by country and perpetrator (government or non-government). Then I used R’s ‘pscl’ package to estimate zero-inflated negative binomial regression (ZINB) models that treat the death counts as the observable results of a two-stage process: one that determines whether or not a country has any one-sided killing in a particular year, and then another that determines how many deaths occur, conditional on there being any. In addition to my indicator for election years, these models included all the risk factors used in the earlier matching exercise, plus population size and the logged counts of deaths from one-sided violence by government and non-government actors (separately) in the previous year. All of these variables were included in the logistic regression “hurdle” model; only elections, population size, and the lagged death counts were included in the conditional count models.

To my surprise once again, the results suggested that, if anything, atrocities the risk of mass atrocities is actually lower in years with national elections. In the model of government-perpetrated violence, the coefficient for the election indicator in the hurdle model was barely distinguishable from zero (0.04), and the association in the count portion was modestly negative (-0.20, s.e. of 0.20). In the model of violence perpetrated by other groups, the effect in the hurdle portion was modestly negative (-0.25, s.e. of 0.20), and the effect in the count portion was decidedly negative (-0.82, s.e. of 0.19). When I reran the models with separate indicators for executive and legislative elections, the results bounced around a little bit, but the basic patterns remained unchanged. None of the models showed a substantial, positive association between either type of election and the occurrence or scale of one-sided violence against civilians.

In light of the weakness of the observed effects, the noisiness of the measures employed, and my prior beliefs about the effects of elections on risks of mass killing—shaped in part by the Kenyan case I discussed at the start of this post—I’m not quite ready to assert that election years actually reduce the risk of mass atrocities. What I am more comfortable doing, however, is ignoring elections in statistical models meant to forecast mass atrocities across large numbers of countries.

If you’re interested in replicating or tweaking this analysis, please email me at ulfelder@gmail.com, and I’ll be happy to send you the data and R scripts (one to get country-year summaries of the UCDP data, another to run the matching and modeling) I used to do it. [UPDATE: I've put the scripts and data in a publicly accessible folder on Google Drive. If you try that link and it doesn't work, please let me know.] Ideally, I would cut out the middleman by putting them in a Github repository, but I haven’t quite figured out how to do that yet. If you’re in the DC area and interested in getting paid to walk me me through that process, please let me know.

10 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on January 14, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Democratization, Mass Atrocities
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on January 14, 2013

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/do-elections-trigger-mass-atrocities/

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.

12 Comments
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

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/how-not-to-bring-democracy-to-china/

Libya Revisited

Since the collapse of the Gaddafi regime a little more than a year ago, Libya has served as a Rorschach test for American and European observers of international relations—a complex and disorderly swirl of political events onto which we typically project our prior beliefs about the circumstances under which military intervention in other country’s conflicts is smart and just. Where observers whose biases tilt toward the “justice” part of that equation tend to see averted atrocities and nascent democracy, self-described “realists” usually spotlight the persistence of militia-fed violence and the secondary effects of Libya’s collapse on its neighbors in the Sahel as grounds for arguing that NATO should never have stepped in.

A recent article in the Economist offers fresh support for proponents of that intervention. In a dispatch entitled “Rising from the Ruins,” a magazine not known for its bleeding heart informs us that,

Since the colonel’s death in October last year at the hands of rebel fighters, Libya has not only held national elections, followed a fortnight ago by the presentation of a diverse government, albeit that not all of its members have been endorsed. It has also started to build a new system of civil administration that may one day form the backbone of a law-abiding and prosperous society.

The piece nods in the direction of last month’s deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the fears of terrorism and religious extremism that were amplified by that assault, but it goes on to suggest that those fears may be misplaced.

On the ground, the picture, though far from uniformly rosy, is more hopeful. Many of the new state structures and services…are being created from the bottom up rather than handed down by a central government that is still only embryonic. The new powers in the land are council leaders, a sort of cross between mayors and regional governors. Some are doing well.

By “doing well,” the author seems to mean “doing what governments are supposed to do,” namely, providing order and delivering basic public goods:

Regional structures are taking shape. Rickety they may be, but they increasingly trump those in the capital, where political rivalries and the fear of being accused of corruption have led ministers to duck hard decisions. Some cities are creating their own economic links with the outside world…Dynamic local leaders have improved services. The streets of a range of coastal towns are far cleaner than in Cairo or Tunis. Rubbish-collecting lorries and street sweepers in tidy overalls are out every morning. Hospitals have reopened. Most important for ordinary Libyans, services such as tap water and electricity—disrupted during the rebellion—are working just about everywhere. Children are back at school.

I’m not a Libya pro, and I can’t offer any first-hand accounts of developments there from my desk in suburban Maryland. What I can bring to the table is the perspective of a longtime observer of democratization and state collapse. From that perch, I think the skeptics are mostly wrong. Critics of NATO’s intervention are right to bemoan the violence and injustice and spillover that Libya’s collapse has brought. The mistake they make, I think, lies in their failure to consider a realistic set of alternatives to NATO intervention and where they would have led.

My sense of the plausible alternatives starts from the observation that the Libyan state under Gaddafi was a personalist regime—a system in which political authority is almost wholly concentrated in the hands of single individual—and all personalist regimes collapse eventually. As Barbara Geddes has shown in her excellent work on authoritarian breakdown, personalist regimes rarely survive the death of their “big man,” and the ensuing breakdowns are often bloody.

Given these facts, the idea that would-be interveners were choosing between fomenting instability or returning to authoritarian stability is false. Without any nudge from NATO forces, Libya in 2011 had already slipped into civil war. At that point, its possible futures included a quick and brutal restoration of order under Gaddafi, a quick rebel victory, or a protracted civil war. Absent foreign intervention, either brutal repression or a protracted civil war appeared to be the most likely trajectories, while a quick rebel victory seemed highly unlikely.

It’s easy to see that every one of these scenarios would have been bloody. What’s more often overlooked, I think, is that every one of these scenarios would also have led to state collapse followed by a long and messy period of state-building. The only real difference is in the timing. Even if the Gadaffi regime had managed to restore control in 2011, Geddes’ research suggests that it would merely have postponed its day of reckoning; the factional scrambles we’re seeing today would have occurred eventually, only after another episode of brutal repression and probably after another eruption of civil war. Meanwhile, a prolonged version of the conflict that started in 2011 would have entailed its own form of state collapse, de facto partition, that would have produced many of the same negative repercussions we’re now lamenting (militia justice, spillover effects) while merely delaying the arrival of the positive ones. By helping to hasten the rebels’ victory in a fight that started without them, NATO’s intervention merely accelerated the arrival of a tumultuous but inevitable period of political transformation.

Some critics of the NATO intervention are comfortable with the decision to intrude in Libya’s civil war but critical of the hands-off approach the United States and Europe have taken to state-building. What I think we’re seeing in dispatches like the one in this week’s Economist, however, is that the absence of a heavy foreign footprint in post-Gaddafi Libyan politics is actually serving the country pretty well. Rather than weakly empowering a favored cadre and encouraging massive rent-seeking, the less intrusive posture the United States and Europe have adopted in Libya is allowing state-building to proceed of its own accord.

Now, instead of swinging away at a foreign-funded piñata, Libya’s regional factions have to choose between swinging at each other or working out ways to get along. Because none of those regional factions enjoys a significant coercive advantage over its rivals, there are strong incentives to refrain from the former, and that seems to be helping push the latter along. As James Madison argued in Federalist No. 10, it’s impossible to remove the causes of factionalism, so the best we can do is to try to control its effects. The crazy-quilt character of post-Gaddafi politics may be hindering the emergence of a powerful central government, but it also naturally protects against one alternative that Madison saw as a graver threat than faction, namely, a tyranny of the majority. We’ll never know for sure, of course, but my hunch is that the state produced by this halting process will ultimately prove more durable than any construct we would have gotten from another foreign-funded, “high modernist” state-building binge. If Afghanistan and Iraq are any guide, that’s actually not a very high bar to clear.

2 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on November 19, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Authoritarian Breakdown, Democratization, International Relations, Revolutions, State Collapse, State-building
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on November 19, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/libya-revisited/

A Mexican Standoff in Georgia

Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream coalition has only held power for a few weeks since its surprise win in last month’s parliamentary elections, but some of its first steps already have me worried about the risk of a reversion to authoritarian rule there. A week ago, Georgian authorities brought criminal charges against Bacho Akhalaia, a former defense minister and close ally of President Mikheil Saakashvili’s, along with two sitting officials in the Defense Ministry. This week, we hear that authorities have arrested five senior officials in the Interior Ministry on charges linked to the October election.

I’m worried about these arrests because I’m watching them through the lens of a theory that sees strategic uncertainty as one the leading killers of new democracies. In my mental model, democracies can revert to authoritarian rule three ways: 1) an executive coup, whereby the ruling party quashes its rivals or otherwise rigs the political system in its own favor; 2) a military coup, whereby state security forces install themselves in government; or 3) a rebellion, whereby one or more opposition parties successfully seizes power by means other than a fair election. Rebellions occur rarely and almost never succeed, but executive and military coups are historically common, and most attempts at democracy worldwide have failed within a decade or two of their start by one or the other of these means (see here, here, and here for some previous posts on these broader points).

The spoils of state power often play a strong role in enticing incumbent officials and military officers to attempt coups, but they aren’t the only force at work. Political factions may also be lured into undemocratic behavior by uncertainty about their rivals’ intentions and fear of the steep costs of guessing wrong.

A game-theoretic model demonstrates this point in a formal way, but you can get the same idea by thinking about a Mexican standoff (and if you don’t know what that is, watch the embedded clip below from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly for the classic cinematic example). In democracies, the three gunfighters are the ruling party, the opposition, and the military. In some cases, each of these factions may be itching to knock off its rivals as a way to win sole control of some treasure at hand. In other cases, though, some or all of the dueling pistoleros might genuinely prefer to cooperate with the others. Maybe there’s an even bigger treasure up the road that they can only capture if they work together, or maybe they’re just tired of shooting. Whatever the reason, the problem is that this desire for cooperation can’t always overcome the fundamental problem of mutual distrust. Because the stakes are so high, every little turn of the eyes or twitch of the finger is liable to get misinterpreted as a sign of bad intentions, and no one wants to be the sucker who waits a little too long to shoot in hopes that things will work out okay on their own.

Turning back to Tbilisi, the early arrests of Saakashvili loyalists in the state security apparatus are raising concerns that Georgian Dream means to punish its former overlords in ways that push the boundaries of democratic practice. An executive coup is the typical trajectory for new democracies in the post-Cold War period, especially in countries, like Georgia, where politics is sharply polarized. Even if they aren’t aware of those general facts, many observers seem quite sensitive to this risk. “The gloves are off in Tbilisi as the new ruling power takes aim at President Mikheil Saakashvili’s allies,” Molly Corso wrote of the arrests in Business News Europe. According to the New York Times, “some lawmakers feared [the arrests] presaged a wave of reprisals against members of President Mikheil Saakashvili’s defeated government.” And on today’s TBLPOD podcast from Tbilisi, Camrin Christensen noted that, “People here are now probably thinking, ‘Oh, no, am I also on this list?’ and thinking about taking family vacations.”

It’s not the handful of arrests themselves that are so worrisome, of course. It’s what they imply about Georgian Dream’s underlying intentions. In the Mexican standoff metaphor, these arrests are a menacing turn of the eyes and hips in the direction of Saakashvili’s United National Movement (UNM) and its sympathizers in the police and defense establishment.

Maybe those fears are overblown. Maybe Georgian Dream is being straight with us when it says it’s just pursuing legitimate investigations into abuses of power during President Saakashvili’s tenure. Even if that’s the case, though, the resulting uncertainty about its true intentions and growing fear of a self-coup will increase the risk of a military coup or a rebellion by the UNM as these factions grow more concerned about their fading prospects under Georgian Dream. The stronger their belief that Ivanishvili has it in for them, the stronger their incentive to respond fast, before the bullets arrive and score some serious damage.

My judgment might be clouded my affection for the place—I was a Soviet area-studies major as an undergrad; one of my oldest and closest friends is an American expat now living in Tbilisi, and I loved what I saw when I traveled there for his wedding a few years ago—but I’m optimistic that this budding standoff will wind down without any grave injuries or fatal mistakes. Georgia’s rival factions might not like each other, but they hate and fear Russia even more. (The cartoon to the right sums up many Georgians’ views of their 2008 war pretty nicely.) Because of the omnipresent threat from its neighbor to the north, Georgia badly wants into Europe, and entry into NATO is seen as the first door through which it must pass. NATO has sound geostrategic reasons not to admit Georgia while the threat of renewed war with Russia lingers, but Saakashvili’s authoritarian tendencies didn’t help its case, either. The risk of further alienating Europe with a blatant demolition of democracy will probably be powerful deterrent to would-be rebels or coup plotters.

European officials are keenly aware of this desire and already making good use of their leverage. A few days after the former defense minister’s arrest, RFERL reported that NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he was “extremely concerned” about Georgia’s post-election politics. “It’s for the legal system, the judicial system in Georgia, to sort out these cases,” he told a meeting of NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly in Prague, “but of course it’s important that such trials are not undermined by political interference and we will of course follow that development very, very closely.” As will we.

7 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on November 15, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Democratic Breakdown, Democratic Consolidation, Democratization
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on November 15, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/a-mexican-standoff-in-georgia/

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.

4 Comments
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

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/pathways-to-political-pluralism-in-china/

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