All posts tagged arab spring

“Muslim Rage!” as an Availability Cascade

How do we make sense of sensationalism like the “MUSLIM RAGE” headline on this week’s Newsweek cover? Here’s one idea:

An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action. On some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes aroused and worried. This emotional reaction becomes a story in itself, prompting additional coverage in the media, which in turn produces greater concern and involvement. The cycle is sometimes sped along deliberately by ‘availability entrepreneurs,’ individuals or organizations who work to ensure a continuous flow of worrying news. The danger is increasingly exaggerated as the media compete for attention-grabbing headlines. Scientists and others who try to dampen the increasing fear and revulsion attract little attention, most of it hostile; anyone who claims that the danger is overstated is suspected of association with a ‘heinous cover-up.’ The issue becomes politically important because it is on everyone’s mind, and the response of the political system is guided by the intensity of public sentiment. The availability cascade has now reset priorities. Other risks, and other ways that resources could be applied for the public good, all have faded into the background.

That’s Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow (p. 142), and I think this vignette nicely describes the frenzied American reaction to the wave of violent attacks on U.S. diplomatic outposts that began a few days ago. The term “availability cascade” was coined in a 1999 paper by Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein, and it’s rooted in a cognitive bias psychologists call the availability heuristic: a human tendency to judge the risk of an event by the ease with which vivid examples spring to mind. Recent and dramatic events are easier to recall, and wall-to-wall multimedia coverage keeps those events fresh in our minds. The resulting cascade is a form of herd behavior, the complex process that also contributes to things like bubbles and crashes in the stock market—and, arguably, the anti-American riots that have the U.S. in a tizzy right now.

By describing our response as an availability cascade, I don’t mean to imply that these events are unimportant. Attacks on diplomatic posts are a big deal in international politics, and numerous people have died in the ensuing violence, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya. As such, these events will and should have real consequences, hopefully to include fresh thinking about how to conduct diplomacy in environments with weak or fragmented security services and powerful anti-American groups.

Rather, my point is that these events probably aren’t the political earthquake we’re making them out to be, and our herd-like response may lead us further astray. For starters, most of the recent protests haven’t been that large. In a very helpful blog post, political scientist Megan Rief compares the size of the protests in the past week to the size of the early gatherings in the s0-called Arab Spring and shows that the recent events have generally been much smaller. She also spotlights a specific choice being made by media outlets—the chief “availability entrepreneurs” in this cascade—that is shaping our impressions of the threat these events pose:

It is interesting to observe how media images of the crowds at Tahrir square in early 2011 were presented in wide-angle format, while the current spate of protest images are closely cropped around smaller, violent groups of people, giving the impression that the crowds are large and menacing.

I think it’s also useful to keep in mind that we’ve seen similar waves of unrest a couple of times in the past several years, and each time, things have returned more or less to normal within a couple of weeks. The first wave occurred in 2006 over the publication of “blasphemous” cartoon, and another struck in 2010 over American “pastor” Terry Jones’ call to mark the anniversary of 9/11 by burning the Koran. The short life span of those previous waves doesn’t guarantee that the current one won’t drag on or even escalate further, but it suggests that escalation is unlikely.

Meanwhile, the frenzied reaction is having real-world consequences. On his blog a couple of days ago, longtime Middle East observer Juan Cole lists the “top ten likely consequences of Muslim anti-U.S. embassy riots,” including further declines in tourism to Egypt and Tunisia, countries whose already-struggling economies depend heavily on those foreign visitors, and deeper U.S. entanglement in the domestic politics of Yemen. At Foreign Policy, Josh Keating discusses the effects of terrorism on the design of America’s overseas outposts and asks if the U.S. can keep its diplomats safe without walling them off from the societies they’re supposed to be engaging.

More broadly, this cascade is threatening to reconfigure American public opinion, and through it American foreign policy, in ways that we might later regret. In the online magazine Jadaliyya, Bassam Haddad appropriately bemoans the spate of stories questioning support for recent changes in the politics of the Middle East and North Africa under “casually barbaric” headlines like, “Was the Arab Spring really worth it?” If anything, the U.S. government is traditionally guilty of overreach in these parts of the world: deeply enmeshing itself in the domestic politics of many Arab countries, striking at targets imperfectly identified in secret, and even trying desperately to “reshape the narrative” in societies where anti-Americanism runs deep and wide. Still, I think we also risk under-reaching if we let the opportunistic behavior of a few “availability entrepreneurs” in predominantly Muslim countries and in our own media reconfigure our government’s approach to whole swathes of the world at the very moment those societies are struggling to the institutionalize the political values we so loudly claim to espouse.

Here’s hoping that cooler heads prevail.

4 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on September 17, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Complexity Politics, Protests and Popular Uprisings
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on September 17, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/muslim-rage-as-information-cascade/

In Defense of Political Science and Forecasting

Under the headline “Political Scientists Are Lousy Forecasters,” today’s New York Times includes an op-ed by Jacqueline Stevens that takes a big, sloppy swipe at most of the field. The money line:

It’s an open secret in my discipline: in terms of accurate political predictions (the field’s benchmark for what counts as science), my colleagues have failed spectacularly and wasted colossal amounts of time and money.

As she sees it, this poor track record is an inevitability. Referencing the National Science Foundation‘s history of funding research in which she sees little value, Stevens writes:

Government can—and should—assist political scientists, especially those who use history and theory to explain shifting political contexts, challenge our intuitions and help us see beyond daily newspaper headlines. Research aimed at political prediction is doomed to fail. At least if the idea is to predict more accurately than a dart-throwing chimp.

I don’t have much time to write today, so I was glad to see this morning that Henry Farrell has already penned a careful rebuttal that mirrors my own reactions. On the topic of predictions in particular, Farrell writes:

The claim here—that “accurate political prediction” is the “field’s benchmark for what counts as science” is quite wrong. There really isn’t much work at all by political scientists that aspires to predict what will happen in the future…It is reasonable to say that the majority position in political science is a kind of soft positivism, which focuses on the search for law-like generalizations. But that is neither a universal benchmark (I, for one, don’t buy into it), nor indeed, the same thing as accurate prediction, except where strong covering laws (of the kind that few political scientists think are generically possible) can be found.

To Farrell’s excellent rebuttals, I would add a couple of things.

First and most important, there’s a strong case to be made that political scientists don’t engage in enough forecasting and really ought to do more of it. Contrary to Stevens’ assertion in that NYT op-ed, most political scientists eschew forecasting, seeing description and explanation as the goals of their research instead. As Phil Schrodt argues in “Seven Deadly Sins of Quantitative Political Science” (PDF), however, to the extent that we see our discipline as a form of science, political scientists ought to engage in forecasting, because prediction is an essential part of the scientific method.

Explanation in the absence of prediction is not somehow scienti cally superior to predictive analysis, it isn’t scienti c at all! It is, instead, “pre-scientific.”

In a paper on predicting civil conflicts, Mike Ward, Brian Greenhill, and Kristin Bakke help to explain why:

Scholars need to make and evaluate predictions in order to improve our models. We have to be willing to make predictions explicitly – and plausibly be wrong, even appear foolish – because our policy prescriptions need to be undertaken with results that are drawn from robust models that have a better chance of being correct. The whole point of estimating risk models is to be able to apply them to specific cases. You wouldn’t expect your physician to tell you that all those cancer risk factors from smoking don’t actually apply to you. Predictive heuristics provide a useful, possibly necessary, strategy that may help scholars and policymakers guard against erroneous recommendations.

Second, I think Stevens actually gets the historical record wrong. It drives me crazy when I see people take the conventional wisdom about a topic—say, the possibility of the USSR’s collapse, or a wave of popular uprisings in Middle East and North Africa—and turn it into a blanket statement that “no one predicted X.” Most of the time, we don’t really know what most people would have predicted, because they weren’t asked to make predictions. The absence of a positive assertion that X will happen is not the same thing as a forecast that X will not happen. In fact, in at least one of the cases Stevens discusses—the USSR’s collapse—we know that some observers did forecast its eventual collapse, albeit usually without much specificity about the timing of that event.

More generally, I think it’s fair to say that, on just about any topic, there will be a distribution of forecasts—from high to low, impossible to inevitable, and so on. Often, that distribution will have a clear central tendency, as did expectations about the survival of authoritarian regimes in the USSR or the Arab world, but that central tendency should not be confused with a consensus. Instead, this divergence of expectations is precisely where the most valuable information will be found. Eventually, some of those predictions will prove correct while others will not, and, as Phil and Mike and co. remind us, that variation in performance tells us something very useful about the power of the explanatory models—quantitative, qualitative, it doesn’t really matter—from which they were derived.

PS. For smart rebuttals to other aspects of Steven’s jeremiad, see Erik Voeten’s post at the Monkey Cage and Steve Saideman’s rejoinder at Saideman’s Semi-Spew.

PPS. Stevens provides some context for her op-ed on her own blog, here. (I would have added this link sooner, but I’ve just seen it myself.)

PPPS. For some terrific ruminations on uncertainty, statistics, and scientific knowledge, see this latecomer response from Anton Strezhnev.

7 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on June 24, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Forecasting, Statistics
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on June 24, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/06/24/in-defense-of-political-science-and-forecasting/

Cats and Mice, Regimes and Oppositions

On Monday, Russian provocateur Alexei Navalny posted something on his English-language blog that caught my eye. Over the weekend, more than 100,000 Russians had gathered in a Moscow stadium to support President Putin’s re-election bid. You could forgive a Putin opponent for being disheartened by the scene, but where others might see these massive pro-Putin rallies, or “putings,” as signs of an impending defeat, Navalny saw opportunity:

All these putings are a great gift to us.

Look: 200 thousand people gather in one location. And 80 per cent of them are those very ‘people of the off-line’ whom we can’t reach via the Internet.

Now there’ll be no need to drop leaflets into mail boxes, or stick them in doorways, or hand them out near subway stations. They’ve gathered 200 thousand voters together in one place and nudged them to talk politics.

We are unaware whether they’re pro- or antiputinists, we only know that they’re employees of state-financed business or state-run companies.

And now it’s us who’re getting the inside track: these people have already faced the bold lie and hypocrisy of the Chief Thief Putin & Co. They know quite well that they’ve been forced to attend the rally. They know how they’ve been fixed. How they’ve been carried by buses. They’re discussing that “at the head office they’ve given the staff two compensatory days off, while at out branch, only one”. The’re discussing, “At Moscow Electric Power Co. they’ve been paid a 3000 roubles bonus for the rally, and we – 1500. What an outrage”.

200 thousand people as well as their families (one million all in all) know for sure how they’ve been gathered and delivered; yet at the rally they hear from the stage, “We’ve gathered here with our own motion, in order to support blah blah blah”, and afterwards they listen with a grin to TV reports: “Tens of thousands of excited Moscovites, as one man, have come to the rally”.

All this creates favourable conditions for anti- Crooks And Thieves’ campaign, as it would be carried out amid shamelessly foul play.

So in case there are volunteers to go to the puting and agitate against Putin there, that would be a great idea.

Navalny’s judo-like attempt to redirect the force of pro-Putin mobilization against the regime is a brilliant example of the creativity, learning, and strategic adaptation that makes political mobilization so interesting to study and yet so difficult to explain and predict.

For the sake of convenience (and, perhaps, sanity), social scientists usually think of the phenomena we study as occurring in independent “cases,” which can be analyzed, compared, and contrasted as distinct and largely independent episodes. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. The USSR in the 1980s vs. China today. Democratization in Turkey, Tunisia, and Egypt.

This independence, however, is often an illusion born of our need to simplify in order to understand. That’s especially true for phenomena that involve rapid and deliberate imitation and adaptation. Marc Beissinger calls these “modular” phenomena, where modular refers to “action that is based in significant part on the prior successful example of others.” In his incisive analysis of the wave of “color” revolutions that swept the post-communist states in the 2000s, Beissinger points out that modular phenomena

present a challenge for social science theorizing, because the cross-case influences that in part drive their spread violate the assumption of the independence of cases that lies at the basis of much social scientific analysis…Modular phenomena based in the conscious emulation of prior successful example constitute only one form of cross-case influence; spillover effects, herding behavior, path-dependence, and reputational effects are other ways in which cases may be connected with one another. Not all social phenomena are modular, and Galton’s problem [of inferring causes from comparisons of interdependent cases] is not a universal one. But in a globalizing, electronic world in which local events are often monitored on a daily basis on the other side of the planet, the challenges posed to social scientific analysis by Galton’s problem (and by modular behavior in particular) are growing in many spheres of activity.

Beissinger goes on to show how modularity was evident not only in the diffusion of protest strategies and tactics across countries and over time, but also in the diffusion of authoritarian regimes’ responses to those protests:

Example exercises its effects not only on those who would look to it in support of change, but also on those who would potentially oppose it…Established elites opposing modular change learn the critical lessons of the model from its repeated successes and failures and impose additional institutional constraints on actors to prevent the model from succeeding further…This is evident in the growing restrictions on civil society organizations in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan…Moreover, regimes have increasingly turned to manipulating elections without engaging in outright fraud, thereby avoiding aspects of the model that might fuel opposition mobilization…The role of democracy-promoting NGOs like Soros and Freedom House in fostering modular democratic revolution has also precipitated a backlash against them from a number of post-Soviet states, which have begun to view them as revolutionary organizations and to restrict their activities.

These processes of imitation and adaptation can be powerful enough to help popular uprisings overwhelm structural conditions that would seem to tilt heavily against them. At the same time, these processes can also help apparently frail authoritarian regimes stifle and survive those challenges. In an article in the latest issue of Democratization, Evgeny Finkel and Yitzhak M. Brudny see the Russian government’s response to the uprisings that happened around it in the 2000s as a quintessential example of successful authoritarian counter-adaptation. They write:

The colour revolutions, and especially the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, are widely perceived as major international setbacks to Putin’s Russia. The Ukrainian events alarmed Russian elites, who feared the possibility of a local colour revolution during the 2007–2008 electoral cycle. To thwart the perceived colour revolution threat, Russian authorities adopted strategies that combined a political, administrative and intellectual assault on the opposition and Western ideas of democracy promotion. An integral part of this assault was, first, an attempt to create a mass youth movement, Nashi, as a counterweight to the various youth movements that were the driving forces behind the colour revolutions in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine. Second, it was an attempt to delegitimize the idea of liberal democracy itself, labelling it subversive and alien to the Russian national character.

That strategy seemed to work well for several years, but the reformist movement that has emerged in Russia in the past few months reminds us that these victories are never permanent. And, if Navalny’s blog post is any indication, the cunning regime is now confronting some equally shrewd opponents.

Political sociologists Donatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow see similar dynamics at play in protests against global trade and financial regimes in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In a fascinating recent paper, they write about the transnational diffusion not just of new forms of protest behavior, but also of police practices in response to them, and of the interplay between those two streams of learning. Intriguingly, the authors–two of the greats in the study of social movements–find that

the mechanisms that cause protester and police innovations to diffuse are remarkably similar, even though they can combine in different ways at different moments: promotion, the proactive intervention by a sender actor aimed at deliberate diffusion of an innovation; assessment, the analysis of information on past events and their definition as successes or failures, which leads to adaption of the innovation to new sites and situations; and theorization, the location of technical innovations within broader normative and cognitive frameworks.

As della Porta and Tarrow’s work shows, these dynamics are not unique to authoritarian regimes. Over at Plastic Manzikert, blogger Kelsey Atherton sees evidence of similar learning across police forces in their responses to Occupy encampments in the United States, and he thinks that learning helps explain why the movement has petered out.

What St. Louis did, more effectively and less violently than New York, was unoccupy it’s camp by taking advantage of protester exhaustion and finite capacity to respond. When one side plays nonviolent in the face of an aggressor, the contest becomes one of public perception. When the nonviolent protesters found themselves outmaneuvered by nonviolent police, there was no battle of public perception to be had. The violence and resistance of Zuccotti made for compelling media–unusual tactics, contended public space, seemingly out of proportion crackdown, and a clumsily aggressive handling of the situation made the action look brutal and the protesters come across more as heroic victims than the public menace the police needed them to be.

But without the violence, there isn’t that narrative. Polite, unthreatening police calmly restoring a public square in shirtsleeves de-escalate the scene, and manage to make protest the one thing it shouldn’t be: boring.

The global interplay of regimes and oppositions evident in all of these “cases” is a bit like a bunch of interconnected games of cat and mouse, all happening at the same time. Within each domain, each family of mice is busily trying to outwit its own cat, and each cat is  diligently trying to catch its own mice. All the while, though, the cats and the mice are learning from what happens everywhere else–sometimes just by watching, but other times by talking and conspiring and even lending a hand. Often that aid passes from mouse to mouse or cat to cat, but sometimes it’s the cat in one arena lending a hand to the mice in another, and vice versa. As communication and international organization get easier, the whole process only thickens and accelerates.

With this much interdependence at work, it’s no wonder we had such a hard time anticipating the Arab Spring (and the “color” revolutions that preceded it, and the collapse of communism that preceded it, and…). As social scientists, we can try to learn things from this latest wave that will help us anticipate where and when the next one will occur. As we do, though, we have to bear in mind that the potential agents of those future events will probably be learning and adapting and evolving even faster.

1 Comment
by dartthrowingchimp on February 29, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Authoritarian Breakdown, Authoritarian Rule, Complexity Politics, Democracy Promotion, Protests and Popular Uprisings, Revolutions
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on February 29, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/cats-and-mice-regimes-and-oppositions/

In Defense of Particularism in American Foreign Policy

I’ve just finished reading John Lewis Gaddis’s terrific biography of George Frost Kennan, a towering figure in American foreign policy after World War II whom Henry Kissinger described as “one of the most important, complex, moving, challenging and exasperating American public servants.” Apart from recommending the book, which I do without hesitation to anyone with an interest in world affairs, I wanted to talk about how Gaddis’ distillation of Kennan’s ideas helped me clarify some of my own thinking on the conduct of foreign policy.

Nowadays, discussions of grand strategy in U.S. foreign policy are usually framed as a battle between realism, which emphasizes power and encourages statesmen to focus shrewdly on their national self-interest, and liberal institutionalism, which emphasizes cooperation and encourages statesmen to build institutions that facilitate it. Kennan–who was not trained as an academic and apparently didn’t care much for formal theories of international relations–saw the same terrain from a different perspective, and I think his map may be the more useful one.

For Kennan, the crucial divide lay between universalists and particularists. Gaddis spells out this theme most clearly in his discussion of Kennan’s thinking about how the United States ought to respond to the successes of Communist revolutionaries in China in 1947. Mao’s gains posed an early test of the recently pronounced Truman doctrine, which had seemed to pledge the United States to do all it could to prevent Communist advances anywhere in the world. While Kennan was dismayed by that doctrine’s absolutist language, it overlapped with the containment strategy he had begun to advocate as a response to the global ambitions and aggressive nature he saw in the Soviet Union.

Even so, and despite loud calls in the U.S. to do whatever was necessary to defend Chiang’s regime, Kennan convinced Truman to provide only a bare minimum of support to the Nationalists. According to Gaddis (p. 299), Kennan had thought that

Americans had clung too long to the idea of remaking China, an end far beyond their means. The [State Department's] Policy Planning Staff [which Kennan headed] should determine what parts of East Asia are ‘absolutely vital to our security,’ and the United States should then ensure that these remain ‘in hands which we can control or rely on.’

Kennan framed this recommendation within the need to choose between universal and particularist approaches in foreign policy. Universalism sought to apply the same principles everywhere. It favored procedures embodied in the United Nations and in other international organizations. It smoothed over the national peculiarities and conflicting ideologies that confused and irritated so many Americans. Its appeal lay in its promise to ‘relieve us of the necessity of dealing with the world as it is.’ Particularism, in contrast, questioned ‘legalistic concepts.’ It assumed appetites for power that only ‘counter-force’ could control. It valued alliances, but only if based on communities of interest, not on the ‘abstract formalism’ of obligations that might preclude pursuing national defense and global stability. Universalism entangled interests in cumbersome parliamentarism. Particularism encouraged purposefulness, coordination, and economy of effort–qualities the nation would need ‘if we are to be sure of accomplishing our purposes.’

Kennan’s recommendation on China seemed to contradict his own grand strategy, but this contradiction reflected his deeper beliefs about the importance of particularism. He understood that a Communist victory in China would be a setback for the U.S., but he didn’t think it would be a disaster, and he believed that even massive American assistance was unlikely to stop the Communists from winning.

In this history, I hear echoes of contemporary debates over the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) doctrine and whether or not the U.S. should intervene militarily in Syria to stop the mass atrocities occurring there. As in the arguments over China policy in the 1940s, universalists often make the case for intervention in Syria on both moral and strategic grounds. Mass atrocities are morally abhorrent, of course, but acting to stop or prevent them is also an essential function of America’s role as the producer and defender of a liberal global order, a universalist might argue, just as stopping Communism in its tracks was during the Cold War. In a recent call for more forceful U.S. action against Syria, Anne Marie Slaughter, a successor of Kennan’s as director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, made just such a case. She wrote:

If you believe, as I do, that R2P is a foundation for increased peace and respect for human rights over the long term, that each time it is invoked successfully to authorize the prevention of genocide, crimes against humanity, grave and systematic war crimes, and ethnic cleansing as much as the protection of civilians from such atrocities once they are occurring, it becomes a stronger deterrent against the commission of those acts in the first place…If the U.S. says it stands behind R2P but then does nothing in a case where it applies, not only will dictators around the world draw their own conclusions, but belief in the U.S. commitment to other international norms and obligations also weakens, just at a time when the U.S. grand strategy is to expand and strengthen an effective international order. The credibility of the U.S. commitment to its own proclaimed values will also take yet another critical hit with every young person in the Middle East fighting for liberty, democracy, and justice.

After reading about his approach to China, it’s easy to imagine Kennan responding to this universalist argument by asking: “Yes, but how likely are we to succeed, and at what cost?”

To universalists, that kind of equivocation may seem immoral. Kennan, whom Gaddis portrays as a religious person and a philosopher, was not insensitive to these concerns. His rejection of universalism was not meant as a rejection of moral thinking. Instead, Kennan’s commitment to particularism was informed by his judgment that stark views about right and wrong were poor guides to foreign policy-making.

Could governments behave as individuals should? His preliminary conclusion, sketched out in his diary, was that politics, whether within or among nations, would always be a struggle for power. It could never in itself be a moral act…Foreign policy was not, therefore, a contest of good versus evil. To condemn negotiations as appeasement, Kennan told a Princeton University audience early in October [1953], was to end a Hollywood movie with the villain shot. To entrust diplomacy to lawyers was to relegate power, ‘like sex, to a realm in which we see it only occasionally, and then in highly sublimated and presentable form.’ Both approaches ignored the fact that most international conflicts were ‘jams that people have gotten themselves into.’ Trying to resolve them through rigid standards risked making things worse.” (p. 492)

As a frequent critic of the U.S. government’s attempts to provoke and promote democratic revolutions elsewhere–here and here are some blogged examples–I was particularly interested in how Kennan’s commitment to particularism was evidenced in his frustration with policies aimed at supporting the “liberation” Communist-ruled countries during the Cold War. In Kennan’s view,

“[A policy seeking 'liberation' in Communist-ruled countries] is not consistent with our international obligations. It is not consistent with a common membership with other countries in the United Nations. It is not consistent with the maintenance of formal diplomatic relations with another country. It is replete with possibilities for misunderstanding and bitterness. To the extent that it might be successful, it would involve us in heavy responsibilities. Finally the prospects for success would be very small indeed; since the problem of civil disobedience is not a great problem to the modern police dictatorship.” (p. 479)

Those concerns may sound cold, but Kennan was not indifferent to the liberationists’ cause. In fact, his views on the subject were also informed by a conviction that democracy would prevail in the end without active American support. According to Gaddis (p. 495), Kennan believed that

Democracy had the advantage over Communism in this respect, because it did not rely on violence to reshape society. Its outlook was ‘more closely attuned to the real nature of man…[so] we can afford to be patient and even occasionally to suffer reverses, placing our confidence in the longer and deeper workings of history.’

Like Churchill, who famously remarked that “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried,” Kennan saw many faults in Western society in the 20th century, but he saw the available alternatives as even worse. Nevertheless, he firmly believed that any gains realized by pushing for liberation were not worth the entanglements, lost opportunities, and even wars that might result, especially when war could be nuclear.

Kennan saw himself as more of a “prophet” (his word) than a theorist or practitioner, and his views on “liberation” illustrate how he often thought about international relations on time scales that most people either don’t consider or consider a luxury. His containment policy was founded on the prescient expectation that the Soviet Union’s internal flaws would eventually lead to its own disintegration, but he did not expect to live long enough to see that happen.

When contemplating the plight of actual people suffering under actual dictatorships, the idea that democracy will eventually prevail can seem a little too convenient, like it’s just a way to absolve us of any responsibility for the injustices of the here and now. Is it really more convenient, though, than the belief that righteousness is always right? Where Kennan’s view is materially convenient, implying that we can achieve the desired result through inaction, the liberationist’s view is morally convenient, presuming that well-intentioned actions will always bring good results.

And there’s the matter of the historical record. Long-term trends clearly support Kennan’s expectation that democracy would keep expanding, albeit fitfully and with many reversals. More important, these advances have usually come either without direct U.S. support, or in places where U.S. involvement was incidental to the eventual outcome. The events that precipitated the collapse of the USSR and the end of Communist rule in Eastern Europe mostly caught the U.S. by surprise, and the U.S. response to them was generally modest and ambivalent.

Likewise with the Arab Spring. The wave of uprisings that swept the Arab world in 2011 started in Tunisia, where the U.S. had done virtually nothing to promote democracy. It soon spread to Egypt and Bahrain, where U.S. support for military “deep states” vastly outweighed its material and verbal commitments to opposition groups, and to Libya, where the U.S. had actually warmed to the dictator in recent years in response to his decision to give up weapons of mass destruction. In other words, theses revolutions were hardly American-made; if anything, they occurred in spite of American indifference and support for the status quo. In this sense, the Arab Spring supports Kennan’s expectation that American intervention is hardly a prerequisite for democratic revolution, and that democracy will advance on its own through the “longer and deeper workings of history.”

If universal principles aren’t the way to go, how, then, should foreign policy be conducted? For most of his adult life, Kennan owned and worked a small farm in southern Pennsylvania, and he often did the yardwork at his home in Princeton, too. It’s not surprising, then, that he may have best expressed his commitment to particularism and penchant for thinking on long time scales in a horticultural metaphor that envisioned a patient, process-oriented approach as the best way to strike a balance between moral ambitions and animal interests. This metaphor was offered up during a series of four lectures Kennan delivered at Princeton in 1954–lectures that became the book Realities of American Foreign Policy, and I think Gaddis’ summation of those lectures (pp. 494-495) it makes a proper coda to this post.

Americans could no longer afford economic advances that depleted natural resources and devastated natural beauty, Kennan insisted. Nor could they tolerate dependency, for critical raw materials, on unreliable foreign governments. Nor could they tear their democracy apart internally because threats to democracy existed externally. Nor could they entrust defenses against such dangers to the first use of nuclear weapons, for what would be left after a nuclear war had taken place? These were all single policies, pursued without regard to how each related to the others, or to the larger ends the state was supposed to serve. They neglected ‘the essential unity’ of national problems, thus demonstrating the ‘danger implicit in any attempt to compartmentalize our thinking about foreign policy.’

That lack of coordination ill-suited the separate ‘planes of international reality’ upon which the United States had to compete. The first was a ‘sane and rational one, in which we felt comfortable, in which we were surrounded by people to whom we were accustomed and on whose reactions we could at least depend.’ The second was ‘a nightmarish one, where we were like a hunted beast, oblivious of everything but survival; straining every nerve and muscle in the effort to remain alive.’ Within the first arena, traditional conceptions of morality applied; ‘We could still be guided…by the American dream.’ Within the second, ‘there was only the law of the jungle; and we had to do violence to our own traditional principles–or many of us felt we did–to fit ourselves for the relentless struggle.’ The great question, then, was whether the two could ever be brought into a coherent relationship with one another.

They could, Kennan suggested, through a kind of geopolitical horticulture. ‘We must be gardeners and not mechanics in our approach to world affairs.’ International life was an organic process, not a static system. Americans had inherited it, not designed it. Their preferred standards of behavior, therefore, could hardly govern it. But it should be possible ‘to take these forces for what they are and to induce them to work with us and for us by influencing the environmental stimuli to which they are subjected.’ That would have to be done ‘gently and patiently, with understanding and sympathy, not trying to force growth by mechanical means, not tearing the plants up by the roots when they fail to behave as we wish them to. The forces of nature will generally be on the side of him who understands them best and respects them most scrupulously.’

3 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on February 18, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Foreign Policy, International Relations
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on February 18, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/in-defense-of-particularism-in-american-foreign-policy/

Economic Growth and the Survival of New Democracies

Last week, a senior official in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood warned the U.S. against cutting aid to his country at a time when Egypt is, he suggested, on the brink of economic collapse. In an interview with the Washington Post, Khairat Al-Shater said that reductions in Western aid would exacerbate an economic crisis that could “transform a peaceful revolution into a hunger revolution.”

Al-Shater’s warning reflects a widely held view that new democracies can be made or broken by their economic performance. “It is a cardinal principle of empirical democratic theory,” democratization scholar Larry Diamond writes, “that hard economic times are supposed to mean hard times for democracy.” This principle has been confirmed by a few statistical studies on the survival of democratic regimes: other things being equal, the risk of democratic breakdown does seem to be higher when GDP growth rates are slower. (See here, here, here, and here for affirmative findings and here for a negative one.)

After reading Al-Shater’s warning, I decided to revisit this question with an emphasis on the real-world concerns of the moment. Instead of looking at the entire life course of all democracies, as previous studies generally do, I wondered what economic performance around the time of a democratic transition–like we saw in Tunisia in 2011 and like we might be seeing right now in Egypt and Libya–would tell us about the prospects that a democratic regime will survive well beyond its founding elections. Perhaps these earliest years create impressions and encourage strategies that enable or afflict the ensuing regime during this formative period in ways we can’t see when we lump entire episodes of democracy together.

To test this conjecture, I used a global data set to identify all transitions to democracy that occurred during the period 1955-2008. With that case list in hand, I built a logistic regression model of the relationships between the conditions under which those transitions occurred and the odds that the ensuing regimes would survive for at least five years. (As it happens, surviving for just five years is actually a pretty big deal. Of the 103 transitions to democracy that occurred during that period, only 62 produced regimes that lasted longer.)

From prior research, we know that higher levels of economic development, the absence of political polarization, prior democracy, and the end of the Cold War are all associated with improved prospects for democratic consolidation, so all of those factors were included in the model. To capture the marginal effects of economic performance on prospects for democratic survival–the original point of this exercise–I added measures of annual percent change in GDP per capita for the three years bracketing the transition: the one before, the year of the transition, and the year after. (See the end of the post for more details on the modeling.)

As expected, I found that a new democracy’s survival prospects are indeed better when its economy grows faster around the time of its birth. In contrast to al-Shater’s gloomy prognostication, however, the effects I observed were not large. The marginal effects from GDP growth in the year of the transition are illustrated in the line plot below. As the chart shows, a difference of several percentage points in GDP growth–a large swing in most real-world situations–would produce only a very modest difference in the estimated likelihood of surviving past five years, other things being equal. (I don’t think p-values are as informative as estimates of marginal effects, but for those of you wondering, the p-value in this instance is 0.28; the coefficient is 0.046.) The association with growth on either side of the transition are not captured in that chart, in part because they were even weaker (coefficients of 0.027 and 0.018 and p-values of 0.54 and 0.70, respectively).

We can also see the weakness of this effect in the modest contribution of those growth rates to the statistical model’s ability to accurately assess risk in the historical cases. The figure below plots Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves for versions of my model with and without the measures of initial GDP growth. ROC curves summarize a model’s ability to discriminate between cases with and without some feature of interest–in this instance, surviving past five years. The better the model does, the farther the line pushes toward the upper left-hand corner, and the larger the area under the curve (AUC). As you can see, adding measures of GDP growth to the model doesn’t improve the accuracy by a whole lot, producing just about a 2% bump in AUC.

On the whole, I’d say these results run counter to the spirit, if not the letter, of prevailing expectations. The marginal effects of economic performance flow in the anticipated direction, but they don’t have anything close to the kind of “make or break” impact that Al-Shater and Diamond’s statements imply. A new democracy’s level of economic development and the occurrence of acute political polarization tell us the most about its survival prospects, and variations in economic performance around the transition don’t seem to move the needle a whole lot beyond that.

I wonder if the prevailing wisdom about the dire consequences of poor economic performance for democratic consolidation isn’t at least in part a case of the availability heuristic at work. Historical cases of economic crisis followed by democratic collapse easily spring to mind (Weimar Germany, anyone?), and it’s not hard to generate a plausible story linking those two events. What those plausible stories seem to overlook, though, is that many of those attempts at democracy probably would have failed anyway, even in the absence of economic crisis, because that’s the fate of most democracies across a wide range of conditions. Meanwhile, there are plenty of countervailing examples of young democracies that survived sharp economic contractions (say, Greece after military rule, or much of post-Communist Europe), but these null cases seem to be more forgettable.

Even if economic growth had a stronger impact on prospects for democratic survival than my analysis indicates it does, I’m skeptical that this information would be as useful to policy-makers seeking to promote democracy as I suspect they think it is. Assume for a moment that a bump of a few percentage points in GDP growth in the transition year would double the odds in favor of democratic survival. Can anyone tell me what policy interventions will reliably pump growth rates that far, that fast? If foreign aid or economic policy could work that kind of magic, wouldn’t the “developing” world already be a lot richer?

I’ll wrap this post up by going back to where we started, namely, the Middle East after the “Arab awakening.” Even though GDP growth doesn’t contribute much to it, the model’s overall performance isn’t bad. After looking at those ROC curves, I wondered what the model would say about the prospects for the survival of new democracies in three Arab countries on the cusp of new tries at democracy: Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Of the three, only Tunisia would already qualify as democratic by my definition, but Egypt and Libya are both in the midst of transitions from authoritarian rule that could put them over the threshold soon. So I took the IMF’s latest projections of their growth rates and plugged them into the model, along with recent data on their levels of economic development and my best guess as to whether or not they would qualify as acutely polarized according to the data set I used for that indicator. Here’s what came back as estimates of the  probability that each of those new democracies would make it to their sixth birthday, assuming that, of the three, only Tunisia would not qualify as acutely polarized:

  • Tunisia: 82%
  • Egypt: 48%
  • Libya:  89%

The contrast between Tunisia and Egypt’s survival prospects did not surprise me, but the high estimate for Libya did. Interestingly, expected economic growth seems to be contributing to this result. According to the IMF, Libya’s economy contracted by more than 60% in 2011, but it’s expected to recoup some of those losses in 2012 with an astonishing annual growth rate of nearly 70%. That value is so unusually large that it packs a lot of wallop, even though the weight for GDP growth in the equation is small. Whether that anomalous leap translates into a tremendous boost for democratic consolidation in the real world is another matter. Color me dubious.

Details of the Modeling

The sample for the statistical analysis described here comprises 103 democratic transitions that occurred in countries worldwide during the period 1955-2008.  These transitions were identified using the same data set on episodes of democracy that was summarized in my book. To focus on transitions most like the ones occurring in the Middle East today, cases where new countries were “born” with democratic regimes were excluded from the analysis. I did not use the well-known and widely-used Democracy and Dictatorship Data Set because, as elaborated in this working paper, I have serious concerns about its utility for survival analysis. (That said, I would be very interested to see how sensitive the results reported here are to the choice of measures of democratic transitions and breakdowns. I’d do it myself if this were an academic paper, but, hey, it’s just a blog post.)

Once I’d assembled a roster of relevant cases, I used the ‘glm’ command in R to estimate a logistic regression model that included the covariates listed below (with sources in parentheses). The analysis file includes one record per transition. The dependent variable in this model was a binary one indicating whether or not a democratic episode lasted more than five years beyond its transition year. As noted above, 62 of the 103 cases did.

  • Annual percent change in GDP per capita in years t-1, t, and t+1, where t is the year in which the democratic transition occurred (World Development Indicators)
  • Infant mortality rate, relative to annual global median and logged (U.S. Bureau of the Census)
  • Political polarization (a.k.a. “factionalism,” indicated by a score of 3 on Polity’s PARCOMP variable)
  • Any prior episodes of democracy
  • Post-Cold War period

The ROC curves were created using ROCR.

If you’d like to replicate and tinker with this analysis, please email me to ask for the data set and R script. My address is ulfelder <at> gmail <dot> com.

10 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on February 6, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Democratic Breakdown, Democratic Consolidation, Forecasting, Statistics
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on February 6, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/economic-growth-and-the-survival-of-new-democracies/

What Do We Know about Democratic Transitions? A Listsicle of 9 Judgments

A year ago, a client asked me to summarize what we can learn from prior research about how transitions from authoritarian rule unfold. Looking back now on the list of nine judgments I produced, I think it holds up fairly well, so I thought I would post it here for a wider audience.

If this were an academic paper, I’d need to start with a bunch of definitions, to document the sources for each of these inferences, and to respond to competing claims. But it’s not an academic paper, it’s my blog, so I’m going to keep it simple and just offer my own thoughts with the occasional reference. The text of the list I produced a year ago is bolded, and I’ve added some annotations in plain text about my confidence in those earlier judgments and related reflections on recent events.

1. Popular protest during the transition period does not diminish prospects for democratization; in fact, it probably enhances them. High confidence. The idea that popular moderation facilitates democratization has been thoroughly debunked by Nancy Bermeo, Ruth Berins Collier and James Mahoney, and Elisabeth Jean Wood, among others.

2. Having the military involved in politics during the transition period is not necessarily a bad thing. Much depends on the intent of that intervention, and early signs that military leaders support democratization probably bode well for a democratic outcome. High confidence in the first part, low confidence in the second. I suppose it’s better to have juntas start out saying nice things about democracy than not, but we really don’t know if those early noises tell us much about where the transition is headed.

3. The transition process does not have to be inclusive or otherwise democratic for a democratic regime to result. High confidence. By definition, the process needs to end with free and fair elections for democracy to follow, but the process leading up to those elections doesn’t need to be broadly inclusive. It rarely is, yet democracy still happens.

4. Elite pacts are neither necessary nor sufficient for a democratic outcome to occur, and their presence probably does not much affect the odds that democracy will survive if it is established. High confidence; see this recent post for more on why.

5. Political rivals do not have to be evenly matched for a democratic transition to produce democracy. If anything, the opposite is probably true: democracy is more likely to emerge in cases where de facto power tilts heavily in the direction of groups that favor democratization for its own sake. Moderate confidence. This is a major conclusion of now-ambassador Mike McFaul’s 2002 book, and I think the results of the Arab Spring so far support it as well, but power is hard to measure and the sample is small.

6. Cohesive opposition movements help to keep transitions on a path toward free and fair elections in ways that fragmented oppositions do not. Moderate confidence, although again, I think the trajectories of the Arab Spring cases so far bear this out.

7. Choices about institutional design—separation of powers and electoral systems—do not have a big effect on the outcome of the transition process, in part because they are endogenous to it. High confidence. As Philippe Schmitter puts it, “Allegedly democracy-unfriendly institutions are symptoms, not causes.”

8. Democratic transitions are more likely to produce a democratic regime in countries that depend heavily on foreign aid than in ones that don’t. Moderate confidence. It depends on where the aid comes from, what other interests the donor countries have at stake, and whether or not alternative sources of state finance are available. On Egypt, for example, I’m skeptical that U.S. military aid provides much leverage.

9. The most likely outcome of a democratic transition nowadays is a competitive authoritarian regime, either because initial elections will be unfair by design or because the party that wins those elections will quickly use state resources to advantage itself in future contests. Highest confidence. Democracy is hard to produce and relatively easy to undo. Just ask the Iraqis, or the Nicaraguans, or the Hungarians, or…

11 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on January 19, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Transitions to Democracy
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on January 19, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/what-do-we-know-about-democratic-transitions-a-listsicle-of-9-judgments/

Assessing Prospects for Democracy in the Arab World

As events in Libya turn for the better, optimism about the trajectory of the “Arab awakenings” is swelling again. Assuming that at least a few of these revolutions lead to governments chosen in mostly free and fair elections, what are the prospects that those new democratic regimes will survive? A few months ago, I wrote a guest post for the Monkey Cage blog that tried to answer this question by looking at patterns from other attempts at democracy around the world in the past five decades. I think that analysis still holds up, so I thought I would post it again here.

The original post follows, but the short version is that I’m a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist. Some of the revolutions probably won’t lead directly to democratic regimes, and most of the democracies that do emerge will probably revert to authoritarian rule within a decade or so. Even those failed attempts, however, are likely to be an important step forward in a meandering trip that will lead eventually to durable democratic rule.

Prospects for New Democracies in the Arab World: Chronicles of Deaths (and Rebirths) Foretold

Some authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa will probably survive the flurry of popular uprisings sweeping that part of the world right now, and in some cases where uprisings manage to topple longtime rulers, new authoritarian regimes will probably emerge. Transitional governments might overstay their mandates; political insiders might rig fresh elections in their own favor; security insiders might seize power for themselves; and some states might fragment or disintegrate, leaving no functioning national government behind.

Even with all of these grimmer possibilities on the table, however, at least a few of these uprisings will probably produce new regimes that are at least minimally democratic.* Assuming that happens, what are the chances that those new democratic regimes will endure? Taking patterns from attempts at democracy elsewhere in the world during the past half-century as a rough guide, I would offer four generic predictions.

1. Most attempts at democracy born of the Arab Spring will probably fail. By “fail,” I mean simply that the democratic regime will be replaced at some point in the future by an authoritarian one. According to the data I describe in a book on democratic breakdown and consolidation, the average life span for a democratic regime is just 16 years, and a substantial majority of the democratic episodes that began in the past half-century have ended with a return to some form of autocracy. Unless this region or this moment in history proves terrifically exceptional, we can expect most of the new democracies that emerge in the Middle East and North Africa in the next year or two eventually to suffer a similar fate.

2. Those failures probably will not happen right away. Instead, they are more likely to occur during the second, third, or fourth national election cycle, anywhere from three to 20 years after the start of democratic government. Democracies rarely break down immediately after founding elections. Contrary to theories claiming that democracy is consolidated by habituation, the risks of democracy-ending coups and rebellions actually seem to rise after an initial low point and remain elevated for quite some time. This pattern should serve as a caution to activists and policy-makers who might be tempted to shift their gaze elsewhere after founding elections, assuming that a country of interest is on track for democratic consolidation once it’s pulled off the initial transition.

3. Elected governments may pose a bigger threat to nascent democracy in the Arab world than jilted militaries. During the cold war, democracies were usually killed by military officers who snatched power from elected officials. In the past 20 years, however, the risk of military coups has declined significantly, and executive coups—what Adam Przeworski and his co-authors called the “consolidation of incumbent advantage”—have become the dominant form of democratic breakdown. The reasons behind this shift are too complex and uncertain to belabor here, but this secular decline in the risk of military coups—which shows up in other data sets, too—has important implications for efforts to support new democracies in the region. Civil-military relations will surely be an important and sensitive issue in many new Arab democracies, but concerned parties should also be thinking creatively now about how to tie elected officials’ hands against erosions of civil liberties, abuses of state resources, and dirty tricks in future balloting.

4. On the bright side, the countries where initial attempts at democracy fail will probably try again soon. A study I co-authored a few years ago with Mike Lustik shows that countries which have tried democracy before are more likely to try (again) than comparable countries which have never had a democratic government. We think this pattern exists because the organizations and expectations born from earlier tries do not evaporate when democratic institutions are dismantled. Few Arab countries have ever been led by governments chosen in free, fair, and inclusive elections, so even failed attempts at democracy should help lay the groundwork for longer-term success.

* I consider a regime to be democratic when: (1) National rulers (legislative and executive) have been chosen through competitive, multiparty elections; (2) Those elections involved little or no fraud and little partisan abuse of state resources; (3) No ascriptive groups (e.g., women, or members of certain ethnic groups) were denied the right to vote in those elections; (4) No unelected group or individual (e.g,. a king, military leaders) weilds veto power over a wide range of national policy issue areas; and (5) Freedoms of speech, assembly, and association are broadly respected.

3 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on August 23, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Democratic Breakdown, Transitions to Democracy
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on August 23, 2011

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2011/08/23/assessing-prospects-for-democracy-in-the-arab-world/

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