All posts tagged China

Enough about Inequality and Unrest Already!

Can we please, PLEASE stop it with the assertions that a country’s income inequality tells us a lot about its propensity for social unrest?

This claim pops up all the time. Exhibit A from an article I read this morning, on China’s official Gini coefficient for 2012:

China’s reality of inequality – and the challenge to narrowing the gap – remains unchanged: the current coefficient of 0.474 poses a high risk for social unrest.

I understand, and am even sympathetic to, the claim that gross disparities in wealth are unjust, particularly in societies where the poorest want for basic needs like food and shelter. I also recognize that organizers of, and participants in, contemporary social unrest often call out economic inequality as one of their chief grievances.

What I’m just not seeing, though, is empirical evidence that countries with higher economic inequality are more susceptible to social unrest.

For starters, there’s the general observation that economic inequality is common and persistent, but large-scale social unrest is uncommon and usually fleeting. What Jim Fearon and David Laitin wrote in 1996 about inter-group tensions and ethnic violence applies just as well here:

Among existing theories of ethnic conflict, accounts focusing on past tensions between groups that are memorialized in narratives of blame and threat tend to dramatic overprediction of violence. Such narratives are almost always present, but large-scale interethnic violence is extremely rare.

The same goes for inequality and popular rebellion. The former is ubiquitous while the latter is scarce, so it’s hard to see how the presence of the one can be said to predict the risk of the other.

Okay, so maybe inequality doesn’t help explain the timing of social unrest, but it does predispose certain societies to erupt when other forces come together. It’s not the spark that starts the fire; it’s the dry tinder that helps the spark catch and spread.

Well, I’m just not seeing this, either.

To look at the association between inequality and unrest, I started by downloading the World Bank’s data on income inequality from Hans Rosling’s Gapminder site. These data summarize occasional national surveys on income or consumption in a Gini coefficient. The higher the Gini coefficient, the more unequal the distribution of incomes in that society. Because the data are only updated occasionally—many countries have just one or two reported values since 1979, the start of the World Bank’s observation period for this measure—I reduced the time series into a single value by taking the maximum (or, in some cases, lone) value for each country. Then I used Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s data on nonviolent uprisings to identify which countries had seen at least one civil-resistance campaign emerge between 1980 and 2006. Finally, I used the ‘sm‘ package in R to produce kernel density plots that visually compare the distribution of Gini coefficients across those two sets of countries.

The results are shown below. As you can see, there seems to be virtually no difference in the level of income inequality among countries that have and have not produced popular uprisings since 1980. In a bivariate logistic regression model estimated from these same data, the coefficient for the Gini index is <0.01. Not exactly the powerful discriminator we keep hearing about, eh?

inequality_and_uprisings

That chart only looks at nonviolent uprisings, but published research on violent conflict suggests that the association isn’t especially strong there, either. In a 2008 paper (h/t Cyrus Samii), political scientist Gudrun Østby finds only a weak link between income inequality among individuals and the risk of civil-war onset in 36 developing counties. Interestingly, she does find evidence that higher levels of inequality between ethnic groups increase the risk of violent rebellion, suggesting that inter-group comparisons play a role in fomenting conflict. Still, this isn’t the rich vs. poor narrative on which the conventional wisdom about inequality and rebellion depends, and on that score, Østby’s analysis only strengthens my prior belief.

In light of that empirical evidence, it’s hard to put much stock in the oft-heard claim that highly unequal countries are especially prone to social unrest. Given how noisy the data on income inequality are, it seems particularly absurd to treat small fluctuations in a single country’s Gini coefficient as a useful indicator of rising or falling prospects for a popular uprising or civil war. I don’t think this blog post is going to do much damage to the conventional wisdom, but if there are any takers out there, I would be happy to bet against anyone who wants to use Gini coefficients to predict where the next rebellion will occur.

Update: In the Comments, Rex Brynen suggested I also compare the distributions of Gini coefficients in a couple of subsets where inequality would arguably have a stronger effect: poorer countries, and poorer countries with no history of democracy before 1980 (the start of my period of observation). The plots below do that, where “poorer” is defined broadly as countries that weren’t OECD members as of 1980. As you can see, there’s still virtually no separation in the broader non-OECD subset (the plot on the left). When we limit our view to non-OECD countries with no democratic experience before 1980 (the plot on the right), we get a little bit of separation in the expected direction, but the difference is still rather marginal. (In a bivariate logistic regression estimated from this subset, the coefficient is 0.03 with an s.e. of 0.04.)

inequality_and_uprisings_subsets

24 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on February 3, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Protests and Popular Uprisings, Revolutions
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on February 3, 2013

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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/

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/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 Comment
by dartthrowingchimp on October 26, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Authoritarian Breakdown, Authoritarian Rule
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on October 26, 2012

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

ISO Revolution, Organized Opposition Not Req’d

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Dictatorships Build Stuff that Crumbles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the Communist Party of China Is Right to Worry about Popular Protests

China’s rulers are very nervous about collective action by their own citizens, and they have reason to be. Statistical forecasting of democratic transitions supports the supposition that, far more than leadership change or a slumping economy, the mobilization of nonviolent uprisings is what could tip China toward deep political reform. In the short term, the most likely outcome under all scenarios is a continuation of Communist rule, but the path to democratization seems almost certain to run through popular protests.

We know that the Communist Party of China (CPC) is very worried about collective action because they’re showing it. According to a recent study by social scientists Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Molly Roberts of more than 1,400 social-media services in China,

Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collection action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content. Censorship is oriented toward attempting to forestall collective activities that are occurring now or may occur in the future — and, as such, seem to clearly expose government intent, such as examples we offer where sharp increases in censorship presage government action outside the Internet.

We also know that, in spite of these efforts, popular protests are still happening in China, and their frequency seems to be increasing, particularly around issues of environmental protection and public health. According to a recent post on the International Herald Tribune‘s IHT Rendezvous blog,

Although there are tens of thousands of civic protests every year in China, most are small-scale, ineffectual and officially smothered. But high profile demonstrations over environmental issues are occurring with more regularity, size, violence and political oomph.

That last point about the size, violence, and “political oomph” of these popular challenges was driven home by photographs from a recent protest in the eastern Chinese city of Qidong, where citizens confronted local authorities over their plans to dump waste water from a paper plant and compelled them to reverse course.

How much of threat does contentious collective action really pose to Communist Party rule, though? To try to answer this question, I used a statistical model designed to predict switches from authoritarian to democratic rule to estimate the likelihood of that event’s occurrence in China under various alternative scenarios. Technical details follow at the end of this post, but here I’ll simply note that the model controls for several risk factors widely thought to influence the odds of a democratic transition, including prior experience with democracy, the duration of authoritarian rule, natural-resource wealth, and the end of the Cold War. On top of those structural conditions, the model also considers the following more dynamic factors (with the “other things being equal” caveat attached to all of the following statements).

  • Leadership Change. Democratic transitions are more than three times as likely for at least a few years after a new leader takes office as they are under longer-tenured leaders.
  • Economic Growth. As expected, transitions are more likely when growth is slower.
  • Civil Liberties. Also as expected, transitions are more likely to occur in autocracies that impose fewer restrictions on freedoms of speech, association, and assembly.
  • Nonviolent Rebellion. Autocracies are more than eight times as likely to transition to democracy when challenged by nonviolent civil-resistance movements as they are when these organized popular challenges are absent.

To see what this model says about prospects for democratization in China, I fed it values of the relevant variables under several different scenarios, starting with one representing the current state of play. In all of the scenarios, China experiences a leadership change in 2012 as expected, an event that should already more than triple its risk of democratization.

  • Baseline. GDP growth hits the Party’s latest target of about 7.5 percent, civil liberties remain unchanged, and no civil-resistance movements emerge in 2012.
  • Slow Growth. GDP growth slumps to a more bearish 5 percent in 2012, but civil liberties remain unchanged and no civil-resistance movements emerge.
  • Modest Liberalization. Civil liberties expand slightly, moving from 6 to 5 on Freedom House’s inverted seven-point scale, but growth hits current targets and no civil-resistance movements arise.
  • Popular Challenge. One or more nonviolent movements emerge, even as growth reaches current targets and no political liberalization occurs.
  • Popular Challenge and Slow Growth. Growth slows to 5 percent and one or more nonviolent movements emerge while the Party holds steady on civil liberties.
  • Crackdown. Growth slows to 5 percent and nonviolent movements emerge, but the Party responds by tightening the screws, dropping the country’s civil-liberties score from 6 to 7.

Now, here are the predicted probabilities of a democratic transition occurring in 2013 we get when we plug in the numbers for these various scenarios.

A few things stand out to me from that chart.

First and foremost, the likelihood of a transition to democracy occurring before the end of 2013 appears to be quite small in absolute terms, and that doesn’t change much under any of these scenarios. The predicted probabilities in the chart range from less than 0.001 under the baseline scenario—which already takes into account the leadership change that’s occurring this year—to a maximum of roughly 0.005 under the popular challenge-plus-slow growth scenario. Because democratic transitions are so rare—on average, only one or two of these happen worldwide in any given year—the forecasts this model produces are always skewed toward zero. Even taking that downward bias into account, however, these numbers are pretty small. To put them in perspective: a country would need to score about a 0.05 to land in the top fifth of all authoritarian regimes in any given year, and nearly all transitions have historically happened in countries somewhere in that fifth. In short, continuation of the status quo is by far the most likely outcome in China over the next year, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that.

Bearing that in mind, I’m struck by how little the forecasts are moved by the ongoing leadership change and the prospect of a sharp economic slowdown. The former is already factored into the baseline forecast, which hovers perilously close to zero. As for the GDP growth rate, a drop from 7.5 percent to 5 percent would be a tremendous slump for China, unprecedented in its recent history, but the model suggests that variations of a few percentage points have not historically had much effect on the odds of regime change.

Last but not least, the chart clearly shows how strong the historical association is between the organization of civil resistance to authoritarian rule and the occurrence of democratic transitions, and what that patterns suggests about how democratization is likely to come about in China. The few scenarios that finally push the forecast upward all involve popular mobilization, and even a crackdown in response to that kind of agitation doesn’t do much to reverse that push.

Thus, of all the things that might happen in China in the next several months, the one that would probably have the biggest impact on near-term prospects for a democratic transition is the successful organization of a civil-resistance movement calling for fundamental changes to China’s political system. Intriguingly, statistical modeling of the conditions under which these movements get started suggests that, of all the countries in the world, China—because of its size and socio-economic development—is the most likely place for this kind of movement to emerge.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

The model I used to generate these scenarios is a logistic regression model that was estimated with the ‘glm’ command in R from data for all authoritarian regimes in the world during the period 1972-2008. In the jargon of event history analysis, this is a “discrete-time logit” model that considers the risk of a democratic transition in annual slices while controlling for duration dependency, parameterized here as the natural log of the authoritarian regime’s lifespan in years, interacted with a binary indicator for countries that have attempted democracy before. The resulting model includes the following parameters:

p(transition to democracy | authoritarian rule) = f { any history of democracy + log(regime duration) + [history of democracy * log(regime duration)] + post-Cold War period + energy and mineral extraction as a % of GNI + civil-liberties index + annual GDP growth + any civil-resistance movements + any leadership changes in past three years }

The data on regimes and regime transitions used in this analysis comes from a data set I created for the Political Instability Task Force (PITF). The indicator of civil-resistance movements was taken from a data set created by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan for their widely-cited work on “why civil resistance works.” Data on GDP growth and energy and mineral extraction come from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators. The civil-liberties index is produced by Freedom House, and the indicator of leadership change is based on another data set created for PITF, this one by Monty Marshall.

If you are interested in seeing detailed results from this analysis the data used in it, please email me at ulfelder <at> gmail.

7 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on August 9, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Authoritarian Rule, Democratization, Forecasting, Protests and Popular Uprisings, Transitions to Democracy
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on August 9, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/why-the-communist-party-of-china-is-right-to-worry-about-popular-protests/

Statistics Is Not Alchemy

Are aid and investment from China driving crackdowns on the press in some parts of Africa?

I don’t know.

That’s unsatisfying and maybe even a little annoying, but I’m writing a post about it anyway because why I don’t know says a lot about how hard it is to do good quantitative social science, even in the age of Big Data. Here’s the story:

A few Mondays ago, the New York Times ran an op-ed entitled “Africa’s Free Press Problem” in which the author, Mohamed Keita of the advocacy group Committee to Protect Journalists, asserted that press freedom is eroding in Africa, and foreign forces are partially at fault. According to Keita, “Independent African journalists covering the continent’s development are now frequently persecuted for critical reporting on the misuse of public finances, corruption and the activities of foreign investors.” He lays part of the blame for this alleged trend at the feet of Western governments more interested in promoting economic development and stability than democracy, but he sees other forces at work, too:

Then there’s the influence of China, which surpassed the West as Africa’s largest trading partner in 2009. Ever since, China has been deepening technical and media ties with African governments to counter the kind of critical press coverage that both parties demonize as neocolonialist.

In January, Beijing issued a white paper calling for accelerated expansion of China’s news media abroad and the deployment of a press corps of 100,000 around the world, particularly in priority regions like Africa. In the last few months alone, China established its first TV news hub in Kenya and a print publication in South Africa. The state-run Xinhua news agency already operates more than 20 bureaus in Africa. More than 200 African government press officers received Chinese training between 2004 and 2011 in order to produce what the Communist Party propaganda chief, Li Changchun, called “truthful” coverage of development fueled by China’s activities.

When I finished Keita’s piece, I was sympathetic to his concerns, but I was skeptical of his claim that the ebb and flow of press freedom in Africa was being shaped so decisively by China’s recent investments on the continent. From my own reading of politics, I see the kinds of constraints on the press that Keita describes in Ethiopia and Rwanda as normal features of authoritarian rule. By my reckoning, both Ethiopia and Rwanda have been repressing independent journalism for quite a while, so I couldn’t see how China’s recent overtures would have much to do with why that repression is happening. Cause has to precede effect and all that.

Being an empiricist and a blogger, I figured I’d pursue my hunch by taking a look at the data and writing a post. In a day or two, I could run a statistical analysis that would check Keita’s implied claim that Chinese engagement was reducing press freedom in Africa. I knew that both Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders produce annual, country-level measures of press freedom covering at least the past decade, so I was confident that I could observe recent trends on that side of the equation. All I needed was comparable data on aid and foreign direct investment from China, and I could run some simple fixed-effects models to see if changes over time in those money flows really were associated with decreases in press freedom, as Keita’s essay seemed to suggest.

And that’s where I hit a wall. First, I Googled “china foreign investment data” and “china foreign aid data” and came up with next to the nothing. The best I could do was an incomplete, project-level data set of Chinese foreign aid projects in Africa from 1990 through 2005. Next, I posted queries on Twitter and the listserv of the Society for Political Methodology. The latter led me to the University of the Pacific’s Daniel O’Neill, who confirmed my growing suspicion that the data I wanted simply don’t exist. We can see annual outflows of FDI from China, but we can’t see where that money’s gone, and bilateral data on development assistance from China are not available. (Even if they were, I’m not sure I would have trusted the numbers, but that’s beside the point for now.)

So, here we are in 2012, and it’s impossible to answer a seemingly simple question because the data we need to answer that question are nowhere to be found.

In fact, there are a lot of really interesting and important social-science questions where this is true. Income inequality is one of them, as I discussed on this blog a few weeks ago. Unemployment is another. If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone suggested adding unemployment to a global statistical model of political instability, I’d be a lot richer. It turns out, though, that many countries don’t report unemployment rates, and many of the ones that do only started to do so recently. A quick look at the World Bank’s World Development Indicators shows the problem clearly; lots of countries have no observations, and those gaps are correlated with other things that contribute to the risks of political instability–poverty most especially, but also authoritarian rule and recent or ongoing civil violence.

The list of known unknowns is a lot longer, but I think that’s enough to make the problem clear. From popular discussions, you’d think we’re living in an era when anything and everything is routinely quantified and the only problem left is finding the signal in all that noise. For some questions in some (rich) countries, that’s a fair description. For many of the big questions in comparative politics and international relations, though, we’re only just starting to exit the Dark Ages, and the past–and often even the present–are essentially lost to statistical analysis.

2 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on May 8, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Statistics
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on May 8, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/05/08/statistics-is-not-alchemy/

The Geology of Democratization

For the past 25 years, when we’ve talked about democratization, we’ve used the lexicon of transitions. As the prevailing narrative would have it, the breakdown of authoritarian rule launches a process of institution-building that leads eventually to democracy. Political democratization is the conjoined twin of social and economic modernization, and any country moving away from an authoritarian regime can usefully be described as “in transition” to a democratic one.

In geological terms, the transitions approach likens democratization to the production of igneous rock. Over time, pressures build under the crust of an existing authoritarian order. When that pressure becomes too intense, an eruption occurs. The old order is shattered, and fresh material pours onto the surface. That fresh material gradually but inexorably cools and hardens into a new, more modern order. The process might take a while, and parts of the new formation might crack and crumble while young, but the basic process is one of unidirectional transformation through disruption, replacement, and consolidation.

I don’t think the transitions metaphor works very well, and I’m not alone in that view. Ten years ago, Thomas Carothers wrote an essay called “The End of the Transitions Paradigm” that nicely showed how the transitions metaphor misrepresented the messier reality of modern regime change, and how that mismatch had often led Western foreign policy and aid astray.

Carothers’ essay was read widely in professional circles, but it doesn’t seem to have produced the gestalt shift to which its title aspired. Twenty years after the Soviet Union disintegrated, we still talk about the states born of that collapse being “lost in transition.” One of the first things the U.S. Department of State did after the Arab Spring hit was to open a Middle East Transitions Office that could coordinate and oversee U.S. policy toward the three “transition countries” of Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. In 2012, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) still maintains an Office of Transition Initiatives that motivates its existence with a narrative of disruption, opportunity, and consolidation.

I think the biggest problem with the transitions metaphor is that it misrepresents the nature of the underlying change process. Returning to the language of geology, I think democratization is more like the production of sedimentary rock than igneous. Institutions aren’t destroyed, replaced, and consolidated; as Francis Fukuyama masterfully describes in The Origins of Political Order, they are laid down in layers. New and old abut and sometimes comingle at the edges, but the one does not supplant the other. Instead, many layers coexist, and over time the process of layering interacts with other forces, like gravity and erosion, to produce something different from the sum of its parts. The heart of the process is not disruption but accretion. Change does not occur in a sequence; instead, it occurs through the interaction of multiple processes occurring on different time scales.

We can see this kind of accretive process occurring in “transitional” countries like Egypt, where the dramatic changes that have followed Mubarak’s ouster–the establishment of a new ruling council, the emergence of new political parties, and the convocation of a freshly elected parliament–have been poured atop a political economy that does yet not seem to have cracked or shifted.

We can see the interaction between layering and other forces in “consolidating” countries like Turkey, where the military’s role as political overseer wasn’t ended abruptly but instead shifted gradually as military elites became sandwiched between strengthening Islamist forces and the hardening expectations of its NATO allies.

We can even see these complex and cumulative effects at work in authoritarian regimes like China’s, where traditional kinship groups are the organizational form through which some of the most powerful demands for democratization are being expressed. Those demands, in turn, are arising in response to land grabs driven by the interplay of newer forces of globalization and long-standing forms of elite privilege.

Carothers’ 2002 essay might not have transformed the way we talk about democratization, but it’s not because he was wrong. Where the prevailing metaphor sees disruption and displacement, a closer look at the world suggests a more complex process of accumulation and gradual transformation. Maybe intellectual orders work like political ones, and the shift away from teleological metaphors of transition and consolidation will happen gradually and subtly. However it happens, it would be nice to see it happen soon.

1 Comment
by dartthrowingchimp on March 2, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Authoritarian Breakdown, Complexity Politics, Democracy Promotion, Democratic Consolidation, Democratization, Revolutions, Transitions to Democracy
Tagged , , , , ,

Posted by dartthrowingchimp on March 2, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/the-geology-of-democratization/

Forecasting Democratic Transitions in 2012

2011 was a year of remarkable democratic ferment, as citizens in an unusually large and diverse set of countries took to public spaces to demand more dignity in their lives and more accountability from their governments.

In nearly all cases, the democratization those protesters are demanding remains incomplete. While Occupy participants in the United States rightly decry the occasional act of police brutality against them, the gap yawns widest in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes, which still “occupy” more than two of every five countries, including some of the richest and most populous.

Which of those authoritarian regimes are “ripest” for transitions to democracy in 2012? To help answer that question, I used a statistical technique called Bayesian model averaging to identify and weight a number of risk factors and then applied those weights to the most recent data available. The result is a set of probabilistic forecasts of democratic transition for all countries worldwide currently under authoritarian rule.

For purposes of this forecasting exercise, political regimes are categorized in “either/or” fashion. A regime is considered to be a democracy when it meets all of the four conditions enumerated below. A regime that fails to satisfy any of these conditions is considered to be an autocracy.

1. Elected officials rule. No unelected individuals (say, a king, like Abdullah II of Jordan or Mohammed VI of Morocco) or organization (say, a military junta, like Egypt’s SCAF) determine or direct policy outcomes.

2. Elections are fair and competitive. Elections offer voters a meaningful choice between candidates and are free of widespread fraud and abuse.

3. Politics is inclusive. All adult citizens–male and female, without regard to racial or communal identity–have equal rights to vote and participate in politics.

4. Civil liberties are respected. The government generally recognizes and protects freedoms of speech, association, and assembly.

A transition to democracy occurs when a government chosen by fair, competitive, and inclusive elections takes office (assuming the other conditions enumerated above hold as well). The transition is dated to the installation of the new government, not the elections. This rule avoids treating aborted transitions, such as the one that occurred in Algeria in 1991, as equivalent to the establishment of democracy. Conceptually, the idea is that the authoritarian regime remains in place until a new government is actually installed, and as such, that authoritarian government may veto the transition at any moment until that handover of power.

The chart below plots the estimated likelihood of transition in 2012 for all autocracies worldwide, based on preliminary data from 2011. One thing that’s immediately noticeable about these scores is that they are all pretty low. If you check the scale on the bottom axis, you’ll see that most scores are under 10%, and many are approximately zero. To some extent, that’s an artifact of the rarity of these events. On average, only a few democratic transitions happen worldwide each year, so the easiest way to make a forecast that’s about 95% accurate is simply to say they won’t happen anywhere. The point of an exercise like this one is not to identify precisely which countries will transition when, a task that’s still well beyond the reach of current data and methods (and will probably remain so forever). Instead, it’s better to think of the list as an attempt to identify which of the world’s authoritarian regimes are most likely to experience the few transitions we might expect to see over the course of 2012.

I hope the forecasts stand on their own, but I’ll offer comments on some the results that I found most surprising or intriguing.

* Most surprising to me, Syria ranks among the 10 countries most likely to transition in 2012, while Egypt lands much farther down the list, barely cracking into the top 40. Beyond the nonviolent movements that arose in both countries in 2011, those estimates don’t account for recent events, and any subjective assessment would probably flag Egypt as the more likely case. Nevertheless, I think these estimates do hint at near-term potential for political transformation in Syria while reinforcing the need for caution and concern on the prospects for democratic government in Egypt. (Note: the Egypt forecast assumes that civil liberties improved in 2011 to a 4 on the Freedom House scale. The estimated probability would be slightly higher if that score were a 3, and it would be noticeably lower if that score were a 5 or worse.)

* The forecasts suggest that prospects for a democratic transition in 2012 in Russia improved substantially with the emergence of a nonviolent protest movement after fraudulent legislative elections earlier this month. It ranks 13th on the list, in the same neighborhood as Armenia and (surprising to me) Sudan.

* For China, the analysis confirms the prevailing view that the structural potential for a democratic transition remains low, but it also underscores the point that China’s transition prospects will improve if and when civil liberties expand or the economy suffers a sharp downturn.

* Many of the countries found to be most likely to transition soon are in sub-Saharan Africa: Burkina Faso, Uganda, Mali, Kenya, and Senegal represent five of the top 10, while Mozambique, Malawi, Madagascar, and Guinea-Bissau can also be found in the top 20. Also notable is Nigeria‘s presence just a few notches further down the list, in the 23rd spot. These forecasts suggest that the good-news story of accelerating economic growth on that continent may coincide with another regional wave of fresh attempts at democracy.

* Where sub-Saharan Africa looks especially promising, Central Asia looks especially bleak. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan land at the bottom of the list, and Tajikistan perches just a few notches higher. These grim forecasts are driven by those countries’ lack of democratic experience, their exceptionally repressive regimes, and their oil and gas wealth.

For readers who want a peek under the hood, I can tell you that these estimates are generated by an algorithm that accounts for just a few things. (Of course, all of the parenthetical statements about relative risk get the caveat, “Other things being equal.”)

* Whether or not the country has ever had a democratic regime (a transition is more likely if so)

* The age of the current authoritarian regime (the effect depends on prior democracy; risk increases over time for countries without democratic experience, but it’s more or less constant over time for countries with democratic experience)

* The scope of civil liberties the previous year, per Freedom House’s index (a transition is more likely with more liberties, but the association is non-linear)

* The share of the country’s gross national income generated from oil & gas extraction, per the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (a transition is less likely with more oil)

* Whether or not the country had a nonviolent popular movement the previous year, according to Erica Chenoweth‘s NAVCO data set (more likely if so)

* The annual rate of economic growth, according to the IMF’s September 2011 World Economic Outlook (more likely when growth is slower)

That list isn’t short because I lacked ideas about what else might help predict these events. Many other factors were also considered but were found to be poor predictors, while still others were left out of the analysis because there simply wasn’t enough data for enough countries or years (sometimes historical, sometimes current) to use them. Some of the factors I included in the call to BMA but found to be poor predictors of democratic transitions include:

* Per capita income (ditto for infant mortality rates)

* Literacy rates (normalized to the annual global median)

* Percent of the population in urban areas

* Youth bulge

* Trade openness (imports plus exports as a share of GDP)

* Mobile phone subscriptions per capita (normalized to the annual global mean)

* Ethnic or cultural diversity

* Ongoing civil war

I’d love to have readers use the Comments field to offer their own views on prospects for democratic transitions in 2012 and the factors and forces that will drive those events. Meanwhile, I’ll close with a wish: I hope I’m wrong and every one of these countries gets a democratic government very soon.

17 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on December 18, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Forecasting, Statistics, Transitions to Democracy
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on December 18, 2011

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/forecasting-democratic-transitions-in-2012/

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