All posts in category Transitions to Democracy

Demography and Democracy Revisited

Last spring on this blog, I used Richard Cincotta’s work on age structure to take another look at the relationship between democracy and “development” (here). In his predictive models of democratization, Rich uses variation in median age as a proxy for a syndrome of socioeconomic changes we sometimes call “modernization” and argues that “a country’s chances for meaningful democracy increase as its population ages.” Rich’s models have produced some unconventional predictions that have turned out well, and if you buy the scientific method, this apparent predictive power implies that the underlying theory holds some water.

Over the weekend, Rich sent me a spreadsheet with his annual estimates of median age for all countries from 1972 to 2015, so I decided to take my own look at the relationship between those estimates and the occurrence of democratic transitions. For the latter, I used a data set I constructed for PITF (here) that covers 1955–2010, giving me a period of observation running from 1972 to 2010. In this initial exploration, I focused specifically on switches from authoritarian rule to democracy, which are observed with a binary variable that covers all country-years where an autocracy was in place on January 1. That variable (rgjtdem) is coded 1 if a democratic regime came into being at some point during that calendar year and 0 otherwise. Between 1972 and 2010, 94 of those switches occurred worldwide. The data set also includes, among other things, a “clock” counting consecutive years of authoritarian rule and an indicator for whether or not the country has ever had a democratic regime before.

To assess the predictive power of median age and compare it to other measures of socioeconomic development, I used the base and caret packages in R to run 10 iterations of five-fold cross-validation on the following series of discrete-time hazard (logistic regression) models:

Base model. Any prior democracy (0/1), duration of autocracy (logged), and the product of the two.
GDP per capita. Base model plus the Maddison Project’s estimates of GDP per capita in 1990 Geary-Khamis dollars (here), logged.
Infant mortality. Base model plus the U.S. Census Bureau’s estimates of deaths under age 1 per 1,000 live births (here), logged.
Median age. Base model plus Cincotta’s estimates of median age, untransformed.

The chart below shows density plots and averages of the AUC scores (computed with ‘roc.area’ from the verification package) for each of those models across the 10 iterations of five-fold CV. Contrary to the conventional assumption that GDP per capita is a useful predictor of democratic transitions—How many papers have you read that tossed this measure into the model as a matter of course?—I find that the model with the Maddison Project measure actually makes slightly less accurate predictions than the one with duration and prior democracy alone. More relevant to this post, though, the two demographic measures clearly improve the predictions of democratic transitions relative to the base model, and median age adds a smidgen more predictive signal than infant mortality.

Of course, all of these things—national wealth, infant mortality rates, and age structures—have also been changing pretty steadily in a single direction for decades, so it’s hard to untangle the effects of the covariates from other features of the world system that are also trending over time. To try to address that issue and to check for nonlinearity in the relationship, I used Simon Wood’s mgcv package in R to estimate a semiparametric logistic regression model with smoothing splines for year and median age alongside the indicator of prior democracy and regime duration. Plots of the marginal effects of year and median age estimated from that model are shown below. As the left-hand plot shows, the time effect is really a hump in risk that started in the late 1980s and peaked sharply in the early 1990s; it is not the across-the-board post–Cold War increase that we often see covered in models with a dummy variable for years after 1991. More germane to this post, though, we still see a marginal effect from median age, even when accounting for those generic effects of time. Consistent with Cincotta’s argument and other things being equal, countries with higher median age are more likely to transition to democracy than countries with younger populations.

I read these results as a partial affirmation of modernization theory—not the whole teleological and normative package, but the narrower empirical conjecture about a bundle of socioeconomic transformations that often co-occur and are associated with a higher likelihood of attempting and sustaining democratic government. Statistical studies of this idea (including my own) have produced varied results, but the analysis I’m describing here suggests that some of the null results may stem from the authors’ choice of measures. GDP per capita is actually a poor proxy for modernization; there are a number of ways countries can get richer, and not all of them foster (or are fostered by) the socioeconomic transformations that form the kernel of modernization theory (cf. Equatorial Guinea). By contrast, demographic measures like infant mortality rates and median age are more tightly coupled to those broader changes about which Seymour Martin Lipset originally wrote. And, according to my analysis, those demographic measures are also associated with a country’s propensity for democratic transition.

Shifting to the applied forecasting side, I think these results confirm that median age is a useful addition to models of regime transitions, and it seems capture more information about those propensities than GDP (by a lot) and infant mortality (by a little). Like all slow-changing structural indicators, though, median age is a blunt instrument. Annual forecasts based on it alone would be pretty clunky, and longer-term forecasts would do well to consider other domestic and international forces that also shape (and are shaped by) these changes.

PS. If you aren’t already familiar with modernization theory and want more background, this ungated piece by Sheri Berman for Foreign Affairs is pretty good: “What to Read on Modernization Theory.”

PPS. The code I used for this analysis is now on GitHub, here. It includes a link to the folder on my Google Drive with all of the required data sets.

4 Comments

by Jay Ulfelder on February 3, 2015 • Permalink

Posted in Democratization, Development, Forecasting, Statistics, Transitions to Democracy

Tagged demography, Richard Cincotta

Posted by Jay Ulfelder on February 3, 2015

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2015/02/03/demography-and-democracy-revisited/

The era of democratization is not over

In the latest issue of the Journal of Democracy, (PDF), Marc Plattner makes the provocative claim that “the era of democratic transitions is over, and should now become the province of the historians.” By that, he seems to mean that we should not expect new waves of democratization similar in form and scale to the ones that have occurred before. I think Plattner is wrong, in part because he has defined “wave” too broadly. If we tighten up that concept a bit, I think we can see at least a few possibilities for new waves in the not-too-distant future, and thus an extension of the now–long-running era of democratization.

In his essay, Plattner implicitly adopts the definition of waves of democratization described by Samuel Huntington on p. 15 of his influential 1991 book:

A wave of democratization is a group of transitions from nondemocratic to democratic regimes that occur within a specified period of time and that significantly outnumber transitions in the opposite direction during that period of time.

Much of what’s been written and said about waves of democratization since that book was published accepts those terms and the three waves Huntington identifies when he applies them to the historical evidence: one in Europe from the 1820s to the 1920s; another and wider one in Europe, Latin America, and Asia from the 1940s to the early 1960s; and a third and so-far final one that began in Portugal in 1974, has been global in scope, and now appears to have stalled or ended.

I find Huntington’s definition and resulting periodization wanting because they focus on the what and don’t pay enough attention to the why. A large number of transitions might occur around the same time because they share common underlying causes; because they cause and reinforce each other; or as a matter of chance, when independent events just happen to cluster. The third possibility is not scientifically interesting (cf. the Texas sharpshooter fallacy). More relevant here, though, I think the first two become banal if we let the time lag or chain of causality stretch too far. We inhabit a global system; at some level, everything causes, and is caused by, everything else. For the wave idea to be scientifically useful, we have to restrict its use to clusters of transitions that share common, temporally proximate causes and/or directly cause and reinforce each other.

By that definition, I think we can make out at least five and maybe more such waves since the early 1900s, not the three or maybe four we usually hear about.

First, as Plattner (p. 9) points out, what Huntington describes as the “first, long” wave really includes two distinct clusters: 1) the “dozen or so European and European-settler countries that already had succeeded in establishing a fair degree of freedom and rule of law, and then moved into the democratic column by gradually extending the suffrage”; and 2) “countries that became democratic after World War I, many of them new nations born from the midst of the European empires defeated and destroyed during the war.”

The second (or now third?) wave grew out of World War II. Even though this wave was relatively short, it also included a few distinct sub-clusters: countries defeated in that war, countries born of decolonization, and a number of Latin American cases. This wave is more coherent, in that all of these sub-clusters were at least partially nudged along by the war’s dynamics and outcomes. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to split the so-called second wave into two clusters (war losers and newly independent states) and a clump of coincidences (Latin America), but there are enough direct linkages across those sets to see meaning in a larger wave, too.

As for the so-called third wave, I’m with Mike McFaul (here) and others who see at least two separate clusters in there. The wave of democratization that swept southern Europe and Latin America in the 1970s and early 1980s is temporally and causally distinct from the spate of transitions associated with the USSR’s reform and disintegration, so it makes no sense to talk of a coherent era spanning the past 40 years. Less clear is where to put the many democratic transitions—some successful, many others aborted or short lived—that occurred in Africa as Communist rule collapsed. Based partly on Robert Bates’ analysis (here), I am comfortable grouping them with the post-Communist cases. Trends in the global economy and the disappearance of the USSR as a patron state directly affected many of these countries, and political and social linkages within and across these regional sets also helped to make democratization contagious once it started.

So, based on that definition and its application, I think it’s fair to say that we have seen at least five waves of democratization in the past two centuries, and perhaps as many as six or seven.

Given that definition, I think it’s also easier to see possibilities for new waves, or “clusters” if we want to make clearer the distinction from conventional usage. Of course, the probability of any new waves is partially diminished by the success of the earlier ones. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s countries now have regimes that most observers would call democratic, so the pool of potential democratizers is substantially diminished. As Plattner puts it (p. 14), “The ‘low-hanging fruit’ has been picked.” Still, if we look for groups of authoritarian regimes that share enough political, economic, social, and cultural connections to allow common causes and contagion to kick in, then I think we can find some sets in which this dynamic could clearly happen again. I see three in particular.

The first and most obvious is in the Middle East and North Africa, the region that has proved most resistant to democratization to date. In fact, I think we already saw—or, arguably, are still seeing—the next wave of democratization in the form of the Arab Spring and its aftermath. So far, that cluster of popular uprisings and state collapses has only produced one persistently democratic state (Tunisia), but it has also produced a democratic interlude in Egypt; a series of competitively elected (albeit ineffective) governments in Libya; a nonviolent transfer of power between elected governments in Iraq; ongoing (albeit not particularly liberal) revolutions in Syria and Yemen; and sustained, liberal challenges to authoritarian rule in Bahrain, Kuwait, and, perhaps, Saudi Arabia. In other words, a lot of countries are involved, and it ain’t over yet. Most of the Soviet successor states never really made it all the way to democracy, but we still think of them as an important cluster of attempts at democratization. I think the Arab Spring fits the same mold.

Beyond that, though, I also see the possibility of a wave of regime breakdowns and attempts at democracy in Asia brought on by economic or political instability in China. Many of the autocracies that remain in that region—and there are many—depend directly or indirectly on Chinese patronage and trade, so any significant disruption in China’s political economy would send shock waves through their systems as well. I happen to think that systemic instability will probably hit China in the next few years (see here, here, and here), but the timing is less relevant here than the possibility of this turbulence, and thus of the wider wave of democratization it could help to produce.

Last and probably least in its scope and impact, I think we can also imagine a similar cluster occurring in Eurasia in response to instability in Russia. The number of countries enmeshed in this network is smaller, but the average strength of their ties is probably similar.

I won’t hazard guesses now about the timing and outcome of the latter two possibilities beyond what I’ve already written about China’s increasing fragility. As the Arab Spring has shown, even when we can spot the stresses, it’s very hard to anticipate when they’ll overwhelm the sources of negative feedback and what form the new equilibrium will take. What I hope I have already done, though, is to demonstrate that, contra Plattner, there’s plenty of room left in the system for fresh waves of democratization. In fact, I think we even have a pretty good sense of where and how those waves are most likely to come.

7 Comments

by Jay Ulfelder on September 11, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Democratization, Transitions to Democracy

Tagged Journal of Democracy, Marc Plattner, Mike McFaul, Samuel Huntington

Posted by Jay Ulfelder on September 11, 2014

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/the-era-of-democratization-is-not-over/

One Outsider’s Take on Thailand

Justin Heifetz at the Bangkok Post asked me this morning for some comments on the current political situation in Thailand. Here is a slightly modified version of what I wrote in response to his questions.

I won’t speak to the specifics of Thai culture or social psychological theories of political behavior, because those things are outside my areas of expertise. What I can talk about are the strategic dilemmas that make some countries more susceptible to coups and other breakdowns of democracy than others. Instead of thinking in terms of a “coup culture”, I think it’s useful to ask why the military in the past and opposition parties now might prefer an unelected government to an elected one.

In the case of Thailand, it’s clear that some opposition factions recognize that they cannot win power through fair elections, and those factions are very unhappy with the policies enacted by the party that can. There are two paths out of that conundrum: either seize power directly through rebellion, or find a way to provoke or facilitate a seizure of power by another faction more sympathetic to your interests—in this and many other cases, the military. Rebellions are very hard to pull off, especially for minority factions, so that often leaves them with trying to provoke a coup as their only viable option. Apparently, Suthep Thaugsuban and his supporters recognize this logic and are now pursuing just such a strategy.

The big question now is whether or not the military leadership will respond as desired. They would be very likely to do so if they coveted power for themselves, but I think it’s pretty clear from their actions that many of them don’t. I suspect that’s partly because they saw after 2006 that seizing power didn’t really fix anything and carried all kinds of additional economic and reputational costs. If that’s right, then the military will only seize power again if the situation degenerates enough to make the costs of inaction even worse—say, into sustained fighting between rival factions, like we see in Bangladesh right now.

So far, Pheu Thai and its supporters seem to understand this risk and have mostly avoided direct confrontation in the streets. According to Reuters this morning, though, some “red shirt” activists are now threatening to mobilize anew if Suthep & co. do not back down soon. A peaceful demonstration of their numbers would remind the military and other fence-sitters of the electoral and physical power they hold, but it could also devolve into the kind of open conflict that might tempt the military to reassert itself as the guarantor of national order. Back on 1 December, red shirts cut short a rally in a Bangkok stadium after aggressive actions by their anti-government rivals led to two deaths and dozens of injuries, and there is some risk that fresh demonstrations could produce a similar situation.

On how or why this situation has escalated so quickly, I’d say that it didn’t really. This is just the latest flare-up of an underlying process of deep socio-economic and political transformation in Thailand that accelerated in the early 2000s and probably isn’t going to reach a new equilibrium of sorts for at least a few more years. Earlier in this process, the military clearly sided with conservative factions struggling to beat back the political consequences of this transformation for reasons that close observers of Thai politics surely understand much better than I. We’ll see soon if they’ve finally given up on that quixotic project.

Whatever happens this time around, though, the good news is that within a decade or so, Thai politics will probably stabilize into a new normal in which the military no longer acts directly in politics and parts of what’s now Pheu Thai and its coalition compete against each other and the remnants of today’s conservative forces for power through the ballot box.

5 Comments

by Jay Ulfelder on December 11, 2013 • Permalink

Posted in Coups, Democratic Breakdown, Democratic Consolidation, Democratization, Development, Protests and Popular Uprisings, Revolutions, Transitions to Democracy, Violent Conflict

Tagged Thailand

Posted by Jay Ulfelder on December 11, 2013

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/one-outsiders-take-on-thailand/

Bangladesh as Archetype of Contemporary Political Development

If you want to get a feel for the political muddles that trap most countries for decades on a sine wave of democratization and de-democratization, and why durable exits from those oscillations are so hard to come by, you might want to take a look at Bangladesh.

Bangladesh won its independence from Pakistan in 1971 after a genocidal struggle that left hundreds of thousands dead and displaced tens of millions. Since then, the country has roughly split its time between democratic and authoritarian rule. As happened in many newly independent states in the twentieth century, the champions of national independence came to power through elections and then refused to leave. Also typically, the one-party regime born of that refusal soon fell to a restive military. Seventeen years passed before another fairly-elected civilian government came to power, starting the longest spell of more or less democratic government in the country’s still-short history.

Over the ensuing two decades, the core feature of politics in Bangladesh has been acute polarization. Whenever elections approach, the rival Awami League (AL) and Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) engage in bitter public showdowns that bring tens of thousands of supporters into the streets and often produce low-level violence on the margins. Unsurprisingly, the two parties carry that same animosity into government. “Once a party is in power in Bangladesh,” the Economist recently noted, “it is the unalterable tradition to declare nearly everything decreed by your opponents to be null and void.”

Meanwhile, the military has continued to play a more active role in politics than democratic theory would allow. In 2007, as elections approached and the cyclical clash between the AL and BNP cranked up, Bangladesh’s military leaders apparently saw intervention as the lesser of a few evils and tossed their civilian rulers. Two years passed under a caretaker government of the military’s choosing. Civilian supremacy returned at the end of 2008, when the AL won elections widely regarded as the fairest in Bangladesh’s history, but according to the International Crisis Group, Bangladesh’s military remains “visibly restive”:

On 19 January [2012, the military] announced it had foiled a coup by mid-level and retired officers who sought to install an Islamist government. This followed an assassination attempt on an AL member of parliament in October 2009 by mid-level officers seething over the deaths of 57 officers in a mutiny by their subordinate paramilitary border guards the previous February. Large-scale dismissals, forced retirements, deepening politicisation and a heavy-handed approach to curb dissent and root out militants have created an unstable and undisciplined force.

The systemic result of this struggle between two political rivals and the military is the familiar “truel,” or Mexican standoff, that characterizes politics in many countries stuck between stable dictatorship and durable democracy. The defining feature of this standoff is each player’s uncertainty about its rivals’ intentions; no one trusts that the others won’t make a grab for power and then shut out or destroy the others. That uncertainty, in turn, sharply increases the odds of undemocratic behavior, because even players fully committed to democracy in principle might feel pressed to cement or usurp power in order to block their distrusted rivals from doing the same to them first.

Now, in late 2013, elections are due again, and Bangladesh seems to be spiraling toward another local climax of this cyclical confrontation. As Reuters reports, the AL and BNP have called competing rallies in the capital this Friday, and at least one party leader has told followers to come “prepared with arms.” Already this year, state security forces have killed scores of protesters in unrest spawned by the workings of a war-crimes tribunal that many BNP sympathizers see as a political bludgeon directed against them. According to my statistical forecasts, Bangladesh ranks among the 20 countries in the world most susceptible to coup attempts this year, a result that confirms many observers’ concerns that the military might respond to wider disorder as it did in 2007.

So how does a country get off of this roller coaster? Attempts to induce democratic consolidation often focus on institutional design, but Bangladesh shows how this prescription is more easily written than filled.

One of the focal points in the current confrontation is the AL government’s recent decision to dispense with an arrangement whereby a caretaker body would replace the elected government in the run-up to elections. The BNP has cast that decision as an attempt by the ruling AL to tilt the upcoming election in its own favor. Ironically, though, the caretaker arrangement has often been the focal point of mutual recriminations in past elections, as the two parties would fight over whether or not the caretakers were sufficiently unbiased.

In other words, the system that was meant to dampen that mutual distrust only seemed to end up stoking it, but when one party finally made a change, that act is seen through the same lens. The fundamental problem with expecting rule changes to induce democratic consolidation is that the process of institutional design and change is itself political, so it is subject to the same pathologies and touches off the same worries.

Outsiders can also exhort party leaders to negotiate in good faith, but parties aren’t unitary actors. Those leaders sit atop a massive pyramid of principal-agent problems, and internal rivals often respond opportunistically to attempts at compromise by stoking fears of capitulation and offering themselves as the bulwark against it. Aware of this risk, those leaders rarely take the first step.

The histories of Europe and Latin America imply that Bangladesh will eventually find a way out of these oscillations onto a new equilibrium that includes durable democracy. Unfortunately, the history of countries born in the past half-century—never mind a cursory look at the politics on the streets of Dhaka right now—suggests this election cycle probably isn’t the moment that’s going to happen.

3 Comments

by Jay Ulfelder on October 21, 2013 • Permalink

Posted in Coups, Democratic Breakdown, Democratic Consolidation, Democratization, Development, Transitions to Democracy

Tagged Bangladesh, coups, International Crisis Group, military coup, truels

Posted by Jay Ulfelder on October 21, 2013

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/bangladesh-as-archetype-of-contemporary-political-development/

There Are No “Best Practices” for Democratic Transitions

I’ve read two pieces in the past two days that have tried to draw lessons from one or more cases about how policy-makers and practitioners can improve the odds that ongoing or future democratic transitions will succeed by following certain rules or formulas. They’ve got my hackles up, so figured I’d use the blog to think through why.

The first of the two pieces was a post by Daniel Brumberg on Foreign Policy‘s Middle East Channel blog entitled “Will Egypt’s Agony Save the Arab Spring?” In that post, Brumberg looks to Egypt’s failure and “the ups and downs of political change in the wider Arab world” to derive six “lessons or rules” for leaders in other transitional cases. I won’t recapitulate Brumberg’s lessons here, but what caught my eye was the frequent use of prescriptive language, like “must be” and “should,” and the related emphasis on the “will and capacity of rival opposition leaders” as the crucial explanatory variable.

The second piece came in this morning’s New York Times, which included an op-ed by Jonathan Tepperman, managing editor of Foreign Affairs, entitled “Can Egypt Learn from Thailand?” As Tepperman notes, Thailand has a long history of military coups, and politics has been sharply polarized there for years, but it’s still managed to make it through a rough patch that began in the mid-2000s with just the one coup in 2006 and no civil war between rival national factions. How?

The formula turns out to be deceptively simple: provide decent, clean governance, compromise with your enemies and focus on the economy.

This approach is common in the field of comparative democratization, and I’ve even done a bit of it myself. I think scholars who want to make their work on democratization useful to policy-makers and other practitioners often feel compelled to go beyond description and explanation into prescription, and these lists of “best practices” are a familiar and accessible form in which to deliver this kind of advice. In the business world, the archetype is the white paper based on case studies of a one or a few successful firms or entrepreneurs: look what Google or Facebook or Chipotle did and do it, too. In comparative democratization, we often get studies that find things that happened in successful cases but not in failed ones (or vice versa) and then advise practitioners to manufacture the good ones (e.g., pacts, fast economic growth) and avoid the bad (e.g., corruption, repression).

Unfortunately, I think these “best practices” pieces almost invariably succumb to what Nassim Taleb calls the narrative fallacy, as described here by Daniel Kahneman (p. 199):

Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen.

The narrative fallacy is intertwined with outcome bias. Per Kahneman (p. 203),

We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact… Actions that seem prudent in foresight can look irresponsibly negligent in hindsight [and vice versa].

When I read Tupperman’s “deceptively simple” formula for the survival of democracy and absence of civil war in Thailand, I wondered how confident he was seven or five or two years ago that Yingluck Shinawatra was doing the right things, and that they weren’t going to blow up in her and everyone else’s faces. I also wonder how realistic he thinks it would have been for Morsi and co. to have “provide[d] decent, clean governance” and “focus[ed] on the economy” in ways that would have worked and wouldn’t have sparked backlashes or fresh problems of their own.

Brumberg’s essay gets a little more distance from outcome bias than Tepperman’s does, but I think it still greatly overstates the power of agency and isn’t sufficiently sympathetic to the complexity of the politics within and between relevant organizations in transitional periods.

In Egypt, for example, it’s tempting to pin all the blame for the exclusion of political rivals from President Morsi’s cabinet, the failure to overhaul the country’s police and security forces, and the broader failure “to forge a common vision of political community” (Brumberg’s words) on the personal shortcomings of Morsi and Egypt’s civilian political leaders, but we have to wonder: given the context, who would have chosen differently, and how likely is it that those choices would have produced very different outcomes? Egypt’s economy is suffering from serious structural problems that will probably take many years to untangle, and anyone who thinks he or she knows how to quickly fix those problems is either delusional or works at the IMF. Presidents almost never include opposition leaders in their cabinets; would doing so in Egypt really have catalyzed consensus, or would it just have led to a wave of frustrated resignations a few months down the road? Attempting to overhaul state security forces might have helped avert a coup and prevent the mass killing we’re seeing now, but it might also have provoked a backlash that would have lured the military back out of the barracks even sooner. And in how many countries in the world do political rivals have a “common vision of political community”? We sure don’t in the United States, and I’m hard pressed to think of how any set of politicians here could manufacture one. So why should I expect politicians in Egypt or Tunisia or Libya to be able to pull this off?

Instead of advice, I’ll close with an observation: many of the supposed failures of leadership we often see in cases where coups or rebellions led new democracies back to authoritarian rule or even state collapse are, in fact, inherent to the politics of democratic transitions. The profound economic problems that often help create openings for democratization don’t disappear just because elected officials start trying harder. The distrust between political factions that haven’t yet been given any reason to believe their rivals won’t usurp power at the first chance they get isn’t something that good intentions can easily overcome. As much as I might want to glean a set of “best practices” from the many cases I’ve studied, the single generalization I feel most comfortable making is that the forces which finally tip some cases toward democratic consolidation remain a mystery, and until we understand them better, we can’t pretend to know how to control them.

N.B. For a lengthy exposition of the opposing view on this topic, read Giuseppe Di Palma’s To Craft Democracies. For Di Palma, “Democratization is ultimately a matter of political crafting,” and “democracies can be made (or unmade) in the act of making them.”

11 Comments

by Jay Ulfelder on August 23, 2013 • Permalink

Posted in Coups, Democratic Breakdown, Democratic Consolidation, Democratization, Transitions to Democracy

Tagged arab spring, coup, Daniel Brumberg, Daniel Kahneman, Egypt, Jonathan Tepperman, narrative fallacy, Nassim Taleb, Thailand

Posted by Jay Ulfelder on August 23, 2013

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/there-are-no-best-practices-for-democratic-transitions/

Yes, That’s a Coup in Egypt

Apparently, some of the protesters who support what the Egyptian army is doing right now claim it isn’t a coup because they believe it expresses the popular will, and the U.S. and the E.U. so far refuse to stick a label on it.

Well, I hate to break it to those people, but in any conventional sense of the term, this is a coup. Here are a few of the definitions used by leading scholars of coups and civil-military relations. First, Monty Marshall, who compiles a data set on coups and coup attempts for the Political Instability Task Force (scroll down to the Polity IV section here):

A coup d’état is defined as a forceful seizure of executive authority and office by a dissident/opposition faction within the country’s ruling or political elites that results in a substantial change in the executive leadership and the policies of the prior regime (although not necessarily in the nature of regime authority or mode of governance).

Now Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne from the coding rules for their Coup d’état Dataset:

[Coups d’etat are defined as] overt attempts by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting head of state using unconstitutional means…there is no minimal death threshold for defining a coup. A coup attempt is defined as successful if the coup perpetrators seize and hold power for at least seven days.

Last but not least, Samuel Huntington from his 1968 classic, Political Order in Changing Societies:

The distinguishing characteristics of the coup coup d’état as a political technique are that: (a) it is the effort by a political coalition illegally to replace the existing governmental leaders by violence or the threat of violence; (b) the violence employed is usually small; (c) the number of people involved is small; (d) the participants already possess institutional bases of power within the political system.

Force deployed? Check. By political insiders? Check. Chief executive replaced? Check. Legal procedures not followed? Check.

That the army’s apparent ouster of President Morsi may be popular doesn’t make it legal or erase the fact that he only “agreed” to go when coerced. That military leaders may not claim executive authority for themselves does not obviate the fact that they are pushing out a sitting president at gunpoint. That the coup could push Egypt onto a more positive trajectory doesn’t change the nature of the initial act.

On that last point, I’ll emphasize the word “could.” It’s impossible to say with confidence what comes next for Egypt. I’ve seen a number of people list infamous coups from the past (Algeria, Argentina, Chile, Iran…) as evidence that military intervention always makes things worse, but I’ve also seen a recent study by Nikolay Marinov and Hein Geomans showing that coups in the post-Cold War period have been less damaging to democratization:

Whereas the vast majority of successful coups before 1991 installed durable rules, the majority of coups after that have been followed by competitive elections… While the coup d’état has been and still is the single most important factor leading to the downfall of democratic government, our findings indicate that the new generation of coups has been far less harmful for democracy than their historical predecessors.

Again, I don’t know what comes next in Egypt, but I think the folks using historical analogies to argue that a coup can only make things worse there are ignoring an important source of bias in their analysis. Maybe coups are bad for the health of the polity, but there’s a selection effect at work here, too. Coups happen in situations that are already crappy, and the set of plausible counterfactuals in these crappy situations rarely includes a sharp turn for the better. A coup in Egypt might delay democratization and further damage the already-reeling economy, but it’s hard to imagine an alternative path from June 30 that is both politically realistic and looks a whole lot better. This is the common tragedy of transitional politics, and Egypt appears to be no exception.

40 Comments

by Jay Ulfelder on July 3, 2013 • Permalink

Posted in Coups, Democratization, Transitions to Democracy

Tagged Egypt, Hein Goemans, Monty Marshall, Nikolay Marinov, Samuel Huntington

Posted by Jay Ulfelder on July 3, 2013

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/yes-thats-a-coup-in-egypt/

More Shots Fired in Egypt’s Transitional “Truel”

Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians are expected to take to the streets on June 30 to press for the resignation of President Morsi and his government, and the impending confrontation between these protesters, the government’s supporters, and state security forces has lots of people on edge. Here’s how Tarek Radwan set the scene in a recent post on Foreign Policy‘s Mideast Channel blog:

What began as a humble attempt to translate countrywide discontent with the way President Mohamed Morsi has governed Egypt, the Tamarod — or “Rebel” campaign — has mobilized millions of Egyptians for a protest that promises to be epic on the anniversary of Morsi’s inauguration. Although opposition forces initially kept the signature drive that demands Morsi’s removal from office and early elections at arms length, nearly all of the relevant players in Egypt’s transitional drama now recognize the campaign’s significance and potential to affect change. Movement within the political opposition, including coordination meetings with the campaign and youth groups for a post-Morsi transition plan, suggests a fundamental belief that the June 30 protests could realize Tamarod’s goal of replacing the president.

Islamists who support Morsi’s government, primarily from the Muslim Brotherhood, responded with a counter-signature drive of their own called Tagarrod — or “Impartiality” — to reiterate their faith (no pun intended) in the political system and the elections that brought him to power. Supportive Islamist groups have also called for a June 21 protest against violence. However, the counter-campaign’s attempt to balance the scales only seems to accentuate the country’s deeply divided polity.

Meanwhile, the army has responded ominously to the planned mass protests, issuing a public warning that it will “not allow an attack on the will of the people” and a calling instead for dialogue and (ha!) consensus.

In a recent column for Egypt’s online Daily News, activist and one-time candidate for parliament Mahmoud Salem sketched three scenarios for how this latest confrontation ends: 1) a clear victory for the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), 2) a clear victory for the Tamarod campaign, or 3) a military coup. The forms the latter two outcomes would take are clearest: the government resigns and fresh elections are held, or the military tosses out the government and installs itself or a government of its choosing in power. It’s less clear to me what an “outright victory” for the MB would look like, but Salem seems to have in mind a violent routing of the organized opposition with the cooperation or at least complicity of the military. Salem sees the third scenario (military intervention) as the most likely one but acknowledges that the situation is highly uncertain.

For reasons that are probably narcissistic but I’d like to think are intellectual, I’m struck by how closely Salem’s scenarios and outcomes match up with the game-theoretic model I use to analyze the politics of democratic consolidation and breakdown. This model portrays politics in newer democracies as a kind of “truel“—a lousy neologism for a three-way version of a duel—involving two rival political factions and the military. In principle, any of those three groups can usurp power at at any time. Election winners can rig the game to ensure that they keep winning; election losers can overthrow the government by revolutionary means; and the military can carry out a coup.

In the metaphor of a truel, attempts to usurp or defend power are like shots fired at different rivals. As in a real gunfight, those shots don’t always hit or kill, and rivals can also choose not to fire. In many new democracies and other “transitional” cases, it’s easy to imagine one or two or even all three of these actors attempting to hoard or usurp power (i.e., take a shot) at almost any time, and it’s also easy to imagine most of those attempts failing.

Democracy is effectively consolidated when all of those actors routinely abide by and uphold democratic procedures, especially but not limited to fair elections and freedoms of speech, association, and assembly. The risk of these usurpations of power never gets to zero, but in some long-standing democracies it’s awfully close to it. That’s the truel equivalent of everyone agreeing to put their guns away and resolve their disputes in other ways. In the real world, military coups have become less common than they were during the Cold War, and revolutions rarely succeed in overthrowing elected governments. Consolidations of incumbent advantage aren’t hard to find, though, and attempts at all three forms of usurpation are still common in the “life courses” of newer democracies.

So what can the truel metaphor tell us about Egypt? First, it’s evident that Salem’s three scenarios exclude an important fourth scenario in which everyone either misses or holds his fire. If the June 30 protests don’t force out the Morsi government, inspire a military coup, or lure MB supporters into widespread counterrevolutionary violence, this latest round could come and go without producing dramatic changes in the political landscape. Based on the outcome of the last couple of confrontational moments in Egyptian politics and the fractiousness of the Tamarod coalition, I’d say this is probably the most likely outcome.

The truel metaphor also raises some questions about the wisdom of the opposition’s decision to press revolutionary demands through mass unrest. This is the political equivalent of shooting at the incumbent, but game theorists will tell you that the optimal strategy for the weakest player in a truel is often to hold fire or to miss on purpose. That’s because the dominant strategy for the two strongest players is usually going to be to try to eliminate the other, so the weakest player can often do well by letting that confrontation play out, leaving him in a showdown with the lone survivor, possibly even with the advantage of getting to shoot first at a now-damaged rival.

In Egypt right now, I’d say the MB and the military are clearly the two strongest players, while the groups behind the Tamarod campaign are still the weakest. If that’s right, then the maximalist strategy Salem and his cohort are pursuing is probably quixotic. As Salem acknowledges, this attempt to oust the MB is unlikely to succeed, but the act of trying is probably increasing the risks of both a military coup and a deeper consolidation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s grip on power by strengthening those groups’ fear of a revolution, and thus their incentives to preempt or respond to that threat with a crackdown or coup of their own.

Of course, that might be exactly what some of the participants in the Tamarod campaign are hoping for. Some of the MB’s rivals have openly called for a military coup against the Morsi government as their best hope for a “reset” of Egypt’s transition, and the occurrence of sustained mass unrest is, at this point, probably the only thing capable of making that happen. By attempting another revolution—or a counter-counterrevolution, depending on whom you ask—these factions are probably looking to draw the Brotherhood’s supporters into a fight that would, in turn, lure the military into a coup. What looks a little crazy on the surface may turn out to be crazy like a fox.

Last but not least, careful consideration of the current moment in Egyptian politics shows how the truel metaphor elides the possibility of bargaining among the players. After writing a draft of this post yesterday, I discussed it with Michael Hanna, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. As Michael pointed out to me, there’s really a fifth scenario here, too, in which the military uses the credible threat of a coup to compel the MB government into a political deal designed to halt the spiral of polarization that keeps producing these showdowns. The military seems like it really doesn’t want to be responsible for governing Egypt right now, but it probably wants even less to see the country descend into a period of sustained mass violence. One way to try to achieve both of those goals would be to give the government an ultimatum: accept a compromise with the opposition or get shot at from two sides at once. If I had to lay odds, I’d say this is probably the second-most-likely outcome, after the “everyone misses or holds his fire” scenario described earlier.

So that’s what my analytical self makes of this remarkable moment. All the while, my emotional self continues to marvel at the courage and tenacity of the many people who keep struggling to make the most of this historic opportunity to democratize Egypt, and to sympathize with the fatigue and frustration this seemingly endless transition and its accompanying economic woes must be producing. Honestly, I have no idea what that’s like, and it’s infinitely easier to comment from afar.

17 Comments

by Jay Ulfelder on June 26, 2013 • Permalink

Posted in Coups, Democratic Breakdown, Democratic Consolidation, Democratization, Protests and Popular Uprisings, Revolutions, Transitions to Democracy, Violent Conflict

Tagged Egypt, Michael Hanna, Mohamed Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood, The Century Foundation

Posted by Jay Ulfelder on June 26, 2013

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/more-shots-fired-in-egypts-transitional-truel/

A Quick Comparative Assessment of Georgia and Venezuela

Two countries with competitive authoritarian regimes held elections this past week, with very different results. In Georgia, President Mikheil Saakashvili’s United National Movement (UNM) lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since it took power in the Rose Revolution nearly a decade ago. In Venezuela, however, President Hugo Chávez won a fourth term by his slimmest margin yet, defeating challenger Henrique Capriles by “only” a 9-percent margin.

As a forecaster, I went 1 for 2 in predicting the outcome of these elections. Because they are—or, in the case of Georgia, were—electoral authoritarian regimes, I expected the ruling parties to win in both cases. There seemed to be a lot of uncertainty about the outcome in both, but as I said on Twitter, the illusion of uncertainty is a design feature of this type of regime. Regarding Venezuela, I gave Chavez 4:1 odds of beating Capriles. I recognized that the election machinery introduced some uncertainty into the process, but I believed Chavez had tilted the playing field steeply enough in his own favor to return himself to office, regardless of Capriles’ appeal. I didn’t make a specific prediction about Georgia, but if I had, it would’ve been about the same, and for the same reasons. The challenging Georgian Dream coalition clearly had some momentum heading into the election, but I thought Georgia’s machine politics and byzantine electoral system would allow Saakashvili’s UNM to retain a parliamentary majority anyway.

So, how did two apparently similar cases produce two different outcomes? On the fly, I can think of three explanations, all of which could be true at the same time.

First, it’s quite possible that I read the two cases wrong in advance of the election. Maybe Georgia really was less authoritarian than I thought. Electoral authoritarian regimes are inherently ambiguous, and this ambiguity makes it especially hard to observe small changes, or to be confident that the small changes we do see will be meaningful ones. For cases in this boundary area, however, small differences can have a big impact on the results.

Second, Georgia had a national scandal erupt over prison abuse in the campaign’s final weeks, and it’s possible that this “October surprise” was severe enough to knock the system off its old equilibrium. Video clips showing male prisoners being tortured and sexually assaulted by guards sparked mass demonstrations in cities across the country, and many Georgians seemed to see the abuse as metaphor for deeper systemic problems that the Rose Revolution had failed to correct.

Third, I think the two countries’ different positions in the international system played a role. Hugo Chavez has explicitly positioned his country as a counterweight to “Western hegemony,” and that adversarial posture has encouraged him to thumb his nose at critics and election observers from countries and organizations he sees as hostile to his “Bolivarian revolution.” Mikheil Saakashvili, by contrast, has hugged the United States and Europe, aggressively—almost desperately—pursuing entree into NATO and the European Union as a way to catalyze Georgia’s “modernization” and to protect it from the angry Russian bear next door.

This Westernization strategy led Saakashvili to subject his electoral process to much closer scrutiny and made him far more sensitive to criticisms from Europe and the U.S. than Chavez could ever be. Criticisms from previous elections about bias in state-owned media and partisan abuse of state resources led to specific reforms that certainly were not revolutionary but probably helped regrade the electoral landscape into more level terrain.

In retrospect, then, I think I can see why Georgia was riper for change than Venezuela was, and how the ambiguity inherent in electoral authoritarian regimes made that contrast hard to spot in advance. Whatever the specific causes, though, I think I need to tweak my mental model of electoral authoritarianism to allow for more uncertainty about the outcome of their elections. My old model emphasized the authoritarian part and saw the elections as pure theater. My new version will be less confident in its judgment of the character of these ambiguous cases, and it will leave more room for those theatrics to have real consequences.

13 Comments

by Jay Ulfelder on October 8, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Authoritarian Breakdown, Democratization, Transitions to Democracy

Tagged electoral authoritarianism, Georgia, Hugo Chavez, Mikheil Saakashvili, Venezuela

Posted by Jay Ulfelder on October 8, 2012

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/a-quick-comparative-assessment-of-georgia-and-venezuela/

Democracy Is Not Fading Away

On September 15, the U.N. observed the International Day of Democracy, an occasion meant to encourage reflections on the state of democracy around the world and ways to promote and consolidate it. Many of the reflections I saw stuck with a theme that’s been sounded a lot in the past few years: democracy is on the defensive. In its annual Countries at the Crossroads report, for example, Freedom House asked if recent uprisings in the Arab world were producing a global swing toward democracy and good governance and concluded that they were not. “Declines far exceeded improvements” in the 35 countries the report covers, “in both number and scale.” That pessimistic conclusion echoed the tone of Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2012 report, which warned of a “continued pattern of global backsliding.” According to their data, 2011 was “the sixth consecutive year in which countries with declines [in their political rights and civil liberties scores] outnumbered those with improvements.”

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: best I can tell, these pessimistic assessments are mistaking predictable dips in the road for the slope of the longer route, which continues to point uphill. Advocacy groups like Freedom House are rightly concerned with making and then protecting gains in as many cases as possible, but I think that mission makes their analysis of recent churn more alarmist than the evidence warrants.

To see why recent reversals don’t necessarily mean that democracy is on the decline, we have to widen our lens. Looking back over the past few centuries, as Xavier Marquez and I both did in recent blog posts, the spread of democracy is breathtaking. Even when we narrow our lens to the past century, the gains are remarkable; a system of government that only appeared in some of the world’s richest countries before World War II is now the dominant form worldwide.

Of course, those long-term trends don’t necessarily mean that recent reversals aren’t the start of a long decline—past performance does not guarantee future returns and all that—but I’m pretty confident they aren’t. To see why, we need to narrow our vision even further, to the last 25 or so years. Take a look at the chart below, which plots annual counts of transitions to democracy (blue) and autocracy (red) in countries worldwide.* At this time scale, the most notable pattern is the cluster of transitions to democracy in the early 1990s, what many have called the “fourth wave” of democratization in the world.

Because the risk of democratic breakdown is not zero, any cluster of transitions to democracy is likely to produce a cluster of reversals. Other things being equal, a jump in the number at-risk individuals should eventually result in a jump in the number of “deaths.” From analysis of the survival of democratic regimes over the past half-century, we know that the risk of breakdown increases over the first decade or so of a new democracy’s lifespan, and most attempts at democracy end within about 15 years of their start. Knowing this about their life expectancy, we can predict that the cluster of democratic reversals should start arriving several years after the wave of transitions to democracy begins, and it should then recede once the more vulnerable of those new democracies have succumbed.

Looking back at the chart above with that information in hand, what surprises me is that the number of transitions to autocracy in the past 10-15 years hasn’t been higher. If anything, the incidence of democratic breakdown has been lower than we would have expected in the wake of that blue wave in the early 1990s, which significantly increased the stock of democracies at risk of failure.

We can see this more clearly by looking at annual event rates instead of raw counts, using the number of each event type in the numerator and the number of countries at risk of that event type in the denominator. The chart below does just that, with dots marking the annual observations and a line that smooths out some of the year-to-year variation. Here, it’s clearer that the rate of democratic breakdown has been lower in the post-Cold War period than it was during the Cold War, while the rate of transitions to democracy has held fairly steady. As Freedom House observes, the rate of breakdowns has risen a bit in the past several years, but it’s still remained much lower than it was in the 1960s and early 1970s. More important, some countries continue to transition to democracy each year, and the democracy bin continues to fill up just about as fast as it empties.

I understand where the advocates are coming from, and I realize that their regular ringing of the alarm may even be contributing to the positive trends these charts show. I also know that trends don’t last forever, and the patterns we see when we take this long view aren’t necessarily irreversible. I just think those patterns are more encouraging than we realize when we focus our attention on the worst and most recent stuff, as advocates are professionally inclined to do.

* The data set used in this post is on the Dataverse (here). The R script used to make the charts is on GitHub (here).

2 Comments

by Jay Ulfelder on September 21, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Complexity Politics, Democratic Breakdown, Democratic Consolidation, Democratization, Transitions to Democracy

Tagged Freedom House

Posted by Jay Ulfelder on September 21, 2012

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/09/21/democracy-is-not-fading-away/

Episodes of Democracy and Autocracy: A New Data Set

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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