In Seeing Like a State, James Scott describes how governments have tried to make their societies more legible in pursuit of their basic organizational mission—”to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion.”

These state simplifications, the basic givens of modern statecraft, were, I began to realize, rather like abridged maps. They did not successfully represent the actual activity of the society they depicted, nor were they intended to; they represented only that slice of it that interested the official observer. They were, moreover, not just maps. Rather, they were maps that, when allied with state power, would enable much of the reality they depicted to be remade.

Statistical forecasts of political events are a form of legibility, too—an abridged map—with all the potential benefits and issues Scott identifies. Most of the time, the forecasts we generate focus on events or processes of concern to national governments and other already-powerful entities, like multinational firms and capital funds. These organizations are the ones who can afford to invest in such work, who stand to benefit most from it, and who won’t get in trouble for doing so. We talk about events “of interest” or “of concern” but rarely ask ourselves out loud: “Of interest to whom?” Sometimes we literally map our forecasts, but even when we don’t, the point of our work is usually to make the world more legible for organizations that are already wealthy or powerful so that they can better protect and expand their wealth and power.

If we’re doing our work as modelers right, then the algorithms we build to generate these forecasts will summarize our best ideas about things that cause or predict those events. Those ideas do not emerge in a vacuum. Instead, they are part of a larger intellectual and informational ecosystem that is also shaped by those same powerful organizations. Ideology and ideation cannot be fully separated.

In political forecasting, it’s not uncommon to have something that we believe to be usefully predictive but can’t include in our models because we don’t have data that reliably describe it. These gaps are not arbitrary. Sometimes they reflect technical, bureaucratic, or conceptual barriers, but sometimes they don’t. For example, no model of civil conflict can be close to “true” without including information about foreign support for governments and their challengers, but a lot of that support is deliberately hidden. Some of the same organizations that ask us to predict accurately hide from us some of the information we need most to do that.

Some of us try to escape the moral consequences of serving powerful organizations whose actions we don’t always endorse by making our work available to the public. If we share the forecasts with everyone, our (my) thinking goes, then we aren’t serving a particular master. Instead, we are producing a public good, and public goods are inherently good—right?

There are two problems with that logic. First, most of the public doesn’t have the interest or capacity to act on those forecasts, so sharing the forecasts with them will usually have little effect on their behavior. Second, some of the states and organizations that consume our public forecasts will apply them to ends we don’t like. For example, a dictatorial regime might see a forecast that it is susceptible to a new wave of nonviolent protest and respond by repressing harder. So, the practical effects of broadcasting our work will usually be modest, and some of them could even be harmful.

I know all of this, and I continue to do the work I do because it challenges and interests me, it pays well, and, I believe, some of it can help people do good. Still, I think it’s important periodically to remind ourselves—myself—that there is no escape from the moral consequences of this work, only trade-offs.

In my neck of the intellectual woods, views on the causes of Russia’s recent aggression in Ukraine split into two camps, which I’ll call the Realists and the Russianists. Some people straddle the two groups, and there are other streams of thought on this issue, but mostly the conversation seems to break into competing claims along the following lines.

For their part, the Realists explain Russia’s behavior as a product of the insecurity endemic to the international system. Realism sees world politics as fundamentally anarchic, and the absence of a trusted protector encourages states to husband and grow their power as the only reliable means of protecting their survival and autonomy. This insecurity is so compelling that it even tempts states into expansionist actions aimed at preempting future threats, either directly by winning control over the menacing rival or indirectly by increasing their own power. As Arthur Eckstein (2006, p. 21) describes,

In an anarchic state-system where relations are strongly competitive and conflictual, where unresolved disputes, tensions, and frictions accumulate, and where every state must look primarily to its own resources in order to defend itself, it makes sense for every state to take the strongest possible measures to increase its own security. But measures successfully taken to increase one state’s security act simultaneously to undermine the security of every other state. The result is that the level of tension and distrust intensifies all around. Moreover, making a competitor (i.e., a potential adversary) more insecure not only tends to increase the other state’s interest in militarization but also—as Realists judge from conditions in the modern world—the other state’s own interest in territorial expansion.

Seen through this lens, the revolution in Ukraine in February created both a threat and an opportunity for Moscow. After Yanukovich fled his post, Russia was especially eager to secure control over Crimea because it is home to the Black Sea Fleet, but Putin’s government was also motivated to grab at parts of Ukraine by the continuing expansion of a rival power that already abuts its borders. For Realists, it is not coincidental that Russia’s most aggressive gambits in the past decade have come in Georgia and Ukraine, two countries that border Russia and to which NATO and the E.U. have continued to dangle the promise of eventual membership. Nor is it surprising that Russia seized a chunk of Ukraine and continues to destabilize the rest of it when it looked like Kiev was finally poised to take a clear step toward “the West” by signing an E.U. association agreement and rejecting membership in Moscow’s rival project, the Eurasian Customs Union.

So that’s where the Realists seem to be coming from. The Russianists, meanwhile, see Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine almost entirely as the product of a domestic turn toward chauvinism—or, for the more fatalistic, the resurgence of a chauvinism that never really goes away. Some Russianists see the Putin administration’s waxing nationalism as an earnest manifestation of its core values, while others view it more cynically as a ploy to rally domestic support for the government in the face of a sputtering economy and frustration with authoritarian rule. In either case, though, the root cause of Russian aggression is said to lie within its own borders, and NATO and the E.U. are potential partners whom Russia is rebuffing because its own pathologies blind it to the mutual gains that more cooperative relations would produce.

As is often the case, these competing explanations also imply different expectations about the future. Many of the Russianists I follow have reacted to the annexation of Crimea with predictions that a Kremlin crazy (like a fox?) with nationalism will not stop until it is compelled to stop. They now expect the eventual annexation of eastern and possibly southern Ukraine and see Moldova’s Transdniestr region as a probable next target. Some even warn that the presence of large numbers of co-ethnics in Estonia and Latvia will compel Russia to venture there, and they fear that those countries’ NATO membership, and the untested promise of collective defense it represents, will not suffice to deter this ambition. In their view, the logic of Russian domestic politics now dictates an expansionist line that can only be broken by crippling punishment and loud threats of harsh retaliation.

By contrast, many of the Realists seem less alarmed about where this crisis goes from here. They believe that the same insecurity which motivated Moscow’s recent aggression will also discourage Putin & co. from pushing much farther against the interests of a powerful rival, especially when Russia’s own hard-power resources are already stretched thin and maybe even shrinking. Instead, they expect Moscow to focus on consolidating its recent gains and to avoid provoking an even costlier response by probing the boundaries of NATO’s resolve.

Whether Moscow holds the current line or moves to annex more territory won’t prove one camp right and the other wrong. A single episode will rarely suffice for that, and either course is at least possible under either framework. What it will do, however, is provide new information on which we can and should update our thinking about which view is more right. If Russia stops at Crimea, it would undercut many Russianists’ claims that Putin & co. are compelled by their chauvinist project to “protect” ethnic kin and to continue regrowing the empire. If Moscow does pushes much further, however—and, especially, if it ventures into the Baltic states—it would be hard to sustain the Realist line that domestic nationalism is largely ephemeral to this process.

Importantly, there’s also a prescriptive side to this debate. If the Russianists are (more) right, then now is the Munich moment, and the only way to halt Moscow’s expansionist drive is to make clear to the Putin government that it will suffer badly for its transgressions. If the Realists are (more) right, however, then the bellicose response some Russianists seek could exacerbate the situation by amplifying the security dilemma that underlies the current crisis.

For what it’s worth, my views on this particular case hew closer to the Realists. Russian domestic politics is surely influencing Moscow’s behavior—how could it not?—but if I had to pick a single class of events to which this episode belongs, I would put it in the bin with the many, many other instances of aggressive self-help in response to the insecurity endemic to an anarchic international system. Observers of world politics have noted this pattern for literally thousands of years. Meanwhile, the nationalist turn we’re seeing in Russian domestic politics could be as much consequence as cause of these international tensions, and the idea of Russia as pathologically expansionist is hard to square with the limited scope of Russian irridentism we’ve actually seen over the past 20 years. Europe and the United States may insist and genuinely believe that they mean Russia no harm, but their active and vocal pursuit of democratic change in Moscow undercuts this claim, at least in the eyes of the people who staff the apparatus that actually makes Russian foreign policy. That pattern doesn’t justify Russian aggression, but I do think it goes a longer way toward explaining it.

This is a guest post written by Matt Reichert, Miguel Garces, Quratul-Ann Malik, and Ian Lustick of Lustick Consulting. Any questions about this post, these models, Lustick Consulting, or agent-based modeling can be directed to info@lustickconsulting.com.

For students of civil-military relations, the ouster of Ukrainian ex-President Viktor Yanukovich  is puzzling—it’s just not quite clear what to call it. Unlike the case of Egypt, where the checklist of coup criteria can be marked down with a single swift sentence, classifying the Ukraine case has required much more thought. With parliament as the chief perpetrator, and without the Ukrainian armed forces or military playing a significant role, this coup feels like a fire without the smoke. It is not so much a coup, as coup-ish.

How do we forecast “coup-ish?” We suggest that the Ukraine case typifies the type of forecasting challenge that is best met by conceptual disaggregation. In his treatment of Ukraine, what Ulfelder has captured is the unique analytic role played by what has been termed “diminished subtypes.” According to David Collier and Steven Levitsky (1997), a diminished subtype appends and subtracts one or more criteria from some root concept, making it related to, but not quite a pure specification of, that concept. It is the root concept “with adjectives.” Their example is ‘illiberal democracy,’ which does not meet the minimal requirements of the root concept ‘democracy,’ and includes additional criteria and a smaller number of cases than the root concept democracy. Yet there is still important analytic utility to defining the concept in connection with democracy.

What happened in Ukraine might be classified not as a pure ‘coup,’ yet for Ulfelder, it is clearly close enough that recognizing it as ‘coup-ish’ in some way is analytically useful. Thus, we propose the diminished subtype ‘parliamentary coup.’

For this to hold, the diminished subtype ‘parliamentary coup’ must satisfy most, break at least one, and add at least one criterion to the existing definitional criteria for the root concept “coup.” To understand how this might be accomplished, it is useful to first re-state the three coup definitions used by Ulfelder – one each from the coding rules for the two datasets used to validate his coup forecasts, and one from Ulfelder’s own commentary on Ukraine – and identify where they are congruent and diverge. Following the example of Powell and Thyne, we break down the definitions into three components.

There is general agreement here on the target, chief executive, and some agreement on the tactic—it must be extra-legal and in some way forceful. There is disagreement on the perpetrator—whether it must be a state actor, or simply a political insider.

Another way of conceptualizing these definitions and their inter-relationships is that extra-legal seizure of the chief executive office operates as an overarching abstract concept. By specifying the perpetrator, we build the root concept ‘coup:’ an extra-legal seizure of the chief executive office by some state actor. When we adjust the specification of the perpetrator, we get our diminished subtype ‘parliamentary coup:’ an extra-legal seizure of the chief executive office by an unarmed political insider. The diminished subtype shares but also excludes some criteria of the root concept, and both fit comfortably under the over arching abstract concept, as illustrated in the figure below.

We included here the subtype ‘military coup’ to distinguish the conventional tactic of specification from the diminished subtype route. While the diminished subtype satisfies some but not all of the criteria of the root concept, the conventional subtype exists entirely within the root concept, and simply drops the level of generality by adding criteria and reducing the number of qualifying cases. Thus, while all military coups are coups, not all coups are military coups – and all parliamentary coups are not quite coups, but still coup-ish.

What does classifying our classification scheme buy us? The added value is more than semantic. How we choose to conceptualize, and being self-aware about those choices, can shape and affect how we analyze, how we model, and also how we forecast. As Giovanni Sartori observed (1970), “concept formation stands prior to quantification.” Here, we will demonstrate how using these different conceptualizations in a model, and taking on the analytic baggage that comes with each, affects not just the forecasts we make, but also the questions we ask about those forecasts.

An agent-based model makes for especially fertile ground for this type of introspective test, for two reasons. First, it is a causal model, which means that the individual chains of implications for each type of concept are available for interrogation. Second, the animating principle behind the agent-based modeling approach is complexity, which incorporates the overlapping chains of causation and nth order effects produced by thousands of individually specified interacting agents. This means that the ultimate effects of specifying a concept one way or another are truly unpredictable at the outset.

Here, we will test the forecasting implications of these alternative conceptualizations of a coup, using the Virtual Strategic Analysis and Forecasting Tool (V-SAFT). V-SAFT, which Lustick Consulting has developed with support from DARPA and ONR, includes a battery of agent-based models representing virtual countries available for interrogation, experimentation, and forecasting. Each model is comprised from (1) a landscape of individual agents heterogeneously characterized to reflect the particular social and political topology of the target country, (2) simple rules of interaction by which agents adopt, discard, and trade politically motivating identities, and (3) broader rules orienting swaths of the landscape toward or away from the political center of power (classified as levels, from ‘dominance’ at the center, to a position of radical opposition at the ‘non-system’ level).

Using our models for Thailand, Pakistan, and Egypt, and keeping with the examples posed above, we operationalized a coup in three ways.

Our forecast for each conceptualization of a coup, alongside Ulfelder’s original forecasts, appear in the figure below.

A first glance tells us that disaggregating the root concept ‘coup’ affects the rank ordering of likelihoods. With the parliamentary coup (diminished subtype) operationalization, the rankings produced by LC’s forecasts match Ulfelder’s. With the simple coup or military coup (subtype) operationalizations, however, Thailand drops in the rankings, behind Pakistan and then Egypt.

Where this kind of concept disaggregation buys us the most explanatory power is where we see forecast divergence. In Ulfelder’s forecast, we see the greatest disagreement between his two models on the forecast for Thailand, indicating a lower level of certainty for forecast accuracy. In LC’s forecasts, we also see the greatest disagreement in Thailand. In other words, how we operationalize and disaggregate the root concept ‘coup’ seems to have the greatest implications in Thailand, compared to Pakistan and Egypt – especially with regard to the diminished subtype. What are the implications in Thailand of such a jump in likelihood for a parliamentary coup, alongside a decrease in the likelihood for a military or traditional coup?

One of the more puzzling features of the Ukraine case’s coup-ish-ness is its normative implications. If the Ukrainian case is a ‘just coup,’ is that exceptional, or are all parliamentary coups ‘just?’ And would a different type of coup have been unjust? The figure below provides some insight. Here we see the likelihood of subversive anti-state violence—a dependent variable endogenously produced by V-SAFT models—disaggregated by coup type. While the presence of a coup significantly increases the likelihood of anti-state violence, the effect is generally greater for a traditional or military coup. The relationship between coup type and violence is more pronounced in the Thailand case, which is likely due to its larger sample size (as noted in the preceding figure, Thailand generated more parliamentary coups). So, while coups of any kind are rarely peaceful, the diminished subtype that we saw in Ukraine is generally associated with less popular violence. In this way, disaggregating our concept can at times help our analytical thinking inform our moral thinking.

By systematically exploiting theoretically differentiated ABM simulation models, forecasters and analysts can sharpen their self-awareness of concept choice, measure its implications, and ultimately improve the real utility of concept categories for policy makers. To further explore the forecasts produced by V-SAFT’s regular battery of country models (Egypt, Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Venezuela, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Kenya), please visit this page (registration required) on Lustick Consulting’s web site. For our publications on the application of agent-based modeling approaches to social science, please see this page (no registration required).

As you probably know if you read this blog, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have taken to the streets in frustration over the past week after President Viktor Yanukovich reversed course and decided not to sign an association agreement with the European Union. Meanwhile, thousands of Thais ostensibly aggravated by an amnesty bill that might have opened the door to former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s return have swarmed and occupied several government ministries and are now openly demanding that the army oust the current prime minister.

I’m not going to try to give accounts of these events, which are still growing and morphing, or their causes, which are multifaceted and inevitably ambiguous. Instead, I’d like to underscore what the protests in both countries show us again about how hard it is to convert popular action into political change.

Cheering on the rallies in Kiev earlier today, writer Anne Applebaum tweeted:

She’s right, of course. The problem for the tens of thousands in Ukraine’s and Thailand’s streets is that this is a very hard task. Political power is an amorphous thing, and inertia is its most prevalent form. “Levers of power” is just a metaphor, but that’s the point. The absence of something tangible for protesters to seize and push and wield makes it surprisingly difficult for them to convert their physical mass and emotional energy into the changes in rules and procedures and personnel they usually seek. Protesters can fill squares and topple statues and even swarm the buildings where laws are made, but the social practice of government does not allow them to pick up pen and paper and rewrite the rules while they’re there. When protesters try to do something like that, they are usually ignored or waited out or driven back with violence.

To convert their apparent power into significant political change, protesters usually have to find a way to convince some people on the inside to listen—to rewire the system on their behalf, or to invite their representatives into the control room. In Thailand, anti-government protesters are directing their appeals at military leaders, but so far those leaders aren’t heeding the call. In Ukraine, boxer-cum-presidential hopeful Vladimir Klitschko has called on President Yanukovich to resign, but so far Yanukovich isn’t budging.

Even when they seem to heed the crowd’s call, those insiders have an uncanny knack for bending the arc of politics back toward the status quo ante. In Egypt in 2011, protesters got the military to force Hosni Mubarak from office after decades in power, but the military-led transition that ensued has somehow landed that process not far from where it started.

I don’t mean to be a downer—to suggest that protesters are powerless, or that we can or should measure the value of activism solely by the change it immediately does or does not produce. In a way, you could read this reminder as a backhanded compliment to the activists who do manage to produce significant and durable change. As Frederick Douglass famously suggested, mass activism may not be sufficient to produce institutional change, but it is almost always necessary.

It’s also not clear that the effervescence of protest power is inherently a bad thing. In the case of Thailand, people who value democracy should probably be cheering the failure of a reactionary, elitist movement that’s trying to topple an elected and still reasonably popular government. While Yanukovich’s democratic credentials are shakier, I’m sure there are many Ukrainians who feel the same way about any effort to force their president from office before his term expires. Maybe this tendency toward inertia in politics is the inevitable output of the contraptions we build and task with reconciling our heterogeneous desires for progress and our shared fear of disorder.