All posts tagged Barbara Geddes

A Case Study in the Limits of Generalization in Comparative Politics

If you’re here because you’re interested in comparative politics, you ought to go chug yesterday’s rich post on Nate Jensen’s blog about what legislatures in authoritarian regimes do and then chase it with Tom Pepinsky’s addendum on his own Indolaysia blog. Nate solicited thoughts on this topic from some of the best minds in the field, including Tom, and you can learn a lot in just a few minutes of reading.

What struck me in reading those posts was the sharp tension in comparative politics between the general and the specific. Nate’s question has been a focal point for comparativists for nearly a decade now, and the arc of that inquiry it has inspired should be familiar to anyone who works in this field.

A particular case or new line of deductive theorizing suggests an intriguing puzzle.
Some solutions to that puzzle are tabled in the form of broad conjectures.
Patterns are found in cross-national data that seem to confirm those conjectures. (Note, though, that the preceding two steps do not necessarily occur in that order).
The field buzzes with the promise of a new covering law, the Holy Grail of political science. Conference panels abound.
People with expertise in specific cases start to nibble at that law, identifying permutations or exceptions in the parts of the world they know. By the time they’re done, there’s practically nothing left.
Distracted by the next big puzzle, the field fails to notice what just happened.
The policy community discovers the covering law and incorporates a few of its prescriptive implications (“Consociationalism good! Presidential systems bad!”) into current practice.

Okay, so those last two may be a little mean spirited, but you get the idea: there’s some meta-irony here. The quest for covering laws keeps serving up failures, but the quest itself ends up following a recurring pattern.

On the specifics of how institutions shape politics, I think Nate’s virtual round-table also provides a nice reminder of the limits of functionalist theories of institutionalism. Functionalist theories see institutions as intelligently designed solutions to specific political and economic problems. For any formal political institution, we should be able to work backwards from the fact of the institution’s existence to the problem it was intended to solve and then show in practice how the institution’s origins support that line of reasoning. Voilà.

The problem is the disconnect between the assumed version and the reality of how institutional arrangements come into being. In some cases, historical institutionalists have mustered compelling evidence to show how the original institutional innovation was deliberately and successfully designed to solve a specific problem in a specific case. Most of the time, though, the backstory on how a particular institution actually came to exist in any instance chosen at random looks rather different from that first instantiation. And when a functionalist theory gets the “how” part wrong, it’s going to get the “why” part wrong, too.

Scott Desposato’s contribution to Nate’s post on legislatures in authoritarian regimes provides a nice case in point: Brazil. That country’s 20-year, military-led authoritarian interlude didn’t proactively decide to create a legislature as a way to credibly commit to the protection of its subject’s property rights or to craftily divide its opponents. Instead, it inherited an elected legislature from the democratic regime it toppled, which inherited its basic contours from the colonial metropole that built it. If the Brazilian junta can be said to have made a choice here, it was the decision not to demolish an extant legislature, but that choice surely had as much to do with inertia and the expected costs of such a destructive act as it did with the anticipated benefits of keeping an elected legislature around.

These path dependencies are less problematic for softer versions of institutionalist theory that emphasize the marginal and contingent effects of specific institutions under a variety of conditions, as I think Jennifer Gandhi does in her award-winning book on political institutions under dictatorship.

Even there, though, the layers of contingency pile up pretty quickly. Institutions that seem to function a certain way in a certain set of cases for a certain period of time start to do different things or simply become less relevant as the economic, social, and technological context changes around them, and as wily humans looking for an edge keep innovating. For example, in an era of ubiquitous and instant communication, the information-gathering and opposition-moderating functions that authoritarian legislatures are sometimes said to serve may now be satisfied in other ways, as Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Molly Roberts suggest in a widely-cited paper on the selective censorship of China’s Sina Weibo social-media platform.

So where does that leave us? I think the opening line of Barbara Geddes’ contribution to Nate’s blog post sums it up nicely:

Autocratic legislatures play different roles and serve different functions in different dictatorships.

In other words, “It depends” is about as close to a covering law as we’re going to get.

The Libyan Surprise

Libya doesn’t have a democratic government yet, but after yesterday’s elections, it’s awfully close. As Juan Cole summarizes, turnout for the national vote was good, violence was scarce, and voters were ebullient. If the national assembly these elections were choosing manages to convene and to appoint a government, Libya will have crossed the threshold to electoral democracy for the first time in its history.

According to prevailing theories of democratization, this wasn’t supposed to happen. Libya is an oil-rich country with no democratic experience in a part of the world where democratic development has lagged badly. Because of its oil, Libya is not poor, but decades of punitive rule by the Gaddafi regime left the country without the kind of organized “civil society” often cast as the workhorses of democratization. Theories of authoritarian breakdown predicted correctly that Gaddafi’s personalistic regime would end with a bang, but they also told us that democracy was unlikely to follow. Contrary to theories that see European and American democracy-promotion schemes as crucial catalysts of reform, democratization is occurring in Libya with virtually no outside prodding. Foreign forces helped tip the revolution against Gaddafi, and the U.N. has provided important technical assistance for the elections, but the impetus to the transition has really been domestic. Reflecting many of these conventional views, a statistical model I built to forecast when countries with authoritarian regimes would cross this threshold pegged Libya’s prospects for a transition in 2012 pretty close to zero.

Libya is also unusual in that it isn’t really a state right now, at least not a functional one. The National Transitional Council (NTC) that is supposed to step aside when the new assembly appoints a government is recognized internationally as Libya’s sovereign authority, but its domestic recognition is much weaker. By my reckoning, the Libyan state collapsed in 2011, and the NTC’s bumbling rule hasn’t reversed that process. I can’t think of another modern case where national elections were held successfully in a country that was as politically fragmented as Libya is today. The NTC is the nominal national government, but the country is largely being run by a melange of city and neighborhood councils and the revolutionary militias that midwifed their birth.

What the faithful might call a miracle, statisticians would call an outlier. Whatever tag we apply, this is clearly a happy surprise.

I don’t have much to say (yet) about why this surprise has happened. I will say that grand theories of democratization have failed plenty of times before, and efforts to construct new mid-range theories probably ought to wait a few more years for new patterns to cohere—not just in the Middle East and North Africa, but also in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia—before attempting to assert any new patterns with confidence.

Of course, even a successful transition would not put Libya on a glide path to a democratic future. As I discussed on this blog last year, most first attempts at democracy fail, usually within a decade of their start. At this early stage, there’s no reason to assume that Libya will also buck the trend on this side of the imaginary wall.

It might, though, and the fact that this possibility even exists is a welcome and delightful surprise—for the world, yes, but for Libyans most of all.