Dictators

In my corner of Twitter, I recently became obliquely aware of a kerfuffle about Michael Bloomberg saying that “Xi Jinping is not a dictator”. (Twitter is funny that way: sometimes all you get is a trace of some public person’s comment as reflected in memes or snark, and it takes some effort to find the original motivation for the jokes. It’s like a cloud chamber for political events). Not that this blog has any interest in current affairs, but I thought I actually had something to say about the question of the terms we use to talk about non-democracy, and I haven’t written here in a while.

At one level, this is an entirely unimportant and uninteresting controversy. The term “dictator”, like all political terms, can obviously be used as a weapon in the endless skirmishes for positional advantage in American politics and culture; and failure to label Xi Jinping as a “dictator” is easily equated with support for the crackdown in Hong Kong and repression in Tibet, Xinjiang, and elsewhere in China.

Similar controversies often arose when Chávez was alive (was he a dictator?), and still do occasionally with other people as well (is Orbán a dictator? Putin? Erdoğan?). They all have a similar structure: the person denying “dictatorship” status focuses on some attribute of the leader in question that seems incompatible with a standard “image” of dictatorship – e.g., the lack of violence against particular people, free election to the post of president or term limits, formal or informal accountability to selected constituencies, popularity – while those arguing for dictatorship tend to focus on the non-democratic aspects of the system over which the leader presides (lack of freedoms, use of violence, lack of formal accountability to other constituencies, life tenure). Though these disputes are ostensibly about correct descriptions – is this person a dictator or not? – their (usually obvious) point is coalitional – does the person making the descriptive claim belong in this or that group? (Unsurprisingly, Chinese leaders themselves prefer not to be called dictators, despite the fact that the Preamble of the Constitution of the People’s Republic still straightforwardly endorses the “people’s democratic dictatorship”).

This is unavoidable and to be expected; ostensibly descriptive terms have always been used in cultural and political struggles to increase or decrease the status of people and places, and their meaning is therefore “essentially contested.” Moreover, because they have long histories of use in these struggles, all such terms become sedimented with multiple valences that are impossible to “bracket off”. When we talk about “democracy” or “dictatorship” we invoke a plenitude of historically accumulated meanings and values that cannot simply be wished away by appeal to the dictionary. Yet alongside the political use of these words there is also an analytic use. (I’m a Weberian; I still see a distinction between Wissenschaft and politics, so sue me). From this point of view, the proper analytical use of a term like “dictatorship” should be informed by its historical roots, which in turn point the way to certain core ideas, but cannot be identical with its current usage in political struggles.

The history of the word “dictatorship” is probably familiar to readers of this blog; indeed, I sketched it here a long time ago, and then wrote about it at more length in chapter 2 of my book. The name of an ancient Roman republican magistracy, a person temporarily entrusted by the Senate to “save the republic” in emergency situations without being encumbered by procedural niceties, it already had a bad odour by the time of Sulla. These connotations were further cemented by Caesar’s assumption of the office in perpetuum, but none of this mattered for a very long time, as dictatorship was associated with republics, and republican forms of government basically ceased to exist for many centuries afterwards in the West. (The word for a bad ruler in non-republican contexts was tyrant or despot, not dictator; as Hobbes caustically put it, tyranny was “monarchy misliked”).

Accordingly, “dictatorship” came again into common usage in English and other European languages the mid-19th century, and more clearly at the beginning of the 20th century, when “democracy” (republics with universal suffrage) became more fully established; dictatorship is the pathology of republics, not of monarchy. And initially at least users of the word harked back to its “positive” or neutral sense; José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia in Paraguay even declared himself “perpetual dictator” in 1816. Dictatorship is also associated with the invention of terms like “Caesarism” in the 19th century to describe regimes like those of Napoleon III or Bismarck, which combined appeals to “popular” legitimation, republican forms, and authoritarian features; these were the first people in a long time that could be described as “dictators” in European politics, and writers looked back to the analogy with Caesar to think about them.

When Marx and Engels appropriated and positively valorized the idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (a term coined by Marx’s associate Joseph Weydemeyer), which they contrasted with the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”, they thus had already a rich cluster of meanings to draw on. There is the idea that dictatorship is rule without regard for law or traditional norms in special situations; that dictatorship is associated with republican forms, and can be extended, even “perpetual”, yet is not an inheritable office; and the idea that dictatorship (unlike tyranny) need not be, as a matter of definition, used for ill. To this I would say that they added the idea that dictatorship could be a system, not just an individual office, and the “dictator” could be a party or a class.

I’m guessing that this last conceptual addition made it possible for political scientists to use the term “dictatorship” to talk about all forms non-democracy – that is, to set up the modern opposition between democracy and dictatorship. In the age of democracy, even divine-right monarchy could be understood as a form of dictatorship, despite the conceptual opposition in classical political thought between these terms. But this came at a cost, insofar as the rich variety of non-democratic political forms became associated with the pre-existing connotations of the term “dictatorship.”

I think this is a bit unfortunate, not only because of the gap this opened between scholarly and popular uses of the term “dictator” (many people think of a “dictator” as the name for one particular kind of non-democratic ruler, not as a generic term for all such rulers) but also because it hides a number of important conceptual distinctions within non-democratic systems. (As you may have noted, I prefer the very general term “non-democracy” to talk about what many scholars call simply “dictatorships”).

In particular, we can distinguish, roughly, between how authoritarian control over society is (that is, how much of social life is patterned and directed by centralized uses of state power), and how much is the authority of a top leader divorced from control by norms, laws, or other elites more generally; and it is the latter dimension that many people tend to focus on when they talk about dictatorship. Implicit in Bloomberg’s comments, for example, is the idea of the dictator as the unaccountable or unbound leader; and having taught a course on dictatorships for many years I can testify that many of my students come in with the same idea. (I talk about this in my book at more length - this is just the capsule version).

These two “dimensions” of non-democracy often go together, but they can also be decoupled. Consider a place like Vietnam today (where I just visited, so it’s on my mind). A one-party state, most of my readers would be unlikely to call it a democracy, despite the fact that its constitution asserts the principle of democracy, Vietnamese media has been significantly liberalized since the early 2000s, and there’s even some competition in elections to the legislature and within the VCP – certainly more so than in China, and potentially with implications for economic and other outcomes. After all, this is still a country that tightly restricts competition for state power and where independent political organization is not allowed; it is authoritarian in the sense that a great number of activities – especially those connected with the competition for state power – are tightly restricted by the state.

Yet it would be difficult to name a single leader as the “dictator” of Vietnam; specialists in the politics of Vietnam talk instead about a “troika” (the General Secretary of the Communist Party, the President, and the Prime Minister) of mutually accountable and similarly powerful figures, all of whom are ultimately answerable to the Central Committee of the party, which has not been a rubber-stamp body since probably the death of Le Duan. While one could bite the bullet and say that Nguyen Phu Trong, the current General Secretary of the VCP, is Vietnam’s dictator, since Vietnam is a “dictatorship” (= “a non-democratic regime”) and he is by common consent the most powerful figure in the regime, this would sound a bit weird. Better, in my view, to say that Vietnam has an authoritarian regime where the leadership is more or less constrained by formal and informal rules, and so there’s no single “dictator”.

In this framework, what you get is a two-dimensional space where non-democratic regimes vary along the two dimensions of social control or “authoritarianism” and elite accountability or “personalism” (or “dictatorship”). In theory, you could have regimes where social control is fairly extreme (on the “totalitarian” side of the spectrum) but top leaders are tightly constrained by norms of collective leadership, for example, and vice-versa. We can even use data to get a rough picture of these regimes. Using a measure of “personalism” in non-democratic regimes from the latest book by Geddes, Wright, and Frantz (How Dictatorships Work, about which more in a later post perhaps) and a measure of civil society control from the Varieties of Democracy dataset we can get this picture (this is interactive, hover over a dot to see the name of the leader):



Now, this is a purely illustrative picture. I don’t have space to delve into the construction or quality of this data, and I certainly don’t believe all of it. Moreover, the “personalism” data only goes to 2010, so it does not allow us to see what Xi Jinping would look like here. The numbers do not have a real scale either - they represent an arbitrary index. But it does show that there is a lot of variation along these dimensions. Consider China:

According to this measure, the peak of “dictatorship” in China (Mao in the 1960s) is during the Cultural Revolution, which is also the peak of social control. But Mao did not always have this degree of power; earlier he was more of a first among equals, and as the cultural revolution dragged on he also lost prestige, though social control remained high throughout his tenure. In the 1990s, Deng and Hu represent lower levels of personal power – collective leadership eventually became more established at this time – as well as an opening of social control.

The graph's four quadrants represent four distinctive patterns. The “dictators” – leaders with high personal power, unbound by norms, institutions, or the elite – are at the top of the graph. These are the people we might expect: Trujillo, Mobutu, Qaddafi, Franco, the Duvaliers, the Kims, etc. Their regimes take their name from them; they are “dictatorships” in the sense that they can be identified with their dictator. But in some cases (e.g., Compaoré in Burkina Fasso, Kérékou in Benin, Eyadéma in Togo) they did not manage to get the state to exercise much social control (at least by this measure! results may vary on other measures!). Or consider Venezuela, which Geddes, Wright, and Frantz code as a non-democracy from 2006:



Here Chávez appears as a ruler with high personal power, more so than the military dictator Pérez Jiménez, who was constrained by a military Junta. But control over civil society was not extraordinarily high during his tenure, unlike during the military regime (note Pérez Jiménez was overthrown in 1958 - hence that “low social control” point in 1958, since V-Dem data is coded at the end of the year).

At the bottom of the graph, by contrast, we have non-democratic regimes that are not defined by their occupants, because their rulers are much more tightly constrained by norms, institutions, or other elites. In the lower-right corner, in particular, we have regimes that are sometimes confused with democracies. These are places like Taiwan in the early 1990s, or Mexico in the 1980s and 90s (where the President was term limited and constrained by the PRI, other parties existed and were able to organize and compete in elections). Some of these regimes engaged in targeted repression, but it would be a bit weird to say that Zedillo, for example, was the “dictator” of Mexico – though Mexico at the time was authoritarian (even if only in the mild “competitive authoritarian” sense coined by Levitsky and Way).



There is an interesting question here about how leaders come to have personal power – i.e., how they become full-fledged “dictators” in the popular sense of the term. This is a question that Geddes, Wright, and Frantz explore in their book in some detail, and about which I hope to say more later. For now, however, note only that a leader who is unbound by legal or traditional constraints either has what Weber called “charismatic” authority (e.g., Mao in the mid-1960s), or the kind of control over resources that allows them to bypass such legal and normative constraints (e.g., Mobutu in his later years). But that's a story for another post.

Propaganda as Literature: A Distant Reading of the Korean Central News Agency's Headlines

A rather long post on reading the Korean Central News Agency's headlines I am not putting directly on this blog because it contains interactive graphs that I cannot figure out how to embed, but look nice on GitHub. North Korean politics plus lots of data art, including baroque Sankey flow diagrams!

See it here.

New Book: Non-Democratic Politics

My new book, Non-Democratic Politics: Authoritarianism, Dictatorship, and Democratization has been out for a few weeks (Palgrave, Amazon). For the usual vaguely superstitious reasons, I did not want to make an announcement until I had a copy in my hands, but now I do. Just in time for the holidays!

I confess that I feel a bit ambivalent about the book’s publication. On the one hand, I’m of course glad the book is finally out in the wild; it’s been a long process, and it’s great to be able to touch and see the physical result of my work, and to know that at least some other people will read it. (Much better scholars of authoritarian politics than me also said some nice things about it in the back cover, which is extremely gratifying). Moreover, if you have followed this blog, you will find that some material in the book elaborates and supports many things I have said here more informally (on cults of personality, propaganda, robust action in the Franco regime, the history of political regimes, the Saudi monarchy, etc.); one reason I wrote the book was to be able to put together in a reasonably coherent way my thoughts on these subjects, and I felt encouraged enough by some of the reaction to my writing here to think that I had something to say. (Without this blog, this book probably would not exist; thank you readers!) And since I teach this material here at Vic, the result should be useful as a textbook. (If you teach classes on non-democratic politics do consider the book for use in your course!).

But I also feel that the book should be seen as “version 0.1” of what I really wanted to do. There was more that I wanted to write, and there are things I already want to add or revise (partly in response to current events, partly in response to learning new things), though I will only be able to do this if Palgrave decides there’s enough demand for a second edition. If I had more contractual leeway (and academic clout) I would put the whole thing in my Github repository and make it into an evolving work, adding or deleting material over time as I learn more, or correcting errors as they are brought to my attention, and releasing new versions every so often. But I don’t have that kind of leeway or clout yet (perhaps in the future – we’ll see); and traditional publication still offers some advantages (including dedicated peer review, from which I benefited a lot. Thank you, anonymous reviewers, whoever you are, for helping me improve this book).

In lieu of putting the entire work online, however, I have created a website where all the charts and data in the book are available, and where I can give free rein to my love of ggplot2 graphs and data art. The site (https://xmarquez.github.io/AuthoritarianismBook/) contains replication code for all the figures and tables in the book, natural-language explanations of the code, and full documentation for all the datasets, and is to boot available for download as a single R package. It also contains some extensions of the figures in the book, including huge vertical graphs of the kind that sometimes appear in this blog but could never fit in a normal book. My hope is that people can use this package (and the associated website) to easily do their own exploratory data analysis on the topic. I have tried to make it as user-friendly as possible for people with little experience using R; and I intend to update it regularly and add new features and corrections. Check it out![1]

The hardcover is unfortunately priced (I don’t recommend you buy it, unless you’re an academic library), and I think even the paperback should be cheaper, but I don’t make those decisions. Nevertheless, if you have enjoyed this blog in the past, and would like to see how many of the aspects of non-democratic politics I have discussed here fit together, or you simply wish to learn more about non-democratic politics, consider buying it!

Normal service on this blog will resume shortly.

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1. There will also be some further narrative material available at a different website, including extended discussions of a few cases, but I’m way behind on producing these narratives. ↩

Artisanal Democracy Data: A Quick and Easy Way of Extending the Unified Democracy Scores

(Apologies for the lack of posting - I've been finishing some big projects. This is of interest primarily to people who care about quantitative measures of democracy in the 19th century, or for some unknown reason enjoy creating latent variable indexes of democracy. Contains a very small amount of code, and references to more.)

If you have followed the graph-heavy posts in this blog, you may have noticed that I really like the Unified Democracy Scores developed by Daniel Pemstein, Stephen Meserve, and James Melton. The basic idea behind this particular measure of democracy, as they explain in their 2010 article, is as follows. Social scientists have developed a wealth of measures of democracy (some large-scale projects like the Polity dataset or the Freedom in the World index, some small “boutique” efforts by political scientists for a particular research project). Though these measures are typically highly correlated (usually in the 0.8-0.9 range), they still differ significantly for some countries and years. These differences are both conceptual (researchers disagree about the essential characteristics of democracy) and empirical (researchers disagree about whether a given country-year is democratic according to a particular definition).

PMM argue that we can assume that these measures are all getting at a latent trait that is only imperfectly observed and conceptualized by the compilers of all the datasets purporting to measure democracy, and that we can estimate this trait using techniques from item response theory that were originally developed to evaluate the performance of multiple graders in academic settings. They then proceeded to do just that, producing a dataset that not only contains latent variable estimates of democracy for 9850 country-years (200 unique countries), but also estimates of the measurement error associated with these scores (derived from the patterns of disagreement between different democracy measures).

This, to be honest, is one of the main attractions of the UDS for me: I get nervous when I see a measure of democracy that does not have a confidence interval around it, given the empirical and conceptual difficulties involved in producing numerical estimates of a woolly concept like “democracy.” Nevertheless, the UDS had some limitations: for one thing, they only went back to 1946, even though many existing measures of democracy contain information for earlier periods, and PMM never made use of all the publicly available measures of democracy in their construction of the scores, which meant that the standard errors around them were relatively large. (The original UDS used 10 different democracy measures for its construction; the current release uses 12, but I count more than 25).

Moreover, the UDS haven’t been updated since 2014 (and then only to 2012), and PMM seem to have moved on from the project. Pemstein, for example, is now involved with measurement at the V-Dem institute, whose “Varieties of Democracy” dataset promises to be the gold standard for democracy measurement, so I’m guessing the UDS will not receive many more updates, if any. (If you are engaged in serious empirical research on democracy, you should probably be using the V-dem dataset anyway. Seriously, it’s amazing - I may write a post about it later this year). And though in principle one could use PMM's procedure to update these scores, and they even made available an (undocumented) replication package in 2013, I was never able to make their software work properly, and their Bayesian algorithms for estimating the latent trait seemed anyway too computationally intensive for my time and budget.

I think this situation is a pity. For my own purposes – which have to do mostly with the history of political regimes for my current project – I’d like a summary measure of democracy that aggregates both empirical and conceptual uncertainty in a principled way for a very large number of countries, just like I believe the UDS did. But I also would like a measure that goes back as far as possible in time, and is easily updated when new information arises (e.g., there are new releases of Freedom House or Polity). The new V-dem indexes are great on some of these counts (they come with confidence intervals) but not on others (they only cover 2014-1900, they are missing some countries, and the full dataset is a bit unwieldy – too many choices distract me). Other datasets – the trusty Polity dataset, the new and excellent LIED index – do go back to the 19th century, but they provide no estimates of measurement error, and they make specific choices about conceptualization that I do not always agree with.

But why wait for others to create my preferred measure when I can do it myself? So I went ahead and figured out how to first replicate the Unified Democracy scores without using a computationally intensive Bayesian algorithm, and then extended them both forwards to 2015 and backwards to the 19th century (in some cases to the 18th century), using information from 28 different measures of democracy (some of them rather obscure, some just new, like the LIED index or the latest version of the Freedom House data). And I created an R package to let you do the same, should you wish to fiddle with the details of the scores or create your own version of the UDS using different source measures. (Democratizing democracy indexes since 2016!).

The gory details are all in this paper, which explains how to replicate and extend the scores, and contains plenty of diagnostic pictures of the result; but if you only want to see the code to produce the extended UDS scores check out the package vignette here. If you are an R user, you can easily install the package and its documentation by typing (assuming you have devtools installed, and that I’ve done everything correctly on my side):

devtools::install_github(repo = "xmarquez/QuickUDS")

The package includes both my “extended” UD scores (fully documented and covering 24111 country-years going all the way to the 18th century in some cases, for 224 sovereign countries and some non-sovereign territories) and a replication dataset which includes 61 different measures of democracy from 29 different measurement efforts covering a total of 24149 country-years (also fully documented). (Even if you are not interested in the UDS, original or extended, you may be interested in that dataset of democracy scores). For those poor benighted souls who use Stata or (God fobid) some awful thing like SPSS (kidding!), you can access a CSV version of the package datasets and a PDF version of their documentation here.

To be sure, for most research projects you probably don’t need this extended Unified Democracy measure. After all, most useful variables in your typical democracy regression are unmeasured or unavailable before the 1950s for most countries, and if your work only requires going back to the 1900s, you are better off with the new V-dem data, rather than this artisanal version of the UDS. But the extended UDS is nice for some things, I think.

First, quantitative history (what I wanted the extended UDS for). For example, consider the problem of measuring democracy in the USA over the entirety of the last two centuries. Existing democracy measures disagree about when the USA first became fully democratic, primarily because they disagree about how much to weigh formal restrictions on women’s suffrage and the formal and informal disenfranchisement of African Americans in their conceptualization. Some measures give the USA the highest possible score early in the 19th century, others after the civil war, others only after 1920, with the introduction of women’s suffrage, and yet others (e.g. LIED) not until 1965, after the Civil Rights Movement. With the extended UDS these differences do not matter very much: as consensus among the different datasets increases, so does the measured US level of democracy:


In the figure above, I use a transformed version of the extended UDS scores whose midpoint is the “consensus” estimate of the cutoff between democracy and non-democracy among minimalist, dichotomous measures in the latent variable scale. (For details, see my paper; the grey areas represent 95% confidence intervals). This version can be interpreted as a probability scale: “1” means the country-year is almost certainly a democracy, “0” means it is almost certainly not a democracy, and “0.5” that it could be either. (Or we could arbitrarily decide that 0-0.33 means the country is likely an autocracy of whatever kind, 0.33-0.66 that it is likely some kind of hybrid regime, and 0.66-1 that is pretty much a democracy, at least by current scholarly standards).

In any case, the extended UDS shows an increase in the USA’s level of democracy in the 1820s (the “Age of Jackson”), the 1870s (after the civil war), the 1920s after female enfranchisement, and a gradual increase in the 1960s after the Civil Rights movement, though the magnitude of each increase (and of the standard error of the resulting score) depends on exactly which measures are used to construct the index. (The spike in the 2000s is an artifact of measurement, having more to do with the fact that lots of datasets end around that time than with any genuine but temporary increase in the USA’s democracy score). Some of these changes would be visible in other datasets, but no other measure would show them all; if you use Polity, for example, you would see a perfect score for the USA since 1871.

Just because what use is this blog if I cannot have a huge vertical visualization, here are ALL THE DEMOCRACY SCORES, alphabetically by country:

(Grey shaded areas represent 95% confidence intervals; blue shaded areas are periods where the country is either deemed to be a member of the system of states in the Gleditsch and Ward list of state system membership since 1816, i.e., independent, or is a microstate in Gleditsch’s tentative list).


A couple of things to note. First, scores are calculated for some countries for periods when they are not generally considered to be independent; this is because some of the underlying data used to produce them (e.g., the V-Dem dataset) produce measures of democracy for existing states when they were under imperial governance (see, e.g., the graphs for India or South Korea).

Second, confidence intervals vary quite a bit, primarily due to the number of measures of democracy available for particular country-years and the degree of their agreement. For some country-years they are so large (because too few datasets bother to produce a measure for a period, or the ones that do disagree radically) that the extended UD score is meaningless, but for most country-years (as I explain in my paper) the standard error of the scores is actually much smaller than the standard error of the “official” UDS, making the measure more useful for empirical research.

Finally, maybe this is just me, but in general the scores tend to capture my intuitions about movements in democracy levels well (which is unsurprising, since they are based on all existing scholarly measures of democracy); see the graphs for Chile or Venezuela, for example. And using these scores we can get a better sense of the magnitude of the historical shifts towards democracy in the last two centuries.

For example, according to the extended UDS (and ignoring measurement uncertainty, just because this is a blog), a good 50% of the world’s population today lives in countries that can be considered basically democratic, but only around 10% live in countries with the highest scores (0.8 and above):

And Huntington’s three waves of democratization are clearly visible in the data (again ignoring measurement uncertainty):


But suppose you are not into quantitative history. There are still a couple of use cases where long-run, quantitative data about democracy with estimates of measurement error is likely to be useful. Consider, for example, the question of the democratic peace, or of the relationship between economic development and democracy – two questions that benefit from very long-run measures of democracy, especially measures that can be easily updated, like this one.

I may write more about this later, but here is an example about a couple of minor things this extended democracy measure might tell us about the basic stylized fact of the “democratic peace.” Using the revised list of interstate wars by Gleditsch, we can create a scatterplot of the mean extended UD score of each side in an interstate war, and calculate the 2-d density distribution of these scores while accounting for their measurement error:

The x- coordinate of each point is the mean extended UD score (in the 0-1 probability scale where 0.5 is the average cutoff between democracy and non-democracy among the most minimalistic measures) of side A in a war listed by Gleditsch; the y-coordinate is the mean extended UD score of side B; each blue square is the 95% “confidence rectangle” around these measures; the shaded blobs are the 2-d probability densities, accounting for measurement error in the scores.

As we can see, the basic stylized fact of a dyadic democratic peace is plausible enough, at least for countries which have a high probability of being democratic. In particular, countries whose mean extended UD democracy score is over 0.8 (in the transformed 0-1 scale) have not fought one another, even after accounting for measurement error. (Though they have fought plenty of wars with other countries, as the plot indicates). But note that the dyadic democratic peace only holds perfectly if we set the cutoff for “being a democracy” quite high (0.8 is in the top 10% of country-years in this large sample; few countries have ever been that democratic); as we go down to the 0.5 cutoff, exceptions accumulate (I’ve labeled some of them).

Anyway, I could go on; if you are interested in this “artisanal” democracy dataset (or in creating your own version of these scores), take a look at the paper, and use the package – and let me know if it works!

(Update 3/25/2016 - some small edits for clarity).

(Update 3/28 - fixed code error).

(Update 3/30 - re-released the code, and updated the graphs, to fix one small mistake with the replication data for the bnr variable).

(Code for this post is available here. Some of it depends on a package I’ve created but not shared yet, so you may not be able to replicate it all.)

The Saudi Monarchy as a Family Firm

(I normally don’t write on current events, since I’m not a specialist in the politics of any country, but I had just finished Michael Herb’s excellent 1999 book All in the Family: Absolutism, Revolution, And Democracy in the Middle Eastern Monarchies when I heard the news that the Saudi King had died. Since I think Herb's thesis about the resilience of Arab monarchies in a world that is basically hostile to non-democratic norms makes a great deal of sense, I thought I’d add my 2 cents.)

Observers of politics have historically applied the term “monarchy” to a variety of superficially similar but sociologically quite distinct regimes: the Roman empire, the Carolingian kingdoms, the Romanov autocracy, the Kuwaiti emirate, the British monarchy. To the extent that there are interesting similarities accross these disparate cases, they have to do with the existence of recognized norms for selecting effective rulers only from a specific lineage (what the Polity coders call an “ascriptive” selection process, or more informally, selection by birthright). Ascriptive selection processes are typically connected both with certain understandings of the basis of authority (e.g., the king should rule because he is the Custodian of Mecca and Medina, not because he represents the people) and an exalted status for the effective ruler; the titles “King” or “Queen” and their various equivalents – Prince, Sultan, Emir, Emperor, Caesar, Shah, etc. – are first and foremost markers of status, elevating the person of the monarch above the common run of people and entitling them to visible honours not available to anyone else in society. The combination of an ascriptive norm of selection to offices with effective political power (rather than purely ceremonial positions) and a particular set of person-centered rituals and symbols defines monarchy, though it does not explain how monarchies survive.

Indeed, given the magnitude of the shift towards democratic norms of justification over the last two centuries, the survival of monarchies presents a bit of a puzzle. Though ascriptively-selected rulers were extremely common before the 19th century, nowadays the number of national states with effective monarchies is tiny; the Polity dataset identifies only 11 countries (Bahrain, Bhutan, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman, North Korea, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Swaziland, and the United Arab Emirates) where there is a norm of selecting members of a particular family for the top executive offices, and you might notice that one of them is not normally thought to be a monarchy but a totalitarian regime. (The data excludes countries with less than 500,000 population; including microstates might add Tonga, Brunei, Monaco, and Lesotho to the list, among others.) In six of these (Bhutan, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Swaziland, and the United Arab Emirates) powerful monarchs nevertheless share some power with other institutions, such as elected parliaments (in the Polity jargon, these regimes have “dual” executives, combining ascriptive and non-ascriptive selection processes). Moreover, once discredited, ascriptive selection processes have proven difficult to resurrect explicitly, even if we broaden our view to consider cases where ostensibly “republican” leaders have tried to ensure that control over the state passes to their sons or other family members after their death or retirement, as Mubarak tried to do in Egypt and Gaddafi tried to do in Libya. There are few “transitions to monarchy” in the 20th century, and the few I can find were quite short-lived. Though many highly personalistic regimes have shown a tendency to turn into family enterprises, they seem to have had mixed success beyond the second generation when recognized selection norms remain “republican” (consider, e.g., the failure of the Duvalier or Trujillo “dynasties” in Haiti and the Dominican republic); North Korea is exceptional in combining ostensibly republican justifications of rule with a successful ascriptive transfer of power to the third generation. We could look at these stylized facts and conclude that the remaining monarchies are mere traditional survivals, doomed to extinction once they run out of oil rents or superpower patronage (a view associated with Huntington, I believe). Or we could conclude instead that the remaining monarchies are precisely the most resilient examples of a once common political form; whatever the Saudi monarchy is doing, for example, it has served it well for over 70 years.

Herb argues that monarchies that have survived to the end of the 20th century (the book was published in 1999) are in fact distinctive in ways that make them very resilient. In particular, most of these are what he calls “dynastic” monarchies rather than “personal” monarchies. (Some people suggest that surviving monarchies in Jordan and Morocco do not fit neatly in either side of this dichotomy, but we’ll ignore these subtleties for the moment since the Saudi monarchy, at least, is the paradigmatic example of a dynastic monarchy). A dynastic monarchy can be compared to a family firm, with the family business being the corporate control of the state (and the enjoyment of its oil rents, in the Saudi case), the king as the family CEO, the senior male relatives as the key executives and company board, and most of the remaining family members as shareholders and lower-level employees. By contrast, in other monarchies the royal family does not play much role in governance or even in sharing the spoils of power; the king rules either in alliance with independent power holders (Barons in medieval Europe, powerful politicians in modern times) or as personal dictators who have managed to keep all potential challengers directly dependent on him through their individual political skills.

The Saudi monarchy fits the dynastic model quite well. Senior members of the family monopolize all important state positions, such as the defence, interior, and foreign ministries, and they play a role in determining the king’s successor. (Since 2007 there is even a formal institution, the “Allegiance Council,” staffed entirely by senior princes, that is supposed to select and confirm a new king and crown prince). Like a responsible company board, the senior princes have on occasion deposed rulers deemed to be irresponsible, and bypassed unsuitable candidates for the succession. For example, they briefly eased King Saud bin Abdulaziz from governance after he blundered with an ill-conceived plot to kill the immensely popular President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt in 1958, and then more permanently in 1964, when they formally deposed him in favor of King Faysal; and the family chose not to make Muhammad bin Abdulaziz king in 1964 1975, despite the fact that he was the most senior of the surviving sons of Ibn Saud, probably due to general agreement within the family that his temper and drinking habits made him a bad candidate, according to Herb.

Moreover, because the family is so large – Yamani quotes an estimate of 22,000 royals in 2009; polygamy plus time produces lots of male-line descendants (Ibn Saud had 43 sons by many wives, who in turn produced many sons of their own) – it can control not only the “ministries of sovereingty,” but place its members throughout the state apparatus, and in particular the armed forces, where they serve to deter coups. In fact, the extended royal family serves as a parallel information-gathering mechanism through the practice of “audiences” with royals, which it uses to both understand what the population is thinking in the absence of a free media and to provide particularized patronage; as Herb puts it,

The ruling families, and especially the Al Saud, use the size of the family to extend the majlis [audience] system to as many citizens as possible … Like American members of Congress the princes of the Al Saud act as intermediaries between citizens and the bureaucracy, earning personal credit for solving the problems that arise out of a bureaucracy that is, in the first instance, a creation of the Al Saud (p. 43).

The family, like many a successful political party (or mafia), has a very hierarchical culture (deference to older members is strictly enforced), effective private dispute-resolution mechanisms (including special jails for misbehaving princes, apparently), and fora where princes are expected to speak candidly and honestly about what they learn from their contacts with non-royals (princes who develop reputations as liars are not likely to go very far). And in return for lifetime submission and service, all royals receive an allowance and a state job, calibrated to their seniority and political importance, from the enormous oil revenues the Saudi state produces. (Firm figures are hard to find, for obvious reasons, but Herb cites estimates that suggest that at the height of the oil boom, in the 1970s, the al Sauds received at least 12% of all government revenue - an utterly fantastic sum).

One of the key things that makes family governance work in this context is, paradoxically, the indefiniteness of the succession rule. The succession norm in Saudi Arabia, for instance, only establishes that the kingship should pass to the most senior “able” male descendant of Ibn Saud, rather than simply to the eldest son or brother of the current king. One might think that this would exacerbate the GoT-style succession conflicts common in many monarchies. (According to Kotkin, almost half of all Romanovs in Russia from Peter the Great to Nicholas II died in family disputes over succession issues, and Herb notes that the Ottoman Sultans even formalized their right to kill their surviving brothers on acceding to power in a “Law of Fratricide” in the 16th century). But Herb argues that the very indefiniteness of the succession norm, combined with the emergence of the modern state with its many positions to fill, actually incentivizes family members to “bandwagon” against ambitious princes who threaten the corporate hold of the family. Though individual princes may prefer to rule unconstrained by the “company board” of their senior brothers and uncles, they will typically prefer that the state remain in family hands over one of their brothers ruling alone or with the support of outsiders. And those who are not contending for the rulership have little incentive to jeopardize their position by supporting candidates who take “extreme” measures in their quest for power, such as threatening intrafamily violence or directly appealing to outsiders by developing alternative patronage networks or offering genuinely liberal reforms. For example, when King Saud bin Abdulaziz did a tour of the realm in 1963 distributing money to tribal chiefs in an attempt to salvage his position and undermine his brother Faysal by securing the support of “outsiders,” uncommitted family members quickly switched to Faysal’s side; as Herb says, the only effect the trip had was “to enrich some bedouin shaykhs and to further alienate his brothers, who sought a decree from the ulema declaring Faysal the ruler and making Saud king in name only” (p. 97). (Shortly after, Saud threatened violence against Faysal, which sealed his fate; he was now deposed for good). Given that different contenders will normally tend to offer similar “bargains” to influential family members and that other family members do not need to pre-commit themselves to one side or another, there is little point for uncommitted princes to strongly support candidates that threaten to overturn the family monopoly on power, while the “losing” contenders can expect to be rewarded with money and influence even if they do not inherit the kingdom. By contrast, a rigid succession rule provides incentives for ambitious royals to use more extreme measures (e.g., poisoning your brothers, appealing to the people) that risk the family monopoly on power.

On this account, the Saudi family does not remain in power because of special family bonds, the certainty provided by a clear succession rule, or some Saudi cultural predisposition towards monarchy, much less because of some special symbolic capital of kingship among Arabs. And though oil helps, Herb rightly notes that the price of support is subject to inflationary pressures; more oil revenues mean potential contenders must pay more for support. King Idris of Libya was overthrown when oil revenues were flooding state coffers (take a look at the GDP per capita line in this picture), partly because he had no family members who had incentives to defend him. The effects of US support on the al Saud family are also quite ambiguous: on the one hand, they mean the family has access to intelligence and resources otherwise unavailable; on the other hand, they provoke a cultural backlash that challengers can and have mobilized. Instead, the family's endurance in power is due to the fact that there are few incentives for family members to mobilize outsider support in their disputes; attempting to do so merely makes family members bandwagon against you. Hence, despite many divisions, on crucial questions the family tends to remain united; and a ruling class that is unified on crucial questions – meaning, a ruling class that does not seek to bring in outsider support to settle its major disputes – is very, very, hard to overthrow. 

This is not to say that the Al Saud family does not reach out to other sectors of Saudi society, distributing resources to favored groups or mobilizing symbolic capital to secure the support of the ulema, for example; but these actions would be quite ineffective if incentives pushed ambitious princes to mobilize outsider support on their own, “escalating” fights by, for example, courting the army or the clerical establishment as individuals. Moreover, even the mobilizing power of the symbols of kingship is typically quite limited. Herb tells a funny story that apparently circulated in the Saudi court in the 30s about the loyalty of the Bedouin to their emir:

As soon as it became clear that the Emir was going to be defeated, his Bedouin followers would be the first to turn and loot his army, justifying this by saying they were his friends and that as he was going to be looted in any case, they had more right than his enemies to the spoils (p. 62).

The Bedouin in the story did not dispute the legitimacy of the emir; they simply reinterpreted it to suit their interests when circumstances changed. In other words, as I’ve argued here in much more detail, the recognition of a norm of authority is compatible with all kinds of behaviours, including turning around once it becomes clear there are stronger challengers; to speak of the “legitimacy” of the Saudi king has very little explanatory power when we seek to explain why the Saudi system has endured. Indeed, in some respects the Saudi system has more in common with systems of single party rule than with medieval European kingship. The Al Saud are an odd party, to be sure; only women can join voluntarily (by marrying into the family) but without gaining any formal power (though they may have influence through their sons). But, with its internal dispute resolution mechanisms, its intelligence networks, its “service” requirements, the family basically mimics the institutions of an effective (if small) party on the Leninist model. And thus the incentives that keep it in power are not dissimilar from the incentives that kept the PRI in Mexico or the Chinese Communist Party in power: they are basically reasons for insiders to stick together and not seek outsider support, and thus to prefer corporate control of the state to going alone.

[Edit 2/3/2015. I got a date wrong - Muhammad bin Abdulaziz was passed over for succession in 1975, when he should have been next in line after Faysal's death. Now fixed.]

Francisco Franco, Robust Action, and the Power of Non-Commitment

(Warning: speculation about Spanish history during the Franco era by an amateur).

I’m currently in Spain, doing some research on Franco’s cult of personality. In preparing for this project, I recently read Paul Preston’s biography of Franco, which presents Franco as a selfish, vengeful, and ultimately petty tyrant who caused the death of hundreds of thousands of his compatriots. (If not for Hitler, Franco seems like he would certainly have been in contention for the “worst person of the 20^th century” award). Yet despite the evidence of Franco’s political cunning (nearly four decades at the top of the Spanish political system puts him in the top 2-3% of all modern rulers in terms of sheer longevity), the portrait that emerges from Preston’s biography is emphatically not one of a decisive and Machiavellian political leader, but one of “astonishing personal mediocrity” (Kindle Loc 17636), a ruler who constantly procrastinated important decisions, acting reactively rather than proactively, and was rarely clear or even coherent about his commitments, to the despair of allies and enemies alike. How could such a person end up leading the winning side of a bloody civil war and becoming the effective ruler of Spain for more than three decades?

Preston argues cogently that luck played a large role, but it struck me while reading his book that one possible key to Franco’s “success” (measured simply by his ability to remain in power) is something that Padgett and Ansell called, in a classic article on the rise of the Medici in Renaissance Florence, “robust action,” action that cannot be easily foiled or prevented by your opponents. Since their ideas about what enables a political leader to act in this way seem to me to illuminate Franco’s spectacular longevity in power, it’s worth describing them in some detail.

Padgett and Ansell begin their article by noting that there is something puzzling about Cosimo de’ Medici’s power in Florence. Cosimo was clearly powerful, despite not holding formal political office, as his contemporaries (including Machiavelli) appreciated keenly;

Yet the puzzle about Cosimo’s control is this: totally contrary to Machiavelli’s portrait in The Prince of effective leaders as decisive and goal oriented, eyewitness accounts describe Cosimo de’ Medici as an indecipherable sphinx …

… Lest one conclude that this implies only savvy back-room dealing, extant accounts of private meetings with Cosimo emphasize the same odd passivity.’ After passionate pleas by supplicants for action of some sort, Cosimo typically would terminate a meeting graciously but icily, with little more commitment than “Yes my son, I shall look into that” (pp. 1262-1263)

Cosimo “never said a clear word in his life” (p. 1308). But not only was Cosimo inscrutable; his actions, especially after 1434,

… appeared extraordinarily reactive in character. Everything was done in response to a flow of requests that, somehow or other, “just so happened” to serve Cosimo’s extremely multiple interests. (p. 1263)

Padgett and Ansell argue, pace Machiavelli, that there were no “deep and ruthless machinations” that explain Cosimo’s political success. Cosimo really was a “sphinx without a secret” (a term coined by one of Franco’s ministers to refer to Franco); his actions really were reactive, not the moves of someone who could always see further ahead than his adversaries. But his actions were robust (not easily foiled or prevented) precisely because he could not be pinned down by them: others had to reveal their interests when acting in ways that he did not:

We use the term “robust action” to refer to Cosimo’s style of control. The key to understanding Cosimo’s sphinxlike character … is multivocality-the fact that single actions can be interpreted coherently from multiple perspectives simultaneously, the fact that single actions can be moves in many games at once, and the fact that public and private motivations cannot be parsed. Multivocal action leads to Rorschach blot identities, with all alters constructing their own distinctive attribution of the identity of ego. The “only” point of this, from the perspective of ego, is flexible opportunism-maintaining discretionary options across unforeseeable futures in the face of hostile attempts by others to narrow those options.

Crucial for maintaining discretion is not to pursue any specific goals [my emphasis]. For in nasty strategic games, like Florence or like chess, positional play is the maneuvering of opponents into the forced clarification of their (but not your) tactical lines of action.  Locked-in commitment to lines of action, and thence to goals, is the product not of individual choice but at least as much of others’ successful “ecological control” over you … Victory, in Florence, in chess, or in go means locking in others, but not yourself, to goal-oriented sequences of strategic play that become predictable thereby. (pp. 1263-1264)

Padgett and Ansell insist that “not pursuing specific goals” is not merely a matter of strategic ambiguity. What is needed is a more radical lack of commitment to specific interests, or rather, a more radical incommensurability of one’s various interests, which they denote by the idea of “multivocality:”

But robust action is not just a matter of behaving ambiguously. Others are too shrewd not to see through behavioral facades down to presumed self-interested motivations. To act credibly in a multivocal fashion, one’s attributed interests must themselves be multivocal. (p. 1307)

In other words, in the face of unpredictable and changing conditions, too much commitment to specific objectives is damaging to one’s survival in power, as it allows others to predict your moves and to credibly paint you as acting selfishly against the interests of potential allies. To be sure, only some people are in a position to act in this way; not just anyone can “succeed” by acting reactively and inscrutably:

Of course, robust action will not work for just anyone. For the flow of requests to be channeled, only some network structures will do. And for the resolution of judge and boss to be credible, coherent interests must remain opaque as far down as it is conceivable to peer. Contra Machiavelli, even Cosimo himself did not set out with a grand design to take over the state: this assumption reads history backward. … Cosimo’s political party first emerged around him. Only later, during the Milan war, did Cosimo suddenly apprehend the political capacity of the social network machine that lay at his fingertips. (p. 1264)

Most of Padgett and Ansell’s article then describes precisely the sort of network structure that makes robust action possible. Roughly speaking, their argument is that the Medici coalition contained inherently contradictory interests, yet it was constructed in such a way that its component parts could only act together through Cosimo: “Robust action by the Medici was credible precisely because of the contradictory character of their base of support,” yet “[t]he result was an awesomely centralized patrimonial machine, capable of great discipline and “top down” control because the Medici themselves were the only bridge holding this contradictory agglomeration together” (p. 1307). By contrast, the coalition of Medici opponents was both far more “coherent” and narrow in terms of the interests it represented (and hence more predictable in its actions) and less susceptible to centralized control (and hence less effective and disciplined).

Now, there are many differences between Franco and Cosimo de’ Medici. But the overall strategies that allowed Franco to survive in power during one of the most difficult periods in European history do present some interesting similarities to the strategies Padgett and Ansell describe in their article.

Let’s start with Franco himself, who if nothing else seems to have shared something of Cosimo de’ Medici’s inscrutability. Preston recites a litany of descriptions emphasizing this aspect of his character:

He was abundantly imbued with the inscrutable pragmatism or retranca of the gallego peasant. Whether that was because of his origins as a native of Galicia, or the fruit of his Moroccan experiences is impossible to say. Whatever its roots in Franco, retranca may be defined as an evasion of commitment and a taste for the imprecise. It is said that if you meet a gallego on a staircase, it is impossible to deduce if he is going up or down. Franco perhaps embodied that characteristic more than most gallegos. When those close to him tried to get hints about forthcoming ministerial changes, they were rebuffed with skill: ‘People are saying that in the next reshuffle of civil governors so-and-so will go to Province X’, tries the friend; ‘Really?’ replies the sinuous Franco, ‘I’ve heard nothing’. ‘It’s being said that Y and Z are going to be ministers’, ventures his sister. ‘Well’, replies her brother, ‘I haven’t met either of them’. The monarchist aviator Juan Antonio Ansaldo wrote of him ‘Franco is a man who says things and unsays them, who draws near and slips away, he vanishes and trickles away; always vague and never clear or categoric’. John Whitaker met him during the Civil War: ‘He was effusively flattering, but he did not give a frank answer to any question I put to him. A less straightforward man I never met.’ Mussolini’s Ambassador Roberto Cantalupo met him some months later and found Franco to be ‘icy, feminine and elusive [sfuggente]’. The day after first meeting Franco in 1930, the poet and noted wit José María Pemán was introduced by a friend as ‘the man who speaks best in all Spain’ and remarked ‘I think I’ve just met the man who keeps quiet best in all Spain’ (‘ Tengo la sospecha de haber conocido al hombre que mejor se calla en España’). (Kindle Locations 113-130).

To be sure, Franco, unlike Cosimo, made lots of public speeches during his life and said many well-documented things to ambassadors, ministers, and other political leaders. But one point that Preston’s biography brings out well is that it is very difficult to construct a coherent position for Franco from his public statements (though Preston tries valiantly). For one thing, he seems to have had no problems disregarding the truth when it was convenient for him to deny it, and he was alarmingly willing to change his position as circumstances or audiences changed. He could say anything with apparently complete conviction: he could be a monarchist one minute, a Falangista the next, and then assert his claim to being a true Spanish democrat. Yet Preston never quite succeeds in establishing that there was one thing Franco “really believed” underneath all the bullshitting and incoherence, some ideological commitment or fundamental interest beyond his maintenance in power that could account for the many different things he said. His key political talent, Preston notes more than once, was for “shroud[ing] his intentions in a cloud of nebulous vagueness” (Kindle Location 14849-14850). Since no one could be quite sure about his real commitments, these could be “read” in a variety of different ways at the time – as fundamentally sympathetic to the Falange, or fundamentally conservative and Catholic, or as those of an anti-communist warrior.

One obvious way in which Franco avoided being pinned down to some particular goal was by often acting through intermediaries, which made it possible for him to deny responsibility. For example, he was cautious not to seem to have sought the posts of commander in chief or head of state; as Preston puts it, “[w]ith his customary caution, Franco preferred to let others make the running and wait for the new honour to be thrust upon him” (Kindle Locations 4093-4094). But as with Cosimo de’ Medici, the point is not that Franco had plotted for a long time to gain supreme power; on the contrary, his early life suggested that he was destined to be a career military man. He was promoted rapidly, and enjoyed his many positions – in particular, he appears to have been very happy as director of the military academy in Zaragoza. For a while it was even a bit iffy whether he would participate in the military rebellion that led to the civil war; it was only when circumstances made supreme command clearly possible that we can even speak of Franco pursuing that option at all, and then only in fairly indirect ways.

More broadly, Franco’s terminal unwillingness to ever close off options made it seem like he was constantly procrastinating important decisions. The most obvious example of this is the question of restoring the Spanish monarchy (one aim of the military rebellion that led to the civil war), which Franco successfully postponed for decades, in part because it would commit himself to a definite course of action, splitting his coalition. But the same was true of his neutrality-cum-covert-support for Germany and Italy in WWII (Preston has some amusing passages where Hitler and Mussolini rage against Franco’s inability to make clear commitments to enter WWII on their side), or of his actions during the civil war.

The latter provides one striking example of the contrast between robust action and non-robust action. Franco was highly dependent on material support from Germany and Italy for his war effort. And Mussolini and Hitler both had serious doubts about Franco’s abilities to lead the nationalist side to victory. So early on, German and Italian military forces sent to aid the nationalist side were only nominally under Franco’s command. But when the one of the three divisions of Black Shirts sent by Mussolini was defeated at Guadalajara, in part due to Franco’s failure to keep his word to mount a simultaneous attack in the Jarama front, Mussolini was too committed to Franco’s victory to do anything about it except continue supporting Franco, and even accede to put the Black Shirts under Franco’s command. As Preston puts it:

Mussolini could see that he had been used but he had little choice but to continue supporting Franco. Guadalajara had smashed the myth of fascist invincibility and Mussolini found himself committed to Franco until the myth was rebuilt. Equally, however galling, it was now clear that it made more sense to work with Franco for a Nationalist victory than independently. Shortly after his letter of exculpation [a letter Franco wrote to Mussolini to explain why the promised forces did not materialize during the battle of Guadalajara], Franco had requested help for a huge assault on Bilbao. Ignoring remarks made by Roatta [the Italian ambassador commander of the Black Shirts in the civil war at the time] about the miraculous appearance of the necessary forces for Bilbao which had never materialized during the battle of Guadalajara, Mussolini ordered his commander henceforth to obey the instructions and directives of Franco. Italian forces would henceforth be distributed in Spanish units and subject to the command of Franco’s generals. When Cantalupo informed him of this on 28 March, Franco was delighted. The Italian Ambassador found him as if ‘freed of a nightmare’. Franco asked him to inform the Duce of his ‘joy at being understood and appreciated’. (Kindle loc 5320-5329).

Franco had (whether by design or not; Preston is of two minds about this) managed to shape the “choice context” of Mussolini so as to induce him to commit himself to Franco’s victory, while retaining some freedom to pursue his own independent policy, despite his material dependence on Italian and German aid.

But what enabled Franco to avoid commitment to specific goals while others could not? What made it possible for him to say to Don Juan (the exiled heir to the Borbon throne) in 1954, that “I don’t find governing an onerous task” and “Spain is easy to govern”? (Kindle loc 14428-14429). Part of the answer to this question – in a sense the more superficial part – is that, as Preston notes, Franco was very good at gauging the price of people:

For nearly forty years he would use [his very extensive formal powers] with consummate skill, striking decisively at his outright enemies but maintaining the loyalty of those within the Nationalist coalition with cunning and a perceptive insight into human weakness worthy of a man who had learnt his politics among the tribes of Morocco. The ability to calibrate almost instantly the weakness and/ or the price of a man enabled Franco to know unerringly [a bit of poetic license, but we’ll let that pass] when a would-be opponent could be turned into a collaborator by some preferment, or even the promise of it – a ministry, an embassy, a prestigious military posting, a job in a State enterprise, a decoration, an import licence or just a box of cigars. (Kindle loc 6251-6255).

And like any other successful dictator, he then used this knowledge to play people against one another and thus prevent them from coordinating against him:

The ‘families’ of the Nationalist coalition would be manipulated like friendly tribes, bribed, enmeshed in competition among themselves, involved in corruption and repression in such a way as to make them suspicious of one another but unable to do without the supreme arbiter. (Kindle locs 7395-7397).

Divide et impera is, of course, the oldest trick in the book; and Franco was good at it, in the (base) sense of using it well to remain at the top of the political system despite not being very much loved, or even very much respected, by those below him. In a revealing anecdote, Preston notes the clever way in which Franco used the corruption of his ministers as an instrument of control:

Franco showed no interest in putting a stop to graft as opposed to using knowledge of it to increase his power over those involved. He often repaid those who informed him of corruption not by taking action against the guilty but by letting them know who had informed on them (Kindle locs 14795-14797).

Here we see also a way of not foreclosing any options: both the denouncer and the denounced remain dependent on Franco, yet the onus of action is put on them, not on Franco. A similar logic of inaction applied to his agents of repression during the civil war and beyond:

Franco was aware that some of his subordinates enjoyed the bloodthirsty work of the repression. His Director-General of Prisons, Joaquin del Moral, was notorious for the prurient delight he derived from executions. General Cabanellas protested to Franco about the distasteful dawn excursions organized in Burgos by Del Moral in order to enjoy the day’s shootings. Franco did nothing. He was fully conscious of the extent to which the repression not only terrified the enemy but also inextricably tied those involved in its implementation to his own survival. Their complicity ensured that they would cling to him as the only bulwark against the possible revenge of their victims. (Kindle locs 5169-5174).

Yet I suspect the deeper reason for Franco’s ability to act robustly went beyond Franco’s particular political tactics. What enabled him to be so effective at using divide et impera seems to me to be the fact that his supporting coalition – made up variously of Falangists (Spanish fascists), Carlistas, other monarchists, conservative Catholics, and the military – was inherently contradictory (as was the supporting coalition of the Medici in Padgett and Ansell’s view), yet could only act together through him. For example, Falangists were skeptical of the monarchy, and in theory had a reformist economic programme, a promise of a grand “social revolution” to which other conservative elements of the coalition were implacably opposed. Monarchists differed among themselves about who should be placed on the throne, and differed about when the monarchy should be restored. The army, which was the group best positioned to overthrow Franco (its senior commanders having “elected” him in 1936 as Generalissimo), had its own divisions and in any case was fearful of another civil war. And so on. Yet Franco’s inscrutability – which, interestingly, was not nearly as much in evidence when he was merely a career military man, and could thus afford to have opinions – allowed him to represent all of these disparate interests with enough credibility that those concerned could at least pretend to themselves that Franco was ultimately working for their ultimate aims. (Of course, you’d need a proper network analysis to make the Padgett/Ansell claim rigorously; for one thing, we’d also need to know whether the various components of the Francoist coalition had few linkages with one another, so that they could act together only through him. This I can’t tell on the basis of the evidence in Preston’s book).

Signs of Franco’s excessive commitment to a particular goal or group were sometimes even interpreted by shrewd observers as political mistakes. For example, when in 1945 Franco’s public support of the Falange seemed to  be attracting much international criticism, José María Pemán wrote in his diary: ‘if they had told me that Franco had a lover it would have seemed bad, not to say strange, but this is worse: he has got a conviction.’ But, as Preston notes, “[i]n fact, the normally shrewd Pemán was wrong. Franco may have had an emotional commitment to the Falange but it did not undermine his capacity for ruthless calculation. He had in fact worked out that there was more benefit to be derived from keeping the Falange. Not only was it a massive bulwark of support but international criticism of it also helped him capitalize on mass resentment of foreign ‘interference’.”  (Kindle locs 12440-12446). I am not sure that Franco “worked out” these benefits consciously, but it is interesting to note that Pemán saw the sign of commitment to a cause as a political mistake because it would box Franco in and close off certain courses of action. Franco’s political strength lay precisely in credibly not being for one or another part of his coalition, and this was made possible because he seems to have had no firm underlying convictions beyond, perhaps, his commitment to a picture of himself as savior of Spain. (Was his support for the Falange in 1945 sincere, or the result of a calculated gamble? Is this question even answerable?). Or conversely, we may say that because his self-image as savior of Spain could “contain multitudes” without being threatened (Franco was rarely bothered by inconsistency) that his interests were themselves “multivocal” in the Ansell and Padgett sense.  

We might also look at the eventual decay of the regime through this lens. By the end of the 60s socio-economic changes (including rapid economic development) had eroded the original Francoist coalition, and key “ideological” questions had been finally settled (e.g., the succession was finally settled on Don Juan Carlos - the current King - in 1969; the “falangist” revolution had been definitively shelved; etc.). Franco was thus less and less able to represent a diversity of interests “mutivocally;” he had, in a sense, finally been boxed in by his own success. This made Franco less and less relevant as the lynchpin of the major coalition that controlled the state, and the institutional changes he had intended to perpetuate his regime did not last. (This is an important contrast to the story Padgett and Ansell tell about the Medici).

If anyone had now the ability to represent contradictory interests “multivocally” and engage in robust action, it was Juan Carlos, who seems to have learned a few things from Franco. Apparently when Franco told Juan Carlos that he had finally decided to settle the succession on him, “Juan Carlos replied ‘rest assured, mi general, I have learned much from your galleguismo (Galician craftiness).’ As they both laughed, Franco complimented him, ‘Your Highness does it very well.’” (Kindle locs 16666-16669). Both Franco and many other people could project their ideas onto the king, who turned out, unexpectedly for a lot of people, to be a leading force in the transition to democracy. (Or am I completely off here?)

Ultimately, all this suggests to me the limits of appealing to belief in explaining political action. To attempt to explain Franco by reference to his specific ideas is to miss the possibility that it was their basic inconsistency that made him able to avoid being "boxed in."

Update 2/3/2013: Fixed some typos.

The Dictator's Dilemma, Mao Edition

Mao Zedong to Ho Chi Minh, June 1966:

I advise you, not all of your subjects are loyal to you. Perhaps most of them are loyal but maybe a small number only verbally wish you "long live," while in reality they wish you a premature death. When they shout "long live," you should beware and analyze [the situation]. The more they praise you, the less you can trust them. This is a very natural rule.

From Daniel Leese's fascinating book Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China's Cultural Revolution (p. 168), which I hope to review here soon.

Varieties of Political Competition

(Part 1.5 of a series on the history ofpolitical regimes. This gets a bit technical in the second half, which contains a sort of blurry sketch of a theory of political regimes)

Our political vocabulary has a very long history. Terms like democracy, dictatorship, autocracy, tyranny, and even words of more recent vintage like authoritarianism or totalitarianism carry a great deal of descriptive and evaluative baggage, acquired in the course of political debate over a long time. They are rich, many-layered concepts, useful for simultaneously referring to and evaluating complex and vaguely-defined combinations of institutional, cultural, and other aspects of social systems. But by the same token, all that baggage makes it very difficult to use these terms to track the history of political institutions in anything but the roughest fashion. Or at least the history of the forms of political competition for power in states.

Consider an apparently simple question like how long the USA has been democratic. Since independence in the late 18^th century? Since the 1820s? Since reconstruction? Since the introduction of women’s suffrage? Since the 1960s? Never? Since the 1960s but only until recently? Until the 1930s? Historically, the idea of democracy has provided support for all of these answers, and all of them have had advocates. And though the current usage of the word "democracy" makes some answers more plausible than others, the controversy is pretty much ineradicable. We may at best be able to agree that the USA today is likely to be more democratic in some ways than in the late 19^th century (a more inclusive suffrage, more tolerance of certain forms of dissent), but perhaps less democratic in other ways than in the 1930s (a more entrenched and pervasive national security bureaucracy that is impervious to political control, greater structural barriers to entry into political competition, etc.). Moreover, even if we agreed that the USA has been democratic for some particular period, this would not necessarily tell us much about how competition for control of the state changed during that time: how norms of leadership selection evolved, how barriers to entry into political competition changed, how the ability to constrain the actions of the winners of the competition for power waxed or waned, etc.

Now consider instead the question of how long the USA has selected its top political leadership via competitive elections where candidates must enlist the support of a substantial fraction of a relatively large group (much greater than Dunbar’s number) to gain power, and where entry into political competition is normatively regulated (there are relatively well-enforced rules about who can be a candidate for power) but where such regulation does not impose large formal barriers to entry (the rules imply the existence of large pool of potential candidates representing a wide variety of interests and with a wide variety of life experiences and skills, even if structural barriers like access to money or racism considerably reduce this pool in fact). This question is in principle answerable (a: since the early 20^th century, at least), but it is not identical to the question of whether the USA is or ever was a democracy, whether in the USA “the people” or “the rich” or “the well connected” rule or have ever ruled, or indeed the question of whether its political system is any good at all.

It seems plausible to say that this method of leadership selection (competitive election) must be a component of democracy in large states (i.e., that no state without some such method of leadership selection can be called a democracy), yet this implies a whole theory of democracy relating competitive elections to ideals of inclusion and autonomy that is itself contestable. Ancient Greeks, for example, thought elections were characteristic of “oligarchic” regimes (rule by the rich), for understandable reasons having to do with the typical barriers to entry into political competition they presuppose (when offices are open to election, only the rich are able to compete for them effectively, as the American primary season certainly suggests); in their view, sortition [selection by lottery], not election, was more appropriate to the ideals of citizen equality implicit in the notion of demokratia (the power of the demos) and isonomia (citizen equality before the law) as they understood it. (They were certainly right for their political context; and perhaps their ideas are worth taking seriously today as well). Even the idea that elections are an institution of accountability (and hence something that helps “the people” to rule) rather than a mechanism of selection (useful only as an efficient way to discover the most talented rulers for an already established hierarchy) is a relatively recent development. At any rate, even if we agreed that competitive leadership selection through vote-gathering in large electorates is part of any definition of democracy in modern states, this does not imply that we would agree on the relative importance for democracy of such elections relative to, say, the inclusiveness of the electorate, the existence of a culture of tolerance, the responsiveness of elected officials to public opinion, or the protection of various rights.

From the point of view of trying to write a history of political regimes, it may thus be best to proceed in a disaggregated way: to speak not of democracy but of regimes where leadership selection is conducted on the basis of competitive elections with large electorates and few formal barriers to entry, for example, as I tried to do in my previous post. Instead of saying “democracy” we say CE/LG/LBE regimes (competitive elections/large group support/low barriers to entry). We thus substitute collections of small and relatively unimportant ideas like political competition through elections for large but important ideas like democracy, and then check whether these individually small and unimportant institutions come together in particular ensembles that make a difference to the things we care about. (E.g., like whether some particular combination of large-group elections, low barriers to entry into political competition, etc. actually tends to evolve over time, and whether these combinations tend to make a difference to the realization of particular ideals of autonomy or freedom). This avoids the historical tangledness of existing regime concepts, though at the cost of bracketing, at least for a time, evaluations of actual institutions. But at least then the important questions become either empirical (which institutions lead to the realization of particular ideals?) or purely philosophical (how should we weigh the relative importance of political values like equality, participation, etc.?).

I am primarily interested here in the institutions that shape political competition for the control of states (so non-state spaces are out of consideration for the moment), as well as the institutions that constrain the winners of such competition: the “varieties of political competition” for short. What we want to know are the “parameters” that describe such competition. What distinctions are useful for thinking about these varieties? A sketch of a theory of political competition might look at the following questions, only some of which overlap with the traditional concerns of democratic theory:

1.  As in the previous post, we might want to know whether the selection of those who control the state is regulated by more or less “self-enforcing” norms or not; periods where people attain power primarily by force (coups, revolutions, etc) seem to be substantially different than periods where people attain power in a normatively regulated way. Whether norms are self-enforcing depends on the commitments and resources of the actors subject to them, not on the norms themselves, since no third parties outside the regime exist to enforce them by definition (in other words, constitutions are mere pieces of parchment unless everyone can credibly commit not to defect). It would then be useful to know whether we can say anything general about the conditions that make some selection norms (hereditary, competitive, etc.) self-enforcing, not just competitive electoral selection norms.
2. We might also want to know which form the norm of leadership selection takes: whether the norm is to select people who fit a certain definite description (as in monarchies, where the next ruler is the heir of the current ruler), or to select people whose names are produced by some random process (lottery), or who meet a certain explicit standard (“meritocracy”), or, more commonly, who can show sufficient evidence of support within a group of “selectors” (election, acclamation, negotiation within the Politburo, etc.). (Mixtures of all of these selection norms are possible, especially when the state contains more than one center of power; in which case we might want to know something about the relative “powers” of these centers of power). Which selection norm is in force seems to have some effect on how long a leader is in power; selection norms that require a leader to show “evidence of support” appear to make it harder for leaders to keep control of states than selection norms that do not. It might also have an impact on the quality of political leaders (ungated), or on their social background. 
3. We might wish to know the size of the group whose support must be mustered when selection is regulated by “evidence of support” or "random" norms, as well as the kinds of barriers to entry into this group. This is in part because when contenders for power must show support from large groups (say, 4-5 times Dunbar’s number, or around 600 people, the size of the typical Central Committee of a communist party), elective institutions almost invariably develop; usually the only way to show that you have the support of 100,000 people is to count them. Moreover, small selector groups almost always indicate highly hierarchical social structures, require different sorts of “payment” by contenders hoping to secure support, and are easier to “cartelize” (preventing contenders from expanding the boundaries of the group by escalating political competition outwards).
4. We might wish to know the sort of “industrial organization” prevalent in the political arena (by analogy with this). For example, in many countries where control of the state is allocated to those who can show support from large numbers of adult citizens via elections, the political arena is typically organized around a few large multipurpose “firms” (parties) who are the main competitors for control, along with a large number of small special purpose groups (think-tanks, civil society groups, PACs, etc). Though the formal barriers to entry into this arena are low, the structural barriers are large (creating a party capable of appealing to large numbers of people takes real economic and symbolic resources), so that political competition operates in practice in an “oligopolic” manner. In other countries, political competition is fully monopolized by a single multipurpose “firm;” in yet others there is a dominant political firm but many special-purpose groups that cannot directly compete for power. Moreover, competition between the main “firms” in the political arena can be more or less regulated by norms that limit the permissible methods of competition. I know there is a well-developed theory of party systems for democracies, but it is not integrated with a theory of politico-industrial organization in other political systems; and we might want to put all of this in a single framework if we are interested in the history of the varieties of political competition.

Simplifying a bit, you might end up with a typology of varieties of political competition like this:

The table could be extended further; but it might get a bit too technical, and I’m not sure how illuminating it would be (more in part 2 with actual graphs and less theory, assuming part 2 ever arrives). The interesting questions would then be about which forms of politico-industrial organization can stably coexist with particular selection norms, and which of them actually produce good consequences, if any; but it might take me a while to get there, if ever.