The Good Tsar Bias

Ian Kershaw's remarkable book The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich is a really clever piece of public opinion archeology. It attempts to reconstruct the rise and fall of Hitler's popularity in Nazi Germany, drawing primarily on secret reports compiled by the Gestapo, the Security Service of the SS, and the clandestine agents of the banned Social Democratic Party -- a task fraught with methodological pitfalls, given the enormous levels of repression the Nazi party was capable of exercising over the German population. (Suffice it to say that preference falsification was rife, compounded by biased reporting by the public opinion researchers of all these organizations, but Kershaw nevertheless manages to extract much useful information from his sources). Among other things, the book makes the case that, at least until the war started turning sour in late 1942, Hitler was far more popular than the Nazi Party, which quickly grew to be disliked, even despised, by the vast majority of Germans,  despite the initial improvement in economic conditions they experienced in the early years of the Third Reich:

At the centre of our enquiry here is the remarkable phenomenon that Hitler’s rising popularity was not only unaccompanied by a growth in the popularity of the Nazi Party, but in fact developed in some ways at the direct expense of his own Movement. (p. 83)

In Kershaw's telling, the contrast arose primarily from the fact that the "little Hitlers" (as Party functionaries were sometimes derogatorily called) were constantly encountered in everyday life, where they were perceived, not without ample justification, as corrupt and overbearing, while Hitler operated on a "higher" plane, concerned with the "big questions" of war and peace:

The ‘little Hitler’ type was ... by no means omnipresent, but was nevertheless sufficiently widely encountered to provoke extensive criticism and to tarnish irreparably he image of the Party. In a sense, the Party functionaries were reaping the harvest of the prejudice which they themselves had helped to sow against local politicians and ‘bigwigs’, and had to face the daily dissatisfaction and discord as the rebound from the utopian hopes in the Third Reich which they had stirred up. The ‘little Hitlers’ in the forefront of the local scene had to bear the brunt of the discontent. In stark contrast, the ‘Hitler myth’ - clearly in part a subconscious mechanism to compensate for the perceived shortcomings of the Third Reich - stood aloof from the dissension on a lofty and untouchable plane (p. 97) 

The Führer ... appeared to be on an elevated plane far removed from the humdrum problems of everyday life and was presumed to be preoccupied with the 'mighty' issues of the nation, pondering matters of foreign and defence policy, of war and peace, holding the fate of the nation in his hand. It was a domain which, in peacetime at any rate, scarcely affected material interests in any direct or obvious way, but one which could be called upon to engender - even if only temporarily - high emotional involvement and maximum national unity (p. 121)

Hitler's increase in popularity at the expense of the Nazi Party was not just a result of perceptions about their different spheres of responsibility; it was also amplified by the strategic choices people made in order to express dissatisfaction in a highly repressive environment where open criticism of the Führer could carry severe consequences. For example, Church leaders who wished to criticize Nazi anti-Christian policies during the "Church struggles" of the mid-1930s attempted to protect themselves against retaliation by preemptively praising Hitler and declaring themselves loyal supporters of him, but as a result they ended up reinforcing perceptions of a good Hitler vs. the bad party underlings who perverted his intentions: "The professions of loyalty to the Führer were in part a ploy to offset criticism of the Party, the SS, of the Church’s number one Nazi hate-figure, Alfred Rosenberg. ... [but] whatever the motives, the actual effect was the enhancement of the myth of the ‘good’ Führer detached from and set against the evil of the Party radicals" (p. 113). And the tactic was also available to other critics of the regime's policies, such as opponents of the murders committed under the Action T4 euthanasia program.

The divergence between Hitler's popularity and the party's unpopularity was not without important political effects. Time and again, Hitler was able to use his position "above the everyday" to discipline the Nazi party and cement his position at the expense of "radicals" -- for example, during the Röhm purge and the "Night of the Long Knives," as well as during the aforementioned "Church struggles." And it would seem that Hitler's personal popularity prevented widespread dissatisfaction with the Third Reich during peacetime from developing into a more serious challenge to the regime; at the very least, it kept in check the party's many centrifugal tendencies, discouraged potential competitors for Hitler's position, and probably helped him accumulate ever more absolute power.

The point that interests me here, however, is that, according to Kershaw, ordinary Germans rationalized the dissonance involved in both disliking the Party Hitler claimed to represent, even embody (more than once, Hitler claimed that "the Führer is the Party and the Party is the Führer", to cite a 1935 statement - p. 83) and supporting, even adoring, Hitler, by means of a particular kind of exculpatory rationalization: "that Hitler was being kept in the dark about the real state of affairs" (p. 102). Or, more vividly, as a Party member from the Upper Palatinate put it in 1934, "Hitler would be all right, but his underlings are all swindlers" (p. 83).

Regardless of the specifics of the Nazi case, these sorts of rationalizations seem common enough that they deserve a name. We find something like them, for example, in the combination of dissatisfaction with the Venezuelan government and genuine love of Chavez characteristic of many Chavistas even before Chavez' death; or in the contrast between the apparent popularity of Putin and the unpopularity of much of Russia's political class and governing apparatus; and perhaps also in the Franco regime, with the disjunction between Franco's apparent high prestige and the unpopularity of the Falange during the 1940s and 1950s. And they seem rooted, as Kershaw implies, in some kind of general cognitive bias or psychological mechanism that operates in a wide variety of contexts. I don't know if psychologists have already baptized the particular mechanism that produced the contrast between the perception of a "Führer without sin" (as a report Kershaw quotes actually says) and the widely detested "little Hitlers" -- Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases doesn't have quite the thing I'm looking for -- but I propose to call it "the good Tsar bias," for the proverbial attitude of ordinary Russians to the Tsar in contrast to his ministers before the revolution. (Whether ordinary Russians actually held this attitude is a different question -- looking around lazily, I can only find one good reference, in W. Bruce Lincoln's Sunlight at Midnight, p. 188 -- but the belief that they did was already proverbial in the 1930s. Even the Security Service of the SS made reference to the "good tsar" idea to account for the widespread finding of their public opinion researchers that people hated the Nazi party, but did not blame Hitler for their everyday woes; Kershaw quotes a report from them that claims that before WWI in Russia people used to explain their dissatisfaction with the government by saying that "Father Tsar knows nothing of it, he would not wish or tolerate it" before going on to warn that "Russia's fate proves this principle is dangerous" -- p. 102.)

The bias comes from the failure to notice that, as Brad Delong used to say, "the cossacks work for the Tsar"; some cognitive or emotional dissonance management mechanism prevents people from acknowledging connections between the proximate and the more remote causal agents of their dissatisfaction that, in retrospect, seem obvious. After all, why, if the leader is so good, does he surround himself with such poor collaborators? In the Hitler case, Kershaw talks about the "naïvety" of the people expressing belief in the "good Führer", and claims that this seems explainable only due to a "prevailing psychological necessity to have a national leader of stature existing in an elevated sphere outside of and removed from the 'conflict sphere' of the everyday political arena" (p. 119). But the dissonance management mechanism seems a bit more general than this.

Though the "good Tsar bias" seems to be related to what psychologists call the just world bias, insofar as it appears to serve as a compensatory form of system justification, it does not seem to be quite the same thing. The "good Tsar" bias does not incline people to say that the world is just, or to rationalize injustice as somehow deserved, only to deny that those leaders who are closely tied to the symbols of the nation (the Tsar, the Führer, the King, etc.) bear responsibility for bad outcomes in everyday life; that responsibility, instead, is assigned to subordinates. In this respect, the bias appears to be more closely related to what Dan Kahan and others have called "identity-protective cognition": the closer a leader is tied to the symbols of the nation or group with whom they identify, and the closer people's identification with the nation or group is, the more difficult it should be for them to accept that the leader is responsible for bad outcomes, since such acceptance threatens one's identity, and the more likely it will be for them to displace that responsibility onto subordinates as a protective measure. And leaders, like Hitler, who are the focus of high-intensity rituals associated with big national occasions -- plebiscitary elections, victories in war, even set-piece speeches on the occasion of good economic news -- are precisely the sorts of leaders who become associated with important community symbols; indeed, in important ways, they come to symbolize the community, as long as the rituals are successful. For this reason, competitive systems of leadership selection should mitigate the bias, since they prevent leaders from being too closely identified with the symbols of the nation, whereas traditional monarchies should amplify it, given the typical association of the monarch with the symbols of the community as such. And wherever the bias operates, leaders should be able to more easily accumulate power at the expense of subordinates.

But even leaders who are closely tied to the symbols of the community cannot always avoid association with some bad outcome; and in these cases the bias should diminish. Despite the best efforts of Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry (and the total monopoly over the media that the Nazi Party commanded, enforced by draconian measures against listening to foreign broadcasts), the defeat of the German armies at Stalingrad irreparably tarnished Hitler's own image, since he had repeatedly taken responsibility for the conduct of the war and stressed the importance of taking the city. The outcome could simply not be blamed on malicious or incompetent subordinates. Indeed, we may even observe an inversion of the bias, in which the subordinates are generally exculpated, and superiors are generally blamed, for bad outcomes; I suspect something like that went on at the end of the war in Germany. 

Readers, are there any other good examples of this bias? 

The Varieties of Electoral Experience

(Some commentary on recent elections in North Korea, and on electoral rituals generally)

As many readers will know, North Korea just had an election for the Supreme People’s Assembly. In these elections – held more or less every five years, previously in 2009 – voters are presented with only one candidate per district, all of them belonging to the Korean Workers’ Party, and expected to vote “yes.” (Though technically they could mark “no” on their ballot papers, voting is not genuinely secret, and North Korean defectors report feeling that the risks of voting “no” are so large that practically no one does it). Even if voters had a choice, however, the offices they are voting for have no real power; as in the old Soviet joke, we might say that citizens in North Korea pretend to vote and deputies pretend to rule. (Some cynically-minded readers might say this idea applies far more widely).

One might think this would be reason enough for voters to sit out the election, but participation is not optional; though apparently some hardship dispensations are available, failure to show up to vote appears to carry severe risks, since the elections function as a political census, providing information about people who might have left the country, military personnel gone AWOL, and other undesirables that can then be used against non-voters and/or their families. New Focus International (a website run by North Korean defectors) reports:

At any other point in the year, family members of missing persons can get away with lying or bribing surveillance agents, saying that the person they are looking for is trading in another district’s market. But it is during an election period that a North Korean individual’s escape to China or South Korea becomes exposed.

There is much more to this election, which takes place once every five years, than politics or propaganda: it is the occasion on which the North Korean state conducts a comprehensive crackdown on missing individuals.

The number of ‘missing’ persons began to snowball around 20 years ago. During the ‘Arduous March’ of the mid 90s, when North Koreans suffered mass famine, many living in inland provinces escaped from their designated residential areas to seek survival opportunities elsewhere. The exact number of those who starved to death during this time is difficult to establish, not least because it was impossible to identify the dead bodies that constantly piled up near train stations and rivers.

As the North Korean state collected the bodies in trucks and transported them to the hills to bury en masse, it exacerbated the confusion of surveillance and security agents in their record-keeping. Although agents continued to receive daily reports from residential surveillance officers, sometimes not even the family members of the missing persons themselves could confirm whether their loved one was dead or alive.

Moreover, those who know that someone in their family has safely made it to China will keep the knowledge secret, because anyone who leaves North Korea is labeled as “a traitor of the people” by the ruling Party. Even when surveillance agents drop in on the homes of missing persons and interrogate family members about their whereabouts, they will stand up to the agents and hold their ground, maintaining that they are out to trade and have not yet returned.

In the mid-2000s, state surveillance and security agents turned to tactics of persuasion rather than confrontation alone. They requested families to give up information about missing persons by saying that they knew the person was in China, but that if he or she returned to North Korea to vote in the next election, all would be forgiven by the Workers’ Party. There were threats too: if the missing person did not return for the election, the treacherous penalty of abandoning the homeland would be paid by the remaining family members.

Still, it is curious that the regime insists on associating this surveillance operation with a periodic electoral ritual, rather than merely announcing a census, which would presumably serve the same purpose. At any rate it is clear that the regime takes the electoral ritual seriously in some ways. Candidate posters are printed, agitators give talks in workplaces about the importance of the elections, and a festive atmosphere is created; and after the election is over, North Korean news agencies dutifully report turnouts above 99%, with 100% support for the KWP and its leader. (The Korean Central News Agency’s report on the results of the 2009 election and its report on the 2014 election are nearly identical). Incidentally, the reason the turnout numbers do not reach 100% is the fact that “[e]lectors on foreign tours or working in oceans could not take part in the election;” KCNA even helpfully notes that electors too old or ill to go to the polls “cast their ballots into mobile ballot boxes” which, if true, appears to show a remarkable degree of commitment on the part of the state to produce a foreordained result, when it could simply cast their ballots for them.

A state powerful enough to produce these outcomes can clearly dispense with elections: the Chinese state does not hold direct elections for its highest legislative bodies, for example, despite claiming to be just as democratic as the North Korean state. Yet North Korea, like almost every other state in the world, prefers to retain public electoral rituals (and has retained them for more than fifty years; NELDA indicates that there have been 10 such elections since 1962, mostly at regular five year intervals, though with one 8 year gap between the 1990 and 1998 elections). But why bother?

One answer I’ve seen in a couple of places seems tempting, but incorrect: that these elections are meant to “legitimate” the regime by providing a “veneer” of democracy (see, e.g., here). The problem is that there is no evidence that anyone is fooled who did not already want to be fooled, and certainly not anyone with any genuine influence in the regime: not the international community (which appears to feel at best amused, at worst trolled, by the whole thing), not the leaders being “elected” (who presumably are well informed about who has real power in the regime, and know it’s not the voters), and not the voters, who “generally have no interest in who their candidate is as many already live their lives apart from the state, and don’t bother to find out the name of the person they have just ‘voted’ into office,” and who have apparently occasionally engaged in iconoclastic destruction of candidate posters and other election-related vandalism under cover of darkness. The “veneer” of democracy that North Korean elections provide is too thin to do any genuine work producing political support for the regime.

Moreover, when we look at the KCNA dispatches that talk about the feelings of voters and the meaning of the event, we find that they do not emphasize the opportunity for popular participation provided by the election, or its democratic character, but the ways in which the ritual shows the people’s unity, loyalty, and gratitude; to the extent that the elections “legitimate” the regime (or better, produce emotional attachments and normative support for the regime), not even the regime thinks that they do so by convincing them that they live in a democracy. (Even in “real” democracies people complain about the lack of choice; why would North Koreans be any different? We must have a very poor opinion of people’s political competence to believe that they can be tricked in this way.)

Though we know very little about voter behavior in North Korea, we do have some knowledge about single party elections in the Soviet Union and various Eastern European states under communist rule, and we have some more robust theories about the purpose of periodic elections and the motivations of voters in settings with some token opposition, like Mexico under the PRI from 1929 until at least 1994, Egypt under Mubarak, or Russia today. This literature suggests that elections do not serve a single purpose for all regimes, and voters behave differently across authoritarian contexts (and in turn behave differently in such contexts than in democratic contexts): the varieties of electoral experience are many. Regimes may stage overwhelming victories to send a signal of invincibility and thus to deter opposition among elites; they may encourage electoral competition to distribute spoils to elites that have some degree of social support, thus coopting these into the regime; they may use elections to determine the competence of officials in mobilizing the population, and/or to observe incipient opposition if actual turnout does not match expected turnout; and they may stage them periodically to produce an orderly circulation of elites, or as a way of managing succession problems. At the same time, voters may vote even while knowing that their vote cannot affect the composition of the government in order to receive election-day goods or to avoid potentially negative consequences; to express support or dissatisfaction (expressive voting is not confined to more democratic contexts); or even because they think it is the right thing to do. But the idea that elections serve to give “legitimacy” to the government plays almost no role in any of these theories.

Soviet elections, which are perhaps most comparable to those in North Korea, are an especially interesting case. (I draw here on a piece by Rasma Karklins from 1986). The Soviet Union spent enormous resources on electoral rituals, which were frequent (more so than in North Korea, on average one per year) and regular. There were “campaigns,” and the day of voting was a festive occasion, sometimes including ceremonies where first time voters were presented with flowers or other gifts. As in North Korea, the voter could only choose to vote “yes” or “no,” but voting “no” entailed some risk and could not be properly done secretly. As in North Korea, the regime enlisted party cadres and ordinary citizens as “agitators” to produce maximum turnout (agitators were made responsible for bringing 20-30 voters to the polls), and there was enormous social pressure to vote. All of this meant that elections always resulted in nearly unanimous verdicts – over 99% support for the party in most cases, with turnouts similarly over 97%. The efforts the regime put on achieving unanimity are remarkable, and the language used to report the results shows striking similarities to the language KCNA uses today (minus the reference to the democratic character of the Soviet Union):

The results of the elections to the USSR Supreme Soviet and the unanimous election to the country’s supreme body of state power of the candidates of the indestructible bloc of Communists and non-Party people provide striking new evidence of the monolithic unity of the Party and the people and of the working people’s full support for the domestic and foreign policy of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] and the Soviet state. The elections have convincingly shown the thoroughly democratic nature of the world’s first society of developed socialism and the working people’s firm resolve to persistently strive for new successes in all sectors of communist construction. (Pravda, 7 March 1979, as quoted in Karklins, p. 451)

Yet these 99% turnouts are not the whole story. The turnout numbers excluded people who were not properly registered to vote, as well as (most?) prisoners, migrants without residence permits, and people who requested absentee ballots but did not actually vote. In a number of cases, people cast voters for other people, a practice that low-level people serving in electoral commissions seem to have encouraged in order to avoid trouble with their superiors. For example, Karklins reports a funny story about how “an Estonian biologist working at Tartu State University voted not only for his wife, but also for 30 of his students, apparently because the student turnout was only around 70%, and he simply took it upon himself to take care of the”problem“.” (p. 453). Actual voter turnout seems to have been closer to 90% than to 100%, and in some of the major cities like Moscow may have reached as low at 75% in some elections; and among those who voted between 1% and 5% made use of their right to enter an election booth to cast a negative vote or to write something on the ballot. Moreover, though voters expressed fear that not voting, or voting no, would lead to trouble, actual penalties seem to have been rare, more a reflection of the generalized fear produced by earlier decades of terror than of the actual incidence of punishment for not performing their assigned roles. (Karklins reports one 1971 case in which an anti-Soviet comment in a ballot led to “an arrest and a five-year sentence in a Soviet labor camp,” though this seems to have been exceptional, not the rule; and I vaguely remember something from I think Gulag Archipielago in which a single spoiled ballot during the Great Terror led to a huge search and numerous arrests). Nevertheless, these small risks meant that non-voters (and people who actually voted no) were among the more educated and politically aware USSR citizens, those most likely to dissent or emigrate; non-voting was one of the “weapons of the weak.” So when I read the North Korean numbers I wonder about the actual incidence of non-voting, especially given the fact that many North Koreans have in fact begun to live their lives “away from the state” since the famine of the 1990s; and I wonder about the actual numbers of “no” voters (are there no North Koreans who take advantage of their right to strike a candidate as a political act? Is the North Korean state so efficient at repression that it always pursues such people?); but I suspect that if the North Korean state knows such numbers, it keeps them very much secret, as they are more useful indicators of its actual support levels.

More importantly, Soviet elections seem to have produced in the long run not legitimacy, but alienation. If politics involves everywhere the mobilization of emotion through ritual, the dominant emotions such rituals produced and amplified seem to have been closer to resignation rather than enthusiasm; the regime ritually triumphed over the citizens by forcing them to participate in a mass charade, boasting of its ability to get citizens to approve of it even when everybody knew of the falsity of these claims. A Soviet election in the 1970s and 80s, at least, was thus a ritual designed to lower the emotional energy of the citizens, and increase that of its rulers, though it is plausible to imagine that the ritual aspects of the elections served to produce enthusiasm in citizens early on – a Soviet election, like an election almost everywhere, was first and foremost a big party, where the symbols of the regime were the key objects of attention, and where emotional commitments to these symbols (including political parties and candidates) can be amplified and preserved (or lost and reversed). It is in this sense that an election can “legitimate” a regime (though in competitive contexts, it always does so at the expense of producing negative emotions among partisans of the losing parties, something that is never properly emphasized in accounts of how democratic elections “legitimate” states). Yet the “legitimation” involved in Soviet elections as the regime wore on was less that granted by citizens on rulers (through enthusiastic emotional attachment to regime symbols, including the party and its candidates) than a kind of self-legitimation by rulers on themselves, more and more dependent on the ability of the regime to “triumph” over its citizens by making them passive and acquiescent rather than enthusiastic and committed.

Today, I suspect that North Korean elections are similarly alienating to North Korean citizens: the people who are emotionally elevated by participation in them are more likely to be the rulers than the citizens. There is evidence that the “hidden transcript” in North Korea is different from the public narrative; that many North Koreans, like people everywhere, mock the symbols of oppressive power whenever they think can get away with it. Where voters endorse the elect, and officials elect the people they desire, the people is likely to become more and more emotionally distanced from these officials as time wears on. Yet the triumphalist ritual of such elections is still useful to rulers committed to remaining in power; the appearance of power, is power.

Update 3/13/2014: edited one passage for clarity, fixed a typo.

The Perils of Public Opinion Research in Libya, circa 2000

This story of how Mabroka al-Werfalli (lecturer in politics at the University of Benghazi, previously the University of Garyounis) managed to conduct the research for her book, Political Alienation in Libya, is fascinating as a window into life in Libya under Gaddafi around the year 2000, and the difficulties of ascertaining "public opinion" in such a society:

Researchers always require an official authorization for opinion surveying in Libya. The problem was who should be contacted to get the permission? Although I was doing the research within my own society, it was difficult to identify who was in charge. Because institutions and individuals do not realize they are entitled to any sort of power, I was trapped for nearly four months in a revolving door of authorities, revolutionary committee offices and security agencies, none of which wanted to stick out their necks. It appeared that nobody wanted to shoulder the responsibility for giving the go-ahead for distributing such a daring questionnaire. (p. 1)

She then tells the story of how she gets shifted from the Basic Popular Congress, to the Head of Internal Security, to the Revolutionary Committee Liaison Bureau, to the governor of the city of Benghazi, and back again to the RCLB, all of whom require someone else's approval, or tell her they've gone on vacation, or simply refuse to meet her. Weeks pass, and she enlists friends and family members in the effort to secure a permit. Eventually, through the good offices of her uncle, she meets someone in security who is willing to grant her the permit "on the grounds that [she] was from the same tribe" (p. 2). But having a permit turns out to be a mixed blessing for her research:

It was not possible to wander around knocking on people's doors and requesting them to fill in forms. Libyans are not familiar with surveys of any kind apart from the population census that takes place every few years, so it is highly unusual for them to have individuals on their doorsteps asking them to answer unusual questions. 

The problem was how to calm people and attain their trust. I wanted to show good will by presenting the security permission, but people then suspected me of being sponsored by the security agencies, and consequently were afraid of me. When I approached people without showing my permit, they were also nervous and would not cooperate with me, fearing that I might have been doing something against the regime and wishing to avoid any involvement in this. People expressed a great deal of hesitation and apprehension when they read the questions set in the questionnaire. A number of them just said sorry and slammed their doors in my face. (pp. 2-3)

She does not give up, however. Enlisting her siblings and their close friends, she forms a team to help convince residents of the Al-Orouba district of Benghazi to answer her questions. Basically, they have to visit every house four or five times to gain people's trust, and some of the people who agree to be interviewed even help persuade some of their neighbors to cooperate with her. But even then sometimes people back out, or family members convince them that it was too risky to participate. Some people would only agree to be interviewed in a car, not in a house. And then the security officer who had given her a permit started getting nervous himself:

First he asked my late uncle to stop the process; then I was summoned to the headquarters where he worked and asked to make people write their names on the forms. I explained the irrationality of doing this, as it would jeopardize my entire project. They let me go but called me again about two weeks later and asked me to hand over all the completed forms I had by that time managed to collect. This was the most serious problem I faced while doing the survey. The decision to be made then was either to hand over the forms and lose all the months of work, or to run off with the forms in order to save them. I had to leave the country before all the forms had been collected. 

After I had left the country, security patrols visited my family to ask if I had managed all the forms so they could take them away. My family told them that I had managed to collect only a few forms, and that I had left for Britain. Because the fieldwork had taken so long, I was running out of time, and I had to go back to England to pursue my study [the book started as a PhD project]. So far, this excuse has protected my family, particularly those who were involved in the distribution and collection of the forms, from inevitable intimidation and detention [the book was completed in 2008, from the UK]. (p. 4)

Problems with the security services were not her only difficulties. There were also cultural obstacles. Interviewees did not wish to be interviewed at their homes, for obvious reasons; so they asked to be interviewed at her home. But her home turns out to be complicated to use:

It was quite difficult to do the interviewing in my home because 47 out of 76 interviewees were adult men, and because I had therefore to meet my interviewees either at the male-lounge (marbou'a) or on the roof above the flat, ... The roof was a good place when the weather was fine, but it was not convenient at all when it was raining and windy. The reason I resorted to the roof was that the male-lounge kept being occupied by guests coming for different purposes so I always had to leave immediately, not only because of violating the privacy of the interview but also because, as a female, I am not allowed to stay in the male-lounge if there is a male visitor. (p. 5)

She does get some help from the fact that she was the daughter of an Imam, but not enough. Trust was built up a little at a time; people who had completed the forms told their neighbors that it was safe to do so, and eventually the survey came to stand for something larger:

People regarded my interest in their political life as a promise to change the circumstances surrounding them, while others regarded it as a confidential and safe way to speak out, since their voices would be heard while their identities would never be revealed. (p. 5)

All of this can be neatly summed up in an observation she makes later:

For a relatively long period the state has been a strange entity for the individual in Libya. He or she has always dealt with it using extreme caution, or has avoided dealing with it altogether, believing that engaging with the state or its authorities involves a high risk to personal safety (p. 11)

The observation applies to other places as well. (One more for my file on the irrelevance of legitimacy).

Anyway, I haven't finished the book, but I think this has got to be a contender for "most difficult to carry out public opinion survey EVER." My hat is off to Dr al-Werfalli; she shows real grit, determination, and courage. I hope she is doing well in post-revolution Libya.

Legitimacy as the Solow Residual of Political Science

Jay Ulfelder kindly points his readers to my (recently updated!) working paper on “The Irrelevance of Legitimacy” in a recent post where he expresses doubt about the explanatory usefulness of the concept of legitimacy. As long-term readers will know, I am entirely in agreement with Jay when he says that

We appeal to legitimacy when we need to explain the persistence of political arrangements that defy our materialist predictions, and when those arrangements do finally collapse, we say that their failure has revealed a preceding loss of legitimacy. In statistical terms, legitimacy is the label we attach to the residual, the portion of the variance our mental models cannot explain. It is a tautology masquerading as a causal force.

It occurs to me that “legitimacy” plays more or less the same role in political science that “technology” sometimes plays in economics. Both are residual concepts that provide an illusion of understanding but do not actually explain much. In economics, talk of “technology” often obscures the fact that we don’t have a very good general theory of what explains economic growth, as Matt Yglesias noted a couple of weeks ago:  

Economists have shown that modern economic growth can't be accounted for merely by growth in the size of the labor force or by accumulation of additional capital. You need to add a third element into the mix. This element is sometimes called "total factor productivity" and sometimes called "technology," but it represents a statistical discrepency, not an inquiry into independently identifiable properties of technological growth. It's like Molière's doctors explaining that opium puts people to sleep because of its virtus dormitiva.

If the discrepency were small, this might not be a big deal and we'd say that economists had shown that capital accumulation is the key to economic growth. But it's not small. What's been found is that economic growth is largely unexplained. Using the word "technology" as a label for the discrepency makes it sound as if the issue is much better understood than it really is.

Technology is here the “Solow residual:” all the different mechanisms by which economic growth occurs that are not accounted for by simple measures of labor and capital utilization. But there are many such mechanisms! Education, changes in political institutions and property rights, the invention of new machines and business methods, new forms of economic organization, changes in social roles, norms, and culture, etc. all can contribute to economic growth beyond increases in labor supply and capital accumulation; but only some of these mechanisms correspond to what we normally think about when we say “technology,” and forgetting this is likely to lead to incorrect inferences. Moreover, we do not actually know which of these mechanisms is the most important in general, and hence which government policies would be most likely to increase growth.

Similarly, “legitimacy” is the label we typically use in political science for all the factors that sustain social order or norms beyond obvious coercion and material incentives. We all agree that the persistence of norms and social order cannot be fully (or even mostly) explained by crude material incentives and obvious coercion; but by subsuming all these “other” factors under a single label we miss the fact that they are really quite various. Collective action problems, rational conservatism, signalling conventions, emotional attachments, habits of discourse and conceptual blinders, identity and affiliation entanglements, sophistry and propaganda, even sincere beliefs in the rightness of the norms or forms of social order in question (for a detailed examination of these mechanisms, read my paper); all of these mechanisms can contribute to their maintenance, and only some of them are close to the folk model of “legitimacy,” in which norms persist because in some sense those subject to them "like" them or at least "accept" them on their own terms. (A model that I take to be false in most relevant cases). Moreover, to the extent that we are interested in changing particular social norms or forms of social order, we will do better to think in terms of how particular mechanisms sustain these norms, rather than in terms of “legitimacy.” 

The Irrelevance of Legitimacy - now as a working paper!

(This paper has now been published. The official version is available here, and an ungated version can be found here).
 
Sorry for the recent silence. I've been busy with administrative tasks, the beginning of the term here in the Southern hemisphere, and indexing a book. I've also been working on a paper: "The Irrelevance of Legitimacy":

The concept of legitimacy plays an important explanatory and normative role in political theory and political discourse. The idea is typically used both to explain the stability of a political order by pointing to acceptance of discursive justifications for that order, and to evaluate its normative appropriateness by comparing the conditions of the actual acceptance of discourses of justification to the conditions of their rational acceptability. The normative and explanatory roles of the concept of legitimacy are linked insofar as actual acceptance of justificatory discourses is usually taken to be (defeasible) evidence for their rational acceptability. I argue here that legitimacy (in the sense of acceptance of discursive justifications for political order) is generally irrelevant for the explanation of political stability: if anything, stability explains legitimacy rather than the other way around. Stability is in turn best explained by the way in which signals of commitment are generated through collective action, not by pointing to the individual acceptance of discursive justifications for political order. I illustrate the inadequacy of explanations of political order in terms of legitimacy by examining the phenomenon of cults of personality in totalitarian regimes, and raise some questions about the normative utility of the concept given its explanatory irrelevance. (Link to download).

I'll be presenting a shortened version of this paper at the Midwest Political Science Association meeting in Chicago on April 13.

Most of the arguments in the paper will be familiar to readers of this blog; in fact, many began life as blog posts (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here), though the paper ties them together and explicates them more carefully. Responses to these posts convinced me that there was something there worth researching more fully and discussing in more detail, and I want to thank readers and commenters for feedback and encouragement. Comments on the paper are also welcome; it is still work in progress (the final section, in particular, still needs a great deal of work, but every part of the argument could be tightened and subject to careful scrutiny, and will likely change a great deal before the paper gets submitted to actual peer review).

The main ideas of the paper were motivated by my dissatisfaction with the Weberian dictum (almost a cliche at this point) that power needs to be legitimated in order to endure. Though relationships of domination are often embedded within justificatory discourses, my view is that we cannot in general explain the stability of such relationships by pointing to the genuine acceptance of such justifications by the subordinate. (As I note in the paper, Weber himself seemed to be aware of this point, if inconsistently; he notes that all that matters for the stability of relationships of domination is that the claim to legitimacy be taken as valid, not that it be believed, and these are two very different things). To say that power needs legitimacy in order to endure is at best to say that power needs credible commitments in order to endure, and discourses of justification typically provide the language in which such credible commitments are expressed and measured; they are the form, not the cause of the stability of power. The title is nevertheless a bit of an exaggeration; a more appropriate title might have been "the limited relevance of legitimacy," since I admit that there are some conditions (primarily cases where exit or voice constraints on a relationship are minimal) where appeals to legitimacy have some explanatory and normative force, but I decided to go for broke. Anyway, I would be grateful for any feedback. Enjoy!

Your irregularly scheduled blogging will resume shortly.

On stability and legitimacy

Consider the following passages from David Beetham’s The Legitimation of Power (1991):

…it is a notable feature of power relations that they are themselves capable of generating the evidence needed for their own legitimation. Thus the evidence of superiority and inferiority which justifies the inequality of condition between dominant and subordinate is itself largely the product of that condition. Those who are excluded from key positions, activities or resources are thereby denied the opportunity to acquire or demonstrate the capacities and characteristics appropriate to their occupation or exercise, so justifying their subordinate position. This is true even where relatively open processes of selection are at work, once the selection is performed by an educational system which is given the task of preparing children differentially for their respective future roles. Evidence about the fitness or appropriateness of people to exercise power thus tends to be structured by the relations of power themselves, and therefore to have a self-fulfilling quality about it.

The same holds true for demonstrations of the general interest. Once some necessary social resource or activity comes to be controlled by a particular group, it follows that the interests of society at large can only be met through satisfying the interests of that group, and on terms acceptable to them. (pp. 60-61)

[…]

The capacity of power structures to generate the evidence necessary to their own justification, and to reproduce the conditions of dependency from which consent to subordination is freely given, helps to explain how it is that their legitimacy can come to be widely acknowledged by those involved in them, the subordinate included. ‘Dominant ideology’ theories tend to put far too much emphasis upon the determining influence exercised by the powerful over the ideas of the subordinate, through their preferential access to the means of ideological construction and dissemination … The account offered here suggests a different kind of explanation: that both the evidence and the interests of the subordinate that the justifications advanced for the rules of power prove plausible to them within the given social context. Their plausibility can only be challenged from a position or standpoint outside that context, e.g. by comparison with alternative rules of power, or when social changes have come to undermine from within the evidence on which they are based. (p. 62)

I think this is pretty insightful, though I still want to take issue with it. Basically, what Beetham is arguing is that to the extent that subordinate groups willingly accept their position within large-scale systems of domination (e.g., to the extent that women accept a subordinate position to men in patriarchal societies, peasants to landlords in an agrarian societies, low-caste groups in caste societies, or for that matter disenfranchised people in a dictatorships or workers under capitalism) this is not primarily because they are duped by the propaganda of the dominant (the classic “false consciousness” explanation), but rather because the operation of the system makes the claims of the dominant – their claims to greater skill, intelligence, effort, care for the common good, etc. – generally plausible.  People will accept the propaganda of the powerful only if (and so long as) it is not obviously in conflict with their everyday experience; and a system will remain legitimate only so long as it works to reduce the gap between the lived experience of people in subordinate positions and the justificatory rhetoric of the powerful by producing systematic evidence that the claims of the powerful are plausible, even true, at least within the context of shared categories of interpretation (which may themselves be structurally biased to favour the views of the powerful). Moreover, given the plausibility of these claims, it will make sense for the subordinate to pursue their interests within the terms set by the system.

It is worth stressing that Beetham does not argue that this is always the case in every social system. Not every social system is experienced as legitimate; and those which are not experienced as legitimate are precisely those where the subordinate can perceive an obvious gap between the qualities or actions the powerful say justify their position and the qualities they actually have, or between the possibilities for pursuing their interests given within the system and possibilities obviously available elsewhere. Moreover, his argument only applies to large-scale social systems. Small-scale relations of domination could not systematically generate the evidence necessary for their own justification; they must “borrow” it from the larger scale system within which they are embedded. For example, in a highly patriarchal society the claims of men for their own position – claims based on education, experience, etc. that are themselves differentially allocated - will only be generally plausible to women; exceptions will abound, and within particular relations it will not always make sense for women to “accept” subordinate positions. (There are a lot of nuances and complications packed into the term “accept,” but let that pass for the moment). If women experience this system as legitimate, it will not necessarily be because of their individual “micro-experience,” so to speak, but because their understanding of “normative” facts (that is, their understanding of what is “normal”) tells them that in general women are less educated, have fewer of the relevant qualities for rule, etc., and that given those facts it will be easier to pursue their interests within the terms set by men.

Yet I think Beetham still puts too much stress on belief as a way to explain stability and pays too little attention to the constraints that opportunities for exit and collective action impose on these same beliefs. If anything, stability explains belief, rather than the other way around. To say that a legitimate system is stable, I want to suggest, is merely to express a tautology: systems of domination that are believed to be stable (even if this belief exists only because, for example, no one can coordinate large numbers on specific alternatives) will (most of the time) produce beliefs rationalizing the legitimacy of the system.

Consider the question of why repressive dictatorships invest so much effort in monopolizing the public sphere and policing the “attention economy.” The problem such regimes face is not that the majority of the people fail to believe the justificatory rhetoric of the rulers now (though they may or may not!), but that whatever they believe now cannot stabilize the regime in the absence of the regime’s efforts to monopolize the public sphere; if their justificatory claims were self-evidently true, they would not require policing the public sphere in the same way. These regimes can close the gap between their justificatory claims and the experience of the people subject to them only by credibly threatening to punish those who might want to break their monopoly over the discourse of justification. It is only when the system is believed to be stable – that is, when the threats to those who would like to break the state’s monopoly over the public sphere are deemed to be most credible – that people will be most likely to adaptively accept the claims of the powerful. 

One might also point to a number of experiments (ungated) that suggest that it is precisely when a constraint is experienced as inevitable or absolute that people are most likely to accept it, whereas when they experience the constraint as somehow not quite as absolute – perhaps because they see a way of changing it or resisting it that they are most likely to reject it.What matters causally, in other words, is the belief in stability rather than the belief in the justifications for the relation of domination; absent the belief in stability, the belief in the justifications also goes.  

Or consider the case of the dalits in India, as described in a short piece I came across recently by Shikha Dalmia. The caste system endures even where formal institutions do not enforce it; it is an informal equilibrium which the dalits themselves help to perpetuate. But why? Dalmia notes that an individual dalit will often do best by abiding by the rules of the caste system:

How? Consider Maya’s story.

Maya assigned herself to our house in 1977. We had no choice. If we wanted our trash picked up, bathrooms scrubbed and yards cleaned, Maya was it. Indians find dealing with other people’s refuse not just unpleasant, but polluting. Hence only dalits are willing to do this work, something that both stigmatizes them and gives them a stranglehold on the market. And they have transformed this stranglehold into an ironclad cartel that closes all other options for their customers.

When Maya got married at 16, her father-in-law paid another dalit $20 for her wedding gift: the “rights” to service 10 houses in our neighborhood, including ours. Maya has no formal deed to these “rights,” yet they are more inviolable than holy writ. Maya’s fellow dalits, who own the “rights” to other houses, can’t work in hers, just as she can’t work in theirs.

Doing so, Maya insists, would be tantamount to theft that would invite a well-deserved beating and ostracism by the dalit community. No one would help a “poacher” or attend her family functions like births, weddings or funerals.

This arrangement has guaranteed Maya a monthly income of $100 that, along with her husband’s job as a “gofer” at a government lab, has helped her raise three children and build a modest house with a bathroom, a prized feature among India’s poor. But Maya’s monopoly doesn’t give her just money. It also hands her clout to resist the upper-caste power structure, not always for noble reasons.

None of Maya’s employers dares challenge her work. Maya takes more days off for funerals every year than there are members in her extended family. Complaining, however, is not only pointless but perilous. It would result in stinking piles of garbage outside the complainer’s home for days. Every time my mother gets into spats with Maya over her sketchy scrubbing, my mother loses. One harsh word, and Maya boycotts our house until my mother cajoles her back. Nor is Maya the only sweeper, or jamadarni, with an attitude. All of New Delhi is carved up among Maya-style sweeper cartels and it is a rare house whose jamadarni is not a “big problem.”

This is consistent with Beetham’s story: Maya accepts her position within the caste system (to the extent that “accept” is the right word for what is going on, but let’s pass that over) because she finds that it is plausibly in her individual  interest to do so, though collectively this results in a bad outcome for all dalits, including social segregation, lack of mobility, etc. (Prisoner’s dilemmas everywhere!). But it is plausibly in her interest to accept her position because opportunities both for collective action to change the system and for exiting the relationship are thought to be unlikely; the collective action or exit constraint is prior to Maya’s first-order beliefs about her caste position, which would easily change if these collective constraints and exit opportunities changed, as we can glimpse near the end of the story:

Maya is resigned to such discrimination, but not her oldest son, 36. He holds a government job, works as a sales representative for an Amway-style company and dreams big. He is embarrassed by his mother and lies to his customers about her work. He makes enough money to support Maya and wants her to quit, but she will have none of it. She fears destitution and poverty more, she says, than she craves social respectability.

But the choice may not be hers much longer.

Upon retirement, she had planned to either pass her “business” to her children or sell it to another dalit for about $1,000. But about six months ago, municipal authorities started dispatching vans, Western-style, to collect trash from neighborhoods, the one service that protected Maya from obsolescence in an age of sophisticated home-cleaning gadgetry.

Maya and her fellow dalits held demonstrations outside the municipal commissioner’s office to stop the vans. They finally arrived at a compromise that lets Maya and her pals collect trash from individual homes and hand it to the vans for disposal. But Maya realizes that this arrangement won’t last. “I got branded as polluted and became unfit for other jobs, for what?” she wept. “To build a business that has now turned to dust?”

Her son, however, is pleased. He believes that this will finally force his siblings to develop skills for more respectable work instead of joining their mother. But Maya shakes her head.

And she might be right. Post-liberalization, the most dogged and determined dalits are able to escape their caste-assigned destiny and get rich. But for the vast majority, as Maya says, opportunities are better within the caste system than outside it.

Where does that leave us? If I had to make a grand claim – which I probably shouldn’t – I would suggest that relationships of domination are disrupted not so much because people come to reject the claims of the powerful, but because opportunities for exit or collective action become concretely available that make these beliefs dispensable. (Another example: the end of footbinding and infibulation. Link is to a superb paper by Gerry Mackie - ungated here).

[update 3/3/2012: fixed some really unclear sentences]

On the Meaning of Political Support

In the closing pages of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt notoriously claimed that “politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same” (p. 279). Her point was that whatever Eichmann’s motivations or beliefs might have been ultimately, he had made himself a “willing instrument in the organization of mass murder;” and ethically and legally speaking, that fact was all that mattered. To support a regime (especially a murderous one) could be nothing more and nothing less than to act in whatever way the regime asks you to.

There is something harsh and uncompromising about this view. We often seem to want to distinguish between support and obedience, or at least to excuse some forms of obedience on the grounds that such obedience was not granted willingly or not grounded in genuine support. We might speak of “preference falsification” and attempt to separate overt obedience, given out of fear or lack of options or greed, from the “real” or “baseline” support that would have been given in the absence of ignorance, coercion, peer pressure or other incentives. (I have often written in this way, and find it a useful shorthand for thinking about things like cults of personality). And when we think about questions of responsibility in coercive regimes we sometimes engage in a complicated moral calculus that balances the inculpatory force of actual obedience against the exculpatory force of morally objectionable incentives (partially) underlying that obedience. Here I take it that our usual intuitions indicate that negative incentives for obedience (like threats of violence) are more exculpatory than positive incentives (like jobs or money), and positive incentives are more exculpatory than “intrinsic” preferences. The man who falsely denounces his neighbour on pain of seeing his son put in prison and tortured may do a wrong, but the wrong is partly excused by the threat of violence (perhaps he does the lesser of two evils), whereas the man who denounces his neighbour in exchange for money behaves less excusably (even if he really needs the money), and the man who denounces his neighbour for fun is a simply a monster. (And what about the man who supports a coercive system because he thinks it is the right system? Here our intuitions seem inconsistent, or perhaps depend on what we think about the source of the belief). In other words, we typically believe that obedience gained at gunpoint expresses less “genuine” support than obedience gained by an appeal to material interest, and that the most genuine support is manifested in purely “disinterested” obedience or collaboration.

I want to put aside for a moment the moral questions about responsibility and exculpation, and just focus on whether we can speak about “support” independently of obedience, i.e., about some “real” level of support underlying a person’s obedience to or collaboration with authority. And here I think Arendt was on to something: to ask about “real” motivations in politics is often fruitless, and sometimes positively perverse. The only way to demonstrate support in politics is by obeying, collaborating, or otherwise doing what the group one supports expects of you; the demand for additional proofs of support can only result in socially destructive (if sometimes individually advantageous) signalling games (see here, here, and here for some examples in this blog; Arendt’s favourite example was the destructive politics of purity during the terror in the French revolution). And the inner world of motivation and belief is too obscure (even to the agent) and fragile to survive the light of publicity, as Arendt repeatedly stressed.

More precisely, I am not sure that it makes sense to speak of political support independently of the institutions that condition obedience and collaboration. For purposes of analysis, we can (sometimes) separate out various “inputs” of what we might call the obedience-production function – coercion, monetary incentives, peer pressure and so on – and call the residual “real or genuine support,” a pure preference for collaboration with or obedience to a group or leader. This is basically what you get in Kuran’s classic analysis of preference falsification and its consequences, which I quite like (in fact, I use it constantly); but it is at best a simplification of the complex phenomenology of belief and motivation, especially when coercion and other external “incentives” dominate over whatever “intrinsic” preferences one may care to postulate. For one thing, in environments where coercion and other incentives are large enough, this residual preference is itself likely to be at least partially produced by all the other forces at work and is likely to be quite small in magnitude; and perhaps more importantly, it won’t always make sense to speak of this residual as a “preference” for the leader or the regime (or as a belief in its legitimacy, for that matter).

These ideas came to mind when reading Robert F. Worth’s superb and disturbing NY Times piece on the last days of the Qaddafi regime:

Unlike Benghazi, the old opposition stronghold in eastern Libya where the rebellion began in February, Tripoli had been a relative bastion of support for Qaddafi. Even the bravest dissidents, who risked their lives for years, often posed as smiling backers of Qaddafi and his men. Now the masks were off, but another game of deception was under way. At all the military bases I visited, I found soldiers’ uniforms and boots, torn off in the moments before they had, presumably, slipped on sandals and djellabas and run back home. Even the prisoners I spoke with in makeshift rebel jails had shed their old identities or modified them. “I never fired my gun,” they would say. “I only did it for the money.” “I joined because they lied to me.”

Everyone in Tripoli, it seemed, had been with Qaddafi, at least for show; and now everyone was against him. But where did their loyalty end and their rebellion begin? Sometimes I wondered if the speakers themselves knew. Collectively, they offered an appealing narrative: the city had been liberated from within, not just by NATO’s relentless bombing campaign. For months, Qaddafi’s own officers and henchmen had quietly undermined his war, and ordinary citizens had slowly mustered recruits and weapons for the final battle. In some cases, with a few witnesses and a document or two, their version seemed solid enough. Others, like Mustafa Atiri, had gruesome proof of what they lived through. But many of the people I spoke with lacked those things. They were left with a story; and they were telling it in a giddy new world in which the old rules — the necessary lies, the enforced shell of deference to Qaddafi’s Mad Hatter philosophy — were suddenly gone. It was enough to make anyone feel a little drunk, a little uncertain about who they were and how they got there.

Were these people deceiving themselves or others? Did the soldiers really support Gaddafi in the past but now do not? Do some of these people support Gaddafi still? The question makes less sense to me than it once did. It is clear that they once obeyed Gaddafi and now do not; and that the change from obedience to non-obedience must be explained as a result of a changing configuration of “inputs” to the obedience-production function, so to speak (changing configurations of coercion, monetary incentives, peer pressure, views of the rebels, etc.); but to attempt to determine if, in their heart of hearts, these people supported Gaddafi then (net of all of these forces) and now do not seems slightly absurd. Their obedience and disobedience, support and lack of support are nothing but the vector product of all the forces (threats of coercion, positive incentives, beliefs about Gaddafi, idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, moral convictions, obscure and half-formed ideas about the future, etc.) operating through them. It may make sense to attempt to disentangle these forces if we are interested in legal or moral responsibility, or in the private tragedies of everyday life in Libya, but it does not make sense to me to attempt to figure out if Gaddafi enjoyed some “genuine” level of support (independent of coercion, money, etc.) as a separate explanatory factor.

But didn’t some people love Gaddafi? And doesn’t such love make a difference? (This is basically the old “fear and love” problem). I do not think it makes the explanatory difference it is sometimes thought to make: those with more “love” for Gaddafi were not necessarily those more committed to the defence of his regime, for example. Here is another passage that jumped out at me in the piece (but really, read it all, though some of the stories are quite disturbing):

Of all the former Qaddafi loyalists I spoke with, only one offered a rationale that went beyond money or compulsion. His name was Idris, and he was a handsome 21-year-old medical student with a downy wisp of beard, a pink T-shirt and jeans. Idris (he asked me not to use his full name) talked about Qaddafi’s loss in a baffled, crestfallen way. We drove to a cafe not far from Algeria Square — since renamed Qatar Square by the rebels, in deference to Qatar’s support for the Libyan revolt — and got a table. I was amazed to see that Idris still had an image of Qaddafi on the screen of his cellphone. “I’ve been passionate for Qaddafi ever since I was born,” he said. His parents felt the same way, though he insisted they had not held any position or drawn any special benefits. “Libya is just a bunch of tribes, and there are blood feuds,” Idris said, when I asked him why. “We see Qaddafi as the only wise man with the power to stop the feuds. If he fails, there will be no one to mediate.” I asked what he thought of Qaddafi’s apparent support for terrorists and his reputation as a maniac in the West. “We see him as a brave man who speaks out against American bullying, as other Arab leaders do not,” Idris said. “So they accuse him of these things.” Idris conceded that Qaddafi made the mistake of surrounding himself with bloodthirsty people like Abdullah Senussi, his security chief and brother-in-law. He also said, like many loyalists, that he was misled about the rebels by Libyan state television, which portrayed them as terrorists. Yet he gave no ground in his love for Qaddafi. When I asked how he felt about Tripoli’s fall, he said: “Devastated. It’s like someone you love, and they’re gone.”

Our conversation began to draw interest from two men sitting at a nearby table, and Idris was getting nervous. We got back into the car and drove to his neighborhood, Abu Selim, a stronghold of support for Qaddafi. The neighborhood is known for criminals and immigrants — a ready base of support for the regime — but Idris’s area was more middle-class. As we drove down his own street, he pointed derisively to the new rebel flags hanging outside the houses. “This was all green flags until last week,” he said. “They love Qaddafi. They haven’t opened their shops, everything is still closed. They are afraid.” Later, he added: “Honestly, before February there was no such thing as pro- or anti-Qaddafi. Only those people who were directly affected, the prisoners or the very religious men, had any view.” We drove past the stalls of a local market, blackened by fire in the final days of fighting. Idris gazed out sadly. “Change is not worth this kind of destruction,” he said. On one wall, I saw the words “Who are you?” It was a satire, like so much of the graffiti, aimed at one of Qaddafi’s recent speeches, in which he repeatedly asked the rebels who they were. But in this neighborhood, full of silent and resentful young men like Idris, the words took on a very different meaning.

I think Idris inadvertently hits on a couple of important points. First, it is interesting to note that when one strips away all the other “inputs” to the production of support – money, coercion, peer pressure, etc. – we are forced to speak of things like “love” (for Qaddafi!). But this love is hardly comprehensible as a preference for Qaddafi over the alternatives, or even as a belief in the “legitimacy” of Qaddafi’s regime; it is obscurely wrapped up with a person’s identity and understanding of the world, and its political consequences appear not to have been significant. (Idris does not appear to have fought for Qaddafi when things got tough, despite his love for him, unlike many other people who were loyal to Qaddafi out of a variety of pragmatic considerations of interest and fear). As a side note, I suspect that one cannot normally speak of beliefs in legitimacy except in the Hobbesian sense of beliefs that converge on particular rules or persons as sovereign. To believe in the legitimacy of a regime is simply to expect that other people will obey its rules and officials and collaborate with its authority; when that expectation disappears, so does the regime, but this is obviously very different from something that can be measured by means of opinion polls, and it seems to have very little to do with the personal feeling that someone like Idris might have had for Qaddafi.

Second, Idris is right to note that before people were forced to take sides, “there was no such thing as pro- or anti-Qaddafi. Only those people who were directly affected, the prisoners or the very religious men, had any view.” The public act of taking a position obviates any question of “inner” support, since the public act is a clear signal of support. And without that public act, there is really no such thing as pro- or anti- Qaddafi “support” other than the ordinary collaboration of everyday life. It is only when people are called upon to do something one way or the other – to shoot prisoners, as some of the people whose stories are told in the piece were called upon to do, or spy on their neighbours, or anything that actually puts them at risk – that we can speak of support (or lack of support) in politically significant ways. And here Arendt is obviously right: obedience and support then are the same; to support the regime was to fight for it, whatever complex motivations one might have had for doing so. It is worth understanding the complexity and tragedy of these motivations (the story of Furjani, in the article, gives a glimpse of the tragic situation in which some people are placed when coercion is the dominant input the obedience-production technology), but from the point of view of explaining the maintenance and fall of the regime these will add very little beyond the obvious facts that most people supported the regime because they thought it was in their interest to do so or were afraid to do otherwise. 

The Irrelevance of Legitimacy

(As I intimated a while ago, I’ve grown weary of the concept of legitimacy. This is an experiment in thinking about how one might understand political life without recourse to this idea, or with a very different version of it).

Both everyday and academic explanations of uprisings and revolutions tend to make heavy use of the concept of legitimacy. For example, a common argument suggests that some of the regimes of the Middle East (Egypt, Tunisia, Libya) collapsed in part because they had long forfeited their legitimacy due to the abusive ways in which they treated their own people, whereas others (Morocco, the absolute monarchies of the gulf) are likely to weather the current crisis because their governments are still considered legitimate by the majority of their populations. (A very sophisticated version of this argument can be found in this piece by Jack Goldstone). More generally, I often come across arguments for the view that some action or discourse “legitimates” certain forms of power and thus helps sustain it, or conversely that the breakdown of particular power relations can be explained (at least in part) by pointing to the fact that people have ceased to consider them “legitimate.” Yet I find most of these explanations for the maintenance or breakdown of regimes unsatisfactory. They seem to amount to little more than saying that regimes (or, more generally, relations of domination) endure so long as they are accepted by the ruled, and when they are not, they don’t. But this is not obviously true.

For one thing, it is not empirically clear that “acceptance” needs to be very deep to sustain many forms of domination and oppression. Consider the variety of ways in which we might say that someone accepts their domination. For example, a person might sullenly submit to some oppressive institutional order because of his or her inability to imagine a different one; or (more commonly) because of his or her inability to mobilize collective action in favor of some alternative order (they face a coordination problem); or because despite the fact that a different institutional order would be better for a large group, it is individually “rational” for individuals to defect from collective efforts to change the current institutional order (they face a standard “prisoner’s dilemma”); or because the institutional order so shapes his or her interests and identity that they find challenges to the order against their “long-run” interests (their interests and those of the order are ultimately aligned, though they still think of themselves as oppressed); or (very rarely) because they think that the institutional order that dominates them is right and just. Many obviously oppressive social orders are not believed to be right and just by majorities of the dominated and yet they endure for a very long time, at least if we believe studies like James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance or Weapons of the Weak, which thoroughly document the fact that peasants in many agrarian societies do not come to accept their domination as rightful and just in any sense. The same is true of most authoritarian regimes, where preference falsification is often rampant, as I indicated in passing in my cults of personality post. Yet it is also clear that many people in such orders also accept their domination in a loose sense of the term: they conform publicly, they vote, they don’t rebel, they even contribute to the maintenance of the oppression by denouncing others or taking advantage of opportunities to climb the social ladder at the expense of others, and so on. Should we say that these social orders are considered “legitimate”? I say no: they should not be considered legitimate in any empirically relevant sense (let alone in any normatively relevant sense, but that’s another story).

The basic (and probably correct) intuition behind the use of the concept of legitimacy to explain the endurance of oppressive regimes or social relations is the idea that power – and more specifically, relationships of domination - cannot normally be sustained by private incentives (payments and threats) alone; “something more” is necessary if domination is to endure for any length of time. Domination is involved in relationships that are typically contrary to the interest of at least one of the parties, and hence it is likely to be resisted whenever the opportunity presents itself. Domination thus often requires repression to sustain the relationship, but repression is costly and often ineffective over the long run if the relationship is supposed to induce the cooperation of the dominated in some productive endeavour; hence domination needs to be “legitimated,” i.e., needs to be based on a set of shared and relatively stable beliefs that enable those who benefit from relationships of domination to direct the actions of those who are in subordinate positions with a minimum of repression even when such direction is against the interests of the latter. When domination is actually sustained in the long run, the argument goes, it must be because those who are dominated somehow accept their domination, however grudgingly, and in particular because they believe certain things about the people or institutions that dominate them (e.g., that the powerful have a “right” to command, or that they have a special sort of charisma, or that certain institutions represent the natural order of things). Conversely, if domination breaks down, then it must be because the dominated have stopped believing these things. (Note that I am talking here about “empirical” legitimacy, not “normative” legitimacy: I am interested in the role the concept of legitimacy plays in explaining domination, not in whether particular relationships of domination are legitimate in some interesting normative sense. Empirical legitimacy claims to be about the beliefs that people actually do have, not about the beliefs that they ought to have).

But this general understanding of how domination requires legitimacy is, I suspect, incorrect or at least fundamentally confused. Though belief may on occasion help sustain domination, the idea that domination is always sustained by (shared) belief is not true. At the very least, the majority of the mechanisms that sustain relationships of domination over the long run are not reducible to beliefs in the rightness or charisma or naturalness of certain people or institutions. For example, we ought to distinguish between a belief in a lack of alternatives (which may make people sullenly conform to a social order they deem oppressive), and a belief in the rightness of a social order, or between the idea that some of the mechanisms through which people are dominated are “hidden” and the idea that these power relationships are considered to be legitimate.

In order to make some progress on thinking about this problem, it may be useful to take a somewhat lengthy detour into Max Weber’s Economy and Society, where Weber rigorously tries to define the idea of empirical legitimacy in order to explain what constitutes a “social order” or a regularity of social action (feel free to skip the next 3-4 paragraphs if this is not your cup of tea). This is still the standard understanding of legitimacy in the social sciences (though it is not the only possible one, other conceptualizations of legitimacy typically draw on it), so it is worth examining in some detail (and improving on it, if possible). At the very beginning of the work, Weber analyzes how different sorts of reasons for action (“micromotives,” to use Schelling’s term) give rise to and disrupt different kinds of social order (“macrobehaviors” or patterns of social action). According to him, there are only three kinds of social order (I draw here on Habermas’ interpretation of Weber’s thought in his Theory of Communicative Action, especially I.ii.1, pp.157-185 and I.ii.4, pp. 254-271; the relevant passages of Weber are mostly in Economy and Society I.i, especially sections 4-6):

1. In habitual orders, social regularities emerge and are kept in existence through the unthinking inertia of everyday activity (“habitual action”); reasons do not play a motivating role in their creation. Such orders are not stable, however, to the introduction of reflection; when people think about what they are doing, they may sometimes act differently, transforming their social order into an interest-based or a legitimate order.
2. In interest-based orders (such as markets, though Weber does not think that markets are sustained purely by interest), social regularities emerge from the mutual adjustment of the activities of more or less instrumentally rational actors engaging in tactical and strategic activity in pursuit of their various interests. Reasons here play a motivating role in the emergence of social regularities, but only privately: each actor has his or her own (different) reasons for acting as he or she does in pursuit of his or her interests, yet social regularities still emerge from the private adjustments each actor makes to his or her behavior in light of the actions of others. In modern game-theoretic terms, the social order is an equilibrium of some game, given people’s (potentially heterogeneous) private incentives for action. Weber thinks, however, that pure interest-based orders are generally unstable, and are thus often stabilized by what we might call “shared” or “public” reasons, which transform interest-based orders into “legitimate” orders properly speaking.
3. In legitimate orders social regularities emerge from the shared acceptance by agents of certain reasons for action or inaction. These reasons are usually understood as normative constraints on the kinds of courses of action that agents might privately consider, such as for example beliefs about the validity, justice, fairness, or virtue of particular actions or norms. Here reasons produce social regularities not through their being held privately (as in interest-based orders) but through their being shared or “public” reasons that can rule out of bounds or override, so to speak, certain kinds of private reasons for action (e.g., reasons to revolt). Weber goes further and identifies three basic ideal kinds of legitimate order: the traditional order, where the legitimating reasons refer to the supposed naturalness of an institution (people fail to imagine alternatives; this is the legitimate equivalent of a habitual order); the charismatic order, where the legitimating reasons refer to the special qualities of a person or persons from whom rules issue; and the legal-rational order, where the legitimating reasons refer to the special qualities of a set of rules (which can themselves be used to generate further rules). These ideas are rather abstract, but the basic point is, I think, generally comprehensible. In a traditional order, when one asks the question “why do you obey/submit/follow somebody’s commands?” the expected answer is “because that is the way we do things here” (not “because otherwise I will be beaten over the head with that stick”). Similarly, in a charismatic order, the expected answer is “because my leader or messiah told me,” and in a legal-rational order the expected answer is “because (other) rules authorize it” or “because the rules are just (i.e., in accordance with the rules or principles of justice).”

But what does it mean for reasons for action to be shared or public? The obvious interpretation (and the one that Weber seems to prefer) is that reasons are shared and public to the extent that many agents believe the same thing about why they or their rulers should or should not act in particular ways. In game-theoretic terms, we might say that in legitimate orders social order emerges not from the private adjustment of behavior by participants in a game according to their private reasons for action (the expected "utility" they might derive from acting in one way rather than another), but from the shared beliefs of participants about the rules of the game, which limit the strategies available to them: a legitimate order is simply one in which enough participants accept the rules of the game as rules (and not merely as constraints imposed on them by the action of others in equilibrium). Empirical legitimacy enables a social order to economize on coercion both by consistently narrowing the range of the possible strategies open to actors and by clearly signaling any violations of the  rules (and hence enabling violators to be more easily punished). This sort of legitimacy is also conceptually related to trust: a government that is illegitimate is one that violates the (shared) rules consistently enough to lose the trust of the population.

One might want to say that to the extent that some people believe in the legitimacy of a social order (that is, believe that the rules structuring the social order, or the persons who have authority to produce such rules, are somehow the right rules, or the right persons), that social order will be made more “resilient” to changes in the habits or private reasons people may or may not have for conforming to the demands of the social order in question (e.g., rewards/penalties and the probability of physical punishment for nonconformity). How else should we explain the enormous investment that dominant groups make in the deployment of what we might call (I’m trying to use this term neutrally) “ideological” resources (persuasive arguments, sophistic arguments, propaganda, cults of personality, the mobilization of scientific or other authoritative discourses to “naturalize” certain institutions or practices, etc.)? How else should we think of these efforts to “legitimate” particular social orders, if not by seeing them as efforts to change people’s beliefs (by means fair or foul, good-faith persuasion or underhanded manipulation) so that they conform better to a particular social order? But then: should we really say that when Robert Mugabe holds a rigged election in Zimbabwe, for example, he is attempting to legitimate his rule?

The key to a different understanding of this problem lies in taking seriously the idea that supposedly “legitimating” beliefs are shared. What matters for (what we normally call) charismatic legitimacy, for example, is less the belief that some particular person is a demigod but that this particular answer to the question “why do you submit/obey/do X/etc.?” becomes expected in some group, and that not giving the expected answer singles one out for sanctions, exclusion, and other bad things. And just as we can have the spectacle of charismatic legitimacy without charisma, we should be able to see legal-rational “legitimacy” in the midst of corruption, or (I suspect) traditional “legitimacy” even when there is widespread awareness of the newness of tradition. Legitimacy is thus underpinned primarily by signals, not beliefs: those who do not provide the appropriate answer in the right circumstances (or rather, those who do not provide a credible answer) identify themselves as violators. Even the corrupt bureaucrat gives lip service to the law, whatever he or she may believe privately, and the irreligious king still takes seriously the traditional liturgical forms.

“Legitimate” social orders thus function like a signaling system in which rulers and ruled, dominator and dominated, both provide (credible) signals of their commitment to particular rules or persons or existing practices; and insofar as the system “works” it produces authority, i.e., it identifies certain people or rules or forms of speech as precisely those people or rules or forms of speech that one is expected (by other people subject to the social order) to follow or use in particular circumstances. But “credible” signals are not always “true” signals; that a signal – a particular answer to the question, “why do you submit/obey/ do X?” – is taken as credible by a relevant receiver does not mean it actually reflects some deep belief about the rightness or justice of the system (though it of course may). Credibility in a signaling system may be achieved in many ways, only some of which involve any sort of belief in the content of the signals.

What matters [for explanations of social change] are the conditions under which alternative legitimacy claims can emerge as focal points for new signaling systems, or under which the signaling equilibrium is disrupted. Here traditional explanations based on legitimacy have somewhat more to say: there are many common conditions under which, for example, the failure of authorities to demonstrate a credible commitment to norms of justice to which a population is committed produces anger and in turn triggers activities that reduce the costs of coordinating signals of commitment to a different social order (a different set of rules or persons). And from this point of view, “ideological” investments (or such practices as blatantly rigged or fraudulent elections, or unbelievable cults of personality) are thus useful not so much because they make people believe in the rightness or special qualities of particular people or institutions, but because they prevent the emergence of alternative focal points for legitimacy claims - e.g., because they destroy the common knowledge necessary for collective action, or because they are too salient for other foci of collective justification to easily emerge (they colonize public space).

But if this analysis is even partially correct, then it seems to me that legitimacy in the traditional sense (as beliefs in the rightness of people or institutions) is irrelevant to the explanation of political phenomena such as revolutions. Legitimacy still matters normatively – we want to live under social orders that are just or fair – but not so much for explaining social change.