The Age of Democracy

(Part of an occasional series on the history of political regimes. Contains some work in progress.)

This is the age of democracy, ideologically speaking. As I noted in an earlier post, almost every state in the world mentions the word “democracy” or “democratic” in its constitutional documents today. But the public acknowledgment of the idea of democracy is not something that began just a few years ago; in fact, it goes back much further, all the way back to the nineteenth century in a surprising number of cases.

Here is a figure I've been wanting to make for a while that makes this point nicely (based on data graciously made available by the Comparative Constitutions Project). The figure shows all countries that have ever had some kind of identifiable constitutional document (broadly defined) that mentions the word “democracy” or “democratic” (in any context - new constitution, amendment, interim constitution, bill of rights, etc.), arranged from earliest to latest mention. Each symbol represents a “constitutional event” - a new constitution adopted, an amendment passed, a constitution suspended, etc. - and colored symbols indicate that the text associated with the constitutional event in question mentions the word “democracy” or “democratic” (see data and methods note below for more details):

(Red lines indicate, from left to right, the date of the first mention of the word “democracy” or “democratic” in a constitutional text, WWI, WWII, and the end of the Cold War [1989]).

The earliest mentions of the word “democracy” or “democratic” in a constitutional document occurred in Switzerland and France in 1848, as far as I can tell.[1] Participatory Switzerland and revolutionary France look like obvious candidates for being the first countries to embrace the “democratic” self-description; yet the next set of countries to embrace this self-description (until the outbreak of WWI) might seem more surprising: they are all Latin American or Caribbean (Haiti), followed by countries in Eastern Europe (various bits and pieces of the Austro-Hungarian empire), Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain), Russia, and Cuba. Indeed, most “core” countries in the global system did not mention democracy in their constitutions until much later, if at all, despite many of them having long constitutional histories; even French constitutions after the fall of the Second Republic in 1851 did not mention “democracy” until after WWII. In other words, the idea of democracy as a value to be publicly affirmed seems to have caught on first not in the metropolis but in the periphery. Democracy is the post-imperial and post-revolutionary public value par excellence, asserted after national liberation (as in most of the countries that became independent after WWII) or revolutions against hated monarchs (e.g., Egypt 1956, Iran 1979, both of them the first mentions of democracy in these countries but not their first constitutions).

Today only 16 countries have ever failed to mention their “democratic” character in their constitutional documents (Australia, Brunei, Denmark, Japan, Jordan, Malaysia, Monaco, Nauru, Oman, Samoa, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Tonga, the United Kingdom, the USA, and Vatican City).[2] And no country that has ever mentioned “democracy” in an earlier constitutional document fails to mention it in its current constitutional documents (though some countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries went back and forth - mentioning democracy in one constitution, not mentioning it in the next). Indeed, after WWII the first mention of democracy in constitutions tended to be contemporaneous with the first post-independence constitution of the country; and with time, even countries with old and settled constitutional traditions seem to be more and more likely to mention “democracy” or “democratic” in some form as amendments or bills of rights accumulate (e.g., Belgium in 2013, New Zealand in 1990, Canada in 1982, Finland in 1995). The probability of a new constitution mentioning “democracy” appears to be asymptotically approaching 1. To use the language of biology, the democratic “meme” has nearly achieved “fixation” in the population, despite short-term fluctuations, and despite the fact that there appears to be no particular correlation between a state calling itself democratic and actually being democratic, either today or in the past.[3]

Though the actual measured level of democracy around the world has trended upwards (with some ups and downs) over the last two centuries, I don't think this is the reason why the idea of democracy has achieved near-universal recognition in public documents. Countries do not first become democratic and then call themselves democracies; if anything, most mentions of democracy seem to be rather aspirational, if not entirely cynical. (Though many constitutions that mention democracy were also produced by people who seem to have been genuinely committed to some such ideal, even if the regimes that eventually developed under these constitutions were not particularly democratic). What we see, instead, is a broad process in which earlier normative claims about the basis of authority - monarchical, imperial, etc. - get almost completely replaced, regardless of the country's cultural context, by democratic claims, regardless of the latter's effectiveness as an actual basis for authority or the existence of working mechanisms for participation or vertical accountability. (These democratic claims to authority also sometimes coexist in uneasy tension with other claims to authority based on divine revelation, ideological knowledge, or tradition, invented or otherwise; consider the Chinese constitution's claims about the “people's democratic dictatorship” led by the CCP).

I thus suspect the conquest of ideological space by “democratic” language did not happen just because democratic claims to authority (especially in the absence of actual democracy) have proved more persuasive than other claims to authority. Rather, I think the same processes that resulted in the emergence of modern national communities - e.g. the rituals associated with nationalism, which tended to “sacralize” a particular kind of imagined community - led to the symbolic production of the nation not only as the proper object of government but also as its proper active agent (the people, actively ruling itself), regardless of whether or not “the people” had any ability to rule or even to exercise minimal control over the rulers.[4] There thus seems to have been a kind of co-evolution of symbols of nationality and symbols of democracy, helped along by the practice/ritual of drafting constitutions and approving them through plebiscites or other forms of mass politics, a ritual that already makes democratic assumptions about “social contracts.” The question is whether the symbolic politics of democracy eventually has any sort of impact on actual institutions. But more on this later.

Data and Methods

The underlying texts used to construct this figure have been gathered by the Comparative Constitutions Project. What “counts” as a constitutional document is subject to some debate, especially in countries like the UK or New Zealand that are sometimes said not to have a written constitution. But all of the documents gathered by the CCP are indisputably important, describing basic structures of government and setting out the rights of citizens. Unfortunately, however, most are not publicly available through the CCP repository due to copyright complications. I thank Zachary Elkins, one of the CCP Principal Investigators, for granting me access to them; I also want to note that the work of the CCP in collecting, categorizing, and coding them is invaluable (and hopefully may soon be more widely accessible, with the Constitute website).

Anyway, in order to create the figure above, I downloaded the PDFs of all the documents in their archive and extracted the text of as many as I could using the Python PDFminer library. (Some of the older constitutions have not been OCRd, and a few are password-protected, so there's no text for them; see the “inventory” file for details). I then used this R script to extract each mention of the word “democracy” in each of these texts. Specifically, I identified each line that contained the pattern “democ” or “demok” or “mocra” or “demo-” in every extracted text file (not all of the available texts are in English, but the word “democracy” has similar roots in most European languages at least), as well as the previous and the following line, and put them in a table. I then inspected this table for false positives - instances where the algorithm picks up the word “democracy” in cases where it isn't actually mentioned in the constitutional text, or instances, mostly in poorly-OCRd Cyrillic texts, where the algorithm picks up words that contain the pattern “mocra” but are not “democracy” or “democratic” (or any variant). The exact list of false positives I found is available in the script, as well as all the changes made to the original list of mentions. Finally, I calculated earliest and latest mentions of democracy (as well as a few other variables). The resulting dataset of democracy mentions plus all code (including the code for the figure in this post), is available in this GitHub repository.

Notes

[1] It is possible that there is an earlier mention of democracy in the data; I have not manually checked every earlier constitutional document, and some of them are poorly OCRd and not in a major language. But France and Switzerland seem right.

[2] Some mentions of democracy occur only in passing, as in New Zealand, where a 1990 bill of rights (coded by the CCP as an “amendment” to New Zealand's constitution) has a section on “democratic and civil rights” and indicates that restrictions on rights must be demonstrably justified in a manner appropriate to “a free and democratic society.” One could easily come up with a story linking most of the countries that do not mention democracy: it's basically countries whose constitutional documents are still strongly influenced by a UK or USA constitutional legacy in Asia, due to a relatively stable post-colonial or post-war history (e.g., Malaysia, Singapore, Japan) and monarchies whose sovereigns are still relatively unconstrained (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Oman, Tonga).

[3] This is tricky to check with an actual measure of democracy for a variety of reasons (though I'm working on it), but at least today there's no correlation. I do wonder whether a long history of mentions is correlated with democracy today - aspiration becoming reality, as it were - or whether the correlation between mentions of democracy and actual levels of democracy has varied through time (perhaps the language of democracy once meant something but today it does not, for example).

[4] For a fuller academic argument on this point, see my piece on “Models of Political Community” here. I think a similar process once took place in the late Roman Republic, as I argued in a piece on “Cicero's Conception of the Political Community” [ungated here]: Cicero almost came to the idea of a “national” state and “representative” institutions.

Update 9 December - minor edits for clarity; fixed some typos.

Inequality Regimes and Rawlsian Growth Rates: Some thoughts on the evolution of inequality 1960-2010, with special reference to Venezuela

(Mostly an excuse to play with the Standardized Worldwide Income Inequality Database, compiled by Frederick Solt, which I just discovered. This post also belongs, loosely speaking, to my long-running series on the quantitative history of political regimes. R code for everything in this blogpost available in this Git repository; you would need to download the dataset separately).

Inequality is difficult to measure. Socially relevant inequalities are manifold, and measurable inequalities in money income are not always especially important. (In the formerly communist states of Eastern Europe income was very evenly distributed; yet this did not mean that there were no important social inequalities). Even inequality in money income is not easy to measure properly. Most existing data is not very comparable accross countries or years, and it is often not even clear to what income concept the sorts of inequality measures people typically use to make a point in political discourse refer to: does it refer to after-tax, after-transfer income or to "market" income? Does it refer to individual or household income? What sorts of things are counted as "income"? How do we account for access to high-quality public services? At best, measures of income inequality are uncertain estimates of an unknown distribution of potential living standards, more or less valid for societies where "money income" is a useful proxy for the ability of people to enjoy various important goods, and of little value outside the context of a conception of a "just distribution" of these capabilities.

Despite the fact that estimates of what is essentially a statistical abstraction often play surprisingly big roles in current political debates (cf. the debate over The Spirit Level some years ago, or recent concern about a rise in New Zealand's gini index), I have recently become more skeptical about the importance of measured income inequality in politics: whatever importance the actual distribution of incomes has for political life in a society, it has to be mediated through complicated processes that refract local lived experience through the prism of context-dependent fairness norms that are only vaguely related, if at all, to the numbers used to measure its skewness.

Yet I'm curious: what sorts of income inequality have in fact increased, and where? How might these changes have mattered? Enter a new and shiny dataset: the Standardized Worldwide Income Inequality Database, which promises to ameliorate some of these measurement problems. The database uses the Luxembourg Income Study - very high quality income inequality data - to calibrate the much larger but less comparable United Nations University World Income Inequality Database. The result: lovely long time series estimates of both the market and the after tax, after transfer (net) gini index of inequality, including standard errors, for 153 countries. My first though on learning about this was: graphs! (Hopefully some non-obvious facts are also involved below).

Let's start by looking at a country that has often been cited as a great success in reducing inequality: Venezuela during the Chavez years. (Also, I was there recently visiting family after a long absence, and I have a personal interest in understanding the changes that have occurred during that time). One question I've been curious about concerns the evolution of inequality in Venezuela relative to other Latin American countries, especially since the coming to power of Chavez in 1999. How do changes in inequality in Venezuela compare to changes elsewhere?

In the following plot, we see changes in both the market ("equivalized (square root scale) household gross (pre-tax, pre-transfer) income", if you must know) and the net gini index of inequality (after tax, after transfer) in 19 Latin American countries from 1999 until 2010, ordered by the estimated rate of inequality reduction (countries that reduced inequality faster appear earlier; read the graph from right to left, top to bottom):

Inequality in Venezuela has indeed decreased relatively quickly since 1999 - the second fastest decrease after Ecuador, which has also had left-leaning governments (though a far more unstable political context, with five different presidents since 1998). Three things are worth noting about the context of these trends, however.

First and most important is that this reduction in inequality is not driven by direct redistribution: there is barely any difference between the "market" gini index (our measure of inequality before taxes and transfers) and the "net" gini index (our measure of inequality after taxes and transfers). To the extent that the reduction in inequality is the result of government action rather than something else, it must have come about through measures like investment in human capital and labor market policies (see Morgan and Kelly 2012, ungated here, for the proper peer-reviewed argument). This is true of all Latin American countries save for Puerto Rico (which is part of the USA in a sense) and (to a lesser extent) Brazil; indeed, redistribution in some countries (Peru) appears to have perversely increased inequality.

Second, most Latin American countries have experienced reductions in inequality during this period, though most remain highly unequal. But Venezuela was already among the most equal countries in Latin America; in 1999, only Uruguay and Costa Rica had lower measured inequality (and the difference in net gini was within the margin of measurement error, so it should probably be disregarded). This surprised me; I had expected higher levels of inequality in Venezuela when compared to other countries, given the level of class conflict on display during the Chavez era. More surprisingly perhaps, if we take a broader look we discover that inequality in Venezuela appears to have been remarkably stable over the past fifty years, fluctuating around a flat trend:

(Lines around dots represent 95% confidence intervals).

In fact, the low level of inequality in Venezuela as of 2010 only returned the country to the level of inequality it last experienced around ... 1992, the year of the February coup which made Chavez famous, and three years after the "neoliberal" paquete of 1989 (which was supposed to have triggered the Caracazo). Inequality did increase after 1992, and poverty had increased before then - the Venezuelan economy had been in decline for a while, as we can see below. Which all goes to show, I suppose, that political unrest and lived experiences of injustice are only very loosely connected, if at all, with measures of income inequality; whereas austerity and large income losses appear more immediately important to political outcomes (as Jay Ulfelder argues here):

(GDP per capita data from the Penn World Table v. 8.0).

Finally, it's probably worth noting that Venezuela's economic fortunes are deeply tied to oil prices, and that the rapid reduction in inequality in the last decade or so should also be placed in the context of the very large rise in the value of oil and gas during this period. Here is an estimate of the per capita value of oil and gas exports for Venezuela, from Michael Ross' oil and gas dataset:

In fact, Venezuela and Ecuador, the countries that have experienced the fastest inequality decreases, have been precisely the two countries that have benefitted the most from oil and gas price increases - money that flows directly to the state (especially since the Chavez government systematically asserted control over the state oil company) and can be used to provide employment and subsidize education, healthcare, housing, staples, and other goods, however inefficiently (e.g., the varios "Misiones" and other social programs created by the Chavez government). At least some of these programs must have played some role in the reduction of inequality, but given the amount of oil and gas money flowing directly to the Venezuelan state (representing most Venezuela's exports, which have become substantially less diversified over the last 15 years) and the typical patterns of clientelism and electoral politics in Venezuela it would have taken a bloody-minded kleptocrat not to reduce inequality by some amount. At any rate, inequality and poverty also diminished quite a bit during the 1970s oil boom, likely through similar channels - massive amounts of money flowing through the state, which increased its ability to employ people and subsidize public services. (I don't mean to sound grudging; though I have doubts about the effectivenes of some of these programs, some of the new housing built during the Chavez years looks decent, for example).

Let's take a broader look, however. How does the Venezuelan experience of inequality reduction compare to some countries outside of Latin America? Just because they've been in the news, let's look at the Venezuelan experience in coparison to Turkey and Egypt; and add the USA and New Zealand to see how two "developed" countries look as well.

That's right: Egypt and Turkey apparently reduced inequality faster than Venezuela in this period (though the error estimates of the gini index for both are also larger), and were less unequal than Venezuela by the end of the period! Also, despite the fact that the degree of "market" inequality was higher in the USA and NZ than in Venezuela, and did not decrease or even increased a little during this period (as measured by the net gini index), both countries remain less unequal than Venezuela (as measured by the net gini index), due to the effectiveness of their redistributive measures.

Now, this is perhaps surprising, but a bit of an aberration, and really, we are dealing with imperfectly estimated quantities (rates of decline) based on measurements with error. So there's really no point in arguing about whether inequality in Venezuela has in fact decreased faster than in Egypt or not; our methods of measuring inequality don't allow us to give a very precise answer to this question (error bars are large, etc.). In any case, it is clear that income inequality has declined pretty fast in Venezuela over the last 15 years, even allowing for some meaurement and estimation error, as we can see by calculating the trend rate of change in the net gini coefficient (the slope of a regression of log(gini_net) on year, to be technical, which yields the estimated trend annual percent rate change in the gini index) for all countries in the dataset:

(I took out countries that had too few datapoints, since the trends didn't look to me like they could be informative. The error estimates in the graph are nevertheless probably too small, since one would need to use the proper rules for error propagation to calculate them, which I have not done. Interestingly, the estimate of the rate of change in the net gini index for New Zealand and the USA since 1998 suggests basically that they have experienced no significant change in measured inequality from 1999 until 2010, contrary to popular belief; their important increases in inequality occurred earlier. More on this in a minute).

What strikes me about this graph is that countries that have achieved very fast reductions in inequality over this period appear to be quite disparate; though left governments are in evidence among these, many countries apparently achieved fast reductions in inequality with supposedly "neoliberal" policies (e.g., Egypt and Turkey) that are now in turmoil. Maybe this is evidence that the gini index does not capture socially relevant changes in inequality; but then it would also fail to capture changes in inequality in non-neoliberal Venezuela and Ecuador. (Of course, other confounding factors may be at work too).

It is also curious that many of the fastest reductions in inequality have occurred in states that do not engage in a lot of explicit redistribution. In fact, a simple correlation between the average redistributive capacity of a state (measured by the percentage difference between the "market" gini and the net gini coefficient) and the rate of decrease in measured "final" inequality over the period is slightly negative (so fastest reductions in inequality have occurred in states that are unable to affect market gini very much at all, or that even increase it through perverse redistribution):

It's probably not worth making too much of this correlation (measurement errors, the relatively short time period under consideration, and confounding factors are not taken into consideration), though it does suggest that many changes in inequality seem beyond the control of most governments. But even when we expand the period of observation all the way to 1960, the correlation does not entirely disappear, though it weakens greatly:

Ultimately, however, the more directly and explicitly redistributive the state has been, the more equal it also appears to be over the long run:

Or, to put it crudely, since 1960 at least market inequality has only been reliably reduced in states that take from the rich and give to the poor. And yet actually taking from the rich and giving to the poor seems to put nontrivial demands on state capacity and political life (witness the existence of robber states that take from the poor and give to the rich). The degree of change in the market distribution of income even appears to be a fair measure of that capacity; from the graph above, it's likely that a state that can consistently reduce gini index of market inequality by at least 30% is a pretty "strong" state (in the "infrastructural" sense of strong), whereas a state that cannot make a dent on the market distribution of income is more likely to be "weak" (with some communist exceptions like the USSR that did not engage in a great deal of explicit redistribution, since, to put it crudely the state owned everything and everyone more or less got paid the same).

And abilities to redistribute income appear to be remarkably "sticky." Few countries appear to become more able to affect the gini distribution over time:

(I've deleted cases with very few data points to make the graph look prettier. See the code for the details). What is striking about this graph is how stable the redistributive capacity of most states has remained over a period of more than six decades: many countries show basically zero change in their ability to change the income distribution. To be sure, some countries have increased their redistributive capacity -- France is a good example -- and others experience wild swings in redistributive capacity, probably related to big political conflicts -- note Bangladesh and Chile, the latter with a big bump around the time of Allende. But at best we can detect a long-term decline in redistributive capacity for the majority of cases (even if the decline is often slight); and often, after a decline, we see long periods of stability rather than change: countries settle into an "inequality regime," with some occasional big bumps which indicate new equilibria.

Note that in many cases the redistributive capacity of the state does not change even while inequality increases: thus, for example, while the net gini has increased over the past six decades in the USA and New Zealand, their capacity to affect the gini coefficient has remained approximately the same (New Zealand has been able to reduce the market gini by about 27%, though there's a slight downwards trend in this number; the USA by about 22%). The structure of their economies changed (by political action, in part), producing more inequality, but their redistributive capacity as states remained basically the same. To decrease inequality by redistribution in cases where the market gini increases substantially seems to require either a big political shock, or a long-run increase in state capacity.

There is another historical pattern that struck me as interesting: both levels of inequality and redistributive capacities seem to be highly correlated accross regions. Neighboring countries appear to have both similar levels of inequality and similar redistributive capacities. Linked economic and political histories seem to produce both the equilibrium level of inequality and the long-run redistributive capcity of the state.

Here, for example, we see the average redistributive capacity of states per region:

(Cases to the right of the solid line are states that on average made their income distribution more equal; the dashed line indicates the median redistributive capacity).

And here is a graph of net gini per region (all observations since 1960):

No great surprises here, perhaps: Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America have been the world's most income-unequal regions over the last six decades, whereas Europe has been consistently equal - the home of both Northern social democracy and Eastern European communism, both of which have been able to keep the distribution of incomes relatively equal through explicit redistribution, though in somewhat different ways.

But perhaps this is of little importance. On one (vaguely Rawlsian) view, what matters is not the income distribution per se, but the ways in which it affects the prospects of the worst off in society. How much does it matter whether or not inequality declines in any given society, especially for the poorest? This will depend on the growth rate of the economy; high growth with declining inequality will be better for the poor than low growth with increasing inequality, though the outcome of the comparison is ambiguous for high growth with increasing inequality or low growth with decreasing inequality.

Now, it occurs to me that with the average income for these countries as well as their level of inequality, we can make an informed guess (technically, a wild guess) about the average income of various deciles for the years in which data is available. To do this properly would be too painful for a blog post, but I assume that empirical income distributions more or less fit a lognormal distribution (even though they fit more exotic distributions better, like the Singh-Maddala distribution or the generalized Beta distribution). With a little help from R, I can then simulate the average income of each decile of every country in the SWIID dataset. (Take a look at the code for the gory details. Also: this is a VERY rough and ready simulation, extremely inefficient to run and cooked up in a day. Do not take these numbers too seriously). We can then provide some vaguely informed answers to a Rawlsian question: which countries have most increased the prospects of the poorest over the last six decades?

The question admits of two more precise formulations, which we'll take on in turn: what countries have had the highest growth rate of income for the lowest deciles of the population? And second, in which countries do the poor have the highest incomes? (The first corresponds to a sort of dynamic version of the difference principle, which I find more interesting). Let's start with looking at the Rawlsian growth rate (the rate of income growth for the lowest decile, which we'll assume represents the group whose position must be maximized in Rawls' theory); the higher the long-run Rawlsian growth rate, the more the country fulfills the dynamic version of the difference principle. Though in theory the long-run growth rate of the economy as a whole and the long-run growth rate of the income of the lowest decile should perhaps converge, in practice they diverge, even over long time periods - some groups do well over some time frame, others do badly. Now, what we would actually want to know from a strict Rawlsian perspecive is the highest long-run growth rate of income for a representative person in the lowest decile of a given country relative to the potential growth rate of the whole economy (in other words, what degree of inequality would produce the highest income growth for that representative person, given the particular structure of that economy), but this is a counterfactual quantity we cannot estimate, so we'll make do with simulating the incomes of the lowest decile for the actual combinations of growth and inequality in existing economies. (I repeat my warning: this is only a simulation!)

First, we estimate the long-run Rawlsian growth rate (for countries with data going back far enough - so we drop countries that don't have long enough time trends, say at least 30 years):

The "Asian Tigers" unsurprisingly top the list: over the last six decades, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea had the highest (simulated) Rawlsian growth rate (in countries with at least 30 years of both GDP and gini data). South Korea and Taiwan are below average in inequality, which makes sense, but Singapore is not. Over the long run, in other words, a high enough growth rate of income seems to compensate for higher than average inequality. But one surprise among the top countries is Egypt - where the poorest decile, if we believe this simulation (and you shouldn't), had a pretty good run over many decades, despite Egypt not being considered a big performer in terms of its average per capita growth. At the bottom, by contrast, we find that Venezuela has essentially experienced zero Rawlsian growth over six decades (in fact, its long-run trend in regular per-capita annual growth is also zero). Though below average in inequality, its income has suffered so many ups and downs (mostly following oil price changes) that the trend is flat; no wonder Venezuelans eventually got tired of all their politicians before Chavez.

Now, there obviously is a correlation between Rawlsian growth and regular growth, as well as between Rawlsian growth and average inequality, but it is not perfect, simply because the Rawlsian growth rate is a function of both the average growth rate and the gini index by construction, and these two things are not perfectly correlated; a high enough growth rate in the whole economy can overcome a large gini coefficient to produce high Rawlsian growth rates and vice-versa. But it's worth noting that extremely high levels of inequality do appear to be associated with plain low growth over the long run, bad for both the poor and everyone else except perhaps tiny kleptocratic elites:

We can now repeat the exercise for the last 15 years and see how Venezuela stacks up since then:

As we can see, the Chavez years (up to 2010; the data does not tell us what happened for the last three years) were quite good for the poor, according to this simulation: the combination of declining inequality and relatively high growth rates (due in great part to rising oil prices) made Venezuela a top ten Rawlsian performer - better even than China, which also had torrid growth rates but increasing inequality during this period. To be sure, this good "Rawlsian" growth rate is only relevant if we ignore the equal liberties principle, which from a strict Rawlsian perspective  is meant to have priority over the difference principle; and increasing disregard of classic liberal rights during this period counts against Venezuela. (I vaguely wondered whether perhaps a "Rawls index" could be constructed, using data like the UDS to measure compliance with the first principle, fair equality of opportunity using the gini index, and the difference principle using the rate of growth of the income of the lowest decile; but since the two principles are supposed to be lexicographically ordered, a combined Rawlsian index would be pointless, useful only if we relax that assumption. Nevertheless, if we relax that assumption, then we would have to face the question of how much the improvement in the condition of the least well off ought to count against the decline in the "equal liberties" of the first principle; and I don't know of any good principled answer).

At the same time, it is interesting to note the countries at the very top are not precisely all left-wing governments; Azerbaijan, Mongolia, and Ukraine appear there. This may be because the simulations are risibly wrong (an important possibility), or the data are wrong; or simply that policies of the kind the Chavez government tried out are not the only possible ones to bring about growth in the income of the poor (and now, with high inflation, sporadic shortages, a large black market premium for dollars, and other problems, they don't look especially sustainable either). Nevertheless, the high Rawlsian growth rate makes it easy to understand why many of the Venezuelan poor felt that Chavez improved their position, regardless of how much responsibility we ought to attribute to his government for that outcome, or how sustainable its policies may be with lower oil prices.

Regardless, a good growth rate for the poorest decile matters: if inequality had remained at its maximum level during the Chavez years instead of declining but the growth rate had stayed the same, I estimate that the a representative of the poorest decile would have earned about $2000 less over the entire period than they actually did. We can call this quantity the "Rawls gap": the amount of income the poorest decile would have gained (or lost) in a given period had inequality remained the same as at the beginning of the period. Of course, since the growth rate would have been different had inequality remained the same, this is merely a fiction; we can't really estimate this counterfactual.

Nevertheless, just for fun, here is the Rawls gap for Latin America, per year:

This allows us to say that in Venezuela, the reduction of inequality that occurred during the Chavez period (assuming, per impossibile, that the growth rate would have stayed exactly the same had inequality remained at the 1999 level) gained a representative person in the poorest decile a total of about $1500-$2500 over 10 years, or about $200 per year, whereas the increase in inequality over the same period in Costa Rica cost a representative person in the poorest decile about $800-$1200 in income, or about $100 per year. This is nothing to sneeze at for the poorest decile (whose average yearly income is only about $3000 per year).

(It's kind of fun, though conceptually pointless and computationally expensive in my system given my crappy code, to calculate various Rawlsian gaps for arbitrary years and countries; for example, the "Rawls gap" for NZ is something like $2000 per year lost in income for the poorest decile if we assume the same growth trajectory but the level of inequality of the early 80s. Which of course we shouldn't - had inequality remained the same, the growth trajectory would have been different. As Adam Przeworski has said, everything is endogenous).

(We could also imagine even more exotic quantities, though I have no time to test them out here. Consider the Rawlsian compensatory growth rate, for example. This would be the growth rate that would compensate the poorest decile for an increase in inequality: if we want to say that some reform x would lead to higher income growth but higher inequality, then the compensatory Rawlsian growth rate is the growth rate where the income growth rate of the poorest decile at the higher level of inequality is identical to their income growth rate at a lower level of inequality but a lower overall growth rate for the economy; you would need a reform to produce at least the compensatory Rawlsian growth rate for it to be justified in terms of the difference principle. Which you may of course think is bogus).

Now, absolute incomes matter too; the difference principle in Rawls is not usually understood in terms of growth rates (though I think that should be the more natural interpretation). But the second version of the Rawlsian question above (where do the poor have the highest incomes?) has a much more obvious and boring answer: the Scandinavian countries, due to both generally high incomes and low levels of inequality due to high redistribution; and most of the countries at the top also score well in terms of the first principle (measured inexactly here by the UDS, which perhaps ought to be discounted a bit given recent developments in some countries). I include it here for completeness:

The roots of that ranking of countries are much older and deeper than this dataset allows us to see.

In theory, both the first ("equal liberties") and the second principle of Rawls' theory ("fair equality of opportunity" plus the "difference principle") ought to go together. In practice, however, Rawls himself thought that they did not always do so, though his reasons for thinking this were not always clear. Though I don't really have the tools to tackle the question of the relationship between liberal rights and the rest of the components of Rawls' theory properly (certainly not here), it looks as if we see a kind of inverted-U relationship in the data:

In other words, over the last half-century, the income of the poor has risen fastest under regimes that have not been on average highly democratic, but also has grown least in these regimes; non-democracy looks like a (potentially quite bad) gamble, though both democracy, long-run inequality, and the long-run growth rate of the income of the poor are probably determined by (or are a reflection of) some deeper social fact, like state capacity, which is not really susceptible to policy intervention. Whatever state capacity is (I have argued it is a kind of development of political technologies) it emerges out of political struggles that take a very long time to work themselves out with many tragic consequences along the way; and in any case the rate of improvement of state capacity is at times immeasurably low.

[Update 12/7/2013 - fixed a reference to a non-existing graph]

The Normativeness of Democracy

(Contains some work in progress, baroquely complex graphs to illustrate the obvious, rank speculation, and half-baked argument. It also continues this series on the quantitative history of political regimes).

Almost every country in the world publicly acknowledges the “normativeness” of democracy today. Democracy has become a sort of universally invoked standard, even though people vehemently disagree about its meaning. How do we know this? For one thing, almost every country in the world describes itself as a “democracy” in its constitutional documents. Using the data collected by the Comparative Constitutions Project, we can see that as of 2006, only 20 of 184 countries with some kind of written constitutional document did not describe themselves as democratic:

Fig. 1 Countries that do NOT describe themselves as democratic in their constitutional documents

This understates the universality of the norm. As we can see above, many of the countries that do not explicitly mention the word “democracy” in their constitutional documents are countries whose public culture nevertheless asserts and assumes that they are long-standing democracies - a judgment typically confirmed by democracy indexes like the Unified Democracy Scores. (There is in fact a slight negative correlation between the current or the long-run degree of democracy, as measured by such indexes, and whether or not the country calls itself a democracy; almost every country in the map above is represented by a blue dot, which indicates that observers generally regard them as democratic).

At any rate many of the countries that do not describe themselves as democracies in their constitutional documents have constitutions dating back to a time where the word “democracy” didn't carry the positive associations it does today, like the USA and the Netherlands; and some nevertheless use words that are effectively equivalent to the word “democracy” today, even if in the past their usage differed, like the word “republic”. Thus the USA constitution guarantees a “republican” form of government to every state; Singapore and Yemen explicitly describe themselves as “republics” in their constitutional documents, and Yemen asserts its adherence to a principle of “political and partisan pluralism”; the Japanese constitutionstates that “sovereign power resides with the people” and that “government is a sacred trust of the people, the authority for which is derived from the people, the powers of which are exercised by the representatives of the people, and the benefits of which are enjoyed by the people;” Jordan stresses that its monarchy is “parliamentary;” the Netherlands, Belgium, Monaco, Denmark, and Norway all describe themselves as “constitutional” monarchies; and of course almost all of these constitutions guarantee some form of universal suffrage. Indeed, of the countries listed above, only the absolute monarchies - Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Brunei - really refuse to pay any lip service to the norm.

Moreover, the assertion of “democracy” in constitutional documents is almost always accompanied by the assertion of the classical “liberal” norms: freedoms of speech, expression, religion, association, press, and the basic equality of all people. The constitutions of the most repressive countries all proclaim such freedoms. Let's take the basic freedoms of association, speech, religion, and assembly, as well as the norm of equality before the law. Almost every constitutional document in the world (over 90%!) asserts all five of these; and among those countries that don't, most proclaim their allegiance to at least four of these. Only two countries (New Zealand and Libya!) failed to mention any of them as of 2006:

Fig. 2 Constitutions missing one or more "liberal" freedoms as of 2006

In the case of New Zealand, this is basically an artifact of the choice of “constitutional document” coded by the Comparative Constitutions Project - the New Zealand Constitution Act, last revised in 1986, is a purely structural document, setting out the powers of parliament and the governor general and describing various other institutions, while other documents, including the Treaty of Waitangi, play a more important role in setting out the important normative commitments of the country. (Many people would anyway say that New Zealand does not have a written constitution; the Constitution Act is simply one part of the constitutional law of the country, and possibly not the most important part). In the case of Libya, the post-Qaddafi interim Libyan constitutional declaration, article 14, explicitly asserts all of the freedoms that the Qaddafi 1977 amendment to the 1969 “provisional” constitution failed to mention. (Interestingly, the 1969 Libyan provisional constitution did mention some of these rights, but they were apparently excised from the 1977 revision).

I find this striking. The old saw about how “even the constitution of the Soviet Union” proclaimed freedom of the press, expression, association, and the like was not only true of the Soviet Union; it is true today of practically every country, however repressive; indeed, many of the countries that fail to expressly list such rights and freedoms in a constitutional document nevertheless affirm them in their public culture. (Note that all countries not listed in the graph above explicitly assert all five liberal freedoms in their constitutional documents, whenever such documents can be identified, which is almost everywhere today; North Korea, for example, affirms all of them). Yet it is obvious that the mere affirmation of these principles does not imply that they are honored in any way shape or form, and in some places the assertion can only be taken as mockery. If we take the UDS score as a very rough measure of how likely it is that these rights are honored in practice, with higher (“more democratic”) scores indicating more likely respect for these liberal freedoms, then we are forced to conclude that there is basically no correlation between expressing normative support for such freedoms in constitutional documents and actually protecting them.

This might seem unsurprising; a cynic might say that I've only rediscovered the obvious impotence of constitutional restraints in the absence of supportive social and political realities. But it is nevertheless interesting, to my mind, that there is such a widespread need to assert these particular normative commitments, even as they are routinely violated, or interpreted in such radically restrictive ways as to render them politically meaningless. Among authoritarian elites, only the House of Saud and the Sultan of Brunei appear to have the courage of their convictions; everyone else hides behind a banner of rights and liberties.

Nevertheless, only some rights within the larger universe of potential normative claims are universally asserted; if we take a look at the full list of rights that the CCP codes - ranging from freedoms of expression, opinion, and association to the right to bear arms or be granted asylum to socioeconomic rights like the right to own a business, to strike, to healthcare, or to a specific standard of living (about 64 in total) we find a small core of liberal rights that basically everybody asserts (plus a right to own property, in uneasy balance with a right of the state to expropriate it, typically with compensation) and a larger penumbra of other rights, different sets of which are asserted by various sets of countries. In the graph below, each word represents a particular rights provision tracked by the CCP project, surrounded by colored dots representing the countries whose constitutions contain that provision. (A list of all of these provision is available in the codebook here). The number near the word represents the proportion of countries that assert the provision (for example, 90% of all countries assert a commitment to protect freedom of association, “assoc”, in their constitution); the color of each dot shows the UDS score of the country as of 2006, where blue indicates “more democratic” and white indicates the dividing line, more or less, between democracies and non-democracies.

Fig. 3: Rights and countries, fireworks mode

(You come here for the intellectual fireworks, right? There, some fireworks). A perhaps more rational (but less fun!) way of visualizing the same data is this:

Fig. 4: Proportion of constitutions affirming particular rights

(Click to enlarge. Red lines indicate where 50% and 80% of the constitutions of the world explicitly affirm a particular provision; the color of the dot represents the average UDS score of countries that endorse a particular right. It was interesting to note that the right to bear arms appears to be unequivocally endorsed by only about 1.5% of the world's constitutions - the USA, Mexico, and Guatemala).

We might thus say that the “liberal” rights and the associated idea of democracy appear to have a good claim to represent a sort of global “overlapping consensus” in Rawls' sense - rights that are publicly accepted for diverse reasons in very different societies- and may serve as a basis for normative judgment everywhere. (Incidentally, this the case not only for public constitutional documents, which may be thought to be elite-imposed and not always faithful reflections of the normative aspirations of the broader society; though this requires another post, public opinion in most countries also seems to overwhelmingly support democracy and many “liberal” ideals [ungated], at least in the abstract, even if it is not always clear what this actually means in practice. Talk, of course, is often cheap, and abstract support for democracy and liberal freedoms does not necessarily translate into genuine concern for them.) Other rights, however, are still objects of normative struggle at a global level; they are not universally accepted.

But though there is much less consensus about these other rights, it is nevertheless striking that public affirmation of any set of these rights is not obviously clustered in particular societies either. It isn't always clear why a society chooses to “constitutionalize” a particular right, and publicly affirm it in its highest legal document; but whatever the case, democracies and non-democracies are about equally likely to endorse a given right in their constitutional documents. As we see above, the average UDS score of countries endorsing any particular right is pretty much the average level of democracy in the sample, at least for provisions endorsed by, say, more than 10% of the world's constitutions.(We can also see this by noticing that of the fireworks above are especially red or especially blue, save for rights explicitly endorsed by very few countries, like the right to bear arms - USA, Mexico, Guatemala - or the provisions specifying that law contrary to religion is void). Furthermore, there is no correlation between the number of rights provisions endorsed by a constitutional document and either the contemporary or long-run level of democracy, as measured by the UDS score or the cumulative UDS score. In fact, constitutions in general seem to be fairly similar to one another; and to the extent that particular sets of constitutions cluster together (grouping together countries that affirm similar sets of rights) these clusters do not correspond to obvious cultural, political, or other groupings.

One way to see this is as follows. (Please indulge my taste for complicated graphs). We take the list of rights and duties coded by the CCP and calculate the matrix of “distances” between them - essentially, we calculate how similar each constitution is to each other along that set of dimensions, using the Gower similarity coefficient, where 1 means the two constitutions are exactly alike (they affirm the exact same rights) and 0 means they are completely dissimilar. We can then use this distance matrix to plot the world's constitutions as a network and visualize their clustering patterns; highly similar constitutions should cluster together (they are less “distant” from one another). And indeed, we can see some patterns (community discovery algorithms suggest the graph below has about 4 big components when we include all links), but these patterns do not correspond to any obvious groups, like democracies or dictatorships, or poor and rich countries. Indeed, the groups obtained in this way can seem downright perverse, placing, say, Germany and Egypt closer together than Germany and the USA:

Fig. 5: Network of similarities among constitutions (rights provisions only, 85% similarity and up)

Or, alternatively, take a random constitution from a democracy (as measured by an UDS score in the top 33% in 2006) and a random constitution from a dictatorship (as measured by an UDS score in the bottom 33% in 2006) and they will share, on average, about 60% of all rights provisions tracked by the CCP project (and about 80% of the basic liberal democratic freedoms of assembly, association, etc.); take two random dictatorships or two random democracies and they will share similarly about 60% of their rights provisions (and 80% of the basic liberal freedoms). The same is true if you look at the “duties” provisions of constitutions - e.g., whether the state has a duty to provide work, or citizens a duty to work or serve in the military. Or, indeed, any other set of provisions tracked by the CCP; it seems difficult to find any dimension - descriptions of executive power, electoral provisions, etc. - along which the constitutions of more or less democratic societies, or societies in different regions, or at different levels of development, appear to be systematically different (any two random constitutions are about 65% similar, taking all dimensions together). In other words, the normative self-presentation of societies whose power structures are widely different (at least as measured by standard indexes) is pretty much identical; if I'm right, you could not systematically say much about the kind of power structures in a society by looking at its constitution.

(At this point, this thought goes through my head: “Are my methods unsound? I see no method at all, Mr Marquez”)

What might explain this “normative convergence”? The point, it is worth emphasizing once again, is NOT about the effective enforcement of constitutional norms; I take it for granted that such norms -specifically, the norms granting individual rights to citizens, of whatever kinds- are only spottily effective in most places, even in many “democratic” countries, though I think it is reasonable to assume that countries conventionally held to be democracies (as measured by the UDS) will tend to enforce whatever rights appear in their constitutions slightly more effectively than the average non-democracy (if perhaps not much more effectively, and with many exceptions). I'm interested, instead, in the “normative mimicry” on display here, and the process through which some norms achieve near-“fixation” in the population, despite what we might call their fictional status in many cases.

Now, before you accuse me of being willfully obtuse, I am aware of the obvious explanation: modern societies, the story goes, required a new “basis for legitimacy” after the breakdown of traditional forms of legitimacy. Norms of popular sovereignty and individual rights come to replace earlier “legitimizing” norms; and so all regimes now “legitimize” their power by appealing to these norms. But I'm not sure that this doesn't simply restate the problem. Why these particular norms and not others? And why would appeal to “fictional” norms - norms that are known not to have any substance on the ground, so to speak - legitimize anything (in the sense of increasing the baseline level of support for a structure of domination)? It's not that there are no answers to these questions; it's just that the appeal to legitimacy is question-begging if what we are trying to explain is how the norms became dominant in the first place, even when they have minimal impact on what happens in day to day life.

There are more and less “optimistic” stories one could tell about this process. An “optimistic” story could say that there was a sense in which the norms of liberal democracy and its associated freedoms became increasingly appealing to people throughout the world over the last two centuries, while alternative norms became less so. (One might here appeal to increasing literacy, capitalist development, the breakdown of local solidarities, etc. to explain the formation of modern subjectivities; whole libraries have been written on these topics). Normative change outstripped social change; and every political regime now feels compelled to pay at least lip service to these “new” norms, if only because not mentioning them exerts some negative pressure on their survival prospects, perhaps by making those subject to it needlessly dissatisfied. By the same token, this story might continue, the mere existence of the norm puts pressure on governments to live up to their highest commitments, and enables dissatisfied people to coordinate their claims; thus Chinese activists, for example, have (on and off) appealed to the party to enforce China's own constitutional norms guaranteeing basic freedoms of speech, association, etc., and perhaps eventually they will get somewhere. Accordingly, even if normative change feels insignificant at first, it can be utterly momentous in the long run - like a force that exerts only a slight pressure, but does so continuously over the very long run and so ends up accelerating a great mass to huge velocities.

While this story is probably not entirely incorrect, it seems to me that the problem here is that for a norm to have any kind of ability to raise the baseline level of support for a political structure, it needs to be not only widely recognized as a normative standard, but credibly asserted by those in power; and many of these norms are not. (It seems absurd to me to think that the mere assertion of freedom of speech in the North Korean constitution can possibly fool anyone who doesn't already want to be fooled for other reasons, to take only an obvious example). Moreover, it seems clear that many of these norms are liable to lose their force as they become globally dominant simply as a result of adaptation on the part of groups adversely affected by them. There was a time, for example, when it was a matter of live controversy who should be admitted to the franchise, whereas nowadays most adults everywhere are enfranchised, even if their votes are utterly meaningless, since powerful groups have adapted to the mere existence of elections (if not necessarily to the possibility of actually fair elections). Similarly, it may be that as legal freedom of speech becomes increasingly unlikely to genuinely threaten powerful interests, the more easily it comes to be accepted as a global norm. Successful adaptation by groups that are disadvantaged under particular norms reduces their propensity to produce conflict; and the global dominance of a norm can thus mean either that it is ripe for struggles to give it substance (let's turn the fake democracy into a real democracy) or that it has been hollowed out, and live conflicts have relocated to other normative arenas (the right to healthcare, or to a standard of living, or to bear arms, or to enforce one's religion on others, etc., rather than suffrage, etc.).

There are also other complications. Suppose that particular norms become entangled with markers of status; to be a “proper” country, with a “proper” constitution involves asserting some of the norms that powerful countries profess to affirm. As long as the norm is merely one of the marks of status tied to a specific collective identity, it can be asserted by most people in an entirely fictive way. The norm then appears as a sort of ornament, one aspect of a collective identity expressing “far” values, while being ignored or rationalized away in concrete situations. (The modern USA is “the land of the free” to most of its citizens irrespective of particular facts about freedom in the USA; and the idea that Venezuelans have “the best constitution in the world” is entirely unaffected, for most Venezuelans, by the fact that it is routinely ignored). On this view, it is precisely higher-status countries that have the most freedom to mention or not to mention particular norms, which is more or less in accord with some of the data above, though I have not checked properly; and “new” norms should come from relatively peripheral countries with leaders intent on raising their status (e.g., Venezuela, whose constitution is chock-full of rights and institutional innovations, however unenforced). (Incidentally, we know that in fact many “democratic innovations” first emerged and were developed in peripheral countries, not major powers). The power of the norm comes here less from the content of the norm - as in the optimistic story - than from its association with other markers of status. I suspect similar things happened in the more distant past; as James C. Scott notes in The Art of Not Being Governed, the symbols of absolute monarchy were often adopted by peoples who had hardly “states” at all: every two-bit chieftain claimed to be a universal emperor.

The global dominance of “democratic” norms in this "fictional" sense complicates our efforts to make sense of events like the Arab revolutions. Were these revolts “for” democracy? People sometimes argue that the revolts were not “for” democracy insofar as many protesters didn't make “democracy” their principal demand; instead, people wanted jobs, respect, dignity, and many other things. But we need to take into account the fact that the Arab republics explicitly endorsed democracy - the Qaddafi constitution made a huge deal of its participatory democratic character, for example - yet the norm was without substance. The revolts have sometimes attempted to give substance to the norm, but sometimes they have chosen different, more contested normative terrains - over the role of religion in public life, for example - where a norm is not yet universally accepted. This does not mean that “democracy” was not valued; it may mean merely that it was not always understood as something that required normative defence, or as a terrain where fighting over meaning was likely to lead to any interesting places, since everyone already agreed on democracy as the standard, though they disagreed in how exactly to give substance to it. Anyway, more of this would become clearer if we had a better sense of how it came about that these “liberal” rights became so dominant as normative fictions - when and where they first became publicly affirmed throughout the world. But I've run out of steam, and this post is already long enough. More later on the more vexed question of “culture” and democracy, perhaps…

Code for replicating the graphs in this post (plus some additional stuff) is available in this Gist (five files, including one with auxiliary functions and some geocoded country codes). You will also need access to the public CCP data.