The Sun was once New

Here's a bit of interesting speculation I'd never heard before, from Peter Watson's "The Great Divide: History and Human Nature in the Old World and the New". According to Watson, "the second most common myth on earth" is the myth of the "watery creation" of the world:

The chief theme of this myth is the separation, usually of the sky from the Earth. This story is found in a band stretching from New Zealand to Greece ... and it invariably has a small number of common features. The first is the appearance of light. As it says in Genesis, 1:3: 'And God said, let there be light: and there was light.' Nearly all cosmogonies have this theme, where it is notable that neither the sun nor the moon is the source of the first light at Creation. Rather, the first light is associated with the separation of heaven and Earth. Only after heaven and Earth have separated does the sun appear. In some traditions in the east the light is let in because the heavy substance of the clouds that envelop the Earth sinks down to the ground, and the light, clearing the clouds, rises to become heaven. (pp. 23-24).

What might account for the wide geographical distribution of this particular myth? Watson's suggestion is that myths of watery creation represent collective memories of the eruption of the Toba supervolcano about 71-74,000 years ago, just as the first human beings were arriving in South Asia. This was probably the most powerful volcanic eruption in the planet in the last two million years, and it precipitated a global volcanic winter for years, including a prolonged period (at least several months) of complete darkness in some areas. The eruption nearly wiped out the human race; various estimates suggest that the total human population on Earth declined to perhaps 3,000-10,000 individuals afterwards, though of course all such numbers are highly uncertain. (We live, still, "by geological consent, subject to change without notice;" but that consent was nearly withdrawn then). And the myths of watery creation provide a fairly good description of how the aftermath of the eruption would have been experienced:

The 'separation' myth is a not-inaccurate description of what would have happened over large areas of the globe, in South East Asia, after the Toba eruption and the volcanic winter that would have followed ... Sunlight would have been cut out, the darkness would have been "thick" with ash, the ash would gradually have sunk to the ground, and, after a long, long time, the sky would gradually have got brighter, lighter and clearer, but there would have been no sun or moon visible perhaps  for generations. There would have been light but no sun, not for years, not until a magical day when, finally, the sun at last became visible. We take the sun for granted but for early humankind it (and the moon, eventually) would have been a new entity in the ever-lightening sky. Mythologically, it makes sense for this event to be regarded as the beginning of time. (p. 25)

The sun was once new.

The book is full of much other interesting but sometimes hard to assess speculation about human prehistory, including fascinating pages about flood myths (the most common of all myths; as a Platonist, I am reminded of these passages), which appear to represent collective memories of enormous floods 14,000, 11,000 and especially 8,000 years ago caused by the melting of gigantic ice sheets.  (The story is a bit complicated, but apparently 8,000 years ago the Laurentide ice sheet started to melt in such a way that the water was "dammed" by an ice plug at the Hudson Strait. When the plug broke under the pressure of the meltwater, sea level would have increased by "20-40 centimeters" more or less instantaneously, according to Watson, and the shift in the distribution of such a huge mass of water would have triggered gigantic earthquakes and tsunamis as the crust of the Earth essentially "bounced"). There are also discussions of the connections between the domestication of dogs and the discovery of fathers (it is not altogether clear that the link between males and conception was made until it was observed in dogs, which have a much shorter gestation period than women; we might say that dogs, in a sense, created the idea of fatherhood), of the different rhythms of root agriculture (common in the Americas) vs. cereal agriculture, and many other things. Perhaps the oddest claim is the idea that a number of important  differences in "religious" practice between the New World and the Old before 1492 can be traced to the fact that more than 85% of all known psychoactive plants on Earth are found in the Americas. (When read in context and tied to a number of other differences between the old world and the new, the claim makes a great deal of sense, but the jokes about stoned Americans write themselves).

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.

The Deification of Hugo Chávez

I normally don’t write much about Chávez or Venezuelan politics here. I find it emotionally complicated for a variety of reasons; and at the end of the day, I have no particular grounds to suppose that my take on Venezuelan politics is any more insightful than that of any moderately informed Venezuela-watcher. Nevertheless, recent developments have collided with my interest in cults of personality and related phenomena to make me want to write about the topic.

To recap: Chávez has been very sick with cancer. On December 10, he went to Havana for an operation, where he has been “battling severe complications” since. The Venezuelan government has not released any clear information about the nature of the cancer, the complications, or Chávez’ condition; rumours of all sorts are rife. What is clear is that the normally loquacious Chávez is sick enough that he is not able to address Venezuelans through any medium, or even to sign the letter that postponed his own inauguration. (Sure, he apparently signed this decree. But there are grounds to doubt that he personally signed it, not least the fact that the document was signed “in Caracas,” where he is not currently located. At any rate, the very fact that people are debating whether or not that signature constitutes a proper “proof of life,” as if we were in some kind of bad kidnapping movie, says all that needs to be said about the situation).

Yet during this time many observers have noted that public displays of loyalty and adulation for Chavez seem to have gone into overdrive, to the point where serious scholars like Margarita López Maya are speaking of the “deification” of Chávez. There are videos in heavy rotation on state TV where Chavez exclaims that he “demands absolute loyalty” because “he is not an individual, he is an entire people,” or where people provide testimonials of their gratitude for Chavez and identify themselves with him (“yo soy Chávez”; more videos here).  PSUV militants issue statements declaring that they are the sons and daughters of Chávez, and that they owe everything to him. Large numbers of ordinary Chavistas publicly tweet their loyalty and concern for Chávez’ health, referring to him as “mi comandante” (my commander) and thus emphasizing their subordination and absolute loyalty. An alternative “red” tv station posts a supposed image of Chávez’ supernatural apparition during a Christmas mass (I’m not 100% sure that one is not a joke; if it is, it’s hard to tell, and many people in the comments seem to have taken it seriously, if only to express disgust with iguana.tv for making chavismo appear ridiculous). And of course the government staged an entire “inauguration” ceremony where thousands of chavistas “took the oath” for the absent Chávez, symbolically embodying him.

All of this is on top of the already omnipresent Chávez imagery in the Venezuelan public sphere, much of which had already been pushed very far into the hagiographic weeds during the recent election (check out the images of youthful Chávez for a striking example); and let’s not even mention the Chávez knickknacks and souvenirs (red berets, T-shirts,  Chávez dolls, posters, etc., many created in apparent violation of a decree banning the use of Chávez’ face without authorization), all of which predate the latest surge of adoration by some time.

The displays of loyalty have been particularly abject among top leaders of the PSUV: Nicolás Maduro, VP and currently “presidente encargado,” claims to be loyal to Chávez “más allá de la vida,” even beyond death, and Elías Jaua (just appointed foreign minister), Tareck El Aissami (Aragua state governor), and Disodado Cabello (National Assembly president) have all said similar things. Their statements tend to depict Chávez as father, teacher, and leader, a man whose guidance has led them to the true values of Christianity, socialism, Bolivarianism, humanism, and concern for the people, stressing the speaker’s utter dependence on him for everything that is valuable in their identity.

What we have here, in short, seems to be a clear case of “flattery inflation,” where an already high level of public adoration is suddenly pushed into the stratosphere. (Indeed, the cult of Chávez seems to have recently displaced a bit the cult of Bolívar that has otherwise been the hallmark of the last 14 years). Moreover, all of this is occurring in the absence of the man and, most interestingly for our purposes, in a relatively open public arena, where there is plenty of social support for people who dislike Chávez and want to express their views. (Remember, about 45% of Venezuelans voted against him in the last presidential election, and perhaps half of them are committed anti-chavistas who cannot stand him; the love Chávez awakens in some has its counterpart in the visceral hatred he produces in others). There may be mild social pressure to praise Chávez in some contexts (I’ve heard stories along those lines, though the pressure to praise only appears to be significant whenever you want to enjoy the perquisites of power or receive economic benefits from the government, e.g., if you are applying for a government job; and there is some limited evidence linking overt opposition to Chávez with loses of benefits and opportunities in the recent past), but there is really nothing in Venezuela that is comparable to the kind of social pressure people experienced in China during the cultural revolution to signal their loyalty to Mao, or still experience in North Korea to praise the Kims. Most “grassroots” praise of Chávez seems sincere, and can even coexist with criticism of his government. So what is going on here?

López Maya takes a stab at the problem by using that rickety Weberian warhorse, legitimacy, which I’ve criticized a number of times: the cult has been turned up to 11 in order to legitimate Maduro’s leadership. I’m not trying to pick on López Maya here; there is nothing especially wrong with saying, in the context of a short newspaper interview, that the recent surge of adulation aims to “legitimate” (“secure” or “cement” might be equally appropriate) Maduro’s shaky grasp on power (especially since the opposition disputes the legal basis for his authority), but it hardly explains much. After all, it’s not as if turning up the level of adulation can change the minds of most anti-chavistas; and it’s not even very plausible to argue that all the hagiographic statements about Chávez by top leaders can persuade the uncommitted that Maduro really is the genuine leader of the country. Moreover, though the government has clearly orchestrated some of the increased displays of loyalty (through the use of state media to broadcast images of people expressing their identity with Chávez, for example), others are definitely coming “from below,” even if they are responding to cues provided by government officials and PSUV leaders.

Here’s how I think one might produce a more complete explanation. (General disclaimer: I am far from Venezuela, have no special insider knowledge of anything, and my sources are likely biased and incomplete, so take everything I say here with large dollops of salt). Let’s start with the top chavistas: why might people like Maduro or Jaua be going to such lengths to show their complete devotion to the absent Chávez? Putting aside character-based explanations – e.g., that they are spineless sycophants, or that they are genuinely passionate about Chávez, however much these things may be true– the main driver of flattery inflation at the top of the PSUV right now seems to be precisely that the absence of Chávez makes it difficult for committed militants to evaluate the credibility of loyalty signals.

Most observers have noted a division – the extent and nature of which is a matter of some controversy – between what we might call the radical and the not so radical wings of Chavismo (left and right chavismo? ), conventionally associated with VP Maduro and National Assembly president Cabello, respectively. With Chávez incapacitated (and likely soon dead, given the probable nature of his illness), a struggle is underway to define the future of the chavista movement and the aims of the “revolution.” Under the circumstances, no top leader of the PSUV can afford to be seen as anything less than abjectly devoted to Chávez; anything less would instantly destroy their credibility with those who matter for their political future (not the median voter). This sort of competition for the loyalty of committed Chavistas is likely to lead to an escalation of displays of loyalty in the absence of an umpire – Chávez – who can credibly arbitrate between potentially disparate goals and visions of socialism or revolution. (We do not need to assume cynicism on the part of anybody here, though of course we should not categorically rule it out either; there is much corruption at the top of the PSUV). Moreover, it is precisely those who are most formally powerful – e.g. Maduro – who have the most to gain from encouraging the adulation of Chávez; because they control the formal levers of power, they are in the best position to punish even minor deviations from prescribed orthodoxy. (Maduro is thus kind of in the Lin Biao position here). The key here is that the signals are meant primarily not for the median, uncommitted voter, but for committed chavistas, who may not agree on everything but agree on the immense importance of Chávez for the movement.

But why is Chávez so important to the movement? (One could raise the more general question: why do single leaders seem to become so important for self-consciously egalitarian, socialist movements?). The usual explanation is that Chávez is a highly charismatic leader; but if charisma is understood as some kind of intrinsic property of Chávez, this again explains nothing. Chávez is charismatic not because he has some magic power that makes people love him – it is always worth remembering that a significant proportion of Venezuelans don’t like him much at all, present company included – but because he has been particularly skillful at using “interaction rituals” that draw on deeply rooted Venezuelan cultural narratives to create and fashion new identities that resonate with socially marginalized groups. He is, above all, a master weaver of stories that resonate broadly with many (but not all!) people. (What is an identity but a role one plays in a grander narrative? To create an identity one only needs the right sort of story). Or rather, the charisma of Chávez is a kind of magic (take it from the expert on the subject!), understood as the skill to manipulate cultural symbols to produce new identities and collective action; and it depends on ritual, theatre, and in general the ability to command attention and tune in to emotion.  

But now that he is absent, these identities are threatened; and we might expect people who feel “chavista” to expend more energy re-asserting their identity in these circumstances, especially in response to cues coming from Chávez’ top followers. Part of Chávez’ genius has been his ability to instill a sense of permanent threat in his followers: to be a chavista is to feel like an underdog, under attack by the combined forces of international capital, despite the fact that the government controls enormous oil resources and nowadays exercises effective hegemony over the media; with Chávez gone, the sense of threat is even greater. We might summarize this simply by saying that identity polarization leads to inflationary demands on loyalty signalling; and identity is at this time highly polarized in Venezuela. 

[Update, 19 January - fixed minor typos]

Endnotes

It's the summer solstice here in Wellington, which always feels like the end of the year to me. The longest day should end the year, in my view. Calendar reform now!

At any rate, it feels like as good a time as any to look back at the year. The readership of this blog has grown a bit over the last year, and some posts garnered significant attention, for which I am quite grateful; it is nice to be read, and responses have been thoughtful and useful. Thanks for reading!

The posts on cults of personality seem to be particularly popular; this year one of the old posts on the subject got picked up on Hacker News, for example, which led to thousands of new views. My own personal favorites this year (if I may say so) were my review of Daniel Leese's book on the Mao cult and the post on the triumph of universal suffrage, which also seem to have been relatively popular. I might also single out the "Complexity of Emotion in Authoritarian States" post (which sort of belongs to last year, when Kim Jong-il died), the post on Charles Tilly's poetry and models in the social sciences, the post on ancient and modern "mixed constitutionalism," and the post on reversed systems of suffrage censitaire and Rawls' difference principle, about which I'm still trying to figure out what I actually think. I didn't write as much this year as last year - it's been an exceptionally busy time at work - but I am reasonably happy with most of the things I wrote, some of which have led to papers in progress. (And, I published a book! Yay!)

But enough of that. In the spirit of celebrating the holidays, here is some cool reading material:

• John Quijada and Ithkuil, the language he invented (via +gwern branwen). An awesome story on language creation as a work of art.
• Jaguars fall, everyone dies (via +Andrew Hunter). Here's how it begins:

The world probably won't end on Friday, but it's still a good time to remind yourself that Mesoamerican eschatology is really really neat.

The Aztecs believed that the creator-god, Ometeotl, created four main gods for the four cardinal directions. These four gods tried to create the world, but it was too dark and they kept screwing up and dropping stuff into the Great Void, where it was eaten by Cipactli the Crocodile Demon With Extra Mouths Upon Every Joint And Teeth Protruding From Her Entire Body.

The gods realized they had to get their act together. They slew the Crocodile Demon and placed the world atop her body. They created mankind out of ashes. And they elected Tezcatlipoca, God of Darkness And Killing Everybody, to become the sun so they could see what they were doing a little better. 

But - and this is what happens when you don't have a God of Staffing Decisions - the God of Darkness made a predictably terrible sun. The stories say he was "only half a sun", although they don't specify whether they mean only half the desired brightness or literally semicircular. In any case, Quetzalcoatl, God Of Niceness And Maybe Not Killing Everybody All The Time, knocked Tezcatlipoca out of the sky, took over as Sun, and did by all accounts a much better job.

It gets better. (Also contains some interesting speculation about why the Aztecs might have developed such a cosmology).

• Chaos and Governance has an interesting series of posts about Ernest Geller's "Plough, Sword, and Book." Geller is unjustly neglected; few people today can do that kind of "big history" as well as he was able (and write so clearly). 
• +Kevin Vallier over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians has been arguing against the idea of a "Property-Owning Democracy" in Rawls. Even if you disagree, Vallier's discussion is clear and enlightening; for the other side of the argument, see Martin O'Neill and Thad Williamson on John Tomasi's "Free Market Fairness," who also make many good points. I think parts of this discussion could be bypassed by understanding the difference principle as a principle of maximal accountability to the worst off in society; but I'm working on a paper on that.
• Foucault's Appreciation of Neoliberalism: on a conversation between Gary Becker, François Ewald, and Bernard Harcourt on Foucault's "The Birth of Biopolitics" (where Foucault engages in depth with Becker's work!). Becker: "I don't disagree with much of it" [!]. It seems to me that the term neoliberalism has mostly ceased to be a useful analytical category; it is now mostly a term of opprobrium, which it was not in Foucault's work.
• Scott Wentland and Peter C. Stone have an interesting paper that anticipates and explores in detail the idea of randomizing electoral constituencies (to simulate a sort of Rawlsian "veil of ignorance") that I mentioned here. (Thanks to Prof. Wentland for bringing it to my attention!). Here's the abstract:

Legislators depend upon their respective electoral districts for reelection. As a result, they face incentives to advance the interests of their constituencies, even when those interested are at odds with the wider interests of the country as a whole. These incentives generate logrolling, pork barrel projects, and other effects that are potentially detrimental to the national interest. Any solution to these problems would have to align the interests of legislators more closely with the national interest. This paper explores one possible proposal for accomplishing this aim. The proposal would require candidates seeking legislative election (or reelection) to run in different districts for primary and general elections. While a candidate would be at liberty to seek nomination by a particular party in any district she chooses, once nominated she would be required to face the candidates of other parties in another district selected at random. The result would be that legislators would make decisions behind what we call a veil of randomness.Our paper describes such a rule, including its philosophical and economic underpinnings, and subsequently demonstrates how the rule changes each politician’s preference function to align with a more universal interest. It concludes by reflecting upon the lessons of this proposal for the project of institutional reform.

• Tom Slee has a series of posts explaining the ideas behind his new and excellent paper on Identity, Institutions, and Uprisings. The basic idea - about which I hope to write more in the new year - is that cascade theories of uprisings should be enriched by incorporating a model of identity formation. Tom uses this to generate some striking insights about how institutions can act as havens for dissent and uprisings are driven by identity polarization. (Full disclosure: I commented on an earlier draft of Tom's paper). 
• And finally, your end-of-the-year extremophile blogging: 

Much tougher than you are

Bacteria having a great time in the anoxic brine of the (formerly) ice-sealed Lake Vida in Antarctica. (Living la vida loca?)

Have a good holiday season, whatever you may celebrate.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: More on Benevolent, Malevolent, and Unconstrained Regimes

(Quick graphical follow up to this post on malevolent democracies and benevolent autocracies; part of this series, asymptotically approaching 2. For discussion of the measures of physical integrity, regime types, democracy, and executive constraint used here see the previous post. Because I just can't help myself).

After finishing the previous post, a clearer way of presenting the idea of a "benevolent" regime occurred to me. Essentially, we can classify all regimes along two dimensions: the degree to which the executive is constrained by formal institutions, and the degree to which the state (directed by the executive) engages in killing, political imprisonment, torture, and so on. Using the CIRI data on the protection of physical integrity rights, the Polity IV measure of executive constraint, and the DD measure of political regimes (by Cheibub, Gandhi and Vreeland) we then get the following four-fold classification:

Benevolent regimes are on the upper left hand quadrant: here, rulers are formally unconstrained but nevertheless have, on average over the last 30 years, respected the physical integrity rights of their subjects. These tend to be relatively wealthy, as we can see, and many of them are absolute monarchies: the Qatar of al-Thani (2001-2008), the Oman of Sultan Qabus ibn Sa'id (1981-2008), Swaziland under various monarchs, Bhutan under Sigme Wangchuk (I've labeled the top 5% of the regimes by the benevolence measure, though they may be hard to see, and some are missing from the plot because they don't have GDP data). But many of them are poor countries (even if their GDP figures are occasionally inflated by oil discoveries, for example) and frankly a bit surprising: Gabon under Bongo (1981-2008), Burundi under Buyoya (1981-1991), Malawi under Banda (1981-1993), for example. All of the latter were rulers who consolidated their power long before 1981, I think; so perhaps with a longer dataset we would get somewhat different results. But still, it is worth noting that "the good" are sometimes long-established autocrats.

The bad are typically regimes that hold elections and have formally constrained executives, but where public opinion and the political class is indifferent or even supports violating the rights of various groups of people: Colombia, India, Israel, Indonesia, all make appearances here, as well as South Africa under Apartheid and Peru during the Sendero Luminoso years. The constraints have stopped working with respect to particular groups - poor peasants in Colombia, native peoples in rural areas in Peru, people who are thought to be associated with separatists in the Philippines, Palestinians in Israel. 

The ugly are the usual suspects: your typical unconstrained, megalomaniacal dictator, like the regimes of Gaddhafi in Libya, Kim Jong-il in North Korea, Milosevic in Serbia, Mobutu in Zaire, Marcos in the Philippines, Galtieri in Argentina, al-Bashir in Sudan, Hoxha in Albania, Taylor in Liberia, and so on. It's the dismal roster. Interestingly, Buyoya of Burundi appears again here (1996-2000) among the unconstrained  - a striking illustration of the fragility of mere benevolence. 

The constrained are the boring regimes - not without problems, to be sure, but about as well-functioning as we usually get. (Though some, of course, may note that constrained regimes "internally" does not mean that the regime will be constrained "externally"; as I mentioned in the previous post, threats to the state seem to turn constrained regimes bad). 

Here, just for the hell of it, is a list of countries ranked by their average degree of benevolence; the boxes tell you were how much their "benevolence" has varied over time, and the dots are the outliers - years where their benevolence has strayed far from the mean:

Fig. 2. Regime rankings by benevolence. Dashed lines identify the USA, Venezuela, and New Zealand

We can see at a glance that "benevolence" is mostly a phenomenon of autocracy, though a few democracies have above-average levels of it; and that malevolence is mostly a democratic phenomenon. Yet benevolence among autocracies varies a bit more than among democracies; your average benevolent despot is not extremely reliable, perhaps. (Note also how Burundi is represented at the top and the bottom of the scale, with two different regimes). It is mostly countries in the middle of the distribution that have consistent records of protecting rights, though they are not unblemished.

Here a final picture ranking countries by their average levels of protection of physical integrity rights (thickness of the line represents democracy level; color represents level of protection - darker blue is better; each colored line shows changes from 1981 to 2008): 

Fig. 2: Ranking of countries by avg. levels of physical integrity protection, showing changes during the 1981-2008 period. Dashed lines identify the USA, New Zealand, and Venezuela

New Zealand has done very well during this period (by this measure at least), but the USA ranks 35 out of 167, with a big dip at the end of the period, and a spotty record (note the light blues in earlier years); and Venezuela's state has been going bad since 1989, with the Caracazo. More dictatorships appear at the bottom of the scale, but also many democracies. Interestingly, the end of the cold war seems to have produced improvements in the protection of rights in very few countries; at a glance, only Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Albania stand out. But New Zealand is only in the middle of the benevolence ranking; it does well because its constraints have worked, not because its rulers are unusually benevolent, though perhaps its constraints have worked because public opinion has been reasonably enlightened, and public opinion has been reasonably enlightened because it has faced no big conflicts in the recent past.

(Some messy code that produces these and other graphs is here).

Of Malevolent Democracies and Benevolent Autocracies: A Very Short Quantitative History of Political Regimes, Part 1.9325

(Continues my occasional series on the history of political regimes, part 1.9325. Lots of charts and graphs and a slideshow, using the Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) human rights dataset and the Political Terror Scale.)

About a month ago, Reed Wood over at the blog Political Violence @ a Glance expressed doubts that there had been much if any meaningful improvement in the extent to which states engaged in torture, beatings, etc. over the past three decades. Neither the Political Terror Scale (measuring the degree to which states engage in torture, political imprisonment, or political murder) nor the Physical Integrity Index of the CIRI dataset (which measures more or less the same thing in a somewhat different way) show any improvement over the last three decades or so, despite the fact that (as we have seen here, here, and here in much greater detail) the world is a more "democratic" place today than three decades ago:

Figure 1. Global mean of the CIRI Physical Integrity Index,  1981-2010 (higher means more protection of physical integrity rights, on a 0 to 8 scale) 

Figure 2. Global mean of the Political Terror Scale,  1976-2011 (higher means more state use of torture, murder, and other physical integrity violations, on a 1 to 5 scale) 

Figure 3. Global mean of the polity2 score,  1976-2011 (higher means more democratic, on a -10 to 10 scale) 

If anything, a slight worsening trend in the extent to which states engage in torture, killing, and so on is detectable here, despite the increase in democracy over the same period. This piqued my curiosity; what is going on here? And what has been the relationship between political regimes and the protection of basic "physical integrity" rights, historically speaking?

Neither the CIRI dataset nor the Political Terror Scale are ideal for answering these questions in sufficient depth; for one thing, their data collection starts just after "peak authoritarianism" in the mid 1970s, and hence misses much of the consolidation of authoritarian regimes in the 50s and 60s. Moreover, it is very likely that the lack of improvement we see above is at least partly an artifact of better reporting and a broader understanding of what counts as a violation of physical integrity by the state, as Anne Marie Clark and Kathryn Sikkink argue in a forthcoming piece. But they can still help us understand broad correlations between political regimes and the malevolence (or restraint) of the state.

Using the CIRI data and a typical measure of democracy (the Polity IV scale, discussed here in more detail), the first thing we note is that, though the overall trend in the protection of physical integrity rights is negative across all regime types, democracies have had on average a better record than other political regimes over the last 30 years:

Figure 4: Trend lines for physical integrity rights by regime type. "Democracy" is defined as a polity score greater than 6; "Autocracy" is defined a polity score lower than - 6. Each point represents a country-year; points are jittered to avoid some overplotting. 

Though we see dictatorships that appear not to engage in torture, killing, and so on, in every year, as well as democracies that do engage in such practices, on average democracies score about 2 points higher in the CIRI Physical Integrity Rights index than autocracies and "anocracies" (the Polity IV term for various hybrid regimes; the picture does not change if we use the Political Terror Scale instead). Since the CIRI index is additive over four measures of state malevolence - extrajudicial killings, disappearances, political imprisonment, and torture, each of which is scored as 0 if the violations are judged to be frequent and widespread, and 2 if they are judged not to have occurred during a particular year (see here for more details) - we could say that democracies on average have committed one fewer crime than autocracies over this period. (Democracies: statistically less criminal than autocracies for over 30 years!). Indeed, nearly 80% of all regimes that receive a perfect 8 in the CIRI index are democracies, while nearly 75% of the regimes that receive a 0 in the index are autocracies or anocracies:

Figure 5: Distribution of regimes accross CIRI index categories. 8 means a high level of protection of physical integrity rights; 0 means widespread violations. "Interruption" includes Polity categories for breakdown of central authority, foreign occupation, and transitional forms.

Moreover, it is also worth noting that the average difference between democracies and autocracies has not changed at all over the entire 30 year period, even as both democracies and autocracies seem to be becoming worse (i.e., more likely to engage in torture, killing, etc.). To me, that looks like prima facie evidence that the lack of improvement in these indexes is at least partly a reporting artifact, though other stories are possible. For example, suppose that the least malevolent autocracies are most at risk of turning into democracies. But they do not immediately become "high quality" democracies; political competition restrains states slightly better than before, but still not well. As more countries become democratic, the average malevolence of both democracies and autocracies should increase - in the first case due to the influx of low-quality democracies into the population (dragging the mean down) - and in the second case due to the exit of less-repressive autocracies from the population. I don't know that this story is correct, but it's worth considering, and some of the trends I discuss below are consistent with this relationship. In particular, if the story is correct, we should see a (slight) strengthening of the correlation between measures of democracy and measures of physical integrity over time - and in fact we do see this.

At any rate, the correlation between democracy and a lower average level of state malevolence remains striking, if perhaps unsurprising given common ideas about democracy. But couldn't it be the case that the correlation is built into the measure of democracy we are using here? Though the Polity IV measures are basically institutional (conceptualizing democracy as a variety of political competition, without assuming much of anything about whether or not democracies are more or less malevolent state forms), it may still be the case that they assume too much. Perhaps coders tend to give "nice" regimes higher scores; some of the political competition categories in the Polity IV index are notoriously opaque. Yet the correlations are the basically the same if we use the most minimal measure of democracy we can think of (the dichotomous DD measure, discussed here, which defines democracy as a regime where the leadership of the state is selected through competitive elections and nothing else):

Fig. 6: Distribution of democracies and dictatorships across CIRI scores. Dichotmous measure of democracy from the DD dataset by Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland.

As before, it looks like most "benevolent" states (those scoring high in the CIRI index of physical integrity protection) are democracies, and most "malevolent" states are dictatorships (or more precisely, regimes where the political leadership is not selected via competitive elections; whether we want to call these regimes "dictatorships" is basically a question of nomenclature). (Results are basically identical if we use the PTS). But there remain a good number of elective regimes who score very low on the index, as well as a good number of non-elective regimes that score high on this index. Let's call the former malevolent democracies and the latter benevolent autocracies. What can we say about them?

Consider first the distribution of CIRI scores across regime types (using the DD measures of regime types):

Parliamentary democracies (59 of them in the dataset, nearly 1000 country-years in total with data on physical integrity protection) and mixed presidential/parliamentary democracies (36 of them, about 500 country-years) are the clear winners here - the least overtly criminal regimes over the past 30 years. Monarchies, however, (14 of them in the dataset, for about 300 country-years) did quite well; few of them appear to have engaged in any significant malevolence during the 1981-2008 period (and most of it was concentrated in Nepal, Morocco, and Saudia Arabia during this time). Indeed, the mean level of "physical integrity rights protection" in monarchies is nearly as high as in parliamentary democracies, and higher than in presidential democracies, which have been the worst of the democratic regimes. Civilian dictatorships appear just as likely to be "good" as to be "bad," and military dictatorships are the worst of the bunch. No non-democracy (monarchic or otherwise), scores a perfect 8 average for the period, whereas some democracies do (mostly small places like Iceland or Tuvalu, or very new democracies that have not yet have time to besmirch their records), though of course a number of democracies score very low too. (The rankings of regime types don't look any different if we use the PTS instead of the CIRI index).

Perhaps more interesting is to look at the most benevolent autocracies and most malevolent democracies over the period. The color of each glyph in the map below represents the average level of the CIRI index for the years for which data exists; the size of the glyph represents the number of years with data (ranging from 1 to a maximum of 30); and the shape represents the average Polity2 score over the 1981-2010 period, split into three broad categories: circles represent countries that have been mostly democratic over the last three decades; triangles represent countries that have been mostly "anocracies" (hybrid regimes); and squares represent countries that have been mostly autocratic. So if the correlation between regime type and the protection of physical integrity rights were perfect, we would expect squares in the map below to be red, circles to be blue, and triangles to be light colored. Red circles thus represent malevolent democracies, and blue squares benevolent autocracies (I've labeled the most malevolent democracies and the most benevolent non-democracies below):

Fig. 8. Average levels of physical integrity protection, 1981-2010, by regime type as defined by the Polity IV score

The top benevolent non-democracies by this measure (average CIRI index greater than 6, average polity2 lower than -6) are a mixed bunch: Suriname, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Gambia, Benin, Gabon, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Taiwan, Singapore, and Fiji. Among these, Oman[!] has the best overall record, with an average CIRI score of 7.17, better than the USA average for the period. Some of these regimes are basically electoral but noncompetitive regimes, such as Singapore; others democratized substantially during the period in question, though reports of torture or political imprisonment appear never to have been common even during more authoritarian times, or were concentrated at the beginning of the period (Taiwan, Poland, Hungary); and others are rich gulf monarchies (Oman, UAE, Qatar). Perhaps the most surprising cases are Gambia, Benin, and Gabon, none of which appear to have engaged in much direct political violence against their own citizens (at least none that was noticed by the State Department or Amnesty International, the ultimate sources for the CIRI index), despite being very poor countries. Happy autocracies, pace Tolstoy, are not all alike.

The top malevolent democracies by this measure show more commonalities: El Salvador, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Israel, and India. These are almost all countries that faced or face substantial internal conflicts - the FARC insurgency in Colombia, Kashmir and Nagaland in India, the conflict with the Palestinians in Israel, conflicts with Kurds and between the secularists in the military and more religious civilian forces in Turkey,very sharp class conflicts in Venezuela, Brazil, and El Salvador. "Internal" threats to the state turn democracies bad. Just look at the CIRI graph for the USA for the period, and check out the dip after 2001 for further evidence:

Fig. 9. CIRI index of physical integrity rights for the USA, 1981-2010

And all this time the USA received a polity2 score of 10 - the highest possible.

Obviously, these overall judgments have to be taken with a grain of salt; as the cases of Poland and Hungary show, the cutoff for the dataset may mean that more repressive periods are excluded from consideration, or it may mean that they are included when there has in fact been a qualitative break in the nature of the state. Furthermore, there may be other factors that are related to the level of physical integrity protection; the level of economic development, inequality, and the rate of economic growth all come to mind, among many other possibilities (some of which are explored below).

One may think that the key factor ensuring that the regime is not criminal is the degree of executive constraint, not the whole degree of democracy. So let's define a benevolent regime as a regime where the executive is highly unconstrained but nevertheless does not act in a criminal way (though it could do so with impunity) and a malevolent regime as one where the executive is so constrained but nevertheless is not prevented from killing, torturing, or imprisoning for political beliefs at least some of its citizens, perhaps because the people who constrain the executive are complicit in its criminality. Now, Polity actually includes a measure of executive constraint, which is highly correlated, but not perfectly, with the CIRI index. (Better, in fact, than the overall democracy measure). We can then ask: are there truly constrained malevolent democracies? Or truly unconstrained benevolent autocracies? Using the DD measure of regime type and the polity measure of executive constraint we can produce an independent "index of benevolence" (essentially, we multiply both, after reversing the exconst measure, and take the square root) - higher is more benevolent, with a median of 4:

Average degree of benevolence/malevolence, by country and regime type (as measured in the DD dataset)

As we can see, democracies are typically constrained but not benevolent; almost all of them score lower than the median of benevolence. The top 10 "benevolent" regimes are all non-democracies (except for Bhutan for a few years, which is a hard case), and we have to go down to Mali to find a regime coded as democratic by DD that also had a relatively unconstrained executive and a reasonable record of not torturing, killing, or imprisoning its citizens. By the same token, most dictatorships overperform a bit; their records are better than the degree of executive constraint would lead one to expect.

The top 10 benevolent autocracies by this method are similar to the ones identified above. Many are absolute monarchies - Qatar, Oman, Swaziland; constrained, perhaps, more by tradition and culture than by formal institutions, as Victor Menaldo has argued (ungated). Some are expected, though still puzzling (why so restrained?): Singapore, Hungary during the last decade of the communist system. Others are very unexpected - many very poor African autocracies - Gabon, Benin. At the other end of the scale we find that malevolence (executive constraints plus torture and imprisonment) is almost always a democratic phenomenon; India, Israel, Colombia, and Jamaica bring in the bottom of the table. When unconstrained dictators do these things it's expected, but when democracies do it it's malevolent.

A temporal view may be interesting too. In the slideshow below, the size of each dot represents the actual level of protection of human rights, the color of each dot represents the naive deviation from the expected level of protection of human rights given the polity score, and the shape of the dots represents the regime type. So red dots are more malevolent than expected given the polity score of the country and blue dots more malevolent, while white dots are at the expected level of human rights protection. The measure for the deviation here is not empirically derived - it's not the residual of a regression of the physical integrity index on the polity score - but normative; a democracy with a perfect polity score that does not engage in torture, killing, and so on is not "benevolent" but merely doing its job properly, whereas a completely unconstrained dictatorship with a polity score of -10 that does not engage in torture, killing, and the like of political opponents is being "merely" benevolent. Hence dots representing democracies with a score of 10 never look blue on the map, and dots representing dictatorships with a score of -10 never look red. I've labeled the countries that have the largest deviations from a simple naive relationship between polity2 and the level of protection of physical integrity.

(Best viewed in full screen by clicking on the link on the lower left corner). Note how the period starts with a lot of benevolent autocracies (including a large number of African countries whose polity score belies the relative benevolence of their states by this measure) and democracies that generally respected human rights. As the nineties come along, there are many new democracies that "underperform"; from a blue and white world (with an even split between benevolent autocracies and democracies that do their job), we come to a world that is mostly pink (with many new and underperforming democracies), consistently with the selection hypothesis mentioned above. Things then take a sharp dive in the aftermath of September 11; most democracies - including most established ones in North America and Western Europe - become more malevolent in the years after 2011. In some cases we can easily point to the specific events that turn countries red in the map: the Sendero Luminoso years in Peru in the 1980s, the Caracazo in Venezuela in 1989, the endless conflict with the Palestinians in Israel. But though many countries in the map appear as benevolent autocracies or as malevolent democracies for short periods, most countries seem to settle to their expected level; both benevolent autocracy and malevolent democracy seem to be fragile, though benevolent autocracy is more common than malevolent democracy.

It is also worth looking at how the relationship between democracy and human rights protection varied over this period. We simply fit a simple linear model regressing the Physical Integrity Index against the Polity2 score for each year, and look at how the coefficient for the polity2 score has changed over time:

Fig. 11: Coefficient of polity2 in the model PHYSINT ~ a*polity2 + b estimated for each year. Shaded areas represent the 95% confindence interval for a.

The picture is suggestive of a structural break in the relationship between democracy and state malevolence with the end of the Cold War. States that had apparently been more autocratic than their record of benevolence suggested suddenly found their expected level of democracy, consistent with the hypothesis mentioned above. But not every country has benefited from increases in democracy. Among countries where we observe changes in their level of democracy in this period as measured by the polity2 score only about half of them (56% or so) seem to have experienced changes in the level of state malevolence that are in the right direction. In other words, it is only in about half the cases in the sample that increases in democracy are (statistically) associated with greater state benevolence (and vice-versa: decreases in democracy are statistically associated with greater state malevolence); in the other half, increases in democracy are associated with greater state malevolence (and vice-versa), though the magnitude of the association appears to be small in most cases:

Fig. 12: Magnitude of the relationship between polity2 and CIRI, per country, 1981-2010. Lines show 95% confidence intervals for the polity2 coefficient

In countries to the left of the red line, increases in democracy were associated in this period with more state malevolence (or vice-versa, i.e., increases in autocracy with more benevolence); in countries to the right, increases in democracy are associated are associated with more state benevolence (as we would naively expect). The striking thing here is how little of a pattern there is; though there are some slight regional associations (democratization appears to have been more correlated with state benevolence and vice-versa in the Americas than elsewhere), and some events are not captured by the graph above (for example, the change in democracy levels and state benevolence among the successor countries of the Soviet Union; this could be done, but I'm not up to it right now), no obvious associations jump out. A better test, perhaps, would look for changes in the degree of executive constraint (indeed, it looks as if changes in executive constraints do have a positive effect on a larger proportion of countries - 63% in my sample instead of 53%); but whether or not political regimes are associated with state malevolence and benevolence, other factors must be swamping much of their influence. Consider, for example, GDP per capita:

Fig. 13: GDP per capita (from the PWT) and the Physical Integrity Index, by regime type (as measured by the DD dataset)

As we might expect, in every regime type except for military dictatorships state benevolence is correlated with income per capita; the state is usually tamer in richer countries, though military dictatorships seem to get more malevolent the richer they are, even as they also become sparser as income increases. Or consider inequality (a much more striking picture):

Fig. 14: Inequality (measured using the UTIP data) and the Physical Integrity Index, by regime type (as measured by the DD dataset)

The malevolence of the state seems to be exquisitely sensitive to inequality in democracies, in contrast to non-democracies; the less repressive regimes are almost all on the upper left hand quadrant. This makes sense in light of the Acemoglu-Robinson story about the relationship between inequality and regime types: democracies enable class conflict, and hence the state is more likely to get more repressive as that conflict intensifies, whereas a dictatorship has "settled" such conflicts - arrived at some repressive equilibrium that is not especially sensitive to inequality. But of course other stories are also possible (not least that the data on inequality is not great); this is not a test of anything. It is also plausible to speculate that as the world became both more democratic and more unequal over the past 30 years, we would have seen a generally flat trend in the mean CIRI index; rising inequality would have cancelled out the effects of rising democracy.

Finally, consider economic growth:

Fig. 15: The Physical Integrity Index and per capita gdp growth, by regime type (as measured by the DD dataset) 

I confess that I found this picture surprising: I thought there would be an association between low levels of economic growth and greater repressiveness, but apparently not.

We could put this all together in some more complex model. But a structural break seems to remain; adjusting for gdp per capita does not change the picture in figure 11 much, though adding inequality softens the relationship a bit. At any rate, it seems as if the old idea of checks and balances is at least somewhat vindicated by the evidence of the last three decades: constraints matter, and don't count on benevolent autocrats.

(Code for all the graphs in this post is available here; as usual, it's very messy. You will also need this file of codes, plus the Penn World Table data, the CIRI dataset, the Political Terror Scale, the Polity data, the DD dataset, and the UTIP inequality dataset).

[Update 13/12/2012 - minor wording changes for the sake of clarity]

[Update: a quick graphical followup to this post here]