A Simple Model of Cults of Personality

(Apropos of nothing in particular, though this article on Gaddafi’s cult of personality and this article on the indoctrination of children at a school in Libya probably had something to do with it. I’m also lecturing tomorrow on the mechanisms of control used by dictators, and this is something I might want to tell my students; writing helps for self-clarification).

Cults of personality are hardly ever taken seriously enough. They are often seen as a sort of bizarre curiosity found in some authoritarian regimes, their absurdities attributed to the extreme narcissism and megalomania of particular dictators, who wish to be flattered with ever greater titles and deified in ever more grandiose ways. And it is hard not to laugh at some of the claims being made on behalf of often quite uncharismatic dictators: not only is Kim Jong-il, for example, the greatest golfer in the world, but he also appears to have true superhero powers:

In 2006 Nodong Sinmun published an article titled ‘‘Military-First Teleporting’’ claiming that Kim Jong-il, ‘‘the extraordinary master commander who has been chosen by the heavens,’’ appears in one place and then suddenly appears in another ‘‘like a flash of lightning,’’ so quickly that the American satellites overhead cannot track his movements. (Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh, The Hidden People of North Korea, p. 55).

To the extent that cults of personality are taken seriously, moreover, they are often analyzed in terms of their effects on the beliefs of the people who are exposed to them. Thus, the typical (if at times implicit) model of how a cult of personality “works” is one in which people are indoctrinated by exposure to the cult propaganda and come to believe in the special qualities of the leader, no matter how implausible the claims, simply because alternative sources of information about the leader do not exist. On this model, the cult of personality creates loyalty by producing false beliefs in the people, and the best way of combating its effects is by providing alternative sources of information. Even scholars who are well aware of the basic unbelievability of cults of personality often speak as if their function were to persuade people, even if they fail to achieve this objective. Hassig and Oh, for example, write that “[e]ven in North Korea few people have been convinced by this propaganda because since Kim came to power, economic conditions have gone from bad to worse” (p. 57) which makes it seem as if the main purpose of the cult of personality were to convince people of the amazing powers of Kim Jong-il.

But this way of thinking about cults of personality misses the point, I think. Not because it is entirely wrong; it is certainly plausible that some people do come to believe in the special charisma of the leader because they have been exposed to the propaganda of the cult since they were children, though the evidence for this is scarce. In Lenin’s Tomb, David Remnick’s compulsively readable account of the last days of the Soviet Empire, one occasionally comes across descriptions of such people, usually elderly men and women who reject or rationalize any and all evidence of Stalin’s “errors” and hang on to their belief in Stalin’s godlike powers. Remnick also tells many stories of people who claim that they used to believe in Stalin but lost their faith gradually, like groupies who eventually outgrow their youthful infatuation with a band. And there is evidence that significant numbers of Russians (how many exactly it’s hard to say) remain “proud” in some sense of Stalin, though this “pride” in Stalin appears to have much less to do with Stalin’s actual cult of personality than with Stalin’s supposed achievements as a leader (e.g., winning WWII, industrializing the country, making Russia into a “high status” country that needed to be taken seriously on the world stage, etc.). Identification with a leader can be a form of “status socialism,” a way of retaining some self-respect in a regime that would otherwise provide little except humiliation. Yet, though I do not want to deny that cults of personality can sometimes “persuade” people of the superhuman character of leaders (for some values of “persuade”) or that they draw on people’s gullibility in the absence of alternative sources of information and their need for identification with high status individuals, they are best understood in terms of how dictators can harness the dynamics of “signalling” for the purposes of social control.

One of the main problems dictators face is that repression creates liars (preference falsification, in the jargon), yet it is necessary for them to remain in power. This is sometimes called the dictator’s dilemma: it is hard for dictators to gauge their true levels of support or whether or not officials below them are telling them the truth about what is going on in the country because repression gives everyone an incentive to lie, yet they need repression if they are to avoid being overthrown by people exploiting their tolerance to organize themselves. Moreover, repression is costly and works best when it is threatened rather than actually used. All things considered, then, a dictator would often prefer to minimize repression – to use it efficiently so as to minimize its distorting effects on his knowledge and on its effectiveness. He can either allow relatively free debate, and run some risk of being overthrown (this happens especially in poor dictatorships which cannot construct a reliable monitoring apparatus, as Egorov, Guriev, and Sonin show [ungated]), or he can use repression and risk being surprised by a lack of support later.

Here is where cults of personality come in handy. The dictator wants a credible signal of your support; merely staying silent and not saying anything negative won’t cut it. In order to be credible, the signal has to be costly: you have to be willing to say that the dictator is not merely ok, but a superhuman being, and you have to be willing to take some concrete actions showing your undying love for the leader. (You may have had this experience: you are served some food, and you must provide a credible signal that you like it so that the host will not be offended; merely saying that you like it will not cut it. So you will need to go for seconds and layer on the praise). Here the concrete action required of you is typically a willingness to denounce others when they fail to say the same thing, but it may also involve bizarre pilgrimages, ostentatious displays of the dictator’s image, etc. The cult of personality thus has three benefits from the point of view of the dictator (aside from stroking his vanity):

1.       When everybody lies about how wonderful the dictator is, there is no common knowledge: you do not know how much of this “support” is genuine and how much is not, which makes it hard to organize against the dictator and exposes one to risks, sometimes enormous risks, if one so much as tries to share one’s true views, since others can signal their commitment to the dictator by denouncing you. This is true of all mechanisms that induce preference falsification, however: they prevent coordination.

2.       What makes cults of personality interesting, however, is that the more baroque and over the top, the better (though the “over the top” level needs to be achieved by small steps), since differences in signals of commitment indicate gradations of personal support of the dictator, and hence give the dictator a reasonable measurement of his true level of support that is not easily available to the public. (Though you have to be willing to interpret these signals, and not come to actually believe them naively).

3.       Finally, a cult of personality can in fact transform some fraction of the population into genuine supporters, which may come in handy later. In a social world where everyone appears to be convinced of godlike status of the leader, it is very hard to “live in truth” as Havel and other dissidents in communist regimes argued.

To be sure, in order for a cult of personality to work, you must start small, and you must be willing to both reward (those who denounce) and punish (those who do not praise) with sufficient predictability, which presents a problem if control is initially lacking; there must be a group committed to enforcement at the beginning, and capable of slowly increasing the threshold “signal” of support required of citizens. (So some dictators fail at this: consider, e.g., Mobutu’s failures in this respect, partly from inability to monitor what was being said about him or to punish deviations with any certainty). But once the cult of personality is in full swing, it practically runs itself, turning every person into a sycophant and basically destroying everyone’s dignity in the process. It creates an equilibrium of lies that can be hard to disrupt unless people get a credible  signal that others basically hate the dictator as much as they do and are willing to do something about that.

There is a terrific story in Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (pp. 97-101), which illustrates both how such control mechanisms can work regardless of belief and the degradation they inflict on people. The story is about a relatively privileged student, “Jun-sang,” at the time of the death of Kim Il-sung (North Korea’s “eternal president”). The death is announced, and Jun-sang finds that he cannot cry; he feels nothing for Kim Il-Sung. Yet, surrounded by his sobbing classmates, he suddenly realizes that “his entire future depended on his ability to cry: not just his career and his membership in the Workers’ Party, his very survival was at stake. It was a matter of life and death” (p. 98). So he forces himself to cry. And it gets worse: “What had started as a spontaneous outpouring of grief became a patriotic obligation … The inmiban [a neighbourhood committee] kept track of how often people went to the statue to show their respect. Everybody was being watched. They not only scrutinized actions, but facial expressions and tone of voice, gauging them for sincerity” (p. 101). The point of the story is not that nobody experienced any genuine grief at the death of Kim Il-sung (we cannot tell if Jun-sang’s feelings were common, or unusual) but that the expression of genuine grief was beside the point; all must give credible signals of grief or be considered suspect, and differences in these signals could be used to gauge the level of support (especially important at a time of leadership transition; Kim Il-sung had just died, and other people could have tried to take advantage of the opportunity if they had perceived any signals of wavering support from the population; note then the mobilization of the inmiban to monitor these signals). Moreover, the cult of personality induces a large degree of self-monitoring; there is no need to expend too many resources if others can be counted to note insufficiently credible signals of support and bring them to the attention of the authorities.  The only bright spot in all this is that dictators can become unmoored from reality - they come to believe their own propaganda - in which case they can be surprised by eruptions of protest (e.g., Ceausescu). 

Crowdsourcing a Democracy Index

(Sorry for the recent neglect of the blog. I just started teaching again, and that tends to absorb all my energy. So here’s a teaching-related post on something I’ve been doing in one of my classes).

One of the things my students are doing in my “Dictatorships and Revolutions” class this term is constructing a democracy index/regime classification like those produced by Freedom House, the Polity project, or the DD dataset of political regimes I’ve used in this blog in the past (see, e.g., here and here).[1] We are looking at examples of how different regime classifications can be constructed, discussing some of their problems, and then collectively constructing a set of criteria for classification, which we will ultimately use to actually code all 192 or so countries in the world at intervals of about five years for a couple of decades. (If you are interested in the actual details of how the exercise is organized, e-mail me; this whole thing is still quite experimental, so I would not mind some feedback. It’s turning out to be a bit complex). Since there are over 100 students in the class (around 120, in fact), this means that we can achieve full coverage (and even some overlap) if each student codes just 2 countries (at various points in time), and I am planning to assign 4-5 countries to each student (so each country gets at least 2 coders).  We will then examine how our crowdsourced index or regime classification compares to some of the other indexes and regime classifications.

As a warm-up exercise, I set up a democracy ranking website using allourideas.org, which I learned about some time ago via the good orgtheory people. Basically, this is a webpage where you are presented with a comparison between two countries, and asked which one is more democratic (you can answer “I don’t know,” and give a reason). The results of the pairwise comparisons can be used to generate a ranking, which represents something like the probability that a given country would be more democratic than a randomly selected country. (But rather than read this explanation, why not go play with it? It can be addictive, and it’s basically self-explanatory once you see it). I asked the students to go to this website in the first class of the term, and to vote; a lot of them voted (an average of about 14 times, i.e., 14 comparisons). I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but I was sort of hoping for a “wisdom of crowds” effect. And there is, indeed, something like that, but the effect is small. Here’s a graph (link for full screen):

Powered by Tableau

The y axis represents the sum of Freedom House’s political rights and civil liberties scores: 2 is most free, 14 least free. The x axis represents the “ranking” of the countries as calculated by the Allourideas software, ranging from 4 (North Korea has only a 4% chance of prevailing in a “more democratic” comparison against a randomly selected country) to 93 (Australia; New Zealand scored 92, and was for a time in first position, which is to be expected from a group from New Zealand; see the complete ranking here). Note that these numbers do not reflect the judgments of “individual” students, but the calculated probability of prevailing in a comparison against a randomly selected country, given the information available from previous pairwise comparisons. (No student or set of students actually “ranked” North Korea last or Australia first). The size of the bubbles is proportional to the class’ subjective “uncertainty”: basically, the number of times a country was involved in an “I don’t know” answer divided by the total number of times the country appeared in any comparisons. There were 1250 votes submitted, but since there are 192 countries, the number of possible comparisons is 36,672, which means that a relatively large number of potential comparisons never appeared. (Which is part of the reason I am posting this here – I want to see what happens if lots of people engage in this informal ranking exercise).

There’s clearly a correlation between the rating by Freedom House and the informal rankings generated by the pairwise comparisons produced by the students – about -0.62, which is pretty respectable. (Some of the correlations between Freedom House and other measures of democracy are not much higher than this). A simple regression of the Freedom House ratings on the rankings generated by the students gives a coefficient of -0.11 (highly significant, not that that matters much in this context), which means that an increase of 10 points in the student-generated ranking is associated with a decrease of about 1 point in the combined Freedom House PR+CL score. (A more thorough analysis could be undertaken, but I don’t feel qualified to do it; I’ve put up the data here for anyone who is interested in doing some more exploration, and will update it later if enough other people participate in the ranking exercise).

Most of the “obvious” cases appear at the extremes – developed, well-known democracies get a high ranking, while obvious dictatorships mostly get a low ranking. Many of the countries that seem to be misplaced, however, appear to be either small and little talked about in the news or not especially well-known to students; see, for example, Ghana (which is ranked lower than it should be, if Freedom House is right) and Armenia (which is ranked higher than it should be, if Freedom House is right). Would this change if more people contributed to the ranking, especially people from a variety of countries around the world (I know this blog gets a small readership from a number of unlikely countries –could my kind readers send this link around to people who might be interested, e.g., students?). Here's a heatmap of the student-generated rankings (darker is more democratic):

The map seems reasonable enough to the naked eye. It seems that even a simple informal ranking exercise can be a reasonable approximation to a professional ranking (like that generated by Freedom House) if the people doing the ranking have some knowledge of the countries being compared, so I would expect that more people participating would probably move the informal ranking closer to Freedom House’s measure. (Maybe this is a most cost-effective method of generating a democracy index – “the people’s democracy index,” as it were). But it could also be the case that the ranking would diverge more from the Freedom House ranking as people from diverse countries participated, with different understandings of democracy. Perhaps global opinion about which countries count as most democratic would diverge sharply from the opinions of Freedom House’s expert coders. Or perhaps it would be affected by national biases – people from particular countries would have a tendency to rank it higher/lower than a more “objective” ranking would. It would be interesting to know – so it would be great if you could spread the word by sending  this link around!

(I have also wondered whether this method would work for generating “historic” data on democracy. But the obvious way of doing this would introduce many very unlikely or difficult comparisons– e.g., could we meaningfully compare democracy levels in 1964 Gambia vs. 1980 Angola using this method? – and the less obvious way would require one to set up a website for each distinct year).

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[1] Technically, an index of democracy and a regime classification are two different things. The Economist and Freedom House produce indexes of democracy/freedom – an aggregated measure of the degree of democracy in a given country at any particular point in time, ranging from 0 to 100. A regime classification instead takes regimes as types, and attempts to determine whether a given country should be categorized as one kind or another.

Links between Serbian, Tunisian, and Egyptian activists

From a very interesting article in the NY Times:

After a strike that March in the city of Mahalla, Egypt, Mr. Maher and his friends called for a nationwide general strike for April 6. To promote it, they set up a Facebook group that became the nexus of their movement, which they were determined to keep independent from any of the established political groups. Bad weather turned the strike into a nonevent in most places, but in Mahalla a demonstration by the workers’ families led to a violent police crackdown — the first major labor confrontation in years.

Just a few months later, after a strike in Tunisia, a group of young online organizers followed the same model, setting up what became the Progressive Youth of Tunisia. The organizers in both countries began exchanging their experiences over Facebook. The Tunisians faced a more pervasive police state than the Egyptians, with less latitude for blogging or press freedom, but their trade unions were stronger and more independent. “We shared our experience with strikes and blogging,” Mr. Maher recalled.

For their part, Mr. Maher and his colleagues began reading about nonviolent struggles. They were especially drawn to a Serbian youth movement called Otpor, which had helped topple the dictator Slobodan Milosevic by drawing on the ideas of an American political thinker, Gene Sharp. The hallmark of Mr. Sharp’s work is well-tailored to Mr. Mubark’s Egypt: He argues that nonviolence is a singularly effective way to undermine police states that might cite violent resistance to justify repression in the name of stability.

The April 6 Youth Movement modeled its logo — a vaguely Soviet looking red and white clenched fist—after Otpor’s, and some of its members traveled to Serbia to meet with Otpor activists.

Another influence, several said, was a group of Egyptian expatriates in their 30s who set up an organization in Qatar called the Academy of Change, which promotes ideas drawn in part on Mr. Sharp’s work. One of the group’s organizers, Hisham Morsy, was arrested during the Cairo protests and remained in detention.

“The Academy of Change is sort of like Karl Marx, and we are like Lenin,” said Basem Fathy, another organizer who sometimes works with the April 6 Youth Movement and is also the project director at the Egyptian Democratic Academy, which receives grants from the United States and focuses on human rights and election-monitoring. During the protesters’ occupation of Tahrir Square, he said, he used his connections to raise about $5,100 from Egyptian businessmen to buy blankets and tents.

This fits with Mark Beissinger's thesis about the "color revolutions": activists learn from one another and spread protest across borders, as I mentioned below. (I was interested to learn that Egyptian activists even modeled their logo on the Otpor logo, just as Ukrainians and Georgians did). The article's description of how these activists used facebook  also suggests that the more important contribution of "social media" to the protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere is less the ability to organize people than the spread of tactical information across borders (basically, how to outsmart the police and energize a small cadre of dedicated individuals).

The whole piece is well worth reading.

Inequality, injustice, and democratization

(Warning: an epically long post that meanders through the literature on inequality and democratization and comes to conclusions that probably sound unsurprising. Written partly as an attempt to construct a workable set of lecture notes for my course this term).

Was economic inequality important in triggering the anti-regime protests in Tunisia and Egypt? A number of news articles I’ve read mention, often in passing, that rising inequality was one of the causes of the unrest in both countries. This inequality was manifested in the large fortunes accumulated by both the Ben Ali and the Mubarak clans and other influential insiders (including senior government figures in both countries) and in the lack of opportunity for relatively well educated people, who struggled to get jobs even with university educations. And many people believe inequality had been rising there (for reasons that are common to a lot of other countries – some “liberalizing” reforms that basically produced forms of crony capitalism that enriched well-connected insiders at the expense of most people).

This seems plausible enough, even if the evidence is scattered and anecdotal; reliable and recent statistical estimates of inequality in Egypt and Tunisia do not appear to exist. What does exist provides inconsistent information. For example, the CIA World Factbook reports a Gini of 0.34 for Egypt in 2001 (which is below average), but without giving sources, and a gini of 0.4 for Tunisia in 2005 (which middling), yet a more complete dataset of inequality measures developed by the University of Texas Inequality Project  (which is pretty complete as these things go, i.e., not that complete) suggests inequality was higher in both Egypt in 2001 (gini of .47 in 1999, and an average of .42 for the period 1963-1999; .47 is above average) and Tunisia in 2000 (gini of .48 in 1998, and an average of .47 for the period 1963-1999). (If you ask Wolfram|Alpha, you seem to get yet another set of numbers, without sources, though they are probably based on some complicated computation involving the CIA factbook.)

At any rate, most of the recent theoretical work on democratization supports a role for inequality in regime change, though not without qualifications, and it certainly would  not support a "high inequality leads to democracy" thesis. Boix and Acemoglu and Robinson, among others, have argued that the level of inequality is a pretty important factor in whether or not a country moves from dictatorship to democracy. Their arguments are slightly different, but the logic is similar. The basic idea is that democracy is more responsive to the wishes of the “median individual” than dictatorship. As inequality increases, the median voter in a democracy will be poorer and will benefit more from redistribution. Under some reasonable assumptions (e.g., voters vote their interests), democracy will thus tend to be, all other things equal, more redistributive than a dictatorship controlled by the economic elite. (The key word is “tend”. Democracies vary greatly in the degree to which they are actually redistributive, as we will see below, for all sorts of reasons you can probably figure out for yourself: ethnic and religious diversity, different constraints on taxation, etc .).

The poor should thus normally prefer democracy to dictatorship; demand for democracy should come from “below” not from “above,” and should be higher the higher the level of inequality. In this framework, moreover, the poor prefer democracy not just because of the redistribution it offers “today” but also because it acts as a commitment device: sure, the rich may offer some economic concessions in the face of unrest, but without an institutional voice the poor cannot be certain that the rich will continue to offer such concessions in the future. Conversely, the rich should normally prefer a dictatorship in which they control the state to democracy, and this preference will be stronger the higher the level of inequality (and thus the expected redistributive effects of democracy). This is obviously a highly simplified story about why people prefer one regime over another – it hardly accounts, for example, for the humiliations of arbitrary power that appear to be the immediate and evident causes of the anger against dictators that we see in actual episodes of mass protest, or for the complexity of class alliances in actual transitions to democracy. But it is not a terrible starting point for thinking about the incentives of key actors in processes of potential democratization.

For one thing, dictatorships do seem to be, on average, more unequal than democracies. Though measures of inequality are not always of very great quality (and should always be taken with a grain of salt), correlations between democracy and equality seem to persist across a range of measures. Using the DD measure of democracy and dictatorship by Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland and the UTIP data we can see that democracies  in the period 1963-1999 had a mean Gini coefficient of  0.4, whereas dictatorships had a mean Gini coefficient of 0.45. Not an enormous difference, perhaps, but at least expected from the theory. Measures of “capital shares” – which are more appropriate in this context, since they basically measure what part of the national income goes to the “capitalist class” – tell the same story. Using a somewhat truncated version of the dataset on capital shares compiled by Rodriguez and Ortega, we find that in the 1963-2001 period the share of the national income going to capital was on average 60% in dictatorships, and 56% in democracies. (I should actually give you confidence intervals for that sort of thing, but I am not quite sure how to produce them).

The actual distribution of inequality across regime types is fairly wide, however: some democracies are more unequal than most dictatorships, and some dictatorships are more equal than most democracies. Consider the following density plot (essentially a smoothed histogram), using the UTIP data and the DD measure of democracy and dictatorship:

(Democracies are represented by the purple line, dictatorships by the blue line). The graph basically tells you that though democracies are clustered towards the low inequality end of the spectrum (the median Gini for democracies is 0.39) and dictatorships towards the high inequality end of the spectrum (median Gini  0.46), there is still a fairly wide spread, with many democracies with high inequality and some dictatorships with low inequality. We can dig deeper, however. If we consider the dictatorships that have lower inequality than most of the democracies (lower than the median level of inequality for democracies), most of them are communist or former communist countries: Albania 1988-1990, Azerbaijan 1991, Bulgaria 1963-1989, Bosnia and Herzegovina 1991, China 1977-1986, Cuba 1977-1989, Hungary 1963-1989, Poland 1970-1988, Romania 1963-1969, Russia in 1993. A few other countries round out the list: Afghanistan (which could be counted as a formerly communist country, and anyway figures for Afghanistan are likely to be nonsense), Singapore 1978-1999, the Seychelles 1976-1986, Syria 1983-1992, Algeria 1976-1994 (which also had a “leftist” revolution), Egypt 1974-1978 (the Sadat years, I believe, though the foundation for this would have been laid during Nasser’s rule), Iran 1981-1989 (another country that experienced a revolution), Malaysia 1993-1999, Portugal 1975, Senegal 1974-1986, South Korea 1979-1987, and Uruguay  1976-1979. The rest of the dictatorships for which there is inequality data in this sample have higher inequality than most democracies. (If you run the same exercise for the democracies that have higher inequality than most dictatorships, you find basically younger democracies – an average age of 13 years, compared to 37 in the entire sample- or democracies that have been repeatedly undermined by coups, though India and Venezuela are clear outliers, Venezuela probably for reasons discussed in this post.).

None of this proves anything (correlation is not causation and all that, besides the fact that the data on inequality is poor and I have not controlled for anything, though other people who know more about this than I do have done so), but it’s interesting (for some values of interesting, I suppose). There is also, among other things, the fact that most coups in Latin America in the 20^th century were supported by economic elites fearful of redistribution and confiscation, and that historically objections to the extension of the suffrage focused on the threat to property more than anything else. This is what we would expect from the highly simplified models of Boix or Acemoglu and Robinson: when inequality is high, the wealthy elite have large incentives to invest substantial resources in controlling the state to prevent redistribution, up to staging a coup (in a democracy) or otherwise supporting high levels of repression (in dictatorship), at least so long as they do not have an “exit” option (perhaps because their assets are mobile or otherwise easily hidden from taxation). But when inequality is high, the poor non-elite also have the most to gain from redistribution, so high levels of inequality should be associated with high levels of class conflict and ultimately with dictatorship (either of the “right” or of the “left,” depending on the balance of forces: so we see revolutionary dictatorships with relatively low levels of measured inequality). Very high inequality seems to lead to irreconcilable class conflict, which a small wealthy elite is more likely to “win” (since its collective action problems are smaller; hence the rarity of great social revolutions). Hence it is no surprise that high levels of inequality appear to be statistically associated with the breakdown of democracy (see, for example, the recent work of Christian Houle [gated]).  One may think that this logic probably works against democracy in Egypt; if the military is as highly embedded in the economy as recent stories note, then it would seem to be less likely that they will agree to relinquish enough power to a genuinely democratic government, especially when much of that wealth funds the lifestyles of senior officers. (The same does not appear to be true in Tunisia, where the military did not appear to have been part and parcel of the “winning coalition” in recent years).

But if the theory is very good at telling us when democracy breaks down or when it is unlikely to emerge (namely, when inequalities are large and visible and wealthy elites cannot easily take their assets elsewhere, as in agrarian economies, so that they have very strong incentives to prevent the poor from gaining control or substantial influence over the state) it seems to be less good at telling us when it is likely to emerge. There is no clear statistical relationship between the level of inequality and transitions to democracy: democracy has emerged in countries with low, high, and medium levels of inequality [Houle again], even though the high inequality democracies have tended to have higher rates of breakdown afterwards. (I do not know if the data is good enough to bear a look at the within-country pattern: do countries that experience an increase in inequality have higher or lower probabilities of transitioning to democracy? Anybody wants to help me look at that? How would you do that?). Part of the problem is that it isn’t clear how lower levels of inequality affect both the “demand” for democracy (Acemoglu and Robinson suggest demand would be lower, but then Boix suggests that the wealthy would have less incentive to oppose it, which seems to produce an indeterminate result) and the ability of non-elite groups to coordinate action (my guess is that low levels of status inequality would make it easier to coordinate collective action and to generate collective protest identities, but I don’t really know). There may also be income effects: high or low inequality may produce different political outcomes at different levels of development (just-so story: it may be that as income increases throughout society, and its marginal contributions to happiness and physical security decrease, direct redistribution becomes less and less important, and other things like physical repression may be more important).  

Moreover, many historical episodes of democratization seem to have been driven by emerging economic elites who wished to avoid predation by other elites controlling the state, and who therefore enlisted the lower classes in their struggles against these predatory state elites, something that does not fit neatly with the “redistributive” models of Boix or Acemoglu and Robinson (as discussed, for example, by Ansell and Samuels here [gated]). Consider the fact that in Egypt the main protests seem to have been “led” (to the extent that they were led at all) by young professionals who would not necessarily be well connected to the state but instead probably suffered quite a bit from its predation. The point is more general: in actual episodes of democratization, the demands for an end to arbitrary treatment by the state – for “dignity”, an end to corruption or police harassment, for free expression, etc. – seem pretty prevalent, even though we can also find demands for redistribution driven by more economic interests.

My guess is that the effects of inequality on democratization are mediated by beliefs about justice or fairness. Here’s a sketch of a theory. There is some cultural equilibrium, produced by long-lasting regimes, between beliefs about what constitutes a “fair” distribution and the actual level of redistribution in society, determining the long-run level of inequality in a society. This equilibrium can be partly genuine (there are differences in what different societies accept as fair processes of distribution, leading to different levels of inequality; see this article by Alesina and Angeletos for more [gated]), but in non-democratic societies the equilibrium is also enforced by coercion and opacity (the people do not know how rich the wealthy really are). But sharp departures from this equilibrium lower the mobilization threshold of people dissatisfied with the status quo – they make more people angry, and hence more likely to mobilize (anger is a much better spur to take risks than plain vanilla self-interest). These departures might be produced by increases in the “visibility” of elite wealth (“ostentation”) or by increases in the incidence of wealth due to unfair processes of distribution (“corruption”). Hence the importance of incidents like the Shah’s grandiose party on the anniversary of the Persian monarchy for triggering mobilization, or even things like the publicity surrounding the comparatively luxurious living conditions of the leaders of the GDR early during the 1989 fall of the communist regime there; in Eastern Europe, where people had been socialized for decades into an ethos of “equality,” even the relatively small privileges of the nomenklatura compared to the rest of the population were seen as galling. (Honecker and Krenz lived luxuriously by egalitarian GDR standards, but not that luxuriously). In general then, we should expect that it is not the level of inequality that matters for mobilization, but sharp changes in inequality, relative to the “fairness” baseline. Yet the level of inequality may still be related to mobilization, since it may be that at high levels of inequality, even small departures from the fairness baseline will be easily perceived as forms of injustice. So that high inequality societies should be, on this view, more prone both to mobilization leading to democratization (as we see in the data assembled by Houle, referenced above, where high levels of inequality seem to be associated with more transitions to democracy: see table 2) and to the breakdown of democracy (because of its threat to the interests of the wealthy).

To finish this epically long post, if you are still reading, consider this interesting statistic from Egypt: according to the World Values Survey of 2005 (if I’m reading the answers to question V120 correctly – link may not take you to the question directly), an astonishing 52% of Egyptians thought that “In the long run, hard work usually brings a better life” – much higher numbers than in the USA or New Zealand. And yet this belief was bound to be tested by the way the Egyptian economy worked (where only the well connected ultimately prospered, and where large numbers of college graduates apparently failed to find jobs). I do not know why the Egyptians seemed to be so optimistic in 2005, but I can imagine that in the face of the realities of the Egyptian economy, a lot of (especially young and previously unmobilized by existing parties) people became very angry, especially young people. Egypt was a very equal society by some measures, but given its “fairness” baseline, it was probably failing spectacularly in the last few years. 

Why does the spread of protest follow regional and cultural lines?

One of the things I find interesting about the recent events in Tunisia and Egypt is the fact that protest tends to spread along regional and cultural lines. Though there is some evidence that the fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia and the huge demonstrations in Egypt are making authoritarian leaders nervous in China (which has apparently started to censor searches on Egypt), Cuba, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and many other countries, their main effect has been on other Middle Eastern countries – Jordan in particular, which has also seen large demonstrations and where the king just fired his entire government. The same phenomenon was seen in 1989, where protest spread primarily in (mostly European) communist countries, and in the early 2000s, with the original “color revolutions,” where protest spread among post-Soviet competitive authoritarian regimes and resulted in regime change in four of them (Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan). And we could go further back in time: there is an age of guerrilla insurrection in Latin America in the 50 and early 60s catalyzed in part by the Cuban revolution, a wave of European revolutions in 1848, and so on (see also the maps of political change below). But why should protest spread primarily along cultural and geographical lines? Why shouldn’t the fall of an autocrat randomly impact all other autocrats, as people update their beliefs in the efficacy of protest?

In a 2007 piece in Perspectives on Politics, Mark Beissinger pointed out that a similar cultural or political context seems to be important for people to update their beliefs in the efficacy of protest. Suppose that citizens in country A successfully manage to overthrow their autocratic government. How should citizens of country B, also under an autocratic government, process this information? If they think the situation in A is very similar to their own, they might think that overthrowing their own autocrat is easier than they thought, and hence be more willing to run the risks of protest, even if, objectively speaking, nothing has changed in their situation. But if people in B believe that their situation – their political institutions, culture, etc. – is very dissimilar from the situation in A, the information provided by the overthrow of the government in A will not be as relevant to their decision regarding whether or not to risk protesting against their own government. As a consequence, protest will tend to spread in regimes that appear to be in culturally and politically similar situations: Soviet satellite regimes, post-Soviet competitive authoritarian regimes, and now apparently non-oil-rich Arab regimes experiencing economic stagnation and high levels of corruption.  This does not mean the protests in B will be successful – many color “revolutions” failed (in Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere) in part because the situation was not actually as similar as people in B believed. But the beliefs of people in B regarding the similarity of the situation in A could, so the argument goes, affect their chances of success in B. Until recently, few people really thought Mubarak was going to be shaken from power by popular revolt (see, for example, this long and well informed piece by Adam Shatz in the LRB); but the success of the revolution in Tunisia actually increased the chances of success in Egypt by lowering the thresholds for protest of many people (leading to a bandwagon or snowball effect of the sort described by Timur Kuran); and it lowered the thresholds of many people in part because people in Egypt saw enough similarities between their situation and that of the Tunisians to revolt.

There is more to Beisinger’s piece than this. He also notes that explicit person to person connections among activists are also very important in ensuring the spread not only of protests but of specific tactics of contention (e.g., what to do in case of a fraudulent election): activists in Serbia, for example, were in contact with activists in Georgia and Ukraine, and many of them were also in contact with people in other post-Soviet regimes like Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and so on. Cultural context mattered here as well: many of these activits could talk to each other in Russian, and they could find many similarities among their different regimes. I assume that similar connections will be found among Arab activists. And he has a very interesting discussion of how autocratic learning interacts with the spread of protest, a topic which I discussed briefly below. But let’s just talk about the implications of the first part of the argument for current events.

First, the argument implies that protest will spread in the Middle East but not necessarily elsewhere, and will become progressively less effective, not just because autocrats will learn to counter such protest, but because people in other regimes will find less and less in their situation that is analogous to the situation in the Middle East. The Chinese and Cuban regimes thus would seem to be safe for the moment, for example.

Second, the argument implies that the more citizens of a country think their situation is unique and without parallel, the less likely they are to follow the lead of protests in other countries. Bad analogical reasoning might actually increase the chances of revolutionary success elsewhere. Even if the situation in Libya, for example, is quite different from the situation in Egypt, if enough people in Libya believe otherwise, they might actually increase their chances of overthrowing their own government. (What are the chances of Qaddafi becoming the Arab Ceausescu?). By contrast, if people in North Korea, for example, (wrongly) believe their own situation and culture is especially unique, they might be less likely to take advantage of a wave of protest. 

What do people think?

Twitter

Almost without really meaning to, I've joined the ranks of the twitterati (partly I wanted to keep up with events in Tunisia and Egypt, partly to have some outlet for the half baked thoughts not worth blogging). I'm at @marquezxavier.

Reflections on the Revolution in Tunisia

I know basically nothing about Tunisia. (It seems that few people do: I tried a search for articles on Tunisia in Google Scholar and a few other places, and there are really only a handful of recent ones that shed any light on Tunisian politics. Perhaps the best thing I read was this piece by Hibou and Hulsey, despite some excessive Foucauldian jargon. I assume most of the important scholarship is in books or in French and Arabic). If you want informed analysis of the events in Tunisia or now Egypt, you should be reading Juan Cole or Mark Lynch. But I do have a professional interest in dictatorships, revolutions, and similar things, and like Joshua Tucker, I think that a comparison of the events in Tunisia to the fall of Eastern European communism in 1989 suggests that Tunisia will not be an isolated event:

...While undoubtedly important for the Tunisian people, the larger question is whether Tunisia could turn out to be the Poland of the Arab world: the first transition away from a regime long thought to be immutable that sets in motion a path of regime change throughout the region. At first glance, this would seem to be extremely unlikely. Prior to Tunisia, it is difficult to remember the last Middle Eastern regime to fall outside of an external invasion (Iran in 1979?). And yet, a quick glance at a Google News search for Tunisia reveals articles linking protests in Tunisia to events in Egypt,Algeria, Jordan and even Gabon and Indonesia.

As I have previously noted, I know next to nothing about Tunisian politics. I have, however, studied the collapse of Communism in East-Central Europe in 1989 in some detail, and so would like to offer the following observations about what lessons 1989 might have to offer those prognosticating about 2011.

1) Almost nobody saw the collapse of communism coming. Despite a plethora of scholarship after the collapse suggesting that it was inevitable, you would be hard pressed to find analysts in the 1980s who thought the Iron Curtain was about to come down. So as unlikely as a serious of democratic revolutions spreading through the Middle East might seem from our current vantage point, the chances that the Cold War would come to a (practically) bloodless conclusion so swiftly seemed equally unlikely.

2) One of the most interesting theoretical pieces I ever read about the collapse of communism was a 1991 World Politics article by Timur Kuran (gated, ungated). In this article, Kuran posits that even people living within a regime that is perched on the edge of collapse may not realize it. The mechanism here is to assume that different people have different thresholds for when they will be willing to publicly oppose the existing regime. Imagine a country with 10 people, one person who will protest if there is at least 1 other protesting, 1 if there are 2 other protesting, 1 if there are 3, etc. It is a stable equilibrium for no one to protest. However, if something happens to put just one person out on the streets (say, a particularly difficult interaction with the authorities, or, hypothetically speaking, an emotional response to someone setting themselves on fire), then suddenly everyone ends up protesting. Person 1 comes out because now there is 1 person on the streets. Once person one comes out, then person 2 comes out because there are 2 people on the street, and onward up the chain. The lesson of the story - in my opinion - is that as long as regimes are repressive and we can assume that citizens have accumulated grievances against the regime, then there is always the possibility that the regime could tumble precipitously.

3) While there clearly was a snowball effect during the collapse of communism - with the collapse in one country giving rise to the collapse in other countries - we sometimes forget just how long it took for the first revolution to come to fruition, and how long it then took to spread to the second country. Timothy Garton Ash has this wonderful line in his book The Magic Lantern where he reports having said to Vaclav Havel that "in Poland it took ten years; in Hungary 10 months; in East Germany 10 weeks; perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take 10 days!". (Rumor has it some subsequently amended this rule to include that in Romania it would take 10 hours.) So one important lesson from 1989 is the fact that snowballs take a while to pick up steam. Events in Tunisia are still unfolding, and may continue to unfold for sometime. This does not necessarily mean they will not eventually spread elsewhere.

4) One fundamental difference that I can not help noting between 1989 and 2011, however, is the lack of a powerful external actor enforcing the non-democratic regimes in the Middle East. East-Central European communist propaganda notwithstanding, few probably doubted by the 1980s the most of the region would throw off communism if Moscow ever gave them the opportunity to do so. Thus perhaps the most crucial information transmitted by the success of the Polish and Hungarian revolutions was precisely the fact that the Russians were not planning on intervening. I'm not sure there is anything analogous in place in the Middle East.

5) There were also direct effects of one revolution on another in the post-communist context, most specifically involving the flow of people. Here the key example is that when Hungary opened its borders, it paved the way for East Germans to get to West Germany. Again, I'm not sure there is anything analogous in the Middle East.

I would add a couple of things:

1. Some people have suggested that since Arab dictators learn from each other, it is unlikely that they will make the same mistakes that Ben Ali made. And there is evidence from other cycles of protest (the so-called color revolutions in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan) of "elite learning" [gated link]: dictators learn the right tactics to suppress or disarm certain forms of contentious politics (e.g., protests after fraudulent elections). "Color" revolutions have not worked in Belarus, Russia, and many other post-soviet regimes.

But communist dictators in Europe also tried learning from each other, and nothing much worked! East Germans first tried repression, and then ditched their hardline leader (Honecker) for a slightly less hardline one (Krenz) and then for a true moderate (Modrow): didn't work. Ceausescu tried just repression: it backfired (and Ceausescu was killed). In general, it will not be obvious to a dictator exactly what combination of repression and concessions will extinguish a protest wave, for reasons that Timur Kuran makes clear in the work cited by Tucker: the dictator does not really know the true distribution of preferences in society. Moreover, factions within the elite might also take advantage of events to undermine the dictator from within. So "liberalizers" in East Germany, Bulgaria, and Hungary seized the opportunity provided by popular mobilization to push aside aging hardline leaders (even if it didn't turn out very well for some of them in the end). The dictator is not the only person that matters when a wave of protest starts: when the revolution constraint binds, so does the coup constraint. (This is the "autocrat's calculation problem," [gated link] and it is nontrivial). So the "learning" process for the dictator should take time, and it is not guaranteed to make him safe.

Furthermore, opposition activists can also learn from and support each other [gated link]. This, it seems to me, is one of the things that social media makes easier: not so much coordinating protests (most people in Egypt or Tunisia are not on Twitter or Facebook), or even getting information out to the public (though there might be something to this), but sharing tips about forms of contention (e.g., ways of avoiding the police, useful media strategies, etc.) across activist networks, propping up morale, etc. (I assume that opposition activists are far more capable of getting around internet censorship, and far more connected across the borders of the Arab world, than other people).

So all in all, it is not clear that the fact that dictators across the Arab world might learn from one another means that they will be safe. they may, eventually, but the "eventually" spells bad news for people like Mubarak.

2. Some people (the link goes to a piece by Josef Joffe that makes this argument better than most) have argued that Tunisia is special: it has a relatively high income among Arab countries (excluding major oil exporters), a highly educated population, a large middle class, etc. Hence, they suggest (going back to the old modernization theory of Lipset and others), Tunisia was "ready" to transition to democracy in a way that poorer countries (like Egypt, for example) are not.

The problem with modernization theory, however, is that it appears to be false. The best systematic evidence we have (see, e.g., here [gated] and here [gated link]) indicates that when appropriate statistical adjustments are made, there is little or no association between the level of income and the likelihood of transition to democracy. A good way to see this is by using two figures from a paper by Acemoglu and Robinson. In the first, we see that cross-nationally, countries with higher incomes do appear to transition to democracy at higher rates:

In the second, however, we look at the variation in income within a country (expecting that, as income increases in a given country, it should be more likely to transition to democracy), and the picture changes: "within-country" variation in income appears uncorrelated with transitions to democracy:

To be sure, this work is not uncontroversial. Other people claim to find more support for the modernization hypothesis (e.g, Boix and Stokes, Epstein et. al; both links gated), but I find these tests less convincing; there is too much variation in income and education levels among countries that do become democratic even for short periods of time (consider, among others, India, the Philippines, Costa Rica, Portugal, Spain, etc.). And this does not mean that Tunisia's advantages count for nothing. But if they do so, they are more likely to be advantages for the consolidation of democracy in Tunisia (if democracy ever emerges there), as Przeworski and his collaborators argued here and elsewhere, than for mere transitions to democracy. In other words, if Mubarak falls and democracy is established in Egypt, it may be less likely to last than any democracy that might emerge in Tunisia (again, not a sure thing).

3. There is also some concern that so far, the Tunisian "revolution" has not been much more than a coup. Members of the old regime are still in charge, the fall of Ben Ali was precipitated by the actions (or lack of action) of general el-Ammar, and at any rate the whole business need not result in democracy, however conceived. There is also precedent for this sort of thing in the revolutions of 1989: the fall of Ceausescu was basically a coup that took advantage of popular mobilization, and it did not immediately result  in a democratic regime. Though Ion Iliescu's National Salvation Front was an improvement over Ceausescu, almost anything would have been, and it was hardly a democratic regime, even in the most minimalist sense. Yet the more liberalized regime of Ion Iliescu, along with various incentives to join the EU, did eventually push Romania in a more democratic direction. "Revolutions" - however defined - take some time, even if they are not guaranteed to lead to democratic outcomes, and the fact that a more liberal faction of the old Ben Ali regime has taken control of Tunisia is no reason to think that they will stay there (see: Krenz, Egon, and Modrow, Hans), especially if the more liberal environment results in a sustained upsurge of mobilization and organization from opposition actors (as has happened time and again: "liberalizers" always think they can remain in power with a few concessions, but often enough they are either displaced in coups by hardliners or forced into fuller negotiations with the opposition. They also fail to have good knowledge of the true distribution of preferences in society).

More generally, if we follow the "democratization" literature of some 25 years ago (summarized in O'Donnell and Schmitter's classic little book of 1984), the key factor here seems to be whether the hardliners control military forces (they do not seem to in Tunisia, at least judging from what I read in the news) and whether liberal elements in the regime can be forced into tacit alliance with the opposition to prevent the return of hardliners to power (I am in no position to judge this).

All in all, though nothing is certain, I would not easily discount the possibility that we will see lots more political change in the Arab world this year, much of it potentially positive. Political change does tend to come in waves (see the posts below).

{Update 1/27: fixed embarrasing mistake referring to Ben Ali as Zine el Abidine]

Visualizing Political Change, now with Coups

Here's a version of the video below, but now with coups d'etat:

For a note on the sources, see my post below.

Visualizing Political Change

I am mulling over a post on the events in Tunisia, but I've been distracted. I may get around to it eventually, but right now I've been busy trying to make some animated maps for use in my "dictatorships and revolutions" class. Here's the first result:

I tried something like this a few months ago, but this is an improvement over the previous map. First, it uses the update to the Alvarez, Cheibub, Limongi, and Przeworski dataset of political regimes by Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland (the "DD" dataset) that covers the entire period 1946-2008 (not just to 2002). And second, it uses a dataset of historical maps of state borders by Nils Weidmann, Doreen Kuse, and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch that allows you to visualize such things as the breakup of the Soviet Union or the reunification of Germany.

The DD definition of democracy is very minimalist: a country counts as a democracy if both the government and the legislature are elected in competitive elections. Thus, some countries are classified as democracies which seem to have all sorts of political problems. Moreover, by "competitive elections" CGV mean that a) the opposition can contest the election, and b) the government actually relinquishes power if the opposition wins. Since in some countries the current regime has never lost an election (e.g., Botswana), it is not always possible to unambiguously code the country as a democracy or a dictatorship given their coding rules. In such cases, they err on the side of classifying the country as a dictatorship (this is their "type II error" rule), which leads to some curious outcomes: for example, South Africa never turns into a democracy (look at the video at around the year 1994), and Botswana is always classified as a dictatorship. But they identify these cases with their "type II" variable, so it is possible to see which countries might be democracies but are classified as dictatorships: these are the "ambiguous" cases in the video.

One thing that comes out very clearly in the animation is that regime types tend to cluster temporally and spatially. There are waves of civilian dictatorships and of military dictatorships (see, for example, Africa in the late 1970s and 1980s), as well as of democracies. Most communist regimes clustered around the Soviet Union, and most absolute monarchies are in the Middle East/North Africa. There seem to be strong "regional" influences on regime change, which suggests that the events in Tunisia are unlikely to remain isolated.

Some people criticize the DD data for conceptualizing the democracy/dictatorship distinction as a categorical rather than a gradual distinction (most of my students, for example, really dislike this categorical distinction when I assign a reading from Gandhi in my class). So most political regime datasets (like Freedom House or Polity IV) have some kind of scale from most autocratic to most democratic. The choice is, to some, extent, pragmatic, but I think there is something to the idea that regimes come in types, not just gradations of a single underlying dimension. So I like CGV's effort to identify different regime types, and I am largely in agreement with many of their criticisms of "graduated" indexes of democracy like Polity IV here. Nevertheless, I've also made a similar animation using Polity IV data:

There is less to note here, except the march of democracy. You miss some of the geographic and temporal patterns visible in the DD data.

I'm thinking of making an animated map that shows coups as they happen (using the Coups d'Etat dataset by Marshall and Marshall) now that I've mastered the process of making these maps (it took a while: R and ArcGIS are not the most easy to use pieces of software). Other ideas?

Update, 1/21/2011: I went ahead and did the animated map showing coups d'etat.

Is oil bad for democracy? (A footnote on Thad Dunning’s “Crude Democracy”)

The view that oil is bad for democracy and freedom has become conventional wisdom. (Any view espoused by Thomas Friedman is by definition conventional wisdom). On this view, the rents produced by oil (and, to a lesser extent, other minerals) tend to provide authoritarian rulers both with incentives to entrench themselves and to give them the capacity to do so; as a result, as Friedman puts it, “the price of oil and the pace of freedom tend to move in opposite directions.”

There is indeed some apparent association between high levels of resource wealth and authoritarianism, as documented in many studies (see, e.g., Michael Ross’ “Does Oil Hinder Democracy?” which has been cited more than 900 times). Qualitative studies of Middle Eastern politics (e.g., Kiren Aziz Chaudhry’s fantastic book “The Price of Wealth”) examine in detail the ways in which oil has served to buttress authoritarianism in some countries. And there are theoretical reasons to believe that democracy is unlikely to emerge or be stable when elites control highly immobile assets (like oil wells) from which they derive large rents (see, e.g., Carles Boix’s “Democracy and Redistribution”).

Yet there have always been apparent outliers: Venezuela, for example, seems to have sustained a relatively democratic regime even during the oil boom of the seventies, and Norwegian democracy did not seem to have been adversely affected by a huge influx of oil. Oil and natural resources seem to be bad for democracy in some countries (mostly in the Middle East and Africa) but good in other regions (Latin America). And some recent studies claim that the statistical evidence actually does not favour the view that oil and natural resources are bad for democracy (see, for example, Stephen Haber and Victor Menaldo’s work, who go so far as to argue that there is a “resource blessing” rather than a curse).

Thad Dunning’s book, “Crude Democracy,” develops a neat argument that makes sense of the conflicting evidence. Resource rents, he concedes, tend to produce incentives for autocrats to hang on to power or for elites to struggle to control these rents. (Sudden oil booms, on this view, might increase the attractiveness of capturing the state). But these incentives are sometimes overridden or at least mitigated by the fact that resource rents also decrease incentives to redistribute wealth in the non-resource sectors of the economy. If the non-resource sectors of the economy are highly unequal (and relatively large), then resource rents are likely to decrease the redistributive costs of democracy for elites and the attractiveness of coups; this has been the case, according to Dunning, in much of Latin America. By contrast, if the non-resource sectors of the economy are very equal (and small relative to the resource sectors), then resource rents are likely to have an “authoritarian effect;” this has been the case in African countries like Equatorial Guinea or Middle Eastern countries like the UAE or Saudi Arabia. In other words, when oil (or other natural resources, like tin in Bolivia) is the only game in town for elites, then oil is bad for democracy; but if elites mostly derive their income from other sources, and the country is overall poor and unequal, then oil can actually mitigate redistributive pressures and make democracy more palatable to elites. 

Dunning uses game-theoretical models, statistical analysis, and case studies to support this thesis. He has a detailed case study of Venezuela that is of particular interest to me. In Dunning’s view, the non-oil sectors of the Venezuelan economy have always been very unequal, which would suggest high levels of class conflict. And indeed we do observe lots of class conflict, but especially so during those periods where oil revenues (or more precisely, the oil “take” of the Venezuelan state; not exactly the same thing) declined. Venezuelan democracy appeared most consolidated, and class conflict was lowest, when the price of oil was highest (i.e., during the oil boom of the 1970s). By contrast, the rise of Chavez (and more class conflict) coincided with a period where the oil take of the Venezuelan state had declined.

Dunning was writing in 2007, so he cannot address every development of Venezuelan politics since then, but he does argue that Chavez’ redistributive rhetoric has tended to “bite” more – there have been more expropriations, for example – when the price of oil declined, and it has tended to remain mere rhetoric when the price of oil was high. (There are some complications here, since the price of oil is not an exact measure of the oil-related resources available to the Venezuelan state, but you should read the book if you are interested in the complications). The upshot is that if the Venezuelan state’s take from oil is declining, perhaps because petroleum production is declining (as it seems most analysts agree: see also chart below) and oil prices decline or fail to rise sufficiently to compensate for the decline in production, we should expect to see more class conflict, and potentially more authoritarianism from the Chavez regime. So high oil prices (so long as there is enough oil production) moderate actual redistribution and authoritarian temptations (though not necessarily redistributive rhetoric), whereas low oil prices increase actual redistribution and authoritarian temptations (on both government and opposition sides: the coup attempt of 2002 is explained by Dunning in part as a result of higher redistributive pressures on the elite due to a fall in oil revenues).

Qualitatively speaking, this seems more or less right to me, though I am no more than an amateur Venezuela-watcher (I play one in my class, though). But I would complicate the analysis a bit. For one thing, the price of oil has been on an upward trend recently (this is the price of West Texas Intermediate, which tends to be a bit more expensive than the heavy Venezuelan crude, but it will do as a proxy), yet it seems that actual redistribution and the authoritarianism of the Venezuelan government have both increased recently, at least in some respects. This could be because the expectations of redistribution have increased (perhaps because of Chavez’ rhetoric) so that actual oil revenues no longer suffice to mitigate redistributive pressures, even if they are on an upward trend, or because the actual amount of resources that the government perceives from oil have actually decreased due to declines in production and unfavourable deals with other countries, I don’t know. Or it could be that there is some other thing going on, not accounted for in Dunning’s model. (A more industrious blogger would actually try to look up the time series of oil revenue that accrues to the government, to see whether this time series is in accord but this seems to be a non-trivial task; Dunning’s own sources for reconstructing the oil take of the Venezuelan state seem quite inaccessible from New Zealand).

It is also worth emphasizing, as Dunning himself does briefly at the end of his book, that though some form of democracy may be supported by high natural resource prices when the rest of the economy is highly unequal, the quality of that democracy is not necessarily great. A rentier democracy may be democratic in the Schumpeterian minimalist sense, but it is a form of politics that often appears inimical to responsibility, and may be accompanied by a great deal of corruption. (I could speak from personal experience, but it’s been a long time since I’ve lived in Venezuela). In this sense, it could be that Friedman is at least partly right: rentierism may be bad for freedom (to some extent), regardless of whether or not it is always bad for democracy. 

Finally, I would have wanted Dunning to say more about how dependence on oil may have long-term “authoritarian” (or “democratic”) effects. Institutions may be hollowed out by state dependence on rents (this is Aziz Chaudhry’s argument in The Price of Wealth, if I remember correctly – it’s been a while since I read it, but basically the idea is that extreme oil dependence means you do not need to collect taxes and can basically give lots of people unproductive jobs in the government bureaucracy, which has all kinds of deleterious effects on other institutions); and the “Dutch disease” may decrease the size of the non-oil sector over time, increasing the “authoritarian effects” of natural resource rents. Dunning does speak a bit about both of these things, discussing some potential countervailing mechanisms, but some additional qualitative evidence would have been nice.

The quality of the analysis in this book – the game-theoretical models, quantitative tests, and qualitative case studies – is consistently high, though like many books that come out of dissertations there is too much cross-referencing and repetition. (Also, I wonder why the game-theoretical formalization of Dunning’s model leads to such ugly math. There’s nothing wrong with it, but isn’t there a way of handling the math of these optimization problems in a more elegant manner?). I wonder what recent detractors of the "resource curse" (like Victor Menaldo) think of it?

The Weather under Ceausescu

In Romania the temperature never officially dropped below 10deg C, even when there was ice and snow on the ground, because the law said that heating in public buildings had to be turned on when it did.

From Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, by Victor Sebestyen, p. 165. Many more interesting stories in this book.

The Decline of Tyranny and the Rise of Dictatorship

Happy new year! I've wanted to blog this for a while, but sickness intervened. May all your new years be free of bacterial warfare. At any rate, here's my small contribution to the burgeoning Ngram literature:

(Link for a bigger picture.)

The Google corpus seems to be pretty sparse before 1800, so I would not take the big spike of "tyranny" of around 1760 as evidence of much. But I'm curious about the slow decline of "tyranny" and the slow increase of "dictatorship" as a catch-all term for the pathologies of political regimes.

"Tyranny" is the older, Greek term. Originally a more or less neutral designation for a "usurper" (as opposed to a legitimate heir in a dynasty) it was later transformed into the term for the worst form of government in Plato and Aristotle, and the sense stuck. Tyranny, however, was never precisely characterized by any institutional features; though there was a loose association between tyranny and "lawless" or "arbitrary" monarchy, ultimately the tyrant was simply the unjust ruler. Thus all regimes can become tyrannical; the distinction between tyrannical and non-tyrannical government is moral rather than institutional.

By contrast, "dictatorship" is a Roman term that is far more directly tied to a particular set of institutions. (For a quick and useful potted history of the term, see Jennifer Gandhi's "Political Institutions under Dictatorship"). The dictator was originally a magistrate chosen by the Senate for a limited time (six months) and formally empowered to act extralegally in situations of crisis. The term acquired a bad connotation after Sulla and later Caesar abused the office in various ways, but it still retained an association with a particular institutional context: the dictator is a sole ruler, typically acting extralegally and commanding substantial force, and so on. It is not used to refer to a distinct political regime by any of the early modern political thinkers I'm aware of, even those like Montesquieu who are interested in classification matters (Montesquieu prefers despotism to tyranny as well), but it is revived by Marx in a sort of paradoxical turn of phrase: the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat." (I imagine the paradox was intentional: in the Roman context, the dictator had often been the instrument of the ruling class to put down revolts from below). What distinguishes the dictator from other rulers is not the justice or injustice of his actions, but the fact that he can "dictate" - impose a command on others.

With Marx we also see a return to the more "neutral" original sense of dictatorship; and though the term still carries a sting - to call someone a dictator is typically to imply something bad about them - it typically needs to be qualified or intensified with some adjective ("brutal" or "totalitarian" dictator, for example). In political science, in fact, some people use "dictatorship" to mean simply non-democracy. (This is not to say that they ignore variation within non-democracy; they use dictatorship as an umbrella term that encompasses everything from Mexico under the PRI to the Soviet Union under Stalin, but they do pay careful attention to some forms of institutional variation within this vast array of regimes).

But why does the more "institutional" term - in fact, a range of such terms, from autocracy and totalitarianism to authoritarianism - seem to displace the more "moral" terms (like tyranny, and to a lesser extent despotism, which also seems to have been popular in the 19th century) as labels for political pathology? Part of this must be the rise of democracy as the recognized "good regime" - even if, in actual practice, democracies often disappoint (but they disappoint less!). If the good regime is institutionally identifiable, then the bad regime might also be institutionally identifiable. Here's another Ngram:

Around 1900, the term "democracy" rises enormously in popularity, while the usage of older terms for different kinds of political regime decrease significantly in English. (Here's the Ngram for the Spanish corpus: some interesting differences, similar broad pattern). It's like the distinctions between non-democratic political regimes "flatten," as Norberto Bobbio argued in his "Democracy and Dictatorship" (though I think he got this from Hans Kelsen): the key dimension of difference we see today among political regimes is whether authority is imposed from above ("dictatorially") or emerges from below ("democratically"). (In social science practice, the key dimension tends to be whether executive recruitment happens through genuinely competitive elections, but it is not clear that this always corresponds well to the contrast between "imposed" authority and "consent" just mentioned).

I also wonder whether this sort of phenomenon is a problem: do the Ngrams tell us anything about the potential loss of conceptual distinction, or merely about words? The conceptual distinctions need not go away: if political scientists start using "dictatorship" as an umbrella term for non-democracy, this does not mean they ignore all variation among non-democracies. (In fact, regime classifications have proliferated in recent years). But if the terms themselves incorporate important conceptual distinctions, their decline suggests a loss of conceptual variety. And then we might ignore, for example, the moral dimensions of variation among political regimes to focus on institutional variations that do not have sufficient moral relevance. But my thoughts on this point are still too muddled, so best to stop here.