The Irrelevance of Legitimacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1989 and the Arab Revolutions of 2011 redux: A plea for theory-driven comparisons

Marc Morjé Howard has a guest post up at The Monkey Cage summarizing some of the similarities and differences between the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe and the current revolts in the Middle East. (I don’t like the term “Arab Spring,” since spring is not a season in Arabia, as somebody reminded me recently, and anyway the implicit comparison with the Prague Spring of 1968 or even the “Springtime of Nations” of 1848 is needlessly discouraging). I hesitate to disagree with Prof. Howard, since he is a real expert on Eastern European politics who has published widely on the events of 1989 and their aftermath, whereas whatever knowledge I have acquired about the fall of communism comes from teaching the events of 1989 at the undergraduate level over the last four years and basically learning on the go. And I am mostly in agreement with what he says about the similarities between 1989 and 2011 (though I might demur on the point about the importance of prediction, but we’ll leave that for another day).

Yet I think the basic idea of the post, in which Howard notes various similarities and differences between the regimes and argues that the differences outweigh the similarities, making him pessimistic about the ultimate democratization of the region, leads to misleading conclusions. In order to know whether the similarities between the cases outweigh the differences, and more importantly whether the differences mean that we should expect much less democratic change in the Arab world than in Eastern Europe in 1989, we need to have a theory or a set of theories that tell us how to weigh them; and it is not clear that Howard provides such a theory, or that the theories that he does discuss support the more pessimistic conclusions about democratic change he draws. Consider the differences between Eastern Europe 1989 and the Middle East now that Howard describes:

1)      The larger geo-strategic environment is very different today.  The movements of 1989 took place within the context of the Cold War, with two main super-powers and their mutually assured destruction.  Today there are numerous complicating factors—some of which existed previously, but now have their own post-Cold War dynamic—including oil, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the rise of China, and many others.

This is true, but these changes in the geo-strategic environment may push in both directions: some of them might favour democratization, some might favour authoritarianism, some might favour regime collapse followed by a different authoritarian regime, and some might be a wash. For example, the global “norm” of democracy has been arguably strengthened since 1989 (and perhaps because of the events of 1989), a change that would make the revolts in the Arab world more likely to lead to liberalized electoral regimes than the revolts of 1989. Theory does suggest that oil gives incentives to elites in authoritarian regimes to hang on to power at great cost (as appears to be happening in Libya, though for many different reasons), and it might give the USA incentives to be protective of their big oil clients (like Saudi Arabia), but some of the best empirical work on the question (by Haber and Menaldo) suggests that oil does not necessarily lead to authoritarianism, at least not in any simple way, and at any rate not every Middle Eastern country is oil-rich (Egypt and Syria, for example, are not, and Tunisia produces only trivial amounts of oil). My point is not that there have been no geo-strategic changes of any significance between 1989 and today, but that in order to say that the differences matter we need a more explicit theory, or at least a more explicit causal story, connecting these differences to likely outcomes (whether democratization or authoritarian survival).

2)      It is important to remember that the East European states were not autonomous.  Indeed, the Soviet Union was the guarantor of stability and continuity in the region.  When Gorbachev made it clear that the Soviet Union would not intervene in Eastern Europe, the gates opened (quite literally in Hungary).  Today’s Middle East contains a mix of small and large states with different levels of autonomy, but there is no equivalent to the Soviet Union lurking in the shadows.

I’m not sure I see that much difference between the Middle East today and Eastern Europe in 1989 in this respect; it all depends on how we define the extent of the regions. As Howard concedes, autonomy is a relative term, and Eastern Europe in 1989 contained a mixture of more and less autonomous regimes. At one end of the spectrum were the GDR, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, which were clearly not autonomous from the Soviet Union: they hosted large numbers of Soviet troops and had only managed to remain in power with direct Soviet support in the past. At the other end were Romania, Yugoslavia, and Albania, which had been able to retain power without significant Soviet support (and sometimes in opposition to Soviet policy). But even a regime like the one in Poland – which was clearly less “autonomous” than, say, Albania or Yugoslavia – did not necessarily depend on the Soviet Union to survive. Jaruzelski’s declaration of martial law in 1981 was not forced on him by the Soviets (though I don’t remember whether he was worried about Soviet intervention if he did not act), and he managed to arrest most of Solidarity’s leadership all by himself. Similarly, the regimes of the Middle East display varying degrees of autonomy from the USA, from states like Bahrain (where the American fifth fleet is stationed) to states like Libya. To be sure, one might argue that the kind of support that the Soviet Union provided at least some of the regimes in the region was qualitatively different from the kind of support the USA provides to its client states in the region, so that when the Soviets withdrew that support, the Eastern European regimes had to fall; but this argument certainly would not apply to Romania, and I think it’s quite dubious for Poland. (And the Albanian regime survived until 1991). Without a fuller causal story about the mechanisms connecting superpower support (or not) to regime preservation, we cannot draw any significant conclusions about the effects of any differences between Eastern Europe in 1989 and the Middle East today for the outcomes of the Arab revolts.

3)      The 1989 movements were not the first democratic protests in the region.  Earlier movements had taken place in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in 1980-81), but these were all crushed.  Nonetheless, they still stood as important precedents, to both the regime and the citizenry, which became useful later.  Although dissent has been brewing in the Middle East for the past decade, there are no comparable precedents to these earlier East European movements.

I think this is incorrect. There may be no precedents that are well known in the West, but there have been antiregime protests in Libya, Syria, and other Middle Eastern countries before the last decade (all of them crushed). The levelling of Hama by Hafez al-Assad in response to antiregime protests there occurred in 1982, and (I think, though I can’t find my source) there have been occasional riots in Benghazi against the Gaddhafi regime since 1969. Whether one should refer to these protests as “democratic” protests is a different matter, but it is worth noting that among the precedents Howard cites the 1956 revolution in Hungary was not necessarily a “democratic” revolution (at least initially, its main leadership did not want to get rid of the communist party’s monopoly on power, though that changed once tanks rolled in), and that after 1953 there were no democratic protests of any significance in East Germany (and for that matter, there were few protests of any significance in Romania). At any rate, it is unclear what the fact that there were protests in some Eastern European countries is supposed to show; as a recent working paper by Krichner, Livne, and Magaloni notes, though more repressive regimes experience fewer mass protests, they tend to fall at higher rates when they do experience such protests. (The intuition is simple: repressive regimes make it very costly to protest. So mass protest in such circumstances signals quite extensive dissatisfaction). One could perhaps tell a story about the building up of democratic movements through protests, but though this story makes sense for Poland, it makes no sense for the GDR and Romania, where the opposition was small and thoroughly infiltrated by the security services.

4)      The East European movements generally fit the classic (from O’Donnell and Schmitter’s Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, published in 1986) model of elite agency, whereby divisions between hard-liners and soft-liners in the regime led to pacts with the opposition, resulting in compromises on both sides.  In this model, the “resurrection” of civil society only came later.  In the Middle East, in contrast, the “popular upsurge” came first, before the elite divisions became apparent.

I don’t think this is right. The only two countries that fit the standard O’Donnell and Schmitter pattern in Eastern Europe were Hungary and Poland. Certainly these were important countries, and it is true that they were also the countries where transitions to democracy were most successful initially (except for the GDR, which is sui generis). But regime change happened in the GDR, Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia despite the fact that these regimes were dominated by hardliners who were unwilling to make compromises until protests had forced them to, and democracy emerged quickly in Czechoslovakia (less quickly and less perfectly in Romania and Bulgaria). The “popular upsurge” came first in the GDR, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, and reformers within the Bulgarian communist party emerged more as a result of a fuite en avant by nomenklatura members who got rid of Zhivkov when they saw the writing on the wall than as a result of a struggle between hardliners and softliners in O’Donnell and Schmitter’s sense (though my old teacher Venelin Ganev should be able to correct me here if this is wrong, since he wrote the book on Bulgaria after 1989).  It seems to me that a better model for what happened in Eastern Europe is the “elite defection” model Mark Beissinger describes in his piece on modular revolution: divisions within the elite played a big role in the first two cases, but then the other regimes fell as elites failed to find the right combinations of repression and concessions to stop popular mobilization. This may not be the right model for the middle East right now (“elite learning” seems more appropriate, where later leaders learn what combinations of repression and concessions will stop popular mobilization), but it is not clear that there is that much of a difference between Eastern Europe in 1989 and  the Middle East today in this respect. And to the extent that there is a difference, it is not clear to me that O’Donnell and Schmitter’s model of “pacted” transitions is the best lens for analyzing these differences.

5)      Unlike today in the Middle East, when the “opposition” is largely faceless, in Eastern Europe there were well-recognized dissidents who had much popular legitimacy.  Although they may have been small in number, these writers, pastors, and environmental leaders were quite influential.  In contrast, many of the long-standing opposition leaders in the countries of the Middle East are ineffective, coopted, or disconnected from contentious politics, thus contributing to the large gap between elite opposition politics and popular demands for democratic change.

Again, I think there is less here than meets the eye. The opposition was entirely faceless (not to mention disorganized and infiltrated) in the GDR, where the Stasi estimated that there were only 60 “core” dissidents in the entire country (see Stephen Kotkin’s “Uncivil Society,” p. 10). There were simply no well-recognized East German or Romanian dissidents, they were all caught by surprise by the revolutions, and they had little role to play in shaping the aftermath (Barbel Bohley? Mircea Dinescu?). Even in Czechoslovakia, Havel was simply not a well-recognized opposition leader under very late, and his influence really came with the revolution. Only in Poland do we meet with real opposition leaders with genuine popular legitimacy, like Walesa. But this point is moot, for revolutions make leaders, not the other way around; and at least Egyptians and Tunisians do seem to have leaders with some legitimacy and name recognition, even if not necessarily wide popularity yet. (What are Amr Moussa and Mohammed El-Baradei, chopped liver? Or Wael Ghonim and some of the other youth leaders of the April 6^th movement?). These are not perfect leaders, but neither was Walesa (or many of the leaders in the rest of Eastern Europe), and revolution and democratization do not depend on having popular and legitimate leaders before a transition.

6)      Except for the Catholic Church in Poland, religion was almost entirely absent in the East European movements.  Although churches were sometimes a “safe zone” in communist countries, the movements themselves were not religious, and the societies are the least religious in the world.  In contrast, in the Middle East, although the movements have not been particularly religious, the societies certainly are, and the role of religion in political life remains a big, open, unanswered question.

The Polish exception is big enough to drive a truck through (since Poland was the birthplace of the 1989 revolutions); the religious component of the Polish revolution was huge, and the society was very religious. (I also think that Romanian society was also more religious than is perhaps generally recognized). But anyway, it is unclear what the religiosity of Middle Eastern societies (which varies widely, by the way, and is organized in many different ways) is supposed to imply, given that, as Howard notes, the movements leading the revolts there have not been particularly religious. Without a good theory, we cannot say much about its effect on regime collapse or democratization – it could be positive, negative, or a wash. What little we do know suggests that the background religiosity of a society (as opposed to the religiosity of particular movements) does not appear to have much effect on political regime (see, for example, Przeworski’s “Culture and Democracy,” unfortunately not online, or Ronald Inglehart’s work). So, granted that there are differences between the religiosity of Middle Eastern and East European societies, we simply cannot tell whether this is a positive fact for revolution and democratization (maybe more religious societies sustain the solidarity necessary for protest better? Or have more ways of organising resistance, as with Friday prayers?) or not; one must remember that Iran was also a relatively religious society that had a world-historical revolution in 1979 (even if the resulting regime was later pushed into a less democratic direction for a variety of reasons).

7)      All movements depend on communication—this has not changed—but the speed of the new media has obviously changed tremendously.  Much of the information in the East European movements spread via samizdat (precious photocopies of texts and information from the outside that were smuggled around secretly).  Today the spread of information is almost instantaneous via Facebook, Twitter, and blogs.

But this particular fact (if it is a fact: remember the feedback loops with TV in the East German revolution) would support the view that the revolutions in the Arab world are more likely to result in democratic change. Of course, if Evgeny Morozov is right, then the effect of this might go in the other direction: Facebook, Twitter, and the like will just make it easier for authoritarian regimes to suppress revolts. But we need a more explicit theory to evaluate the significance of this difference between Eastern Europe 1989 and the Middle East today, and what theory we do have does not indicate that this is particularly likely to retard democratization or even simple regime change in the region; on the contrary.

8)      After the movements of 1989 ran their course, the communist regimes actually fell (even if they reorganized and competed electorally in some cases).  In the Middle East, this has not happened (yet?).  The outcomes of the ongoing transitions in Egypt and Tunisia are unclear, and it remains to be seen whether they will yield a clean break from authoritarian politics.  In the other countries, autocrats still remain in charge, even if they have been shaken by the protests.

Here I think the significance of this point depends on what you mean by “the regimes fell.” Did the regime really fall in Bulgaria? Or for that matter in Romania, where Ion Illiescu and the National Salvation Front (basically repainted communists) took power after Ceausescu fell? The regime fell much more thoroughly in Tunisia than it ever did in Bulgaria, it seems to me (the former ruling party has been suspended, people from the regime elite have been put on trial, etc.). And protests are still ongoing. Revolutions don’t always happen in a day; it took 10 years in Poland.

9)      Extending from point 5, when the communist regimes fell, known opposition leaders were ready to assume office.  Poland’s Lech Walesa and Czechoslovakia’s Václav Havel were the most prominent, but most East European countries had new leaders ready to fill the gap.  This remains an open question in the Middle East.

See my response to point 5). I think “most East European countries had new leaders ready to fill the gap” is a vast exaggeration; it is only in retrospect that this seems to be the case.

10)   In terms of the eventual consolidation of democracy in Eastern Europe, NATO and the European Union have played crucial roles by encouraging democratic reforms and making them conditions of membership.  There are no equivalent regional organizations in the Middle East that could help to push these regimes to further democratize, and they are certainly not going to be invited to join NATO or the EU.

This is true, but what is the marginal effect of this causal mechanism on democracy? If these organizations had not existed, do we think that Poland and Hungary would not have become democratic? Other forces push countries towards more democratic forms of government, and while I do not want to discount the positive influence of the incentive to join the EU and NATO, I am just not sure that we know this was a very big cause of democratization (as opposed to, for example, the availability of the democratic model and its relative success in Western Europe).

I am not arguing here that there are no differences between Eastern Europe 1989 and the Middle East in 2010. Of course there are. But in order to evaluate the significance of these differences for both regime change and democratization, it seems to me better to engage in theory-driven comparisons, where, to use Przeworski and Teune’s phrase, we substitute variables for country names. For example, we might say “countries with a history of democratic protest are more likely to democratize than countries without”; or “countries with a higher GDP per capita are more likely to sustain democracy than poorer countries, though they are no more likely to democratize;” and so on. And then we try to tally the weight of each of these effects, and consider whether (and how) the theory applied both in 1989 and today. For what is worth (and I’m no Middle East specialist), this sort of exercise suggests that Tunisia and Egypt are in relatively good shape to become more democratic (and perhaps Syria, if the regime collapses there, and Jordan and Morocco, if the monarchs there act reasonably), though obviously nothing is guaranteed; other middle Eastern countries less so. 

Crowdsourcing a Democracy Index: An Update

(Part 1 of possibly several, depending on time and mood)

A couple of months ago, I set up a democracy ranking website using the Allourideas software as part of a class project to crowdsource a democracy index (which has now been completed; more on that project in an upcoming post). The site works by presenting the user with a random comparison between two countries, and asking them to vote on which of these countries was more democratic in 2010 (click here if you can't see the widget below):



The 100 or so students in my class started the ball rolling, and their responses generated an initial democracy index that had a correlation of about 0.62 with the Freedom in the World index produced by Freedom House: respectable but not great. The post describing the initial results got some links from Mark Belinsky, the Allourideas blog, and Jonathan Bernstein, which increased the number of votes substantially. In fact, as of this writing, the website has registered 4402 (valid) votes, from about 203 different IP addresses, mostly in the USA, New Zealand, and Australia:

4,402 valid votes means at most 4,402 distinct comparisons out of a possible 36,672 potential comparisons of 192 countries (most comparisons have appeared only once, but a few have appeared a couple of times), or about 12% of all possible comparisons. How has the increase in the number of voters changed the generated index? And how does it compare to the current Freedom House index for 2010? As we shall see, the extra votes appear to have improved the crowdsourced index considerably.

Here is a map of the scores generated by the "crowd" - i.e., voters in the exercise (darker is more democratic, all data here):




And here's a scatterplot comparing the generated scores to Freedom House's scores for 2010 (click here for a proper large interactive version):

Powered by Tableau

The Y axis represents the score generated by the Allourideas software: basically, the probability that the country would prevail in a comparison with a randomly selected country. For example, the Allourideas software predicts that Denmark (the highest ranked country) has a 96% chance, given previous votes, of prevailing in a “more democratic” comparison with another randomly selected country for 2010, whereas North Korea (the lowest ranked country) only has a 5% chance of prevailing in this comparison. The X axis represents the sum of the Freedom House Political Rights and Civil Liberties scores for last year (from the “Freedom in the World 2011” report), reversed and shifted so that 0 is least democratic and 12 is most democratic (i.e., 14-PR+CL). The correlation between Freedom House and the crowdsourced index is a fairly high 0.84 (which is about as high as the correlation between the combined Freedom House score and the Polity2 score for 2008: 0.87). But how good is this, really? What do these scores really represent?

At the extremes, judgments of democracy appear to be “easy”: Freedom House and the crowd converge. For example, among countries that Freedom House classifies as “Free,” only six countries (Benin, Israel, Mongolia, Sao Tome and Principe, and Suriname) receive a score of 40 or below from the “crowd,” which is the highest score that any country Freedom House classifies as “Not Free” receives (Russia). But in the middle there is a fair amount of overlap (just as with expert-coded indexes, whose high levels of correlation are driven by the “extreme” cases – clear democracies or clear dictatorships). Some of these disagreements could further be attributed to the relative obscurity of some of the countries involved, given the location of the voters in this exercise (few people know much about Benin, and anyway the index got no votes from Africa), but some of the disagreements seem to have more to do with the average conceptual model used by the crowd (e.g., the case of Israel). The crowd would seem to weigh the treatment of Palestinians more heavily than Freedom House in its (implicit) judgment of Israel’s democracy. This is unsurprising, since the website does not ask participants to stick to a particular “model” of democracy; the average model or concept of democracy to which the crowd appears to be converging seems to be slightly different than the model used by Freedom House.

We can try to figure out where the crowd differs the most from Freedom House by running a simple regression of Freedom House’s score on the score produced by the crowd, and looking at the residuals from the model as a measure of “lack of fit.” This extremely simple model can account for about 69% of the variance in the crowdsourced scores on the basis of the Freedom House score (all data available here); we can improve the fit (to 72%) by adding a measure of “uncertainy” as a control (the number of times a country appeared in an “I don’t know” event, divided by the total number of times it appeared in any comparison). What (I think) we’re doing here is basically trying to predict Freedom House’s index on the basis of the crowdsourced judgment plus a measure of the subjective uncertainty of the participants. The results are of some interest: for example, participants in the exercise appear to think Venezuela, Honduras, and Papua New Guinea have higher levels of democracy than Freedom House thinks, and they also appear to think that Sierra Leone, Lithuania, Israel, Mongolia, Kuwait, Kiribati, Benin, and Mauritius have lower levels of democracy than Freedom House thinks.

A more interesting test, however, would be to do what Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton do here with existing measures of democracy. Their work takes existing indexes of democracy as (noisy) measurements of the true level of democracy and attempts to estimate their error bounds by aggregating their information in a specific way. I might try do this later (I need to learn to use their software, and might only have time in a few weeks), though it is worth noting that a simple correlation of the crowdsourced score for 2010 with the “Unified Democracy Scores” Pemstein et. al. produce for 2008 by aggregating the information from all available indexes is an amazing 0.87, and a simple regression of one on the other has an R² of .76. So the crowdsourced index seems to be doing something much like what the Unified Democracy Scores are doing: averaging different models of democracy and different "perspectives" on each country.

This all assumes, however, that there is something to be measured – a true level of democracy, which is only loosely captured by existing models. On this view, existing indexes of democracy reflect different interpretations of the concept of democracy, plus some noise due to imperfect information and the vagaries of judgment; they each involve a “fixed” bias due to potential misinterpretation of the concept, plus the uncertainty involved in trying to apply the concept to a messy reality whose features are not always easy to discern (try figuring out the level of civil rights violations in the Central African Republic compared with Peru in 2010, quick!). The crowdsourced index actually goes further and averages the different interpretations of democracy of every participant, just as the Unified Democracy Scores aggregate the different “models” of democracy used by different existing indexes. To the extent that the crowd’s models converge to the true model of democracy, then the crowdsourced index should also eliminate that “bias” due to misinterpretation. But it is not clear that there is a true model, or that the crowd will converge to it even if it existed: the crowdsourced index may have a higher bias (total amount of misinterpretation of the concept) than the indexes created by professional organizations. (And this conceptual bias might shift if more people from other countries voted; I’d really love to get more votes from Africa and Asia).

Even if there is no true model of democracy, it would be interesting to “reverse-engineer” the crowd’s implicit model by trying to figure out its components. (What do people weigh most, when thinking about democracy? Violations of civil liberties? Elections? Opportunities for participation? Economic opportunities?). One could do this, I suppose, by trying to predict the crowdsourced scores from linear combinations of independently gathered measures of elections, civil liberties, etc.; some form of factor analysis might help here? My feeling is that the crowd weighs economic “outcomes” more than experts do (so that crowdsourced assessments of democracy will be correlated with perceptions of how well a country is doing, like GDP growth), but I haven’t tried to investigate that possibility.

It would also be interesting to repeat the exercise by asking people to stick to a particular model of democracy (e.g., Freedom House’s checklist, or the checklist developed by my students – more on that later). It would also be great if the allourideas software had an option that allowed a voter to indicate that two countries are equal in their level of democracy (I think one could do this, but then I would have to modify the client; right now, the only way of signalling this is to click on the “I don’t know” button). Perhaps next year I will try some of these possibilities. All in all, it seems that crowdsourcing a democracy index produces reasonable results, and might produce even better results if the crowdsourcing is done with slightly more controls. (E.g., one could imagine using Amazon's "Mechanical Turk" and a specific model of democracy for generating data on particular years). I would nevertheless be interested in thoughts/further analysis from my more statistically sophisticated readers.

In an upcoming post I will explain how my students produced an index of democracy for 2010, 1995, and 1980, and how that crowdsourced effort compares with other existing indexes. (Short version: pretty well).

[Update 8:40pm: Made some minor changes in wording, added a couple of links]

Nauseating Displays of Loyalty (Towards a General Theory of Sycophancy and Related Phenomena)

An anonymous reader points me to a very interesting paper by Victor Shih on "'Nauseating' Displays of Loyalty: Monitoring the Factional Bargain through Ideological Campaigns" (Journal of Politics 2008, vol. 70(4) pp. 1177-1192 [ungated]):

Autocrats, as factional patrons, only find out the true loyalty of clients during a serious political challenge, when they are least able to enforce the factional bargain. In autocracies with norms against cults of personalities, public, exaggerated praises may constitute an alternative way for clients to signal loyalty credibly. By suffering the social cost of being despised by others, sycophants credibly signal their affinity to a particular leader, thus deterring factional rivals from recruiting them into an alternative coalition. This article develops a measure of such displays of loyalty in China through content analysis of provincial newspapers between 2000 and 2004. OLS and PCSE estimations are used to inquire whether provincial faction members were more likely to echo an ideological campaign launched by their patron. Further analysis explores whether faction members in rich and poor localities echoed the campaign in different ways. The findings suggest that ideological campaigns function as radars that allow senior leaders to discern the loyalty of faction members.

The argument here is in interesting contrast to what I was trying to say in the post on cults of personality. The problem with cults of personality is that the "signal" of loyalty the dictator gets from followers is often uninformative: if everyone says that the dictator is a god, then the dictator cannot distinguish who is loyal (who will stand by him in a crisis, or at least not rebel if given the opportunity) and who is not. Mere praise in such circumstances is "cheap talk." So the leader has a incentive to develop some ways of making praise costly if it is to serve as a signal of loyalty (where loyalty is understood as a certain level of commitment to support the dictator, or at least not to support challengers). But where can this cost come from?

In my post on cults of personality, I argued that the cost comes precisely from the very dynamics of the strategic situation: because the dictator knows that the extravagant praise is uninformative as a signal of loyalty, he demands ever more bizarre performances, and in particular demands that one denounce those who show insufficient enthusiasm for the ever more bizarre performances. To the extent that most people do find it costly to deny reality and denounce others (especially if those others are friends and family), the signals retain some information about the level of commitment of the population to support him, or at least to acquiesce in his rule (given also the costs of not praising the dictator). The level of extorted praise serves as a gauge of the effectiveness of extortion. (Especially when the extorted praise includes denunciations of others: this is what it means in practice to support the dictator, i.e., to be loyal. It has little to do with liking the dictator).

To be sure, as Bernard Guerrero notes here in an interesting response, it is possible that what happens is that you get a sort of "arms race," where ever more bizarre performances are required as old performances lose their information content (because everyone eventually does them). Yet it does not necessarily follow that the signals from the cult lose all their informational value immediately; and as many dictators well know, a cult of personality has to be constantly refreshed. Propaganda is never-ending work. Moreover, even if the cult does not work well as a gauge of support, it can still produce loyalty directly (if some fraction of those exposed to it come to believe in the leader's charisma, which increases their commitment to support him) and it can prevent coordination, so that even if people actually hate the dictator, the cult still prevents them from plotting to overthrow him because they can't gauge other people's feelings. (For a somewhat different if related take on this, emphasizing the ways in which cults implicate the population into supporting the ruler even when they do not actually believe in the leader's charisma, see Lisa Wedeen's superb piece on Syria's Hafez al-Assad and his cult of personality, also recommended to me by a reader. The anecdote that opens the piece is priceless).

Which of these functions of the cult of personality as a tactic of power (gauging loyalty, producing loyalty, and preventing coordination) is most important is a complex question, whose answer probably depends on particular features of the strategic situation facing the dictator. (I'm writing a paper on the topic, so I hope to come to more definite conclusions in the future). I suspect, however, that the direct production of loyalty is the least important function; it seems exceedingly unlikely that calling Assad pere "the World's greatest dentist," as a friend told me apparently happened in Syria in the 80s, was ever seriously intended to persuade people of his charisma. Moreover, I think (for reasons that will become clearer in a second) that perhaps cults of personality are most useful to the dictator when he fears revolutionary threats (threats from outside the ruling elite) more than he fears coups (threats from inside the ruling elite), perhaps because he has been able to sufficiently consolidate his power at the expense of this elite. (Though there's a chicken-egg problem here, for the cult of personality also seems useful as a tactic to consolidate power, as it appears happened in Mao's China and Qaddhafi's Libya). There is after all a tension between the loyalty-gauging and the coordination-prevention uses of the cult, because the cult works best to prevent coordination when the costs to not praising the dictator are much higher than the costs of praising him, whereas it works best to gauge loyalty when the costs of praising him are not insignificant (though both costs could be and normally are high: not praising may entail jail or worse, but praising may entail denouncing loved ones or engaging in humiliating behavior). This means that the dictator may wish to relax the cult if he needs to gauge the loyalty of his close followers (who will help him against his people) more than he needs to prevent coordination among them. One might add that dictators don't always need very precise knowledge of the level of loyalty of the general population (and at any rate there are often other indicators of their likely level of loyalty, like protests, informers, surveys, the level of unemployment, etc.), in which case the coordination prevention and loyalty production functions of the cult becomes more useful vis a vis the general population than its loyalty-gauging uses.

Shih's paper nevertheless helps us understand how mechanisms similar to the cult of personality can help autocratic leaders gauge the loyalty of their close followers (not so much of the population as a whole). His focus is on the "ideological campaigns" that one sees in many communist countries, and especially in China, such as the "Three Represents" campaign during Jiang Zemin's tenure (opening the party to businessmen), or the "Harmonious Society" campaign that is still going on. Such campaigns typically present the thoughts of some particular leader as some momentous and utterly brilliant contribution to philosophy, and they constitute a standing invitation to sycophants, who say things like this:

‘Comrade Jiang Zemin’s thought concerning the "Three Represents" is like a giant building that overlooks the whole situation and contains rich content and deep meanings. It is a creative usage and development of Marxist theory and is strongly theoretical, scientific, creative, and practical. (Yang Yongliang, the vice-secretary of Hubei, quoted by Shih).

But how is this sort of thing useful to leaders? The problem a leader faces here is that he needs to cultivate his supporters by paying them in various forms; but until the chips are down, he does not necessarily know who will in fact help him in such circumstances, because there are no regular opportunities to test their loyalty (like elections in democracies), and after a crisis he may not be around to punish actual disloyalty. So the leader really does need to gauge the loyalty of his clients if he fears potential revolt from below or attacks from other factions, but even extravagant praise does not reliably indicate a credible commitment to support him in times of crisis.

Shih argues that in modern China (post-Mao) extravagant praise has retained its informational value as a signal of loyalty precisely because top leaders have supported norms against cults of personality (a norm that existed before Mao consolidated his power and which was supported by the top leadership after he died as a preventive measure against attempts to concentrate power in similar ways). When there is a norm against cults of personality, the stigma of violating it (and being known as a groveller) is a sufficient cost to ensure that the "praise" really is a credible signal of loyalty to a patron, especially when there are few other options to provide credible signals of loyalty (like, e.g., providing business opportunities for the leader's family or extending extravagant "hospitality" to the leader when he comes to visit your city). The norm seems to exist not only or even at all to prevent concentrations of power, but because top leaders gather useful information from its violation. So leaders launch "ideological" campaigns (like the "Three Represents" campaign) in order to see who will violate the norm against cults of personality.

This is a very clever piece of research. The key fact that Shih exploits to support his thesis is the degree of variation in the extent to which ideological campaigns are echoed by party newspapers around China. In particular, he shows that during the "Three Represents" campaign, newspapers in provinces linked to Jiang Zemin's clients were much more likely to echo it than other newspapers, but only if the province apparatchiks had few other means to signal support. So party newspapers in richer provinces (like Shanghai) which could offer Jiang other signals of support (like business opportunities for his family members or special hospitality when he came to visit) were less likely to exhibit "nauseating" displays of loyalty (the phrase comes from one of the people Shih interviewed, and reflects the anti-cult of personality norm current in today's China) than party newspapers in poorer provinces (which were more dependent on central government support), allowing Jiang to keep tabs on the loyalty of his poorer clients. And in provinces which were not linked to his faction, there were far fewer nauseating displays of loyalty. (One could quibble with a few things. For one, I am unsure how good Shih's measures of whether a province's leaders could be said to be part of Jiang's faction are. But I'm no China specialist. And there is a question as to how useful those extreme displays of loyalty really are to the leader).

The more interesting general point that comes out of these sorts of studies, for me, is how little traditional ideas about "legitimacy" matter for explaining support in all sorts of regimes. Support seems explainable in many cases as a result of signalling equilibria, whereas the traditional Weberian ideas about traditional, charismatic, and rational legitimacy seem to play little role. In fact, I have a hunch - not well developed - that one could understand what is traditionally called "legitimacy" in terms of various sorts of signalling equilibria, and not much would be lost. But that would require a much longer post to explain, and perhaps a paper.

Endnotes

I know this blog has turned into the dictatorship channel recently (that's what I'm teaching at the moment; look out for it to turn into a "history of political thought" blog in a few months). But the internets are full of great writing, much of it thankfully about other subjects:

• Justin E. H. Smith on The Blog as Mask and Gravestone. And while you're at it, read most of his oeuvre. I loved On the Internet and Elephant Wars also, among many, many others. 
• Zunguzungu on Mau Mau and Guantanamo.
• Shotgun Shack on the fragility of everyday life in many parts of the world. (Via Chris Blattman's shared items feed).
• Natalia Cecire on academic blogging. (Via Zunguzungu)
• Duflo and Banerjee on poverty. 
• The Art of Not Being Governed in action in North Korea.
• If you can't get enough of dictatorship and political science, the Monkey Cage has been excellent lately. (And Henry Farrell there has been kind enough to send some links this way).
• Peter Moskos on flogging. (Via Eric Crampton, who has very interesting commentary. This seems ripe for a Foucauldian take, though I'm not sure what it would be). 
• This almost fits into the "extremophiles" blogging category, which I haven't done in a while: bacteria that emit radio waves.
• [Update] I almost forgot: Kevin Kelly on rapidly oscillating evolution. 

This and more also found in my Google Reader shared items feed.  

Qaddafi's Chickens

[In 1977] the Libyan leader suggested that in order to achieve self-sufficiency every Libyan family had to raise chickens in the home. The cages and birds were imported and, for an obligatory fee of fifty-seven Libyan dinars ($150 at the 1977 exchange rate), were distributed by the government to Libyans. To many city dwellers in small apartments raising chickens in their kitchens was a difficult if not impossible affair. The result was that many ate the birds and found other uses for the cages.

...General Qaddafi's declaration that Libya must achieve food self-sufficiency was justification enough for his aid[e]s to institute that controversial plan of raising chickens in the home. The Libyan leader found the idea novel enough to encourage its implementation. On another occasion the General commented on the high cost of new automobiles. Soon after, the government agency entrusted with importing and selling cars to the public began to import only used cars and ironically sold them at new car prices. The policy was reversed only after a great number of people complained. He remarked about the proliferation of Western musical instruments in the country. The result was the gathering and burning of musical instruments. While driving through an area in the suburbs of the city [of] Benghazi  he wondered whether the area would be suitable for agriculture. Within a month all residential buildings in that area were demolished. 

...On the whole Qaddafi is rarely precise about the type of policy he desires and prefers to see the potential policy implemented before he intervenes and modifies it. Even The Green Book is general enough to permit different interpretation and experimentation by the revolutionary committees. Ultimately, however, all policies need the blessing of General Qaddafi. (Mansour O. El-Kikhia, Libya's Qaddafi, p. 106).

This looks like a variant of the signalling process that contributed to the great famine in China. Qaddafi gets a harebrained idea that presents a profit opportunity for his ruling coalition (note the $150 mandatory fee, which seems rather high for 1977, payable, one supposes, into the pockets of the well connected). The idea is therefore vigorously implemented, despite its evident absurdity, and just as quickly discontinued once profits diminish. Similarly with other policies: every weird idea that passes through Qaddafi's lips apparently presented both an opportunity for signalling support and (with the possible exception of the burning of musical instruments) for profit, at least for those with ties to the ruling elite in Libyan society. (Which, judging from El-Khikia's book, published in 1997, was extremely narrow; indeed, the book's appendix basically lists every one of its members at the time).

Many of these policies were "justified" by the "ideology" of the "Green Book." I suppose there are people out there, other than Qaddafi, who take the Green Book seriously. I've even briefly skimmed a good article carefully examining Rousseau's influence on Qaddafi's thought. But unlike the case of Marxist ideas in communist countries, it is abundantly clear from El-Kikhia's book that this "ideology" has primarily, if not exclusively, served as a signalling medium. There are few real ideologues in Libya, only careerists. Belief is mostly irrelevant, since the ideology is incoherent and impossibly vague, and its interpretation depends entirely on Qaddafi's whims. Its only real use is as an instrument of control: Qaddafi gets to decide which performances by competing factions within the revolutionary committees count as sufficiently loyal, which seems to encourage an escalation of zeal (especially in the absence of rewards for slowing down the implementation of absurd ideas). And he can test these policies by gauging which implementations are popular and which ones aren't - i.e., which interpretations of his words can generate oppositional collective action and which ones cannot - without committing himself to any particular interpretation of the policy (since he is the sole authority for their interpretation).

But how do you arrive at this point? El-Kikhia tells a story of institutional destruction: Qaddafi suspends all laws leaving only his dicta and their interpretations by a fluid network of committees (none of which is ever certain of Qaddafi's favor) as the only means of coordinating collective action within the "state." (He apparently suspended the laws in 1974. I couldn't quite believe it, but apparently there is nothing quite like law in the Libya described by El-Kikhia - no real courts for the settlement of disputes according to norms, though I suppose this may have changed since 1997. In fact, I'm not sure it makes sense to speak of a Libyan state in the full Weberian sense of the word, at least given what I've read in this book). Yet this only deepens the puzzle: for Qaddafi didn't start as the kind of ruler who could "suspend" all laws, or whose every passing fancy precipitated a cascade of costly signalling on the part of people wishing to benefit materially from his rule. He had to work towards this point - taking power away from his partners within the Revolutionary Command Council that seized power in 1969, stacking the institutions of the state with family and tribal loyalists, and keeping them all guessing by purging them at irregular intervals. And even then, he still had to deal with coup attempts.

A recent paper by Milan Svolik ("Power Sharing and Leadership Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes," AJPS 53:2, 2009, pp. 477-494) suggests some possibilities. The key insight exploited by Svolik is that members of a ruling coalition (always necessary for control of the state) delegate some power to the dictator to coordinate activity for their mutual benefit (e.g., extracting revenues and sharing them), but the dictator can augment this power by means of actions that are not always observable by the coalition. (In delegating power, after all, the coalition surrenders some control over information). In order to prevent this, the coalition can threaten a coup, but the threat is never wholly credible because failed coups are very costly (you can easily be killed, or in the best case scenario exiled to Outer Mongolia), and members of the coalition can never be sure of what actions the dictator has taken (or failed to take) in response to the threat: dictators lie easily, and can hide inconvenient information. Svolik derives two possible scenarios from these ideas: one in which dictators are constantly threatened, and easily removed by coups (the vast majority of cases: most dictators do not survive their first five years in office) because the coalition is (rightly) suspicious of any moves by leaders to amass power, and one in which they basically last forever (like Qaddafi), barring external intervention or other "exogenous" shocks, like popular revolutions (which are very rare: of 303 dictators lasting more than one day in office and removed by "nonconstitutional" means Svolik examines, 205 were removed in a coup d'etat, and only 32 in a popular uprising, with 30 more stepping down by popular pressure to democratize. Other leaders died in their sleep or were succeeded by "constitutional" means like hereditary succession; these are not counted among the 303 noted here).

I suspect that one of the means by which dictators can amass power vis a vis a ruling coalition is to encourage (consciously? unconsciously? does it matter?) the use of "ideologies" (the name is too grand: signalling languages, perhaps?) whose interpretation they can personally monopolize or near-monopolize as means of coordinating collective action, in lieu of existing norms and institutions, whose interpretation may be more easily controlled by members of powerful elites. The process may start small, with ideas that draw on popular aspirations or customs, and take hold in particular institutional niches. Qaddafi starts with Nasserism and Arab nationalism, which had wide appeal, but Nasserism proves unwieldy, and its interpretation not easily monopolizable. (For one thing, Nasserism in Libya involved the creation of a political party that could draw on other sources of authority for the interpretation of the norms that were to guide collective action, and hence enabled members of the ruling coalition to credibly threaten Qaddafi). But this initial move was not obviously threatening to members of the coalition in Libya, who may have been genuinely attracted to pan-Arabism and Nasserism. But by using Nasserism to disrupt the older institutional order of the monarchy (which was, after all, nothing but forms of coordinated action in light of shared expectations) Qaddafi narrowed the range of people who could authoritatively interpret norms and ideas that could guide coordinated collective action. This gave him an opening to disrupt Nasserism in turn with the "popular committees," which could be more easily used to "weed out those who did not conform to his thinking" (El-Kikhia, p. 54), since the interpretation of the norms guiding collective action there was more easily monopolized by him, even as this development could be presented as a sort of "evolution" or "deepening" of the revolution.

With each step, there is a narrowing of the plausible interpreters of the "signals" that can serve to coordinate collective action, until (with the revolutionary and later the "cleansing" committees) we reach a sort of maximum monopoly on the interpretation of norms and expectations for organizing collective action. (Only Qaddafi can tell what is and what isn't in accord with the norm, and only Qaddafi is believed among interpreters of the norm).

I'm not sure this argument is entirely clear, or right for that matter. So use with care.

[Update 4/30/11: fixed some small grammar problems]

More on Inequality, Democracy, and Dictatorship: Is there a “Natural Rate of Inequality”?

(Continues the discussion in this post, with more graphs, more data, more theory, and more verbiage. Mostly exploratory, considering further research. Statistician General’s warning: all statistical analyses in this post should be taken with large heapings of salt, since they have not been produced by a trained and licensed statistician and do not provide appropriate guidance regarding the uncertainty of any estimates. If you don’t mind a spot of quantitative social science from someone who was not trained in these dark arts but who is overly excited about learning to produce pretty graphs, go on.).

In an earlier post, I discussed some recent models of the relationship between inequality, political regime types, and democratization (e.g., Acemoglu and Robinson or Boix). The basic ideas in these models are pretty simple, even simplistic. In democracies, governments are (ideally, at least) responsive to the interests of the majority of the population, and in particular to the interests of the “median” voter (the voter in the middle of the distribution of income among voters), whereas in dictatorships governments are more responsive to the interests of smaller – sometimes much smaller – groups. To the extent that dictators are responsive to the interests of constituencies where the median income is higher than the median income in society (the typical case), we should expect that dictatorships will tend to redistribute less (to lower income groups) and have higher levels of income inequality than democracies, other things being equal (and other things are not always equal!). Moreover, these models indicate, the higher the level of inequality, the higher the degree of social conflict over the level of redistribution and ultimately over the type of regime, since “one off” redistribution in the face of occasional protest or other contentious action is not sufficiently “credible.” Hence we should expect that in the long run, democracy should be unsustainable at very high levels of inequality, and the only stable regime outcomes should be forms of dictatorship: “leftist” dictatorships where the poor (or rather, people claiming to act in their name) expropriate the rich, and “rightist” dictatorships where richer elites restrain redistributive demands by non-elites through coercive means. Finally, we should observe more regime change at higher rather than lower levels of inequality, more stable regimes at lower rather than higher levels of inequality, and more transitions to stable democracy at middle levels of inequality.

Using data on inequality from the University of Texas Inequality Project (1960-1996) plus data from the World Bank (which I didn’t use in my previous post but extends the UTIP data to 2008 for some countries), and data on political regimes by Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland (1956-2008), we can see that some of these theoretical expectations appear to be reasonably well validated.[1] Here is a plot of the distribution of inequality, as measured by the gini index, in democracies and dictatorships (reproducing the first plot in my earlier post, but with World Bank inequality data added):

The median gini for democracies is 38.6; the median gini for dictatorships is 45.6. (means 40.1 and 44, respectively, with N= 3,321 observations between 1963 to 2008; similar patterns appear if we look only at particular periods, like the post cold war era). If we could add the vast majority of non-democratic systems in human history, the pattern would be even more obvious; as Lindert, Milanovic, and Williamson have argued, ancient non-democratic societies (i.e., the vast majority of all ancient agricultural societies) were at the “inequality possibility frontier” – elites extracted the maximum surplus from society.

But as I mentioned in my earlier post, it is obvious that the distribution of inequality in both democracies and dictatorships is very wide: lots of democracies have high gini values, and lots of dictatorships have low gini values. We do not see two clearly defined “peaks” in the distribution; rather, the distribution of inequality in both democracies and dictatorships appears to be “bimodal” – with distinct high inequality and low inequality peaks.

This is relatively easy to explain in the case of dictatorships: most of the dictatorships with low inequality appear to be communist countries, though there are fewer of these – exactly what we would expect from the theoretical models. (It is, after all, easier to organize a coup than a social revolution). Here’s a picture of the distribution of inequality in dictatorships only, split among communist and non-communist dictatorships:

The communist dictatorships are clustered narrowly at a low level of measured inequality (median gini 28.9; more on the “measured” bit in a minute), while the non-communist dictatorships have a somewhat broader distribution centered around a larger level of inequality (median gini 45.9).

The bimodal distribution of inequality in democracies is harder to explain; like dictatorships, democracies appear to have both a low inequality and a high inequality equilibrium. Why?

One factor that might seem to matter is simply the length of time a democratic regime has been in existence: redistribution capable of affecting the level of inequality in a society seems to take time. Here’s a plot of the distribution of inequality in democracies, split between those democracies that have endured for less than 10 years and those democracies that have endured for more than 10 years:

Younger democracies appear to have larger levels of inequality (median gini for established democracies: 36.2; median gini for new democracies: 44.4). In fact, while democracies appear to become more equal with time, dictatorships appear to become less equal:

 

And while it seems that democracies become more equal as they become richer, dictatorships appear to remain as unequal as before:

I won’t put too much stress on these graphs; the patterns in individual countries do not always or even often bear out the apparent overall pattern, and it is possible that this is just an artefact of the sparseness of the inequality datasets and the general badness of the data from dictatorships. Most “old” democracies in the dataset start at low levels measured inequality but appear to increase their level of inequality over time (e.g., the USA, France), whereas most “new” democracies start at high levels of inequality and appear to decrease these levels of inequality over time. Since there are more “new” democracies than “old” democracies here, it is possible that we are merely seeing is a kind of cohort effect, though one that is consistent with the basic theory: new democracies start at high levels of inequality, and many don’t last long (because of opposition to redistribution by elites), which skews the right hand panel so that it looks as if democracies become less unequal over time. Most dictatorships transition to democracy at a gini of around 45 (which is high for democracies), but that’s because that’s the median gini for dictatorships; similarly, most democracies transition to dictatorship at a gini of around 45 (perhaps because most new democracies are less stable, and they transition to dictatorship before engaging in significant redistribution?).

Moreover, it is obvious that democracies do become quite unequal sometimes. The USA is an obvious case. Here it is interesting to note that the USA is not a new democracy and is clearly quite rich, so (given the previous graphs) we would predict inequality to go down, but it seems to have been on an upward trend even looking at the long run (not just at the last decade):

(Similar patterns are visible in many rich democracies – France, for example). More on why this might be the case in a minute. But let’s think of different possibilities for why democracies might (or might not) decrease inequality. Consider what happened in Poland after the collapse of communism (similar trends are visible in Hungary, Bulgaria, and other communist countries that transitioned to democracy):

In this case, it seems that the transition to communism triggered the wholesale conversion of political access (the main inequality in these societies) into monetary assets, leading to a higher equilibrium level of measured income inequality. Measured income inequality was actually misleading about the distribution of power in communist countries; just because they were “equal” societies in income terms did not mean they were “equal” societies in the things that income can buy elsewhere, and when the basis of the regime changed, the “true” inequality in society reasserted itself in income terms, though it still remained relatively low in comparative terms. (An alternative story: perhaps with the to a market economy, people in Poland and other communist countries had the opportunity to trade off more income against increased inequality, and they took it. This is also plausible, but not my focus here; it is less plausible in places where wholesale conversion of communist apparatchiks to well-connected biznesmeni took place, as in Russia).

   

Sometimes democracy is, in a sense, too successful at an earlier time in redistributing income, prompting a reaction from elites. Consider Chile:

Inequality decreases fast until the 1973 coup, partly because of redistributive policies pushed by the left, at which point it increases again greatly. The interpretation is obvious: the elite could not stomach so much redistribution, and returns Chile to a higher level of inequality by coercive means. (The military Junta led by Pinochet made this point rather explicitly: their mission was to destroy communism and its leftist sympathizers in Chile. So they arrested and sometimes killed the leaders of leftist parties and coercively defanged or banned labor unions). After the transition to democracy in the late 1980s, inequality seems to stabilize at a higher level: the new democratic governments are constrained in the amount of redistribution they can undertake, both constitutionally and prudentially, and at any rate, the structure of Chilean society changes – labour unions have less power, elite assets are more mobile, etc. So elites are willing to transition to democracy, without fearing Allende-style redistribution. It’s like Chile’s long-term “natural” rate of inequality – the rate that is consistent with the maintenance of a democratic regime is somewhere around a gini of 45.

South Korea presents yet another possibility:

This pattern is also nicely consistent with the basic theory, though in a different way. Here we have a right-wing dictatorship facing a communist neighbour that presented a credible but far more redistributive model. (After the Korean War and until the mid 70s, most people thought the North was doing better than the South). In these circumstances, democracy was too threatening to elites: it was too easy to imagine a communist takeover by electoral means. It was still necessary to defuse the threat of social revolution through some redistributive measures (there were some fairly extensive land reforms, if I am remembering correctly), but not through institutionalized democracy, which was too risky. Promises of redistribution were made credible by the communist threat to the north, and in fact carried out to some extent. Eventually, however, inequality decreased sufficiently and the Northern model became sufficiently unattractive that democracy became much less costly to elites, leading to a transition in the late 1980s. Inequality again appears to stabilize after the transition.

A fourth pattern is found in Thailand:

(The highlighted points are years of successful coups; there were more unsuccessful ones, and the 2006 coup is not shown – no gini data for that year). We might interpret this as follows. Democracy is introduced in the late seventies (though resisted, as shown by coups in 1976) and is immediately associated with a decline in inequality, presumably through redistributive policies, but remains plagued with coups (more unsuccessful ones not shown), mostly supported by the elite. Yet the elites do not have enough power to sustain a military regime indefinitely; military coups merely postpone the resumption of redistributive politics. (I don’t know of Thailand inequality data for 2006 and after, but it would be interested to see what it looks like).   

The individual patterns are not always so clear. In fact, in most cases where there is data, no pattern is readily discernible: the aggregate pattern is clear, but the level of inequality in individual countries sometimes appears to fluctuate without any apparent connection to regime type. In some countries, transitions to democracy occur as inequality is going down (the South Korean pattern), in others, as it is going up; and in others the trend appears flat, at least given the available data. In some cases, periods of dictatorship are associated with increases in inequality, in others with decreases in inequality, and similarly for periods of democracy.

I suppose someone with knowledge of individual country histories could make sense of any given country pattern, and someone with better statistical skills could design an appropriate measure of whether inequality goes up or down, on average, during democratic or dictatorial periods. My best guess is that you would need to do a fixed effects model – controlling both for factors that affect the level of inequality at a global scale, and for country-specific factors that affect the level of inequality in a specific country. For example, inequality appears to have increased in many countries in the world in the last decade, presumably due to changes in the global economy – but more in some countries than others, presumably due to particularities of each country, including the influence of the political regime. So we would need to distinguish those global effects that are not subject to political control from the effects of political regime on inequality. Fiddling around a bit with something along these lines (using some advice provided by Eric Crampton, though all errors are mine), I cannot find any specific pattern when controlling for obvious things; if anything, democracy seems to increase inequality over time relative to dictatorship when using a full time series model (though it may be that I am not very good at interpreting the coefficients I’m getting, or that I’m mispecifying the thing somehow; for example, maybe one needs specific kinds of lags, etc. If you have expertise and would like to collaborate on figuring this out, please let me know.).

But what does come out of that fiddling as an important factor determining the level of inequality over time is the number of previous transitions to authoritarianism, which we might interpret as a proxy for the power of the elite to prevent redistribution. In various simple regressions, an additional transition to authoritarianism seems to increase the level of inequality by a unit in the gini index, and democracies with higher numbers of transitions to authoritarianism in the past seem to exhibit higher long-term levels of inequality. Consider this scatterplot:

When looking at the average gini of democracies that have existed for more than ten years, we see that democracies with fewer transitions to authoritarianism in the 58 year span (1962-2008) of the dataset seem to be scattered all over the place, though the upper range is less populated. But inequality clearly increases with previous transitions to authoritarianism, and the range of “permissible” inequality seems to narrow – with more transitions to authoritarianism, the narrow the range of inequality and the higher the mean. (The pattern is visible when looking not just at the mean gini of democracies existing for more than 10 years, but also at the mean gini of all democracies).  

How can we understand this? Here’s one possibility, and (finally) the justification for the title of this post. With fewer experiences of dictatorship in the recent past, democracies can enact a wide range of redistributive policies, depending on beliefs about luck and hard work, “ideological investment” by various interested parties, reasonable arguments, the organizational ability of various actors like labor unions and business associations, the visibility of wealth and the economic structure of society, etc. Such policies have a wide range of consequences, and so inequality may fluctuate quite drastically over time in established democracies, though it will in general experience some downward pressure relative to dictatorships. Perhaps there are “arms races” in which organizational and ideological innovations by representatives of the “left” (labor unions and particular forms of contentious politics like strikes, Marxism, etc.) are in time neutralized by organizational innovations by representatives of the “right” (think-tanks and particular business organizations, legal ways of constraining the power of unions, “neoliberal” ideas, etc.) and vice-versa, so that in the long run, inequality follows a trend determined by structural factors in the economy: the long-run “natural rate of inequality” for the society, kind of like what economists sometimes refer to as the “natural rate of unemployment.” Something like this has perhaps happened in the USA (at least if we credit people like Hacker and Pierson), where “right-wing” actors developed organizational and ideological innovations to counter the organizational and ideological tools of the “left;” but in the long run, what we should see, short of a change in regime, is a reversion to the mean trend, itself determined by economic factors that are not easily susceptible of political control.

 In some societies, however, some of these redistributive policies prove intolerable to elites, who then stage coups. When the society returns to democratic rule, representatives of non-elites know something about the ability of elites to credibly commit to extreme measures in the face of redistributive policies, so the range of distributive outcomes that appears acceptable to all narrows. (Something like this appears to have happened in Chile, for example, where successive “left” governments have “learned” from the past not to engage in certain kinds of redistributive policies). The more successful coups there are in a society, the narrower this range. Over time, you see the development of a bimodal distribution of inequality in democracies: societies where people have learned about the “red lines” that ought not to be crossed have a higher long-run level of inequality given the structure of their economy.

As noted earlier, take all of this analysis with a grain of salt; this is more exploratory than anything else, and I am certainly not a properly trained statistician. I am just curious, and considering further research on these topics. (Collaboration possibilities are also welcome).

---

[1] Data on inequality is patchy and often of poor quality. The UTIP dataset is basically the best there is for cross country comparisons over time (going back as far as 1963 for some countries); the World Bank adds some more data points, especially after 1996 (when the UTIP data ends). I mentioned in a previous post why I like the Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland dataset on political regimes so much - in particular, it operationalizes a clear and theoretically justified distinction between democracies and non-democracies - but more perhaps later.