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).

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[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.

Playing the bones

In Leningrad, I met a man, no longer young, named Kolya Vasyn. He was a genuine dissident in the Brezhnev years, but his dissidence consisted of his worship not of Jefferson or Mill, but of Chuck Berry, Keith Richards, and, above all, John Lennon. ... He told me that when he first started listening to rock and roll, it was impossible to get records and it was before the era when audio cassettes were easy to find. "We had friends who worked in medical clinics and they would steal used X rays," Kolya said. "Someone would have a primitive record-making machine and you would copy the music by cutting the grooves in the material of the X rays. So you'd be listening to a Fats Domino tune that was coming right off of the X ray of someone's long-forgotten broken hip. They called that 'on the bones'." (David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb, pp. 335-336).

I wonder if these records still exist somewhere? (Though perhaps the anecdote was simply too good to check, I know).

Careerists and Ideologues in China's Great Leap Famine

From the department of perverse incentives, a new APSR paper by James Kai-Sing Kung and Shuo Chen ["The Tragedy of the Nomenklatura: Career Incentives and Political Radicalism during China's Great Leap Famine," vol 105, pp. 27-45]:

A salient feature of China's Great Leap Famine is that political radicalism varied enormously across provinces. Using excessive grain procurement as a pertinent measure, we find that such variations were patterned systematically on the political career incentives of Communist Party officials rather than the conventionally assumed ideology or personal idiosyncrasies. Political rank alone can explain 16.83% of the excess death rate: the excess procurement ratio of provinces governed by alternate members of the Central Committee was about 3% higher than in provinces governed by full members, or there was an approximate 1.11% increase in the excess death rate. The stronger career incentives of alternate members can be explained by the distinctly greater privileges, status, and power conferred only on the rank of full members of the Central Committee and the “entry barriers” to the Politburo that full members faced.

This seems to me to tie into the “signalling” theme of the last post on cults of personality (which proved surprisingly popular). The problem here appears from the point of view of the people who want access to power and privilege: how can they signal sufficient commitment to the leadership so that they are rewarded with power and privileges?

Here is what Kung and Chen argue happened in China. In the hierarchy of the CCP, the three highest levels are politburo members, full members of the central committee, and alternate members of the central committee. The politburo is tiny – about 20 people. (This is, we might say, the highest level of the “winning coalition”). In Mao’s time, most of them were founding members of the CCP, had gone through the Long March, or had otherwise participated extensively in guerrilla activities before 1949. Generally speaking, it was thus very difficult for anyone who did not have these experiences to enter the politburo at the time. But it was possible to move from alternate membership to full membership in the Central Committee, a larger body of about 300 or so people (the exact size of the Central Committee has varied over time); and this move brought substantial material and status benefits – more offices, opportunities for patronage, etc. Yet in order to move from alternate to full membership, one had to give sufficient indications of commitment and reliability. In this case, Mao indicated that rewards would come to those who signalled credible radicalism, and credible radicalism could only be signalled by excessive grain procurement, leading to famine.

The Great Leap provided these party officials [alternate members of the Central Committee] with a rare, extraordinary opportunity to respond to Mao’s unambiguous signal that radical behavior would be duly rewarded. The evidence clearly shows that even after controlling for the idiosyncrasies of individual provincial leaders and variations in local conditions, the alternate members were, as a group, indeed more likely to act radically. Our findings thus substantially challenge the reigning assumption that ideology is the main source of bureaucratic radicalism in totalitarian regimes. (P. 43)

But since these full members could not move any further up the hierarchy (the only people who could enter the Politburo at the time were those who had been important in guerrilla warfare or had been through the Long March), once they reached the top they became less ideological:

The idea that career incentives matter is further bolstered by the provocatively counterintuitive finding that radicalism declined among those bureaucrats who, although still having room to move further up the career ladder [to the politburo], nonetheless lacked the necessary “prerevolutionary credentials” to do so, at which point most apparently became satisfied careerists rather than revolutionary zealots. (P. 43).

An interesting question is how a dictatorship moves from the signalling equilibrium where crazy radicalism is rewarded to the signalling equilibrium where other things (e.g., “measured economic performance”) are rewarded, as China has moved. Indeed, it seems to be a common though not universal pattern in communist (and perhaps other) dictatorships: a period of radical policy, with high levels of repression and ideological “investment” (Mao, Stalin, Ulbricht) is often followed by a period characterized by lower levels of ideological fervor, less “proactive” repression, and more emphasis on the provision of material benefits for both the “selectorate” (members of the party) and the rest of the population (Deng, Khrushchev, Honecker). (These material benefits need not consist in economic growth per se – it may be just an emphasis on economic security for the majority of the population and further material privileges for the party, as in East Germany). Totalitarian dictatorships seem to turn into careerist hierarchies concerned with preserving the material privileges of its elites and preventing revolution from below through economic “bribes.” Why?

Kung and Chen seem to think that this simply depends on the character of the dictator: the key difference between Mao’s China and modern China is that Mao was crazy and his successors were not, to put the point bluntly. (I’m putting words in their mouths, but the basic point is simply that Mao was ideologically committed to a crazy vision of communism while his successors, starting with Deng, were more committed to a pragmatic model of economic development). The consequence is that the system remains susceptible to economic disaster, even though it is doing well today:

[I]n the absence of political checks and balances on the dictator, he can easily misuse the same career incentives that have been employed to promote economic growth [in the post-Mao period] under the same conditions of centralized personnel control by the nomenklatura and economic decentralization, leading in this case to economic disaster. (P. 43)

But this seems unsatisfactory to me, though there is probably some truth in the idea. Here are a couple of alternative theories (or rather, sketches of theories). First, following an interesting argument by Kurt Weyland (2008, gated link), one might think that dictators, like all leaders (but even more so: they are an “epistemic bottleneck”), are cognitively constrained; they simply implement whatever policy is seen to be “effective” in their milieu given their objectives (which may include building up the status of the country in the international arena, an objective that we may assume both Mao as well as later Chinese leaders held, and which involves pursuing policies that they believe strengthen the economy). In other words, they emulate those [countries, leaders] they trust, but do not really know what will work (in fact, nobody really does); this accounts for the fact that policies get adopted as “models” and transferred from one country to another sometimes rather quickly. In the 50s, radical agricultural collectivization and other such policies were thought to be “effective” among  Chinese communist leaders (as they had been thought to be effective among Soviet leaders slightly earlier); later they became discredited, but “market-based” policies became popular. As long as relatively good policies are thought to be “effective” in the dictator’s milieu, centralized  dictatorships with the sort of personnel policies that China has will do relatively well, as the dictator (or tiny ruling group) can effectively reward supporters for the implementation of the policy. But if disastrous policies again become popular in the ruling group’s milieu, then the dictatorship will do badly.

But perhaps what happens is that in demanding credible signals of commitment from the upper levels of the hierarchy, the dictator necessarily gets the unprincipled careerists. (This would not come as a surprise to Machiavelli, among other theorists of autocracy: beware of flatterers). Imagine you have a population of principled and unprincipled upper-level party members. The principled party members mostly agree with the dictator, but not 100%; because they are principled, they have their own interpretation of whatever doctrine they all claim to espouse. And they are unwilling to compromise; they have, as we say, “principles.” By contrast, the careerists are willing to say and do anything for the sake of advancement. When the dictator demands radical policy, the people without principled commitments jump at the opportunity, whereas the principled members of the hierarchy get disproportionately punished for demurring or having independent thoughts. (The Bukharins get purged, for example). Over time, the upper level of the hierarchy fills up with careerists. But when the dictator dies, the careerists prefer not to have to do so much counterproductive signalling, and they are now in a position to select the next dictator. So they tend to go for people who are likely to protect their material interests rather than true ideologues, and as a side effect the dictatorship lowers the level of repression and becomes more focused on providing economic goods for both the party organization and the rest of the population. (Also, insofar as they lower the level of repression, they now need to provide material benefits in order to avoid challenges from outside the party organization).

I’m not sure this is right; I would imagine that one would have to first establish whether or not totalitarian dictatorships (high ideological investment, high proactive repression) do reliably turn into post-totalitarian or authoritarian dictatorships (low ideological investment, low proactive repression, a focus on material “bribes”). If it is right, I suspect that this sort of success eventually runs out: without political competition or ideological commitment, the state (or the party) decays into a pure patronage organization staffed by careerists. This seems to have happened in the Soviet Union, though there the problem was compounded by the reliance on central planning (which is to corruption as clouds are to rain); could it also happen in China?

[Update 4/4/11: Added Kung and Shen's title, corrected some obvious typos].

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?