Mixed Constitutions vs. Mixed Economies (or, Ancient and Modern Liberalisms)

(Attention conservation notice: Inspired by a student’s comment a while back, this has languished in my drafts folder. Contains speculative intellectual history, implausible connections between ancient and modern concepts, and self-promotion; nevertheless, I thought it would be worth trying out the argument)

The ancient Greco-Roman idea of the “mixed constitution” is usually taken to be the ancestor of modern (post 18^th-century) constitutional ideas about “checks and balances” and the “division of powers.” This is fine as far as it goes; the early modern writers who first proposed and defended these latter ideas in a systematic way – people like Harrington, Locke, and  Montesquieu, for example – seem to have been influenced to some degree by Greek and Roman theories of the mixed constitution. They used these ideas as one of the lenses through which they interpreted British constitutional practice of the 17^th and 18^th centuries; and there is certainly a sort of family resemblance between the ancient idea about the need for “mixture” in a constitution and the modern idea that a constitution should implement some checks on state power through the functional division of authority among different “branches” of the government.

However, as many people have noted, ancient ideas about the mixed constitution are in many ways quite different from modern ideas about the need for a functional division of authority to prevent abuses of state power. Even the guiding metaphors are different: “mixture” and “separation” denote contrary ideas. But perhaps more importantly, it strikes me that ideas about the mixed constitution played a role in ancient Greco-Roman political discourse that is very different from the role that ideas about “checks and balances” came to play in modern political discourse, and that is in fact surprisingly similar to the role ideas about the “mixed economy” – an economy that incorporates both market mechanisms and government intervention – play in contemporary political thought. I don’t mean this as a claim about intellectual history: ideas about the “mixed economy” today clearly owe nothing to ancient ideas about the mixed constitution. I mean it as a claim about the conceptual place of ideas within particular discourses or debates. Let me try to explain.

As I argue in much pedantic detail in a piece I published last year somewhat misleadingly entitled “Cicero and the Stability of States” (History of Political Thought 32(3): 397-423 [gated, ungated] – the first half is a survey of ideas about the mixed constitution in Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius), ancient ideas about the mixed constitution have two strands.

On the one hand, there is a concern with domination by powerful people and groups. Here the idea of the mixed constitution serves as a model of the “constraints” that should be imposed on the powerful to prevent tyranny, and in this sense it plays a very similar role to ideas of “checks and balances.” However, whereas modern discussions about the separation of powers tend to emphasize the need for a functional division of the tasks of government (into legislative, executive, and judicial activities, for example) to prevent abuses of state power, ancient discussions of the mixed constitution tend instead to emphasize a social division of power among significant social groups to prevent its monopolization (a group “becoming” the state, so to speak). The “simple” or “unmixed” regimes are precisely those regimes where one social group – the rich, the poor, military leaders – monopolizes power (for good or ill; the unmixed regimes are not always considered bad, but they are always considered fragile for a variety of reasons); by contrast, the “mixed” regimes are precisely those where power is “shared,” or, metaphorically, these are the regimes which "mix" the monopolistic regimes so that no social group has uncontested dominance over the others.

To put the point very roughly, I suspect the modern emphasis on separating power goes hand in hand with an emerging consciousness of “the state” as a distinct unified institutional actor that can develop interests that are independent of those of other significant social groups (including dominant groups), and hence is concerned with the institutional mechanisms that can limit its ability to act in dominating ways; ancient political thought, by contrast, has no such consciousness of a “state” as distinct from the social groups that exercise political power (most Ancient Greco-Roman societies had nothing like a state in the Weberian sense of the word anyway), and hence is more concerned with the compromises that various groups need to make to share power stably in ways that are beneficial to all. This is only an imprecise sketch of a complex history, of course. After all, early modern liberal political thought was often also concerned with the problems posed by the domination of one social group over another; 19^th century debates about suffrage are full of fears about what would happen if the poor were allowed to directly elect representatives and hence dominate the state, for example. And 17^th and 18^th century notions of “estate representation” do fit in quite naturally with ancient ideas about mixed constitutions.  Yet I am tempted to speculate in a vaguely Marxist way that ancient Greco-Roman political thought was more attuned to the permanent class conflicts of agrarian societies than early modern liberal thought, perhaps because the latter in part grew out of reflections on the management of confessional or sectarian conflicts in which the state was never merely a class agent, unlike the former.

At any rate, this concern with “sharing” power among significant social groups leads to a second strand of thought about political “mixture.” Here the idea of the mixed constitution serves as a model of the compromises that are possible and necessary between groups whose conceptions of justice – their conceptions of the appropriate distribution of the “benefits and burdens” in the community, their ideas about the appropriate level of hierarchy and equality in the organization of society, and so on – differ systematically according to their positions in society. For example, both Plato and Aristotle (and to a lesser degree other extant writers) suggest that the poor and the rich develop conceptions of justice that have a certain “bias” towards their own structural position: while the poor or the people tend to develop a conception of justice that emphasizes their equality as citizens, and hence the need for an equal distribution of power and authority in the community (expressed most radically in the lotteries of Athens), the rich or the elite tend to develop a conception of justice that emphasizes their inequality – their distinctiveness – and hence the need for an unequal distribution of power and authority (expressed in the demand for closed oligarchies and in justifications that claim the right to rule for those who contribute the most to the community, or those who are wisest, or have the most military virtue). Conflict between major social groups is not simply a clash of naked self-interest (at least not always), but rather appears as a contest between rival moralized conceptions of hierarchy, equality, and fair distribution.

For these Greek (and later Roman) writers, the key theoretical problem thus turns out to be how to bridge these divergent conceptions of justice for the sake of political stability while also promoting as far as possible various other important goods – freedom, independence, the effectiveness of the community as a fighting force, social solidarity, prudent decisionmaking, etc. How can political power be shared so that these contrasting conceptions of justice can all find some place in the community without monopolizing the whole, while maintaining a viable, even flourishing society in other respects? 

This problem is complicated both by material factors (extreme inequality makes it difficult to bridge the conceptions of justice of significant social groups, in the view of most of the extant Greek writers who talk about this problem) and by the fact that these group-relative conceptions of justice, however faulty, cannot be fully “educated away.” That is, whatever the truth of the matter about justice is (and Greek and Roman thinkers thought this was an answerable question) it is simply not possible to consistently convince people in structurally different positions that their conceptions of justice are incorrect. (At best, education can soften the edges of those differing conceptions of justice, but not transform them consistently). The “mixed constitution” is then an attempt to describe how one might give all these different conceptions of justice – or different ideas about what is valuable, or what gives people title to rule – some place within the polity despite the fact that they are partially incorrect (because one-sided) and hence in some ways damaging to the community, and despite the fact that they cannot be "corrected," while not wholly sacrificing other important values. In Plato, for example, the test of a well-organized mixed constitution is that it balances the characteristic values associated with “democracy” (where the poor or the many are dominant) and “monarchy” (a synecdoche for all regimes where small elites are dominant) so as to promote philia (social solidarity), eleutheria (freedom and political independence) and phronesis (prudent decisionmaking). Let me quote myself:

The Athenian Stranger [the main speaker in Plato’s Laws] suggests that a constitution can achieve these three objectives by “mixing” in the right proportion the values traditionally associated with monarchy, especially Persia, and the values traditionally associated with democracy, especially Athens (693d). “Monarchical” values emphasize subordination and status hierarchies, and thus enhance the coordination of action necessary to effective military power, i.e., the kind of power that ensures eleutheria as political independence (694a). But if they are over-emphasized, they disrupt both the solidarity and affection (philia) between rulers and ruled and the ability of information and insight to flow to the rulers (phronesis; 694a-b), increasing the city’s vulnerability to external forces and diminishing the ability of rulers to actually rule for the common good (697d-698a). By contrast, “democratic” values emphasize personal autonomy and equality, and thus enhance the solidarity and affection between rulers and ruled as well as the flow of information throughout the city, which makes the city able to defend itself intelligently at least so long as it can coordinate its actions through its laws and rulers even against vastly superior forces (cf. 698b-699d). But if they are over-emphasized, the city loses both its ability to recognize and defer to actual expertise (and hence loses intelligence; cf. 701a) and the ability to coordinate properly that submission to laws and rulers provide. It thus disintegrates into “every man for himself” (cf. 699c-d), again making it vulnerable to external forces.

Properly constructed institutions will ensure that the citizens will be properly submissive to the laws and the rulers (indeed, that they will “fear” and “revere” the laws and the rulers, cf. 698b), but will also grant enough personal autonomy and ensure enough status equality to ensure that phronesis flows through the city and rulers and ruled share enough affection for each other. Such a constitution will “weave together” the “mother constitutions” of monarchy and democracy (693d) in the sense that it will induce a measured combination of their characteristic values capable of simultaneously ensuring solidarity and affection between rulers and ruled, intelligence in the actions of the city, and the preservation of its political independence. (moi, pp. 403-404)

Though “liberalism” as such did not exist in the Ancient Greco-Roman world, the idea of the mixed constitution thus seems to me to be designed to deal with problems similar to those that have motivated much modern liberal thought: how to deal with intractable conflicts of value (about justice, in this case) when no significant social group can be assumed to have a monopoly on the truth (the philosopher does not count as a social group, even if she does have the truth about justice) in a relatively peaceful way. But ancient mixed constitution thinking (at least the mostly Greek variant of it before Cicero that has come down to us), unlike classical liberalism, tended to see these problems in the context of deep-seated, ineradicable distributional conflicts; and as such, it seems to me, it played a role in political thought similar to the role the idea of a “mixed economy” plays today.

Modern economic debates about the role of the state in the economy are obviously never merely technical debates; they usually invoke, either implicitly or explicitly, different conceptions of justice and fairness, and different answers to the question about the kinds of power that partisans of these conceptions of justice and fairness ought to have in society. (Consider: "taxation is theft" vs. "you didn't build that"). They are debates about what is the right distribution of burdens and benefits in society, and draw on deep-seated intuitions about desert, property, and the like that appear to vary among distinct social groups. The idea of a mixed economy then serves as a model – varying in detail depending on its particular proponent, of course – of the appropriate distribution of social power among partisans of different conceptions of distributive justice, including both a description of the kinds of constraints that should be imposed on powerful social groups (e.g., how democratic states should constrain markets and vice-versa) and a description of the kinds of compromises that partisans of particular ideas of fairness or justice must make while still promoting efficiency (the modern equivalent of the Platonic “prudent decisionmaking” or phronesis), common identity (the modern equivalent of the Platonic philia), and personal autonomy (the modern equivalent of eleutheria).

Proponents of a mixed economy of course disagree about the specific institutions of that would instantiate it properly, just as Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero had different views about proper mixture in a constitution. My point is more about how the abstract model of the mixed economy seems to serve as a reference point for attempting to find pragmatic compromises among social groups with ineradicably different views concerning distributive justice and enduring, if unbalanced, forms of social power (numbers vs. economic power, for example) even if we think that some of these views are correct (or more correct than others). We might say that like the mixed constitution in antiquity, the mixed economy today serves as a standard description of the second best.

Update 7 August: fixed some oddities of grammar and missing words.

New Book: A Stranger's Knowledge: Statesmanship, Philosophy, and Law in Plato's Statesman

Due to a vaguely superstitious reluctance to make an announcement until I had the final physical copies in my hands, I neglected to announce here the recent publication of my first book, A Stranger's Knowledge: Statesmanship, Philosophy, and Law in Plato's Statesman (Parmenides, Amazon). But I now have physical proof that the book is truly available!

(And it's reasonably priced, too, for an academic monograph). 


My interest in Plato's Statesman may seem odd to regular readers of this blog, given that it has morphed into a blog on dictatorships, cults of personality, democratization, and the like. But this blog first started (years ago) as a home for orphaned footnotes that were excised from the book's first draft (click on the archives around 2007 to find some of them; it has taken me a long time to get here). Plato also remains the most prominent, interesting, and challenging defender of the rule of knowledge against the rule of the people, so my turn to the study of nondemocracy is perhaps not so surprising; and the many years I spent working on my interpretation of this puzzling dialogue have continued to nourish my thoughts in unexpected ways (e.g., my series on epistemic arguments for conservatism).  


The dialogue, at any rate, is an exquisite puzzle, which is probably what attracted me to it in graduate school in the first place. A conversation between an unnamed "stranger" from Elea and a young and pliable mathematician named Socrates (not the Socrates of most of the dialogues, who witnesses the conversation but, aside from a short prologue, never says a word), the dialogue purports to be part of a trio of conversations set right before the famous trial of Socrates, each of them concerned with defining a different figure: the sophist, the statesman, and the philosopher. But though the Sophist exists, the Philosopher dialogue does not exist (and it is likely that it was never intended to exist); instead, the Sophist is placed in fictional continuity with the Theaetetus, Plato's most important dialogue on knowledge. The conversation itself is delightfully weird. It is full of strange distinctions and odd conclusions (including an elaborate joke about human beings being "featherless bipeds" or "two-legged pigs," which was apparently fodder for ancient pranksters like Diogenes the Cynic), dead ends and mistakes that are extensively discussed and acknowledged within the conversation itself, a long and detailed digression on the art of weaving, and a complex myth about a great "cosmic reversal" of motion in which human beings are depicted as being born from the earth in old age and living their lives in reverse. All of this leads to an ambiguous defense of the rule of law as "second best" and a characterization of the genuine statesman as someone whose main concern is the timing of existential decisions for the polity as a whole, in apparent tension with Plato's classic discussion of the "philosopher king" in the Republic. 


The puzzle lies in trying to make sense of how all of these disparate elements (which draw explicit attention both to their ill-fittingness and their fittingness) fit together as a single pedagogical and theoretical exercise; and the book is my attempt to provide a solution to this puzzle that makes sense of the dialogue not merely as a methodological discussion (as most scholars argue) but as a work of political philosophy that is decisively concerned with the question of what "political knowledge" could even mean. I may say more about my answer to this question later (though, as with most Platonic dialogues, most of the fun lies in trying to understand the movement of the conversation rather than in the answers to which the conversation arrives); buy the book (or tell your friendly academic librarian to buy the book) to find out the full version. 

Democracy and development since 1950 in one chart

My previous post, in one chart:

(Click here for larger size).

Bubbles to the right are more democratic countries, measured using the Unified Democracy Scores; bubbles to the left are more autocratic countries. Note how the left side of the graph has much more volatility, even within single countries, as expected; the bubbles move up and down like crazy. By contrast, on the right side of the graph everything oscillates more sedately. (Try following Lebanon, for example; you can also zoom in to particular regions of the graph). For another interesting view, change the color to "regime type" and set the Y axis to plot GDP per capita (rather than GDP per capita growth). (Change the scale to "log," too, for a clearer view).

(Data on economic growth from the Penn World Table.)

A Very Short Quantitative History of Political Regimes, Part 1.75: Democracy and Development

(Statistician General’s warning: no significance tests or confidence intervals were harmed in the writing of this post. Appropriate model assumptions not guaranteed. Do not use without consulting a trained and licensed statistician.)

I haven’t done one of these posts on the history of political regimes in a while, but I am preparing something for a class on the topic of the relationship between political regimes and economic development, and figured it’s a nice addition to the series. Besides, it is always a good time to put up pretty graphs on this blog.

What is the relationship between political regimes and economic development? The basics of this relationship in the post-WWII era seem pretty well understood: basically, the richer the country, the more likely it is to be “democratic” (in the sense I’ve discussed here and here, where democracy is conceived as a system of normatively regulated competition for control of states including the usual paraphernalia of elections, freedoms of speech and assembly, etc.), though the reasons for why this is the case remain disputed, and there are obvious and significant exceptions to this pattern. Conversely, the academic literature suggests that democratic regimes have a slight and indirect long-term development advantage, though the evidence for this claim is much more controversial, and there is no consensus on how this particular advantage operates, if it exists at all (for a meta-analysis of studies on this topic, see here).

Here I want to look at how the relationship between development and democracy has changed over the past 60 years. For our purposes in this post I am going to use the Unified Democracy Scores developed by Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton. These scores basically aggregate the information contained in nine other democracy scores – Polity IV, DD, Freedom House, and six other lesser known indexes – in such a way as to indicate the “uncertainty” associated with particular country ratings. The score for a given country ranges between around -2 and around 2, with higher numbers being “more democratic.” A score of “zero” can be interpreted as a cut-off between more or less “open” regimes and more or less “closed” regimes, though we could also use three breaks, with regimes at one end of the distribution being clearly “dictatorships,” regimes at the other end being clearly “democratic,” and regimes in the middle being “hybrid” regimes of various kinds – competitive authoritarian, tutelary democracies, democratizing monarchies, etc.  As an example, here are the scores for the year 2008, split into three quantiles to indicate 

these broad regime categories:

Unified Democracy Scores, 2008

(The length of each horizontal line is the 95% confidence interval for the score; in general, small democracies at the top of the scale have more uncertain ratings, while dictatorships at the bottom of the scale have narrower confidence intervals, indicating less disagreement about the classification of dictatorships than about the determination of the level of democracy beyond a certain point). A three way split works quite well: the countries in red are the more obvious dictatorships, while the countries in blue are more clearly democratic, and the countries in green have the sorts of problematic hybrid regimes that are difficult to classify with certainty as either wholly democratic or wholly undemocratic.

Using those breaks, here is what the distribution of regimes looks like since the 1950s:

Distribution of regime types since 1950

Fully closed regimes had their peak in the late 70s and early 80s, but the end of the Cold War pushed many of these to at least hold elections, as we saw in this post. But how has this distribution evolved in terms of income per capita? Consider this plot:

Income per capita per year and regime type

(GDP data from the Penn World Table). Each circle shows the median income of the particular regime type for a given year, where the size of the circle is proportional to the number of regimes that fall into that category. The lines show a lowess fit for the overall trend growth of income for each particular regime type. I interpret the story the graph tells as follows.

The median income of democratic regimes has been higher than the median income of both hybrid and fully authoritarian regimes since at least the 1950s, and the gap has in general widened, not narrowed, even as the number of democratic countries has increased. (From this graph we cannot tell, however, whether the gap has widened because democratic countries have grown faster, or because non-democratic countries that grew fast turned into democracies; from the graphs below, we may infer that it was a mixture of both). The gap was highest during “peak authoritarianism” in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when most poor and newly independent countries were either hybrid regimes or dictatorships, but it stopped growing after the end of the cold war, when a number of relatively poor countries became democratic.

Interestingly, whereas before the end of the cold war the median hybrid regime was also richer than the median dictatorship, this pattern is reversed after the end of the cold war. Full authoritarianism proved almost impossible to sustain in poor countries without the patronage of the major powers or natural resource wealth; for the most part only relatively rich dictatorships, or dictatorships that retained a special relationship with a major non-democratic country, survived, whereas most poor countries today have some sort of hybrid regime. Thus in 2008, the list of full dictatorships included Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Myanmar (Burma), Qatar, Libya, Swaziland, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Laos, China, Eritrea, Cuba, UAE, Oman, Equatorial Guinea, Sudan, Iran, and Syria. (Not all of these had GDP data in the Penn World Table – North Korea, for example. Note also that some of these regimes have large levels of uncertainty associated with them – the list could very well have included Brunei, for example, instead of Iran; but the basic point does not appear to change if we switch some of these around. I haven’t really checked, since this is only a blog post and checking requires some actual programming, but one could check by drawing new samples of democracy scores from within the distribution Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton generate. That’s the fun thing about the UD scores. It is also worth noting that some of these regimes appear to have survived the end of the cold war only because they had unifying enemies – Eritrea, Cuba, and Iran come to mind; fear can be just as stabilizing as wealth.)

What about growth? Is any particular regime type consistently associated with economic growth? Here’s what it looks like when we plot the relative growth performance of different regimes in every year since 1950:

Economic growth by regime type per year

(Click for a larger version). Each circle represents the median growth rate for the regime type indicated by the color; the size of the circle is proportional to the number of regimes in that category for that year. The lines show a lowess fit of the trend growth rate of each regime type; the shaded areas represent automatically generated 95% confidence intervals. (Many caveats apply. See warning above). Any year where the blue circle is higher than the red or green circles is a year where the median democracy did better than the median hybrid regime or the median dictatorship.  

As indicated by the width of the confidence intervals around the red and green lines, dictatorships and hybrid regimes have had more variability in economic performance than democracies since at least the 1950s: more growth “miracles” and “disasters,” often in the very same country. (See this paper by William Easterly for the actual scholarly version of the argument). To the extent that we can ignore these confidence intervals and focus only on the trend performance, democracies have not always done better than these other regimes. In the early post-war era it seems that dictatorships did better (though most did about as well as democracies), but then decolonization came along and the growth performance of dictatorships basically cratered. Indeed, the 80s, when the so-called “third wave” of democratization began, was also (not coincidentally perhaps?) the time when the “growth gap” between democracies and hybrid and dictatorial regimes was at its widest. Ominously, the last decade has seen a reversal of this pattern, which explains much of the (not very well thought out) commentary about the rise of the “Chinese model.” (Democracies, in particular, seem to have been much more strongly affected by the financial crisis that started in 2008 than either dictatorships or hybrid regimes, though all regimes appear to have been affected to some extent). Yet we should not make too much of this; even in the last decade, democracies did basically the same as the other regimes, judging by the overlap in confidence intervals – their responses seem not to have been too obviously wrong relative to the responses of authoritarian  countries (many of which benefitted from high oil prices). And we should remember that the median per capita GDP of democracies is already much higher than that of dictatorships or hybrid regimes; if we ought to be worried about anything, it is about the effects of bad economic performance on hybrid regimes, which could potentially lead to a reversion to more authoritarian forms of government:

Economic growth by regime type per year

I have purposely refrained from making any big claims about a general relationship between regime type and economic performance. From the evidence above, it seems that there has not been a great deal of difference between different regimes, except in the 80s. But instead of throwing away information by breaking the democracy scores into categories, we could try to look at what the relationship between the raw scores and growth rates looks like in general. Here’s my idea (please tell me if this doesn’t work; there are probably a million problems with it I haven't thought about). For every year, we estimate a simple linear model of the form growth = a*democracy_score + b*log(gdp_per_capita) + c + error. We then plot the coefficient a for each year; when this coefficient is positive, the more democratic the country, the better its performance for that year, adjusting for its existing level of economic development, and when the coefficient is negative, the opposite is true, i.e., the less democratic the country the better its growth performance for that year (many caveats apply). When we do this, we find that more democratic countries had a clear growth advantage only between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, and that advantage seems to have been lost in the 1990s, even reversed:

Growth advantage of democracy per year

(An even simpler model, not controlling for the existing level of economic development, gives a broader democracy advantage, extending back to the 1960s, but not a radically different picture.) It is worth noting that these relationships are different in different regions: the “democracy advantage” calculated using this method has been negative in East Asia, South Asia, and Western Europe for the period 1950-2008, and zero or positive just about everywhere else:

Growth advantage of democracy per region

Interestingly, Polynesia, East Africa, and Central Asia have had some of the largest “democracy advantages”: the more democratic the regimes have been there, the better their growth performance. Looking at entire continents, the broadest democracy advantage by far is in Africa (and it is positive in all).(Many caveats apply: for example, there isn’t a lot of variability in the democracy score in some of these regions, like in Australia and New Zealand, and the calculated coefficients aren't always significant).

Anyway, more could be said, but it’s late and I need to move on. Any thoughts on how to further this sort of analysis? All code needed to replicate these plots is available here; you will need to download the Unified Democracy Scores and the Penn World Table separately. You also need this file of country and region codes.

[Update, 18 May: fixed a small mistake in the last two plots. Results don't change, though the Polynesian "democracy advantage" is now more pronounced]

[Update 2, shortly after: I take it back. It was fine the first time, though it doesn't make much difference.]

Educational software I wish existed: StackExchange for teaching in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Here’s an idea I’ve been mulling over for the past week. (Mulling over enough to have spent many hours in an abortive attempt to create a prototype. But even simple web application programming seems to be a nontrivial problem that requires more time investment than I can muster right now). I have a large bank of questions for some of the courses I teach. These are mostly essay questions (short and long) of varying degrees of complexity, that ask students to make arguments, provide evidence, point to real-world examples, etc. I usually select the questions for final exams or other forms of assessment from this pool; a student who could answer all of them well would have essentially mastered the content of the course.

I would like to have a web application that draws on this pool of questions to do this:

1. In “quiz mode” a student would either select a question or be served a random question from the pool, and then he/she would answer it. They could then move on to a different question, for as long as they wished. (Perhaps the questions could be served in such a way that students can vote for the questions they most want answered, as in Google Moderator). The software would also allow the students to rate both the quality of their own answers (how good they think their answer is) and/or their level of confidence in their answer (how certain they are that they have a good answer), as well as the level of difficulty of the question. Their answers and ratings would go into a database; as they accumulate, the instructor could see which questions are rated as “hard” by students, or display characteristic problems, and focus teaching efforts there.
2. In “rating mode” students would either select a question or be served a random question from the pool, which they would view along with any (anonymized) answers from themselves, other students in the course, or even the instructor. They could then vote on which answer is best (if there is more than one answer) or rate the quality of existing answers. Perhaps they could also comment or edit existing answers if they want to add something to them, or feel a correction is in order. As these ratings accumulate, students would get a better sense of what counts as a good or a bad answer (assuming the “wisdom of crowds” works its magic; the courses I have in mind for this sort of application have around 100 students, which seems like it would be enough).
3. In “asking mode,” the application would allow students to submit questions, which then would go into the pool and could be answered by other students in the class. (Administrators could edit the questions for clarity or reject questions that are not sufficiently related to the topic of the course). 
4. The application could even have something like the reputation management features of the StackExchange family of sites. Students who answer questions would gain reputation “points,” so long as their answers are rated relatively highly (fewer points for unrated or lower-rated answers); asking questions or rating answers would also get them some reputation points, though fewer. (For purely illustrative purposes, imagine that asking a question nets you 2 reputation points, so long as it is not rejected by the instructor, rating an answer nets you 1 point, and answering a question nets you between 5 and 10 points, depending on how highly rated your answers are). Perhaps these reputation points could be translated into actual grade points at the end of the term in accordance with some appropriate formula, though that would depend on the design of the course.

As I imagine it, an application like that would offer students extensive practice in writing, especially if combined with say, a requirement that they answer at least one question every week (in fact, this system could displace one of the traditional two essays we ask students to complete in many courses). It would also help them practice the entire material covered in the course: since the questions for the final exam would be drawn from the pool (or be very similar to some of the questions there) students who use the tool would be essentially studying for the final every time they use it. (“Quizzing” yourself is one of the most useful study techniques available, and the system would be designed so that you would get relatively quick, and eventually accurate, feedback on your answers, without the instructor having to grade hundreds of essays). And I (the instructor) would in turn get feedback on how well they understand the material, as well as on what aspects of the course they are having difficulty with. 

What do people think? What problems would you foresee emerging with a system like this?

As far as I can tell, nothing quite like that exists, though in some ways this would be like a private version of StackExchange, seeded with a pool of questions on some specific course topic and open only to people taking the course. Google Moderator has some useful features, and I’ve been thinking about using it as a study tool for students in my course this term, but it would not be fully integrated with the rest of the assessment in the way I would want. Or is there something out there that I’m missing? How difficult would it be to develop the system I've described above?

The Kantian Logic of Democratization: A Footnote on Levitsky and Way’s Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War

(A review of Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way’s Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War, Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Most political regimes in the world today allow for some form of electoral competition. As we saw in this post, towards the end of the cold war most stereotypical “dictatorships” (where competition by non-official parties was de jure forbidden and political control over the public sphere was nearly complete) began to give way to regimes in which control over the state depended in some way on winning real electoral contests. International pressure from Western powers, the breakdown of the Soviet Union, and popular protest all contributed to this outcome.

Yet elections, as anyone will tell you, do not equal democracy. Most of these “electoral” regimes – places like Zimbabwe, Russia, Romania, Armenia, Georgia, Ghana, Guyana, Kenya, Macedonia, Madagascar, Nicaragua, and many other countries - featured genuine political competition, with fiercely contested elections (unlike the meaningless “elections” held in many communist countries before the end of the cold war), organized oppositions which often held substantive legislative or subnational offices and could occasionally even win presidential or parliamentary elections (unlike in de jure one party states), and at least some islands of media independence (unlike the situation in many genuine dictatorships); but such competition was neither free nor fair by any reasonable standard. Incumbents persecuted or harassed their political opponents by legal or illegal means, intimidated or bought the media, packed supposedly “independent” judicial institutions with their supporters, used state resources without restraint for campaign purposes, and even occasionally fraudulently stole elections through good old-fashioned ballot stuffing and vote falsification in efforts to secure their position.

Consider a few examples. In Ukraine in the 1990s, “businesses that financed the opposition were routinely targeted by tax authorities” and in Ghana similarly “entrepreneurs who financed opposition parties “were blacklisted, denied government contracts, and [had] their businesses openly sabotaged”.” In Taiwan, the KMT used to outspend its opponents 50-1 in elections, and in Russia the Yeltsin campaign spent “between 30 and 150 times the amount permitted the opposition in 1996.” In the Peru of Fujimori, private television stations “signed “contracts” with the state intelligence service in which they received up to $1.5 million a month in exchange for limiting coverage of opposition parties.” (All quotes from Levitsky and Way, pp. 10-11). Everybody knows about the selective prosecution of potentially threatening “oligarchs” in Russia (like Mikhail Khodorkovsky) for tax reasons, not always without some justification (after all, they probably did not get rich by following the rules), but the tactic is common, though with local variations according to context (see, e.g., the Anwar Ibrahim case in Malaysia). Libel and defamation suits, especially, are the tool of choice for shutting down critical forms of media: according to Levitsky and Way, in the nineties newspapers in Croatia were sued for libel more than 230 times; in Cameroon at around the same time the use of defamation suits forced the closure of several newspapers. (We pass over in silence the use of libel or defamation suits in Cambodia, Belarus, Russia, and many other places as a way to intimidate opponents and silence critical voices). Sometimes media restrictions even get a decent veneer of justification, as when the Chavez government in Venezuela refused to renew the “over the air” license of RCTV, an opposition-leaning TV station, in 2007 for having supported the coup against his government in 2002. All of these actions are of course made easier if the government takes care to pack supposedly “impartial” or “independent” institutions (constitutional courts, electoral commissions, and so on) with government supporters (see, e.g., Venezuela and Malaysia). Finally, there are the more obvious tactics to suppress political competition, to be used when all else fails: beatings and imprisonment of opposition members by security forces (ask Morgan Tsvangirai and many other Zanu-PF opponents in Zimbabwe), old-fashioned ballot box stuffing, and vote falsification (in Serbia under Milosevic, Ukraine under Kuchma, and many other places).

Rather than thinking of these regimes as somehow imperfect or transitional democracies, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that we should see them as authoritarian regimes in their own right. Levitsky and Way call them “competitive authoritarian” regimes (a term they coined in a widely cited 2002 article), and tell the story of their emergence and the reasons why some of them managed to more fully democratize but others did not in a recent book (Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War, 2010). The book is a pretty impressive research achievement; the bibliography alone is 110 pages long, and it can serve as a good introduction to the post cold war politics of the 35 different countries they study.[1]

Now, I’d prefer to speak not so much of authoritarianism, democracy, and democratization (at this point at least) but of transformations in the prevalent varieties of political competition in the world. Modern “democracy,” on this view, is merely a system of normatively regulated oligopolistic political competition for state power, which does not sound particularly inspiring, except when we consider how hard it seems to be to achieve even that. In the post cold-war era full political monopolies have tended to decay into systems of unregulated political competition (“competitive authoritarian” or “party hegemonic” regimes) where rulers can often get away with the murder of their political opponents (literally and figuratively); only some of these systems of unregulated political competition turn into modern “democracies,” where rulers cannot so easily get away with murder of their political opponents. So the key question is: how do normatively unregulated systems of political competition turn into normatively regulated ones? How do we move from political systems where rulers “play dirty” by exploiting their control of the state (and oppositions do the same, if they win) to systems where they can’t get away with that, or at least not that easily? (The converse question is also important, though not the focus of Levitsky and Way’s book: why do systems of normatively regulated political competition sometimes break down, leading to regimes where rulers can get away with murder?). The problem is not so much about political turnover (ruling parties do occasionally yield power in competitive authoritarian regimes, even though this typically requires mass protest and other forms of extralegal action as well as winning elections) but about what can shift the kind of political competition that is enabled by a regime.

Levitsky and Way’s answer to that question is relentlessly structural – protest and opposition action plays little role. It is also reminiscent of an old argument in Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” (hence the title of this post; more on that later). In brief, they argue that neither Western pressure nor domestic opposition action by itself is capable of inducing democratization (at best, such international and domestic pressure can produce “electoralization,” not democratization: electoral turnover within normatively unregulated forms of political competition); it is only when domestic and international pressures for democracy are consistently amplified by social and economic links with Western democracies that elites in these regimes will consistently invest in credible ways of enforcing the norms of political competition (e.g., genuinely independent electoral commissions and judicial systems, a press that is not constantly pressured by the government du jour, etc.).

Let’s start with the obvious international pressures for democracy (or political competition, really). Since the end of the cold war most Western powers (at least the powers Levitsky and Way are interested in, the USA and the EU) have adopted an explicit “democratization” agenda, in which they have used various incentives to promote electoral regimes of varying credibility. The effectiveness of these pressures, however, varies with what Levitsky and Way call “leverage,” i.e., the influence Western governments are able to bring to bear on other regimes to make their politics more competitive. Western leverage is greatest for small, aid-dependent countries (like many African countries), and smaller for larger economies (like Mexico or Malaysia). It is larger when democratization is the primary issue on the foreign policy agenda of Western powers (as in many Latin American and Eastern European countries in the 1990s and early 2000s), and smaller when competing issues (like terrorism or other security concerns, especially since 2001) trump democratization (e.g., in the middle East, but also in places like Serbia and Croatia during the Balkan wars), or when other powers are able to provide support to authoritarian rulers (e.g., Russian support for Belarus in the early 1990s, and Chinese support for Burma or North Korea today). It is larger when governments can offer carrots as well as sticks, and smaller when only sticks are available (so the European Union had high democratizing leverage over those countries that were thought to be credible candidates for membership in the EU, but had less leverage over those countries which were unlikely to become members).

Levitsky and Way emphasize that Western pressure for democratization is very often quite superficial; Western powers are easily satisfied if the target government conducts more or less “clean” elections, and sometimes not even that. And they are not always especially consistent; only salient events, like elections, tend to engage them, whereas more ambiguous actions like politically motivated prosecutions or the abuse of state resources for election purposes can pass off uncriticized. (Incidentally, as this neat new paper by Simpser and Donno argues [gated], high quality election monitoring can have unintended bad consequences, pushing competitive authoritarian rulers to use practices that are generally bad for normatively regulating competition, like muzzling the media or packing the courts as a way of getting approval for “clean” elections on election day; too much focus on the quality of elections can thus worsen the quality of the surrounding institutions via strategic adaptation on the part of incumbent rulers).

Leverage is really helpful for democratization only when it is reinforced by what Levitsky and Way call linkage. By this Levitsky and Way mean the whole range of social and economic ties between Western democracies and competitive authoritarian regimes. These may include trade and migration links, the circulation of elites through American and European universities, various forms of communication across borders, and so on.  A high density of these ties helps produce consistent pressure for democratization (or rather, for enforcing norms of fair political competition) by amplifying the effect that even minor violations of the norms of political competition have on foreign and domestic publics, creating transnational constituencies for democracy, and providing incentives for elites in competitive authoritarian states to invest in the credibility of the institutions for monitoring violations of these norms. It is only when linkage is high that foreign pressure really becomes expensive for domestic elites in competitive authoritarian regimes, and not only in purely financial terms; when every suit your government brings against its political opponents produces an endless stream of NY Times articles, cancellations of visits from dignitaries, visa troubles, and in general international opprobrium from their peers and colleagues in Europe or the USA, adherence to the norms of political competition starts looking like a good deal.

Linkage gets you not only an official EU protest over the treatment of Yulia Tymoshenko, it gets you a headline like “Europe Protests Ukraine’s Treatment of Yulia Tymoshenko” in the NY Times, the promise of an investigation by the Ukrainian government, and Joachim Gauck cancelling his travel plans to Kiev. I’m sure similar treatment of a Malawian opposition politician would not have rated anything close to the same reaction. (And Ukraine, in Levitsky and Way’s scheme, only rates medium, not high, levels of linkage). Linkage creates lobbies that constantly bring violations of the norms of political competition to the attention of Western foreign ministries and legislatures, and it creates elite constituencies interested in preventing such violations in the first place; it makes Western pressure consistent and predictable. This is why it was so hard, for example, for Vladimir Meçiar to get away with relatively small violations of the norms of political competition when he briefly ruled Slovakia in the 1990s, and why it seems unlikely that Viktor Orban will be able to consolidate a truly competitive authoritarian regime in Hungary today. By contrast, when there are few regular ties between a competitive authoritarian regime and Western democracies, foreign pressure is erratic and constituencies for enforcing norms of political competition are weak, regardless of the level of leverage. High leverage and low linkage produces at best electoral turnover (i.e., it pushes incumbents out when they lose an election) without genuine transformations in the norms and institutions of political institutions (the opposition is likely to be just as bad as the government in its treatment of the press or its abuse of state resources), which is precisely what Levitsky and Way think happened in many African countries in the 1990s and early 2000s.

A parallel argument works for domestic sources of pressure, though I think here Levitsky and Way muddle the presentation of the issues a bit. They want to argue that domestic pressure is usually not that significant for either democratization or even electoral turnover (in contrast to some recent scholarship, which emphasizes the importance of protest and opposition strength). So they emphasize that what really matters is the strength of states and incumbent party organizations: when these are “strong,” protest doesn’t get you very far. Milosevic survived enormous levels of mobilization as long as his security forces held together, whereas in Madagascar or Haiti the state could barely control the territory, let alone prevent relatively small opposition forces from overthrowing the government (in Haiti, an “army” of about 200 rebels). But, as Levitsky and Way sometimes seem to acknowledge, the interesting question is not so much about turnover but about the fairness of the norms of competition; and here all the work is done by linkage, not state or party strength or opposition pressure. Only high levels of linkage, in their view, induce either victorious oppositions or incumbent governments to invest in credibly enforcing norms of political competition; in its absence victorious oppositions do not behave much better when in power than the governments they displace.

I also think that to speak of “state” vs. “opposition” strength is to reify the fluid character of these things. One can agree that oppositions win power in competitive authoritarian regimes where states and incumbent party organizations splinter (as in the so-called “color revolutions” in the early 2000s), i.e., transfer their loyalty to the opposition or remain neutral, but this hardly means that opposition efforts don’t matter much: successful opposition efforts are typically geared towards inducing such transfers of loyalty. The more interesting point Levitsky and Way make has to do with why some states and parties are so resilient in the face of opposition challenges – think of ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe, holding together in the face of generalized economic collapse and a well-organized opposition movement. Why? Levitsky and Way point to the role of non-material incentives: whereas parties and states that are held together only through patronage (the ability to distribute jobs and benefits) tend to break down in the face of opposition pressure or economic crisis, security forces and parties that were forged in war or insurgency (in Armenia or Zimbabwe, for example), or are otherwise held together by some salient identity in addition to patronage (communism, ethnicity, etc.), tend to require far more pressure, indeed generational change, to break down. (This also works for regimes that are not competitive authoritarian but simply monopolize political competition: Cuba, China, Vietnam, etc.).

There is something “Kantian” about the story Levitsky and Way tell in this book. In Perpetual Peace Kant argues that a “federation” of Republican peoples can spread “if a powerful and enlightened people” that makes itself into a Republic serves as “a fulcrum to the federation with other states so that they may adhere to it and thus secure freedom under the idea of the law of nations. By more and more such associations, the federation may be gradually extended.” This process does not involve a change in human nature; as Kant says elsewhere, “from the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” All it requires is the growing interdependence of peoples, which eventually come to acquire interests in the preservation of republican norms and the maintenance of peace, and which thus make these republican “cores” grow outwards, slowly. Similarly here: norms of fair political competition only spread and become powerful through a process that involves a growing level of interconnectedness across borders. The idea is simultaneously optimistic – electoralization plus growing connections to the core (“globalization”?) make the zone of normatively regulated political competition grow ever outwards – and pessimistic – regimes that are “far” from this core will have fragile and generally unregulated forms of political competition regardless (this suggests pessimism about, for example, Mali). (Though they do not make much of this, their story also suggests that policies that prevent the growth of linkage – like the “embargo” on Cuba – are about the worst possible policy to encourage democratization). Of course, this story also assumes that political competition in the core does not decay, perhaps through processes that rob it of its importance – think of the growth of the national security state in the USA, or the ways in which the great recession has affected most European democracies. But Levitsky and Way tell it pretty convincingly, with masses of qualitative evidence; I learned a lot from this book.

---

[1] Albania, Armenia, Belarus, Benin, Botswana, Cambodia, Cameroon, Croatia, Dominican Republic, Gabon, Georgia, Ghana, Guyana, Haiti, Kenya, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Mexico, Moldova, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Peru, Romania, Russia, Senegal, Serbia, Slovakia, Taiwan, Tanzania, Ukraine, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. All of these countries are classified as “Competitive Authoritarian” in 1990-1995; by 2008, two of them had become “fully authoritarian” (Belarus and Russia), and 14 had become “full democracies” by Levitsky and Way’s accounting. (One additional country, Nicaragua, first democratized and then became a competitive authoritarian regime again by 2008). Their cases do not include countries that became competitive authoritarian after 1995, or which were “party hegemonic” regimes in 1995 (too little competition; e.g., Singapore, in their view, though I suspect this case would be problematic for their theory) but might have become more open since then. They also do not include countries in which unelected offices are the most important ones, even if there is a significant electoral component (e.g., Morocco, Iran) or under foreign occupation. 

Charles Tilly's Poetry, and the Use of Models in the Social Sciences

In a 1991 review essay discussing several books by James C. Scott, the late Charles Tilly gets cranky with rationalistic explanations of behaviour, in verse ("somehow I find the point easier to make in verse"):

Rationalists  imagine  life  as lightning chess, 

each  individual respecting well-known  rules, 

instantly sketching alternative scenarios 

that start from possible  moves,  comparing 

their merits, and choosing  the wisest means 

to  maximize the  probability of  victory, 

only to see  that the  opponent  is playing 

the selfsame  game. In such  a  caricature, 

few of  us  can  recognize  the  improvisations 

of  our  cluttered lives. Are  we  inadequate? 

Let's find  a betaphore,  a better metaphore, 

for the  expedients  by which we  rush through 

the  traps and troubles of  an ordinary day. 

We  resemble  kayakers, knowing the  long stream 

in which we  ride, more  or  less,  but never sure 

when  its course will bend, speed  up,  narrow, 

or thrust us upon  rocks and splintered trees 

savage storms have hurled into  the streambed. 

In fast white water we  often  cannot  tell 

whether we will founder, flip over,  crash 

into  the  bank, or  hurtle against obstacles 

within the  current. When  the  river slows, 

we  become  sentient  driftwood, silently gliding 

at the  pace  of swans. Or we  dig our  paddles 

into  the  depth -  one  side,  then the  other 

in order to  propel  our own  course  past fish, 

past tributary brooks, past fields of  flowers. 

The  riverbanks exist, our boat  exists, we  exist, 

the  current's force  exists, the  boulders  exist, 

and yet we  improvise, combining these  elements 

in  quick inventions, and sometimes  run aground. 

Still, life  as a surging kayak ignores the  fact 

that makes the  race worth  running: the sociability 

that ties  us to  other  humans and their poor  proxies 

dogs,  cats,  and faded  photographs - in strands 

of  gold,  or silk, or steel,  or yet  barbed wire. 

Metaphor  gives way to  metonymy, for our true model 

could  be walking through crowds, alone  or  in pairs, 

silent  or  in  earnest  conversation, at once  scanning 

faces  and facades, feet  moving in two-four beats, 

signaling our  approach with glances  and swaggers, 

knifing between  oncomers  who seem  separate or separable. 

We  follow  those  pioneers  who  find an  open  path 

across the  traffic, follow  even  when  another path 

would  be shorter, or faster, or  easier on  the  feet. 

We  spot  a penny on  the sidewalk, a  gown  in  a window, 

or  a broken hydrant while  the  interior monologue  hums, 

the  exterior dialogue swirls, the  frantic tinkering 

of  every day continues. A  cameraman above shoots  film 

and charts human beings  as molecules  in a  channel, 

lawfully accelerating and slowing according to  density, 

flowing symmetrically around those  talkers who stop 

precisely in midpath, walkers miming viscous  fluids 

whose  laws they do  not  know. Meanwhile we  pedestrians

dream, improvise, weave, stumble,  curse, above  all, hope.  

("Domination, Resistance, Compliance... Discourse," Sociological Forum 6(3), p. 602). To which my first reaction was: WTF? Also: is this the only use of a poem to make an argument in sociology or political science? Are there others? (James C. Scott apparently promised a poem in "his next review" of Tilly's work - does anybody know if the promise was kept?).

I don't have a lot to say about the quality of the poem - let's say it's better than some, but it's no Dante. (I like the  "strands of  gold,  or silk, or steel,  or yet  barbed wire" image, for what it's worth - it brings to mind other "strands of gold" images in ancient poetry and nicely reframes them). As for the points Tilly is making - roughly, that most problems of everyday life are computationally intractable, so we "satisfice," and that our intrinsic sociality affects the patterns of social action that we observe - they strike me as unobjectionable in the abstract. But I get the feeling Tilly misunderstands the purpose of models in the social sciences. (I say this with some trepidation - it is far more likely that I am wrong about this than that Tilly misunderstood anything).

As Kevin A. Clarke and David M. Primo have argued in a recent book (and article) models are maps of phenomena. (David Schmidtz has made a similar claim with respect to theories of justice, and I think both draw on the work of the philosopher Ronald Giere). And the most accurate maps are not always the most useful, though it is important that maps be sufficiently similar in some relevant respect to the phenomenon they image for them to be useful. To this I would add that models are also toys ("toy models") and analogies ("metaphors" - Tilly alludes to this in the poem above). They enable certain kinds of rule-constrained "inferential play" (as toys) and disclose or conceal connections to other phenomena (as analogies or metaphors). (They are rhetoric too, qua metaphors, and hence serve persuasive purposes). But let's stick with the map imagery right now. Consider, to use an analogy Clarke and Primo point to, two maps of the London Underground:

From Knightsbridge.net

From A Welsh View

Is any of them more "correct"? They are certainly useful for different purposes: they provide different forms of orientation with respect to the tube, and each of them has characteristic failure modes when used for other purposes (to which they may not be well suited). The first map is useful for people who are actually using the train - it helps you visualize the transfers you will need to make, as well as the approximate number of stops left until your destination. But it is not a very good guide to actual distances, and it does not provide any information regarding the urban or natural context of the stations. The second map, while being a more accurate description of the physical organization of the underground and of the urban and topographical context of each station, is much less useful to commuters, who are likely to find it too "busy." Neither of them, it is worth stressing, is a perfectly "accurate" representation of the tube, though both are "similar" to it in some significant respect, enough so that we can speak of them as "representations" of the underground.

Similarly with social science models: economists and (some) political scientists tend to prefer more "abstracted" maps of particular social contexts (like the first map above), since they tend to use such maps for purposes that would not be served by the more apparently "accurate" models that may be favored by sociologists or anthropologists or (other) political scientists (like the second map below). The major methodological disputes in the social sciences thus tend to be (sometimes covertly) about the legitimacy of the purposes for which these maps are used (and only secondarily about whether any particular map does serve any given purpose, though that sort of debate does happen too).

In the poem above, for example, Tilly seems to be saying that the "chess" map of the rationalists (which would surely include economists) is not a good map for making sense of social action because we are not like that. (It is interesting that Tilly also seems to allude to the physicist's map, which depicts social action on the analogy with fluid dynamics, whose laws the fluid particles do not understand but which also makes no reference to individual psychologies, unlike the economist's map). But the "chess" model - the model of rational agents - is not generally a description of our psychology, though it does describe a psychology that is in some respects similar to our actual psychology and in other respects dissimilar. To the extent that rationalistic models of human life are useful (and they may not be, certainly not for every conceivable explanatory purpose) they are not useful because they describe our psychology accurately (though they will be more useful the more the similarities to our psychology in the model are relevant to the explanatory purposes to which it is put), but because they may provide insight into how human action can aggregate into larger patterns (e.g., how markets can sometimes produce efficient outcomes, or how conventions can be self-enforcing), or make certain kinds of predictions (e.g., about when certain norms break down), or identify potential puzzles about social action, or even simply to point to  long-term forces pushing social systems in certain directions rather than others. The resulting picture of human action will tend to look (to the anthropologist or the sociologist) like a stick-figure drawing, but that is precisely the point, at least so long as the stick-figure drawing tells us something about human action that is difficult to see in the hyperrealistic map of the anthropologist or the somewhat broader frame of the sociologist.

Social explanation at its best is the art of selecting the right map for orienting ourselves towards some question. In some cases, that map better be quite detailed; if I am interested in getting a real feel for how people distant from me live, or how they can be motivated to rebel against injustice, I am often better off consulting the anthropologists' map than the economist's map. But in other cases, the thickly descriptive map just gets in the way of the particular type of understanding I may be seeking. Even given a certain kind of question, however, some maps will still be better than others. (Some maps give bad directions, or have inconvenient lacunae). In economics, for example, it seems that maps with explicit microfoundations are worse for predictive or policy purposes than maps without such microfoundations, though "microfounded" maps are not thereby useless. In political science, detailed understanding of the politics of particular countries is not necessarily very useful for predictive purposes, though it is certainly very useful for many other purposes. And further problems arise, of course, because fights about methods are also fights about resources and status. The  theoretical pluralism of "multiple maps for multiple purposes" tends to break down when certain mapmakers are marginalized, or when there is a perception that particular kinds of maps are being used for purposes to which they are not well suited while serving to attack the status of makers of alternative maps. Somehow I find it easier to make this point in haiku:

maps are different

but mapmakers are prickly

and love their maps best

(Ok, not a very good haiku. I'm sure you can do better.) 

The Limits of Protest in Complex Societies

(I’ve been invited by the Society for Philosophy and Culture here at VUW to host a session of their Symposiumon “Protest” on 5 April. I have taken this as an opportunity to try to figure out what I think about protest in general, and to speculate wildly on a bunch of related themes. Also, a riot of mixed metaphors)

Dissatisfaction with the social and political world can take many forms – everything from resignation and escape to covert resistance and sabotage to full-blown collective action. It is only sometimes that such dissatisfaction expresses itself as what we have come to understand as protest: collective public action that aims for social or political change. The past year has seen a great global wave of protest movements, among which the Arab Uprisings and the Occupy Wall Street movement are only the most well known. But what can protest accomplish in highly complex societies? What are the limits of protest?

Protest takes many forms: the repertoire of protest is large, and is constantly being re-invented in local idioms and adjusted to local circumstances. Some protests make clear “demands” on specific authorities; others enact their dissatisfaction in more or less spectacular ways, or refuse to speak with one voice. Some forms of protest are meticulously planned and organized; others happen spontaneously, taking advantage of very temporary circumstances, and are as much of a surprise to participants as to the putative targets of the protest.  Protesters have pursued all sorts of goals, from the liberatory to the repressive. Yet all protest is ultimately a form of voice (in contradistinction to exit, in Albert Hirschmann’s famous scheme). And voice generally has two dimensions: an instrumental dimension, and an expressive or communicative dimension. (I am tempted to say: there are locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary dimensions to protest, but that would complicate things needlessly).

Instrumentally, protest is (roughly) a form of coordinated public action that uses diverse tactics to put pressure on specific institutions to address particular problems or issues in more or less specific ways. (We should understand the tactics of protest very broadly: "symbolic" action - including, for example, sharing a video or wearing certain clothing - can be part of the repertoire of protest.) From this perspective, the success of protest is measured by the degree to which it forces these institutions to respond to the problems or issues in question in accordance with the claims or values articulated by protesters. Protest can (sometimes) do this because it can signal changes in the support of members of political coalitions within particular institutions, or in the commitment of important actors to support these coalitions; it can turn the attention of powerful actors within institutions towards the problems raised by participants in protest; it can communicate information about potential solutions acceptable to influential coalition members; and in general can shift public discourse in ways that frame the concerns of the protesters in favourable ways.  These are not the only things that protests can do, but they are the main things that matter for the instrumental success of protest. (For example, protest can sometimes directly create or destroy institutions, but in general it is best to conceive of protest as acting on institutions rather than generally creating or destroying them. More on this point below.)

Consider the protests in Egypt that forced Mubarak from power. How did a relatively small proportion of the population occupying in a mostly nonviolent manner a variety of public spaces succeed in overthrowing a ruler who had been in power for over 30 years and was apparently backed by the USA and a professional military force? The protests did not threaten him physically; rather, they provided the opportunity for members of Mubarak’s coalition of influential supporters to reconsider their support of the old dictator. The very costly signal of commitment given by the crowds assembled for 17 days at Tahrir (and elsewhere), bringing the country to a halt, probably made the upper echelons of the army recalculate the costs and benefits of standing with Mubarak (and having to potentially direct soldiers of uncertain reliability to massacre the assembled crowds). The protests further focused the country's attention budget on a single, specific issue (who should be in control of the state) and framed the problem in a way that was favorable to protesters. Finally, the fact that the protestors had articulated a clear, unifying demand (Mubarak must go) made it possible in turn for the members of Mubarak’s coalition to respond in ways that would defuse the protest. Yet though this was no mean achievement, it is obvious that 17 days of concentrated mass action (with longer roots - there was a lot of preparatory work before those 17 days) are hardly sufficient to completely reconstitute the institutions of the Egyptian state, not just shifting elite coalitions. I do not mean to imply that many people believed that they would, though some of the rhetoric coming from participants and supporters of the Egyptian uprising sometimes gave that impression; only that we need to understand the fundamental limitations of protest as an instrument of social and political change. 

I can think of at least three important limitations. The first is perhaps the most obvious: though, as I noted above, the protest repertoire is large and protesters constantly innovate (the Egyptian protests succeeded in part because of innovative ways of deceiving the police, building up a movement, and identifying promising political opportunities), they are in a race with other actors who are not sitting tight. Develop a tactic that exploits a vulnerability in the political opportunity structure – like the “Occupy” tactic we have seen spread in the past year – and opponents on the other side of the issue will often enough develop something that, if it doesn't entirely counteract the effectiveness of your tactic, will certainly render it less effective. Revolutionaries are creative, but dictators can be too. Technology can give a temporary advantage to one side rather than another, but these advantages rarely last: Facebook and Twitter can help protesters organize, but they can also help opponents track protesters down and infiltrate them. Among the only generalizations that we can make with any certainty is that during the last century "nonviolent" tactics (of which there is an enormous variety) seem to have worked better (and produced better ultimate outcomes) than "violent" tactics to produce political change even in highly repressive contexts. (We are talking here about protest from a purely instrumental point of view; non-violent protest may well be normatively justified in other ways). But in the long run, I suspect the advantage remains resolutely with the defence: states and large institutions typically have resources that allow them, if nothing else, to wait you out or overpower you, as long as those at the top can learn from the mistakes of others.

To be sure, resourceful and creative protest organizers can create new opportunities, while lumbering institutions are sometimes slow to react. As in "regular" warfare, raw numbers and luck sometimes count for more than tactics. But there is no known protest method that can systematically grow a movement and be invulnerable to all counter-tactics, no “nuclear bomb” ensuring unconditional institutional surrender. In the long run, all protest tactics can be counteracted by some counter-tactic, and every counter-tactic in turn will be likely rendered ineffective eventually; hence the advantages of second-comers (Egypt) where protest movements can learn from first-comers who demonstrate the viability of particular protest methods (Tunisia), but the disadvantages of late-comers (Syria) where regimes have observed ways to foil  these tactics. More importantly, there is no protest tactic that can ultimately reconstitute the whole of society if only enough people joined in - no grand general strike that can put an end to the system once and for all. Great social movement protest campaigns are thus typically hard slogs, not lighting victories; they can last many years (indeed, the uprising in Egypt had roots in movements going back a decade or so, and many failed actions through which a movement was built and much was learned), and at the end of the day they only steer the great ship of state slowly in one direction rather than another. (The image of the ship of state is very old - as old as Plato in Western political thought - but it can still serve as a useful analogy for social and political change: if society is like a supertanker, significant political change requires immense energies to turn it around even a little, but too much pressure - civil war, etc. - occasionally breaks the ship and sinks it, spilling the toxic waste all over the place.)

The second important instrumental limitation of protest is also pretty obvious, and has to do with the scarcity of the most important resource that voice requires to be effective: time (or, more specifically, coordinated time). Protest works to focus attention; it concentrates the diffuse and uncoordinated dissatisfaction of many into a unified chorus, and amplifies this dissatisfaction in ways that attract the attention of publics that might share some of these dissatisfactions, and of political coalitions that can act to change the circumstances giving rise to them. But in the short run, the attention budget for all issues of interest is limited; attention can be shifted, not created, since we are a finite number of human beings who live only a finite amount of time. So protesting X means not protesting Y; and protesting X means not doing A, B, and C, at least for the duration of the protest. There is always some other pressing issue that loses out in the competition for attention, some other problem that could be plausibly argued to be more important: to protest is to make a claim about the proper priorities of an institution. (But how could we know?). 

Of course, sometimes X and Y can be subsumed under Z: instead of protesting the gender gap in pay or racism in some particular institution, people protest inequality in general, or capitalism, or the system. But insofar as the effectiveness of protest depends on its ability to shift support within political coalitions, it should be more effective when the "solution" to a problem depends on shifts within one or a few such coalitions (e.g., when it is a matter of of dumping a dictator) than when it depends on untangling multiple coalitions in complex networks of institutions (e.g., when the problem is to democratize an entire society). The best protest can do for more complex problems is to trigger shifts in public discourse ("put things on the agenda") that in turn may catalyze forms of deliberation and "social cognition" capable of generating useful ideas about how to unravel these knots (without resorting to the classic Gordian solution with its attendant violence). And here the communicative or expressive dimension of protest also plays a role: a protest brings forth a public and induces a conversation within it, even if the conversation often leads in directions neither planned nor approved by the protesters.


Here it is also worth noting a difference between protests and institutions. Institutions as it were "store" coordinated action and constantly regenerate it as they use it for specific purposes (but they can squander it if they use it for purposes for which they are not well designed); a protest, by contrast, is always in danger of exhausting its fuel supply. A protest discharges its forces like a battery or perhaps a capacitor; an institution is more like a generator, capable of powering complex circuits of action for longer periods of time to act on complex problems. This is why it makes sense that protests are often directed at institutions, but also why their effects can be so ephemeral. Long protest campaigns can at best transform movements into institutions, continually regenerating the possibility of protest as coordinated action (consider classic human rights institutions like Amnesty International). But instrumentally effective protests will normally tend to simplify and narrow the focus of collective action – to paper over differences of opinion and interest among participants and focus on specific, clearly articulable and above all simple messages that economize on the "coordination energies" necessary to keep the movement together, like the demand that Mubarak step aside; and they will become less effective as the problems they tackle increase in complexity (involving more tangled coalitions of people) and their potential solutions impact participants in more complicated ways. Local protests about issues that are of concrete significance to participants and where key political coalitions are well known will thus tend to be more effective than protests about global, diffuse and complex problems where it is not even clear which political coalitions should be the targets of action (e.g., protests about global warming). 


This is connected to the third important limitation of protest. Effective protest tends to run on simple moral narratives, because human beings tend to be energized to act collectively by simple moral narratives, and protests that do not articulate simple moral narratives will ceteris paribus mobilize fewer people; but the world does not run on simple moral narratives (especially not modern complex societies with many only vaguely visible and poorly understood interdependencies). Protest is often very effective for making dictators leave power, but it is only marginally useful for ensuring that a constitution makes sense, and it is much easier to coordinate large numbers of people to do something about "bad guys" than to coordinate them in ways that will make a lasting difference to complex problems. (There is probably an evolutionary reason for this). Consider the example of the Kony #2012 video: a simplistic moral narrative was able to mobilize millions of people in symbolic solidarity against a bad guy (and perhaps shift the agenda within powerful institutions), but it is highly unlikely that such action will produce lasting and significant positive change where it matters most (though in the best case it may get people involved with local groups in Northern Uganda, and perhaps to learn more about complex problems). 

None of this is to say that because protest has limits, it should not be used. Far from it! Social change of any kind is hard; but protest, as a form of voice, is only one potential method of change. (Various forms of exit are also important; and the parallel building of institutions - starting a new society in place of the old - is also a time-honored way of acting in the world). Moreover, protest should not be viewed only in instrumental terms. Protest at its best opens up public spaces of appearance, where people can experience the joy of acting together, as Hannah Arendt put it. It is expressive as well as instrumental, and there is nothing wrong with that: protest can be a tactic and a party.

[Update 4/6/2012: minor typo fixes]

[Update 2, 4/7/2012: fixed errant pronouns, link]