More Rawlsian Thought Experiments: An Inverse Income Voting System

(For some unknown reason, re-reading Rawls stimulates my weird idea generator. Another politically impossible proposal here, presented as a thought experiment)

[Update 25 August 2012: see the more detailed discussion of this proposal here]

Thinking about the difference principle today, it occurred to me that most of the discussion on the topic tends to be overly focused on the economic institutions that would ensure that the least advantaged group in society would fare best. Yet the difference principle is not restricted in its application to economic inequalities; in fact, the principle specifies that inequalities of authority and political power must also be justified to the worst off group in society: “[t]he second principle applies, in the first approximation, to the distribution of income and wealth and to the design of institutions that make use of differences in authority and responsibility” (§11, p. 53, emphasis mine). Is a standard democratic system – with its panoply of elections, constitutional protections, and so on –justified in those terms? Rawls seems to assume so, even though standard democratic institutions entail clear inequalities in authority and responsibility which are not obviously to the maximum benefit of the worst off.

Moreover, to the extent that Rawls discusses the connection between political and economic inequalities, he tends to think of the direction of causation as going from economics to politics. Unjustifiable political inequalities in authority and responsibility (as, for example, when the rich have undue influence in the political process) would be remedied, in his view, once objectionable economic inequalities are taken care of, which seems reasonable enough; after all, he notes, such inequalities are correlated with one another (§16, p. 83). With low levels of economic inequality, widely dispersed ownership of the means of production, and a healthy dose of public campaign finance, Rawls argues, whatever differences in authority and responsibility political institutions would still produce would be justifiable to the least advantaged (cf. §13, p. 71, §36, p. 198).

But why wait until such inequalities are fully remedied? Imagine that instead of the standard, one person, one vote system, we had a voting system where the poorest person with any income got 1 vote, the person with twice the income of the poorest person got ½ a vote, and a person with 20,000 times the income of the poorest person got 1/20,000^th of a vote. “Income” here includes any government transfers; people with no income would have 1 vote, just as the poorest people with any income. The specific value of the vote would be linked to the income records on file with the national tax agency, and no one could vote who was not linked in some way to the tax system. We might use broad categories instead of specific incomes – say, people making less than $10,000 a year get one vote, people making up to $20,000 half a vote, and so on; and of course we might decide that a different weighting of votes is required. [Update: it occurs to me that using the median income would be easier to set up. For example, voters below the median income each get one vote, voters between the median and twice the median get half, and so on.] Whatever the case, poorer people would have more formal influence than richer people.

In a fully income-equal society, everyone would have 1 vote; in an extremely unequal society, the very poorest would have the most political influence. High-flying hedge fund managers with extremely high incomes likely would have an infinitesimal vote, though they would of course still have many means of exercising influence. After all, elections cost money, and the rich are more able to run for election and lobby legislators. But the idea is that the least advantaged groups would have compensating advantages, as politicians would have to cater to the greatest mass of votes; yet these advantages would diminish as transfer payments increased, or society became more equal. Note also that the specific value of a person’s vote would fluctuate throughout their lifetime, being very high when the person is very young or very old, and very low during their peak earning years. (The system might work kind of like an automatic means test for politically distributed benefits, baked right into the political structure).

Would there be anything wrong with this system, from a Rawlsian point of view? Everyone can still vote and run for office, so the first principle of Rawls’ theory - the principle guaranteeing the equal basic liberties - is not overtly violated; and it seems to me that the inequalities of authority and responsibility produced by this system are more clearly justifiable to the worst off group in society than the inequalities produced by a standard democratic system. For one thing, it provides the least advantaged in society with the fair value of their political liberties in a direct, unmediated way that complicated systems of campaign finance cannot match. Moreover, a political system along these lines bypasses the theoretical discussion about which economic system would best produce outcomes in conformity with the difference principle; different proposals can be tried, and if they worsened the lot of the least advantaged, the poor would gradually acquire sufficient political clout to overturn them. (In theory, this is compatible with pure libertarian laissez faire, so long as such laissez faire actually does improve the condition of the least advantaged group).

Like any oddball proposal, this is very likely a bad idea. (I can imagine all kinds of bad incentives to underreport income, for example, and I’m not sure it would fit with the well-entrenched idea that having an equal voice is a mark of respect of equal citizenship.) But I’m curious: are there specifically Rawlsian grounds to reject this sort of system? (I'm sure there are other grounds). And what are the obvious problems I’ve missed in here? Does this lead to a sustainable politico-economic equilibrium, or simply to an intensification of class conflict?

[Update 2, 20 August 2012: fixed some minor typos. Also thought of some further refinements. Suppose we divide the income distribution into N equal quantiles. The voters in the lowest class have one vote, and the voters in the highest class have (1/(N^x)) fractional vote, where x is a parameter determining how extreme the disenfranchisement of the rich is. When x=0 everyone has one vote, as today; when x=1, the disenfranchisement is strictly proportional to class position, so the each person in the nth quantile has 1/n votes; but we could set x between 0 and 1, leading to a range of different weightings of formal influence for the poorest depending both on the number of "classes" and on the extent of disenfranchisement with income. With few classes and low x, the system is close to our own; with many classes and large x, there is a very steep disenfranchisement curve. What values of these parameters would be chosen behind the veil of ignorance?]

Musical Chairs, Veto Constituencies, Accountability Juries, and other Random Ideas: Further Thoughts on Randomizing Electoral Constituencies

(Attention conservation notice: some more thoughts on this proposal, which gained a modest amount of internet attention in the last couple of days – see Dylan Matthews here, Matt Yglesias here, and Evan Soltas here).

Having slept on it and seen a few responses, I am not yet convinced that the proposal I sketched in the post below would actually be a bad idea (though it probably is!). The basic idea is that the electoral constituency or electorate – the group of people who “selects” the legislator – should be separated from the accountability constituency or electorate – the group of people who “disciplines” the legislator¹ – in such a way that neither the legislator nor the electors would know in advance who the latter group would be. Such a system would (in theory) mimic some of the structural features of a Rawlsian “veil of ignorance,” so that legislators could not tailor their appeal to any particular group of people but are instead incentivized to speak and act in ways that can be publicly justified to any group in society. But there are a variety of ways of accomplishing this, as I hinted at in the original post. Some of these are very close to current practice; others are not so close. I want to consider here in detail a few of these variations:

1. “Musical chairs” representation. This is the simplest form of the proposal. (My original idea was in fact closer to option 2 below, “random veto constituencies,” though it seems to have been quickly simplified into this form, which is at any rate simpler and more elegant). Under musical chairs representation, non-incumbent candidates can run in any constituency they choose, but incumbent candidates running for re-election are randomly assigned a constituency shortly before the election date (say, a month or so earlier). The random constituency can be their original electoral constituency (let’s call this the “initial” constituency). We do not need to imagine that the incumbent draws any constituency with equal probability; a system where the incumbent has a higher probability of drawing his/her initial constituency could strengthen the incentive to do the kinds of constituent service that a lot of people seem to find valuable.
   
   More formally, let’s say there are N constituencies or districts in the system; come election time, incumbents can draw their own initial constituency with probability p, where p > 1/N, and any other constituency with probability (1-p)/(N-1). (More complicated assignments of weights are of course possible). When p = 1, the system works identically to current practice – the incumbent always draws his own constituency; when p = 1/N, the incumbent can draw any constituency with equal probability. We might thus think of p as a measure of “localism” in the system. The lower p, the more the re-election seeking politician will need to act in ways that can be publicly justified to any constituency in the country, but he will of course have less incentive to do constituency service or to represent his locality. p can also serve as a measure of incumbent advantage; the higher p, the higher the advantage, all other things equal.
   
   What might be the benefits of a system where p < 1? By facing the possibility of having to compete for re-election in a constituency other than the one where he has been originally elected, a politician would of course need to avoid acting in ways that can incur disapproval beyond his constituency. But he would still have incentives to represent his constituency, pace Dylan Matthews. For one thing, the chance of drawing his initial constituency is nonzero, and a reputation for serving the constituency one is representing would still be a valuable asset in a race in a different district. Indeed, they might still be able to too easily promise to extract rents on behalf of local interests, as Evan Soltas notes, though I imagine it would be harder to promise this credibly when they don’t know which district they would be representing in the next election. At any rate, promises of local rents aren’t the only criterion by which electorates judge the suitability of candidates, and this system would weaken the appeal of these promises. Moreover, while a district or electorate could insist on electing candidates with purely local appeal, these would, I suspect, tend to be one-term wonders, as would “extreme” candidates. Assuming the distribution of voter preferences is not itself polarized for other reasons, the system would tend to moderate polarization over time as candidates strategically target the “modal” constituency to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the strength of their convictions and their level of risk aversion.
   
   Elections might nevertheless become more competitive under this system, since p < 1 implies a lower level of incumbent advantage, which might be a good thing (more competitive elections tend to be associated with more public goods provision, though this varies depending on the kind of competition). More importantly, as Matt Yglesias notes, the forms of public justification themselves would shift. An incumbent US congressman who defended agricultural subsidies in Iowa during his term, for example, would need to do so in terms that would resist potential sceptical examination by an electorate in New York. And one should not discount the satisfaction electors would get from giving a sound thumping to a politician they find particularly obnoxious but would not, under current practices, normally be able to defeat. (Soltas’ objection that it “weakens accountability structures to have your performance judged by someone else than whoever installed you” is I think overstated; electors judging the performance of a non-local candidate can always opt for the local challenger, or judge the non-local candidate on the basis of his/her record on issues or national significance, as they often seem to do anyway, and as is perhaps appropriate for candidates to a national legislature). Nevertheless, it is probably safe to say that in the aggregate this system would not produce large shifts in policy from the status quo; after all, many mixed-member proportional systems (New Zealand!) try to achieve similar balances of “national” and “local” concerns, even if they use somewhat different mechanisms and have somewhat different effects on the forms of public justification.


2. Random veto constituencies. My original proposal tried to preserve local representation in a slightly different way. Perhaps the simplest form of it is the following: non-incumbent candidates are elected according to the vote totals in the constituency they are running, but incumbent candidates are subject to a veto in a randomly selected constituency (assigned shortly before the election). In essence, the challenger must win only in the local constituency, but the incumbent must win in both the local and the randomly selected constituency. If the incumbent loses in the randomly assigned constituency but wins in the local constituency, the challenger takes power; hence the idea of a veto. The system could make allowance for extremely popular incumbents, so that getting, say, 60% of the vote in their local constituency means that they only have to get 40% of the vote in their randomly-assigned constituency, and getting 80% of the vote in the local constituency means they only have to get 20% of the vote in the randomly assigned constituency. (Again, the chances of drawing a particular constituency could be suitably weighted to favour nearby constituencies, for example).
   
   It seems to me that this system would have most of the advantages of the previous one while preserving the possibility of strongly-rooted local representation. Races remain local, but politicians cannot act in ways that have a strong probability of being disapproved of elsewhere in the country; and incumbent advantage is strongly diminished. Nevertheless, it seems possible that a system of vetoes could create a lot of ill-will; I’m sure people in say, rural South Carolina, would not relish having their choices of representatives vetoed by people in San Francisco or vice-versa. So it does not seem politically sustainable in the long run, even if it would enable the schadenfreude of spectators to see politicians having to justify themselves to hostile electorates beyond their home turf (a benefit that is not to be underestimated; see Jeffrey Edward Green’s The Eyes of the People for a full academic defence).


3. Accountability juries. One problem with the proposals above is that they favour geographical units of representation at the expense of other possibilities. While randomization of such geographical units may have some benefits, certain interests are never going to be well represented on that basis. One could, however, modify the idea of veto constituencies so that the veto would be exercised by juries selected on the basis of some non-geographical criterion. For example, imagine that before each election, we drew five juries of 500 people each selected on the basis of income – the first jury being composed of 500 people randomly selected from the first income quintile, the second from the second, and so on. Each incumbent candidate is then randomly assigned, shortly before the election, to make his/her case before one of these juries; you could be assigned to speak before a jury of the poor, or before a jury of the rich, but you would not know which one in advance. We could have weeklong, televised trials, perhaps presided over by special investigating magistrates, in an echo of the “audits” Ancient Athens subjected its officials to at the end of their terms. The jury could then vote (perhaps with some suitable supermajority requirement) on whether or not the incumbent should be allowed to run for re-election (in that election; no permanent disqualification is envisioned). The possibilities here are, of course, much more various: how we would organize such juries, run the trials, and so on would be crucial questions. I suspect a system like this would shift policy more radically, but I like the idea of having representatives having to justify themselves to randomly selected constituencies that do not have a geographical basis.

Anyway, I’m sure there are huge problems with all of these proposals, which I don’t expect to be political reality any time soon; this is more a thought experiment than anything else. I would nevertheless be interested to hear what some of these problems are, or what alternatives people can come up with.

Rawlsian Legislatures: A Modest Proposal

(Attention conservation notice: various harebrained schemes I cooked up preparing for a seminar on Rawls that appear to structurally mimic ideas about a “veil of ignorance.” Of purely theoretical interest.)

[Update 13 August: see also my further thoughts on these proposals here].

John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice famously introduced the idea of an “original position,” a hypothetical situation in which citizens would come together behind a “veil of ignorance” to select principles of justice that can regulate their common life. There are different ways of understanding the OP, but one useful way – which Rawls himself favoured later in life – is to imagine that the “contracting parties” in the original position are not the members of society themselves, but rather their representatives. Each of these representatives – modelled as rational negotiators – is then supposed to bargain for the best possible “deal” acceptable to the citizens they represent on the terms of cooperation in society, but without knowing which specific set of citizens they represent. This is supposed to ensure that the negotiating parties will only agree on principles that would be acceptable to all citizens as “free and equal.”  Leif Wenar in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes the basic point well:

The original position is a thought experiment: an imaginary situation in which each real citizen has a representative, and all of these representatives come to an agreement on which principles of justice should order the political institutions of the real citizens. Were actual citizens to get together in real time to try to agree to principles of justice for their society the bargaining among them would be influenced by all sorts of factors irrelevant to justice, such as who could appear most threatening or who could hold out longest. The original position abstracts from all such irrelevant factors. In effect the original position is a situation in which each citizen is represented as only a free and equal citizen, as wanting only what free and equal citizens want, and as trying to agree to principles for the basic structure while situated fairly with respect to other citizens. For example citizens' basic equality is modeled in the original position by imagining that the parties who represent real citizens are symmetrically situated: no citizen's representative is able to threaten any other citizen's representative, or to hold out longer for a better deal.

The most striking feature of the original position is the veil of ignorance, which prevents other arbitrary facts about citizens from influencing the agreement among their representatives. As we have seen, Rawls holds that the fact that a citizen is for example of a certain race, class, and gender is no reason for social institutions to favor or disfavor him. Each party in the original position is therefore deprived of knowledge of the race, class, and gender of the real citizen they represent. In fact the veil of ignorance deprives the parties, Rawls says, of all facts about citizens that are irrelevant to the choice of principles of justice: not only their race, class, and gender but also their age, natural endowments, and more. Moreover the veil of ignorance also screens out specific information about the citizens' society so as to get a clearer view of the permanent features of a just social system.

In Rawls’ view, the veil of ignorance can also play a role in the selection and evaluation of constitutions and laws. While the representatives of the citizens in the OP are supposed to select principles of justice in complete ignorance of the citizens’ class, gender, plan of life, and even the general features of their society, the veil can be “lifted” gradually to allow the representatives to agree on how these principles apply to more concrete institutions. This is what Rawls calls the “four-stage sequence”:

After agreeing on the two principles and a principle of just savings, the parties then proceed further through the four-stage sequence, tailoring these general principles to the particular conditions of the society of the citizens they represent. The veil of ignorance that screens out information about society's general features is gradually thinned, and the parties use the new information to decide on progressively more determinate applications of the two principles.

At the second stage the parties are given more information about the society's political culture and economic development, and take on the task of crafting a constitution that realizes the two principles. At the third stage the parties learn still more about the details of the society, and agree to specific laws and policies that realize the two principles within the constitutional framework decided at the second stage. At the final stage the parties have full information about the society, and reason as judges and administrators to apply the previously-agreed laws and policies to particular cases. When the four stages are complete the principles of justice as fairness are fully articulated for the society's political life.

Re-reading Rawls recently while preparing to teach a class, it struck me that it would be possible to mimic some of the structural features of this interpretation of the veil of ignorance in actual legislatures.

The simplest way to do this, it seems to me, would be to divorce electoral constituencies from accountability constituencies. Suppose legislators are elected in a relatively large number of small single-member constituencies (I’m thinking of a small place like New Zealand, where electorates are small, but one could imagine more complex schemes elsewhere). They go to a Parliament or Congress and negotiate laws as best as they can. At the end of their term, however, they must justify themselves to a randomly allocated constituency (not necessarily the one in which they were elected), which decides whether or not they can run for re-election. (A variant: the accountability constituency [also?] has the power to impose a financial penalty on the legislator if it finds the justifications for its actions lacking). The trick here is that the constituency that can hold the legislator accountable is not known in advance, either to the electors or to the elected MPs. If Rawls is correct, this should encourage elected legislators to negotiate “fair” legislative proposals –legislative proposals that are broadly acceptable to all in society.

An example may help. Imagine the electors for Wellington Central elect Grant Robertson their MP. At the end of his term, the Electoral Commission randomly assigns him a different constituency. Say he draws Auckland central, for example. Robertson then has to go to Auckland Central to defend his record in parliament; let’s say he’s given one month to make his case. Auckland Central then holds an “up or down” vote deciding whether or not he can run in the next election. If he’s voted down, he cannot run in that electoral period (though he may run in later periods – no permanent disqualification is envisioned here); otherwise, he gets to run again, if he so wishes, in Wellington Central.

One can easily imagine all kinds of problems with this system. (Consider the possibilities for strategic voting; and I’m sure the pros could come up with all kinds of ways of gaming this system). But I’m having way too much fun thinking about it to worry about these inconveniences right now. For example, imagine accountability constituencies that are functional or income-based rather than geographical. Legislators could be elected in standard geographical constituencies, but then randomly assigned to income-defined constituencies to make their case for being allowed to run for re-election. We might imagine that large “juries” of people from specific income quantiles could be empanelled, and MPs randomly assigned, at the end of their terms, to make the case for their policies to one of these juries in week-long trials. The juries then decide whether or not the MP is to be allowed to run again. Or imagine we got rid entirely of electoral constituencies. Instead, people would vote on the abstract composition of the legislature (expressing their preferences not only about the party composition of the legislature, as in closed list PR systems, but perhaps also their preferences about the level of education or income legislators must have, what percentage of legislators must be women, of a particular race, etc.). Political parties are then tasked to fill a legislature with these characteristics, but the legislators must then, at the end of their term, justify themselves to a randomly assigned constituency, which has the power to impose fines (and perhaps to award prizes).

Ok, so what’s the benefit of this, you may ask? If Rawls is correct, the fact that legislators would not know in advance to whom in society they would be held accountable would mean that they would be inclined to act in ways that are “publically justifiable” to all, including the “least advantaged.” What do people think?

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.

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[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.