“Ten thousand melodies cannot express our boundless hot love for you”: the Cult of Personality in Mao’s China

(6,500 words on Daniel Leese’s fascinating book Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China's Cultural Revolution [Cambridge University Press, 2011], by someone who is no expert on Chinese history, but has lots of non-peer-reviewed theories about cults of personality. Thanks to Andrew Ivory for the book recommendation, and to my colleague Jason Young for conversation on the topic and help with the Chinese characters.)

Longtime readers of this blog know I am fascinated by the phenomenon of cults of personality. (Click here for some of my previous posts on the subject). In fact, I’m working on a paper on the subject and gathering data on the prevalence of cults and cult-like phenomena in the 20^th century, so I was of course delighted to hear about this book. It did not disappoint: Leese’s book is everything a scholarly monograph should be. It is deeply learned, thoroughly researched, and well written; and the story it tells is fascinating. Not the least of its merits, from my perspective, is that it provides supporting evidence for some of my own pet ideas about cults of personality, though it also has led me to rethink and nuance others.

The idea of a “cult of personality” is in some ways a peculiarly modern one. Practices of “leader worship” were of course not unknown in the past; one might almost say that they were basically the default way in which peoples related to leaders in “pre-modern” state societies, from the recognition of Egyptian Pharaohs as god-kings to emperor worship in China, and from the cults of Hellenistic monarchs and Roman emperors to the sacralisation of monarchs in Medieval Europe. But such cults could only become a theoretical and political problem in the context of societies which claimed to be socially or politically egalitarian, as most societies do today; it is only against a background expectation of relative equality that the practice of leader worship appears as an aberration, in need of special justification or explanation. And this problem was especially acute in communist societies, where even formal terms of address had been consciously engineered to express the idea of equality (“comrade”), yet nevertheless appeared to be embarrassingly plagued by forms of leader worship.

It is thus no accident that the term itself (“cult of personality”) came into wide circulation at around the time of Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” of 1956, which condemned Stalin’s “cult of the individual.” The pattern is unmistakable; we can see it, for example, in the books indexed by Google in a variety of languages. So, for example, in English:

Figure 1: Frequency of "Cult of Personality" and related terms in the English corpus of books in Google

Or, more emphatically, in Russian:

Figure 2: Frequency of "Cult of Personality" and related terms in the Russian corpus of books in Google

In Chinese the pattern is somewhat more muddled (there are some weird artifacts if we look at mentions of the term before 1940), perhaps because the Google corpus is less reliable for Chinese texts, and perhaps because of the simplification of the Chinese script that was happening around the 1950s makes it difficult for us to capture all the mentions of “cult of personality” in books published before and around the mid-20^th century. Yet the basic shape of the usage curve is still there, showing the impact of Khrushchev’s speech, though it decays faster and rebounds more than in English or Russian, for reasons that are not immediately clear:

Figure 3: Frequency of "Cult of Personality" in the simplified Chinese corpus of books in Google

Leese’s book takes the Chinese response to Khrushchev’s speech as the starting point for its story. The speech could not but be seen by Chinese leaders as a poke in the eye, especially Mao’s, whose cult bore some resemblance to Stalin’s, even if it had diminished in intensity in 1956 relative to the late 40s. (In fact, the Chinese Communist Party had generally prevented excessive open flattery of Mao during the early years of the People’s Republic, with his consent; later “excesses” lay in the future). And by forcing them to respond and to justify or change their practices, the speech also threatened to produce shifts in power within the CCP. Nevertheless, as we shall see, the speech ended up providing an unexpected impetus to the further development of the Mao cult.

Leese argues that the cult first emerged during the later years of the Chinese civil war as a mobilizing device. It was consciously promoted by the top leadership of the CCP (not just Mao) in reaction to the growing cult of Chiang Kai-shek on the Guomindang side, and seen even by people who had doubts about overly personalizing Marxism as a way to unify the party against their enemies. From this point of view, the cult appeared as a form of what Leese calls “branding” (not my preferred term); and it was specifically nurtured within the party through the practice of “group study” of party history, which presented a mythical narrative of the Long March under Mao’s “correct” leadership. At this stage the cult thus served both to marginalize certain factions (e.g., the group of Soviet-trained cadres around Wang Ming, who had Stalin’s favour) and to motivate party and army members in the continuing struggle with KMT forces; to the extent that the cult also mobilized non-party members, it would have done so mainly through general propaganda campaigns, an arena where it had to compete with similar publicity by the KMT, at least in contested “white” areas. With the victory of the CCP these mobilizing and unifying functions of the cult became less important, though the party of course continued to control the public display of Mao’s image, and the cult could still be used as one of the instruments of centralization employed by the CCP (e.g., against Gao Gang in 1953-54, who developed his own regional cult in China’s north-east and was eventually purged).

This is not to say that there was no demand “from below” for cult practices. Since the CCP was in part a huge hierarchical patronage machine with few formal mechanisms for promotion, signalling loyalty through praise – sending congratulatory telegrams to Mao, for example, even when these were discouraged by the CCP leadership – was a useful means of career maintenance and even advancement. (You want to be the one local committee that does not send congratulatory telegrams? How is that going to look?). But praise of the top leaders was tempered both by the fact that it was embedded in a larger discourse where Stalin, not Mao, was the pre-eminent leader of the communist world, and by the fact that the top leadership of the party seems to have consciously discouraged extreme praise, perhaps because it feared (not unreasonably, as it turns out) concentrating power in Mao’s hands. The cult thus appears here not only as a mobilization device pushed from the top, but as the unintended consequence of loyalty signalling by lower levels of the party, which tended to keep the overall level of flattery relatively high, and inflationary pressures steady; and it was clearly fuelled, though not fully explained, by the undoubtedly high popularity of the party and the prestige of Mao as its leader during the early 1950s.

The death of Stalin, Khrushchev’s speech, and other political developments disrupted this initial equilibrium, in which the expression of loyalty to Mao had not yet crowded out all other signals of loyalty to the party and the revolution, and had not yet colonized public space to the extent to which it did during the Cultural Revolution. For one thing, the death of Stalin had the effect of displacing foreign leaders from their pre-eminent position in public displays, leaving Mao to monopolize an ever larger and more central share of public space. Leese’s book describes for example the faintly comical difficulties experienced by local cadres when trying to organize parades and other festivities after 1953; the question of whose portraits and what slogans to display, and in what order, was evidently of great importance to them (a faux pas could be harmful to one’s career prospects, I suppose), and yet directives from the Centre became ever more confusing. Indeed, a directive of April 1956 essentially declared that no guidance would be provided to local party committees regarding whose portraits to display and in what order during public events. Eventually the confusion seems to have been resolved in the obvious way: portraits of foreign leaders were no longer handed out to marching crowds at official events.

The effects of Khrushchev’s speech on the cult were at first more negative. On the one hand, the CCP’s initial response to it fed into a process of liberalization of the public sphere which had begun somewhat earlier. (Leese interprets the directive relaxing control over the display of symbols and portraits as part of this process). Criticism of the cult and other forms of “dogmatism” was aired in high places, and support for collective leadership expressed. At any rate, the party was (with good reason) confident in its popularity at this time, and prepared to relax its control over the public sphere. Leese thus takes the “Hundred Flowers” campaign of 1957 to be a (botched) attempt at genuine liberalization, though Mao himself later described it as a trap, a way to “lure snakes out of their holes.” As time went on, however, both Mao and groups within the party came to think that liberalization had gone too far: cadres became demoralized and confused (which contradictions were good and which were bad? Why had so many bad things happened since Khrushchev denounced Stalin?), critics started attacking the party and even Mao directly, and Mao’s prestige suffered:

The failure of the rectification campaign [the “Hundred Flowers” campaign] led to a self-generated crisis of faith in ... the CCP’s governance, and the responsibility was clearly to be placed on Mao. He thus faced two “credibility gaps”: The campaign had tarnished his image as omniscient helmsman of the Chinese Revolution among party members, and the campaign’s indecisive enactment led non-party members to question his authority over the CCP (p. 63).

(More worrying, perhaps, was the fact that the failed rectification campaign had opened the doors to criticism of Mao by senior party figures like Peng Zhen and Liu Shaoqi, though Leese does not make much of this.) At any rate, the problems with the rectification campaign prompted Mao to take greater control over the propaganda apparatus and to sharpen the distinction between “good” and “bad” criticism in a way that left Mao more or less in control of determining which views fell into which category. By early 1958, at the beginning of the Great Leap Forward, Mao had even formulated a distinction between a “correct” cult of personality (indicated by the term geren chongbai 个人 崇拜) and an “incorrect” cult (indicated eventually by the term geren mixin 个人 迷信). The distinction sidestepped the theoretical problem raised by Khrushchev’s criticism of cults by redefining “good” cults as a worship of “truth,” but it was transparently driven by Mao’s understanding of the cult “as an extrabureaucratic source of power that did not rely on its recognition within the party elite” (p. 69). In other words, if there had to be a cult, Mao indicated that it better be his as the representative of “truth,” or at least of those people he could approve of, regardless of party views. As Mao said, quoting Lenin, “it is better for me to be a dictator than it is for you.” (Much later, Mao told Edgar Snow that Khrushchev’s failure to develop a cult had led to his eventual purge by Politburo members, which shows that he thought of the cult as a useful device to prevent challenges to his position from within the party). Moreover, the cult seemed to Mao a good instrument for promoting a “lively, emotional climate” that would motivate people to take a “great leap forward” toward communism, just as the cult had served to motivate party members and soldiers during their struggles against the KMT.

The articulation of the distinction between a “correct” and an “incorrect” cult, however, opened the door to flattery hyper-inflation. As Leese notes elsewhere:

... with the validation of a correct cult it was not necessary any more to ‘praise the king the whole time, but, so to say, without explicit praises’, as Paul Pellisson, court historian of Louis XIV, once wrote. During the early years of the PRC, praise of Mao Zedong in public discourse had by and large been curbed with Mao’s consent. But after March 1958, references to the Party Chairman and his thought witnessed a huge upsurge in the media, although in comparative perspective the excesses were dwarfed by the Cultural Revolutionary rhetoric.

Cadres wishing to prove their loyalty could now stop worrying too much about the question raised by Khrushchev of whether cults of personality were compatible with Marxism-Leninism, and hyperbolic praise of Mao and his latest “line” soon became a necessary instrument of career maintenance and advancement within the CCP, though at the beginning such praise was still carefully defined as praise of the “truth” (which just happened to be embodied in the person of Mao and his works).

The praise soon came into conflict with reality, however. The burst of flattery encouraged by Mao led to a flood of “completely fictive numbers of both agricultural statistics and cultural artifacts in order to signal adherence of the provincial cadres to the Party Centre” (p. 73). But the great famine of 1958-59 could not be hidden by mere propaganda; for those affected by the catastrophe, the evidence of the senses was of course in direct contradiction with the claims of Mao and his flatterers, which challenged Mao’s prestige and credibility and offered opportunities to disaffected people within the party. This challenge was the most serious yet to Mao’s position, in part because the famine fomented dissatisfaction within the People’s Liberation Army, whose soldiers could not be fully isolated from reports coming in from family members about the situation in the countryside. (Not even the Central Bureau of Guards, the unit in charge of guarding the leaders of the party, was immune to unrest). Soldiers were asking: is “Chairman Mao ... going to allow us to starve to death”? (quoted in p. 96). Even more seriously, Marshal Peng Dehuai, who had enormous prestige within the PLA, became severely critical of Mao’s policies. This was an intolerable challenge to Mao’s position, who feared a coup; and though Peng was eventually purged (with dire consequences for the Chinese population, since Peng’s public criticism led Mao to stubbornly stick to policies that the party had been quietly about to correct, according to Leese), the need to regain control over the army was pressing. Lin Biao (the youngest PLA Marshal) proved the man for the job.

For one thing, Lin was not shy about praising Mao, and knew how to wield the charge of insufficient adherence to Mao Zedong thought against his enemies within the party and the military. In fact, he was able to shift the norms prevailing at the top of the CCP so that “adherence to Mao Zedong thought” became the sole criterion of loyalty. In practice, this meant that any statements critical of Mao – uttered at any time in the past – could be used as incriminating evidence of disloyalty, and used in factional disputes which nearly destroyed the party, and served to purge many people at the top.

There is a puzzle here, however: as Leese puts it, “[i]t seems difficult to explain why Liu Shaoqi and other CCP leaders watched and presided over the demise of the Beijing party leadership” since the criteria of loyalty promoted by Lin Biao “could be applied to nearly anyone” by those “wielding the power of interpretation” (p. 126). Why didn’t they resist this shift? Leese gestures vaguely towards Mao’s entrenched “legitimacy” as an explanation of the CCP leadership’s passivity in the face of what was, after all, a concerted attack on their position, but I don’t think this rickety Weberian catch-all term helps us very much to understand what happened here. My sense is that under the conditions of pervasive distrust at the top of the CCP, contradicting Lin carried higher risks individually (though greater lowered collective risks) than supporting him or staying silent (which nevertheless increased collective risks); but this was not so much because Mao was especially legitimate among the top leadership (whatever that means) but because the party was too publicly committed to him for objectors to feel confident that they could count on the support of others if they went out of their way to argue against the cult. (By the same token, they could be pretty certain that others would use their words against them).

Interestingly, though Lin knew how to signal his unconditional loyalty (in costly, even humiliating ways sometimes) he seems to have had no special love for Mao himself. On the contrary, he seems not to have liked Mao much, and to have promoted the cult in part as a way of protecting himself from the treacherous shoals of politics at the apex of the CCP; he had seen (in Peng Dehuai’s case) how even the merest hint of criticism could be turned by Mao (and others) against the critic, with severe repercussions, and was determined to avoid a similar fate. Leese quotes a 1949 private note of Lin’s on Mao’s political tactics: “First he will fabricate “your” opinion for you; then he will change your opinion, negate it, and re-fabricate it – Old Mao’s favourite trick. From now on I should be wary of it” (p. 90). By 1959 Lin was adept at anticipating Mao’s position and changing his opinion as soon as he sensed that the old opinion was no longer operative.

Lin used the cult not only to protect himself from the vicious “court politics” of the CCP, but also to discipline the army and tamp down dissatisfaction among the soldiers. The main tool he used to accomplish this objective was similar to the original forms of “group study” that had been used at the very beginnings of the cult, except more narrowly focused on Mao’s writings and more ritualized. The “lively study and application of Mao Zedong thought” was in practice reduced to learning to recite and use quotations from Mao’s works as persuasive tools. But the particulars are fascinating; what Leese describes is in effect the conscious construction of what Randall Collins calls an “interaction ritual” (really, go read Collins – it’s enormously interesting stuff!) that shifted the “emotional energy” of the troops and the party and increased their cohesion (Leese speaks of “exegetical bonding,” which is quite a nice description too).

Contacts between the troops and their families were monitored, but they were not necessarily directly censored. Instead, reports of distress in the countryside were turned into “teaching moments” that extolled the necessity of staying the course and blamed unfavourable weather or the deviations of local officials from the correct line. Elaborate performances making use of all kinds of media – big character posters, theatre, films, poetry, etc. – recalled the “bitterness” of the past (before the communist triumph) and extolled the “sweeteness” of the present (though, as one official noted, “most comparisons of the present sweetness referred back to the period of the land reform, whereas remarks about the Great Leap Forward were “inclined to be abstract and without substance”,” p. 102), while presenting examples of communist martyrs for emulation. The focus was on generating emotion by “remembering hardships” and then channelling that emotion against the enemies of the communist project to achieve bonding. The combination of peer pressure, genuine emotional experiences, and threats of discipline for recalcitrance was clearly powerful, yet the party was aware of the dangers of people merely “acting as if” they believed. Indeed, advice from high up indicated that “cadres were not to insist on formalities such as the weeping of participants as demonstration of their sincerity” (p. 100). But the very fact that such advice had to be given at all probably shows that lower-level cadres did insist on such performances just to be safe.

There were also campaigns to emulate “soldiers of Mao Zedong thought,” which essentially meant soldiers who displayed the sorts of self-sacrificing qualities that the party thought desirable. Here the cult served, it seems to me, as a means by which certain kinds of status competition were encouraged (the heroes of Mao Zedong thought, like Stakhanovite workers in the Soviet Union, received media attention and other rewards), and hence provided a positive incentive to adopt the “correct” sort of identity and behaviour, complementing the negative incentives provided by peer pressure in group study sessions or other collective interaction rituals. And as elsewhere, status competition that is made to depend on the credibility of loyalty signals appears to lead to inflationary pressures on flattery.

From the army, the more intense forms of the cult spread to the broader population over time, accelerating as the Cultural Revolution started. Leese tells the story of the creation of the “Little Red Book,” for example, which was printed more than a billion times between 1966 and 1969:

Image from wikimedia commons

The Little Red Book was at first confined to the army, but demand for it outside its confines was soon enormous. For one thing, political study campaigns in the countryside (which increased in the 1960s) required a focal text to mobilize people properly, and the Quotations provided one. But, as Leese astutely observes, the main thing that the Quotations offered was the “possibility of empowerment for non-party members” (p. 121). Though Leese does not put it this way, the book seemed to provide access to the “code” that enabled people to act more or less safely within the highly unpredictable environment of the early cultural revolution; and the party enabled this demand by basically diverting the resources of the “entire publishing sector” to printing Mao’s writings, “at the expense of every other print item, including schoolbooks” (p. 122). Pace Leese, I think it is a bit misleading to speak of the work’s “popularity”; the work was popular, if that’s the word, because it was becoming essential for everyone to show some familiarity with (read: be able to recite quotations from) Mao’s writings. Indeed, as Leese documents later in the book, during the early cultural revolution Red Guards would set up “temporary inspection offices” on the streets and harass pedestrians about their knowledge of Mao’s works, like the “vice police” in some countries today; this sort of atmosphere helped the cult to grow.

Other rituals were of course important to the spread of the more intense forms of the cult outside the army. The eight “mass receptions” of the Red Guards in 1966 were the most spectacular of these, though in some ways the least interesting (to me). Though the Red Guards became a sort of vanguard in the spread of the cult throughout Chinese society during the cultural revolution, the actual number of people who participated in these receptions would have been quite small relative to China’s total population, most of them impressionable young students who took the advantage of free train travel to get involved in something bigger than themselves. Under the circumstances, it is unsurprising that many of them reported ecstatic experiences on seeing Mao (who didn’t make any big speeches or direct them in any particular way), which in turn cemented their identities as Red Guards; this sort of “interaction ritual” seems likely to produce this sort of outcome fairly reliably, independently of any characteristics of the supposedly “charismatic” figure (consider what happens at your typical K-pop or J-pop concert). The more interesting point for me was about the role that free train travel and accommodation played in encouraging the cult in 1966; for some people, at least, participation in the “exchange of experiences” must have been a great opportunity to see China and engage in rebellious activity with relatively low risk. (As Leese remarks, “many students displayed much more revolutionary fervor in distant places than at home, where they had to consider other interests involved,” p. 139).

As the cult spread and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution deepened, however, the party lost control over its symbols. Leese refers to this as the period of “cult anarchy;” I would compare it to the point at which monetary authorities lose control of the money supply, leading to runaway hyperinflation. Different factions of Red Guards started using Mao’s image and words in incompatible ways, and new cult rituals emerged from the grass roots, sometimes from the enthusiasm of the genuinely committed, sometimes seemingly as protective talismans against the uncertainty and strife of the period. Everybody appealed to Mao to signal their revolutionary credentials, but there was no longer anyone capable of settling disputes over the credibility of these signals. Mao himself wasn’t much help; whenever he spoke at all, his messages were often cryptic and didn’t really settle any important disputes. The cult was now a “Red Queen” race of wasteful signalling, rather than a carefully calibrated tool of mobilization or discipline, driven by a complex combination of genuine desires to signal loyalty and identity and fears for one’s security. (Leese notes that failure to conform to the arbitrary protocols of the cult put people at risk of being sentenced as an “active counterrevolutionary” and documents many cases in which minimal symbolic transgressions resulted in incarceration or even death).

By 1967, for example, statues of Mao first started to be built, something that CCP leaders, and Mao himself, had discouraged in the past, and still officially frowned upon. The statues were typically built by local factions without approval from the central party, and they were all 7.1 meters high and placed on a pedestal that was 5.16 meters high, for a total height of 12.26 meters. (26 December = Mao’s birthday, 1 July = the Party’s founding date, 16 May = the beginning of the cultural revolution. People arrived at this precise convention for the statues without any centralized direction, merely through a signalling process). Later “Long Live the Victory of Mao Zedong Though Halls” were built on a grand scale, again without approval from the central party. Billions of Chairman Mao badges were produced by individual work units competing with each other, which were themselves subject to size inflation (“[a]s the larger size of the badges came to be associated with greater loyalty to the CCP Chairman, … badges with a diameter of 30 centimetres and greater came to be produced,” p. 216); Zhou Enlai would grumble in 1969 about the enormous waste of resources this represented. Costly signalling demands kept escalating; some people took to pinning the badges directly on their skin, for example, and farmers sent “loyalty pigs” to Mao as gifts (pigs with a shaved “loyalty” character).

New rituals and performances emerged too: Leese discusses the “quotation gymnastics,” a series of gymnastics exercises with a storyline based on Mao’s thought and involving praise of the “reddest red sun in our hearts,” and more bizarrely perhaps, “loyalty dances,” (picture at the link) which, like the quotation gymnastics, was “a grassroots invention” designed to physically signal loyalty, and which spread “even to regions where public dancing was not part of the common culture and thus led to considerable public embarrassment” (p. 205). People wrote the character for “loyalty” everywhere and developed new conventions for answering the phone that started by wishing Mao eternal life. One of the most bizarre and interesting stories in the book concerns “Mao’s mangos:” the story of how some mangos that Mao gave to a “Propaganda Team” became relics beyond the control of the Central Party. Let me quote from Adam Yuet Chau’s article on the mangos as relics (Past and Present (2010) 206 (suppl 5): 256-275), which has a much better summary than anything I can manage:

On 5 August 1968, Mao received the Pakistani foreign minister Mian Arshad Hussain, who brought with him a basket of golden mangoes as gifts for the Chairman. Instead of eating the mangoes, Mao decided to give them to the Capital Worker and Peasant Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team … that had earlier been sent to the Qinghua University in Beijing to rein in the rival Red Guard gangs. Two days later, on 7 August, the People’s Daily, the official news organ of the Communist Party-state, carried a report on the mango gift that included the following extra-long headline in extra-large font: ‘The greatest concern, the greatest trust, the greatest support, the greatest encouragement; our great leader Chairman Mao’s heart is always linked with the hearts of the masses; Chairman Mao gave the precious gifts given by a foreign friend to the Capital Worker and Peasant Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team’. 

Yuet Chau then quotes an eyewitness:

Mao gave the mangoes to Wang Dongxing, who divided them up, distributing one mango each to a number of leading factories in Beijing, including Beijing Textile Factory, where I was then living. The workers at the factory held a huge ceremony, rich in the recitation of Mao’s words, to welcome the arrival of the mango, then sealed the fruit in wax, hoping to preserve it for posterity. The mangoes became sacred relics, objects of veneration. The wax-covered fruit was placed on an altar in the factory auditorium, and workers lined up to file past it, solemnly bowing as they walked by. No one had thought to sterilize the mango before sealing it, however, and after a few days on display, it began to show signs of rot. The revolutionary committee of the factory retrieved the rotting mango, peeled it, then boiled the flesh in a huge pot of water. Mao again was greatly venerated, and the gift of the mango was lauded as evidence of the Chairman's deep concern for the workers. Then everyone in the factory filed by and each worker drank a spoonful of the water in which the sacred mango had been boiled. After that, the revolutionary committee ordered a wax model of the original mango. The replica was duly made and placed on the altar to replace the real fruit, and workers continued to file by, their veneration for the sacred object in no apparent way diminished.

Here’s a picture of one of the mangos, from Stefan R. Landsberger’s fantastic collection of Chinese Cultural Revolution posters; the poster is based on a photograph taken very shortly after the gift of the mangos:

Figure 5: "The great leader Chairman Mao's treasured gift to the Workers' Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams of the capital - a mango" (1969). From Stefan R. Landsberger's collection.

 “Mango fever” then spread throughout the country:

In order to share the honour with workers and the revolutionary masses elsewhere, more replicas of the mangoes were made and sent around the country. All over the country welcoming parties were organized to receive the mangoes, and many work units enshrined the mango replicas for the masses to view in order to partake in the Chairman’s gift. Mao badges with the platter of mangoes and posters with revolutionary messages illustrated with the mangoes began to appear; a cigarette factory in the city of Xinzheng in Henan Province began producing a line of mango-brand cigarettes (still in production today); a film was made on class struggle using the Mao mango gift as a key symbol in the story line. In the months following Mao’s giving of the mangoes a mango fever descended upon China.

It’s worth noting that mangos were very rare in China at the time; few people would have seen one, so they were more likely objects of curiosity than one might have expected. A detail from another 1969 poster gives some of the flavour of the mango processions (though actual pictures of these events, one of which is included in Leese’s book, show the mangos inside covered reliquaries):

Figure 6: Detail from poster "Forging ahead courageously while following the great leader Chairman Mao!" (1969). From Stefan R. Landsberger's collection.

As Leese notes, most of these inventions (the mango rituals included) were not authorized by the CCP Centre, and many of the supposed leaders of the cultural revolution (e.g., Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing, and occasionally even Mao himself) tried to curb their practice, or at best only grudgingly authorized them after the fact. From their perspective, these “grassroots” practices and rituals were objectionable because they could not be controlled directly by them.

But it would be a mistake to think that because these practices were not directed from the top, that they were therefore genuine expressions of love for the Chairman. Motivations were of course various, and one does not want to preclude positive affect by definition– those who adopted the identity of “Red Guards” probably thought of themselves as sincerely in love with Mao, for one thing – but whatever people’s motivations may have been they were clearly dominated by the need to signal loyalty against a background of others who were also furiously trying to signal loyalty for their own manifold reasons. The clearest evidence of signalling behaviour is in fact the uniformity of the language used to flatter Mao (“down to the level of single phrases” over thousands of texts p. 184: "boundless hot love," "the reddest red sun in our hearts," etc.); the language of flattery was a code to be mastered, not a way of expressing deeply held emotions, as Leese rightly sees.

This is not to say that flattery was never sincere or reflective of great love for Mao; but its escalation came from the Red Queen race aspect of the situation, not from some deep well of emotion or from awareness of Mao’s charismatic qualities. And this Red Queen race was reinforced by the presence of a small core activist group – the Red Guards at first - that was quite capable of inflicting punishment, directly or indirectly, on those who did not conform. At any rate, as Randall Collins says: “Sincerity is not an important question in politics, because sincere belief is a social product: successful IRs [interaction rituals] make people into sincere believers.” But lose the rituals, and you easily lose the group identities and emotional energy that drive action; sincere belief is rarely an independent driver of action.

It is also unsurprising that such “grassroots” loyalty signalling would tend to draw on various traditional scripts for demonstrating reverence or support, including scripts connected with the veneration of relics in Buddhism (as in the case of the mangos) or other forms of religious worship; the signal has to be recognizable to arbitrary others, and only religious scripts have sufficient universality for this purpose. Similarly, some of the manifestations of the cult (painting loyalty characters all over one’s house) can only be understood in terms of what I would call “magical thinking” – the use of words and objects to ward off evil pre-emptively. (But, unlike other forms of magical thinking, this stuff worked!). There is, in short, little need to appeal to tradition, “feudal” remnants, collective backwardness, or superstition to explain any aspect of the cult, contrary to the standard accounts of the cult offered by communist party theoreticians (and many people today).

This post is already long enough, but it is worth noting that the party seems to have tried to regain control over cult symbols by ratcheting the ritual level up – making the cult protocols more arbitrary – to foster unity in the factionalized atmosphere of the Cultural Revolution. The degree of ritualization was astonishing; Mao quotations came to be used in the most banal exchanges (answering the phone, buying produce, etc.); work units were required to “ask for instructions in the morning” before a portrait of Mao; etc. But the disciplinary function was clear: “[d]eviations from the prescribed routines were regarded as disloyal behaviour and thus potentially engendered drastic consequences” (p. 199). Once direct control over the symbols of loyalty was re-established, the party could move to gradually control flattery inflation and even engage in some controlled disinflation.

Though Leese does not put it this way, his overall story suggests that the Mao cult went through about six different stages, each of which can be distinguished by its own distinctive “inflationary” drivers on flattery of Mao. The first stage can be characterized as one of “controlled inflation,” lasting from the initial building up of the cult in the late 1930s and early 1940s to Stalin’s death, more or less. At this time, the cult was fostered by the entire party leadership and served primarily a mobilizing function, though the party was careful to prevent excessive praise of Mao; we might say that the initial cult building project shifted the base level of flattery upwards, but did not yet produce powerful inflationary pressures on the growth of flattery. The second stage, lasting from Stalin’s death to the failure of the “Hundred Flowers” campaign, more or less, can be characterized as one of slight flattery “deflation.” At this time, a number of events, including Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, prompted a certain amount of liberalization directed from above that led to a slight lowering in the level of flattery and a relaxation of inflationary pressures. With the failure of the “Hundred Flowers” campaign, the cult enters a stage of “sustained inflation,” and control over the cult shifts to Mao and his close associates, who promote it primarily for disciplinary purposes. This stage lasts until the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, when they lost full control over the symbols of the cult. At this point (stage four) we have “runaway inflation”, driven by the need to signal loyalty in factional struggles and avoid punishment. By 1971, however, the party had regained some control over cult symbols, Lin Biao had fallen from grace, and the party engaged in some flattery deflation, helped somewhat by the death of Mao in 1976. (Interestingly, there was not a great deal of spontaneous public grief at the time; as Leese notes, most people were probably rather cynically disenchanted with Mao by then. The old rituals of the cult had lost their emotional power). Finally, one may add the resurgence of something like a posthumous Mao cult after 1989. Here cult practices are driven by many motivations – “disillusionment, nostalgia, renewed national pride, the incorporation of religious traditions, and commercial interests” (p. 262) lifting the background level of flattery from its nadir in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but incapable of sustaining runaway flattery inflation in the absence of encouragement from the CCP Center, which can’t live with Mao, and can’t live without him.

A few general lessons may perhaps be drawn from this story. First, cults of personality basically never emerge from the spontaneous expression of emotion by a population, despite what dictators may have you believe. They are primarily tools of political control within networks of patronage relationships, as Leese rightly sees (hence, in practice, much more likely to emerge in highly authoritarian contexts). I have compared them here to the tools of monetary policy in the economic realm, insofar as they affect the average level of effort invested in signalling loyalty to a ruling group or person (the “flattery level”); but, as with monetary policy, cults can miscarry – in which case uncontrolled flattery inflation may result. Second, their effects are not produced by mere propaganda; interaction rituals are required to produce genuine emotional energy within specific groups, increase cohesion, etc. But the cult does not depend on the genuineness of anybody’s sentiments to work; it depends on the possibility of producing certain kinds of emotional pressures through group rituals. (As an aside, we lack a good “high pressure” political science and psychology; too much of our political science and psychology assume “low pressure” environments. But cults are high pressure phenomena, and attempting to understand them by means of the stories and concepts we use in low pressure environments is apt to lead us astray). Finally, the rickety Weberian apparatus of “legitimacy” and “charisma” is basically irrelevant to the explanation of cults. Leese’s book is mercifully free of those terms, except for the occasional sentence claiming that so and so’s actions “legitimized” this or that; but most of these can be safely ignored (all the sentence can possibly mean is “increased support”).

All in all, this is an excellent book – highly recommended if you are interested in the topic, though it does assume a great deal of background knowledge of modern Chinese history.

The Dictator's Dilemma, Mao Edition

Mao Zedong to Ho Chi Minh, June 1966:

I advise you, not all of your subjects are loyal to you. Perhaps most of them are loyal but maybe a small number only verbally wish you "long live," while in reality they wish you a premature death. When they shout "long live," you should beware and analyze [the situation]. The more they praise you, the less you can trust them. This is a very natural rule.

From Daniel Leese's fascinating book Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China's Cultural Revolution (p. 168), which I hope to review here soon.

The Great Norm Shift and the Triumph of Universal Suffrage: A Very Short Quantitative History of Political Regimes, Part 1.825

(Continuing an occasional series on the history of political regimes. Lots of charts and graphs, and one slideshow, using the Political Institutions and Political Events dataset by Adam Przeworski et al., which is a fantastic resource for people interested in this topic. And I like pictures!).

People sometimes do not realize how total has been the normative triumph of some of the ideas typically associated with democracy, even if one thinks that democracy itself has not succeeded quite as spectacularly. Take, for instance, the norm that rulers of states should be selected through some process that involves voting by all adults in society (I'm being deliberately vague here) rather than, say, inheriting their position by succeeding their fathers. In 1788 there were only a couple of countries in the world that could even claim to publicly recognize something remotely like this norm. Most people could not vote, and voting was not generally recognized as something that needed to happen before rulers could rule; rulers could and did claim to have authority to rule on other grounds. Norms of hereditary selection structured the symbolic universe in which political competition took place, and defined its ultimate boundaries for most people (at least those who lived in state spaces). Yet by 2008 there were only four or five countries in the world that did not publicly acknowledge universal voting rights:


(You can watch the slideshow in full screen or view the individual maps separately here.)

Each map in the slideshow displays three pieces of information, all taken from the PIPE dataset (see the data and methods note at the bottom of this post for more information about the dataset and the process used to generate the maps, including some R code): the type of class and gender franchise restrictions in place in a particular country for a particular year (the number inside each bubble, and the color of each bubble); whether other franchise restrictions are recorded (such as restrictions on voting by priests or the military; this is the border color of each bubble); and whether the franchise expanded or contracted on any particular year (the shape of the symbol). The first digit of each number inside the bubbles always indicates the type of class restrictions in place at the time, ranging from 0 (no suffrage), 1 (estate representation) to 7 (no class restrictions at all); the second digit indicates the type of gender restrictions in place, ranging from 0 (no female suffrage at all) to 2 (equal suffrage rights for men and women). Thus "7" means "manhood" suffrage (all adult males can vote, without property qualifications, so long as they are not disqualified by "other restrictions"), and "72" means universal suffrage (all adults can vote, without property qualification). The code "SN/O" means either that the franchise is determined at a subnational level and hence no single set of class and gender restrictions applies throughout the territory (as in the USA for the 19th century), or that there is an at least partly elected assembly but no franchise information is recorded (this is mostly the case for colonial legislative assemblies before independence in African countries).

The maps start out very sparse; only a few countries in the world recognized an electoral norm in any form at the beginning of the 19th century, though I'd wager that a few of the early adopters, even in class restricted form, are not very well known: Haiti in 1804 (before most of Europe), most central American countries by the 1820s, all Latin America by 1830. The first country in the dataset to adopt full "manhood" suffrage is Greece in 1844 (before France in 1848); the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian empire apparently had some form of class restricted female suffrage by 1861, though New Zealand of course was the first to achieve true "universal" suffrage. (Which is cool). Japan had a form of class-restricted suffrage by 1889, and Iran had full "manhood" suffrage by 1914, along with most of the Balkan countries, followed shortly by Iraq and Turkey, the latter of which achieves universal suffrage by 1930, before Uruguay, the first Latin American country to get there (in 1932).

The most striking thing the animation shows, to me, is how complete is the shift between the world of the 18th century, where politics was structured around norms of hereditary selection, and today's world, where politics everywhere is structured around electoral norms. We can see this at a glance by just looking at the relative frequency of franchise restrictions:

Figure 1: Franchise types worldwide, 1788-2008

The magnitude of the shift is staggering. The number of countries that do not recognize a norm of  universal suffrage is tiny: less than 6% of all countries. And about half of these have universal male suffrage anyway; the half that makes no concessions to the suffrage norm at all - or for which no information is available in the dataset, but is safe to assume have no suffrage at all - consists of the few remaining absolute monarchies. No big country, save for Saudi Arabia (which is not that big), rejects the principle that rulers should be selected via elections (even North Korea enshrines the principle in its constitution!). Universal suffrage is about as close to a cultural universal today as these things get. (And, incidentally, it was not a particularly European practice even early in the 19th century, as we see in the slideshow above).

To be sure, the fact that a norm is publicly recognized - is enshrined in constitutions and given lip service in other ways - does not mean that it is actually very meaningful. The "legitimacy" of the norm, to use a word I dislike very much, does not mean that the norm will be followed, or that it will affect power structures to any significant extent. (Incidentally, the same was true of norms of ascriptive selection in the European middle ages, a subject I would like to return to later; for all its symbolic influence, general belief in heredity as a principle of selection did not mean the norm was generally respected). Universal suffrage does not mean democracy.

It is true enough that the meaning of the norm of universal suffrage varies with the context; the fact that all adults could vote in the Soviet Union or Libya had different political implications than the fact that all adults can vote in New Zealand or Venezuela. But it is still striking that there is now so little political conflict over the principle of universal suffrage, which was once new and terrifyingly radical. That there was at one point a real conflict over the norm - over whether it was the right norm, and who should be allowed to vote - is shown in the frequency of suffrage contractions in the 19th century. Here we can see the traces of large-scale class conflict being played out precisely over the meaning of the norm of voting. Of the 39 franchise contractions unambiguously recorded in the dataset, the vast majority (71%) happened in the 19th century, most in Latin America, a testimony to the fierceness of conflict over the norm at the time:

Figure 2: Expansions and contractions of the franchise, 1788-2008, all countries

(Franchise contractions are the pinkish bars at the bottom).

Figure 3: Franchise changes by region, 1788-2008, all countries

Franchise contractions were often quickly counterbalanced by franchise expansions, as we can see in the slideshow above; the rich never held the normative advantage for long (even if they, of course, held the power). Interestingly, it looks that as overt class restrictions on the franchise disappeared, certain other kinds of restrictions became more important, though the dataset seems patchier here, and it does not include every other restriction we can think of (like felon disenfranchisement). Overt class conflict over the meaning of the norm of voting in the 19th century yields to other forms of conflict: anticlerical conflicts, military-civilian conflicts, ethnic conflicts, territorial conflicts, all of which leave their traces in the constitutional changes recorded in the dataset. (Female enfranchisement comes in two waves, one early in the 20th century and another in the 1950s; the second wave at least seems to have involved no significant male-female conflict, but instead resulted from party competition, as Przeworski documents more fully in this excellent paper). There are even a couple of cases - Kenya in the 1950s and the Soviet Union for a couple of decades after 1918 - where the voting system explicitly disenfranchised the propertied (a real-life antecedent of the voting system I described theoretically here); the advantage in the conflict over the meaning of the norm had swung so radically to the poor that this was even thinkable, though these experiments didn't seem to have had much of an impact for the later development of the norm.  Nevertheless, most of the more noxious "other" restrictions on the franchise have also disappeared today, even if restrictions on military personnel voting still remain in a a couple of places:

Figure 4: Other restrictions on the franchise, 1788-2008, all countries

Latin America again stands out as an outlier in the extent to which its political conflicts were waged in the normative terrain of the franchise: who is excluded, and who is included, has been a much more contested issue there than elsewhere. And most Latin American "other restrictions" have been about the place of the military, reflecting a longer history of tensions between civilian and military powers there (code 6 indicates restrictions on voting by military personnel).

Figure 5: Regional distribution of other restrictions on the franchise, 1788-2008, all countries

Still, one might think that countries may recognize universal suffrage constitutionally, but fail to hold elections, or fail to hold elections for meaningful offices, or elections that allow for opposition. Yet as the number of countries with suffrage has increased, so have the numbers of at least partly elected legislatures with real powers (the figure refers to lower chambers with genuine legislative competences; mere advisory councils, elected or appointed, as in Saudi Arabia, don't count):

Figure 6: Composition of legislatures around the world, 1788-2008

In fact, only a few countries around the world fail to have today any kind of at least partly elected legislature; and even those "partly appointed" legislatures seem to be mostly elected anyway (I use data for 2000, which is more complete for some reason- but the numbers are not likely to have budged much since then):

Figure 7: Composition of legislatures around the world, 2000

(North Korea has the dubious distinction of holding elections but having no meaningful legislature). And along with elected legislatures, we see a corresponding increase in the frequency of elections worldwide:

Figure 8: Number of elections in the world per year, 1788-2008, all countries

In fact, we may be reaching "peak election": there are about 0.35 elections per year per state (counting only national legislative and presidential elections), which is what one would expect from typical electoral cycles of about 3-4 years if every country in the world held elections:

Figure 9: Number of elections per year as a proportion of the number of states in the world

Interestingly, the maximum number of elections relative to the number of states in the state system was in 1920! And as we might have guessed from the information in this post, "peak authoritarianism" in the 1970s was also the nadir of elections relative to the number of countries in the state system. But even then, there were lots of elections. Elections where opposition was NOT allowed were in fact almost as common then as elections that opposition was able to contest:

Figure 10: Number of elections per year with and without political opposition

Both types of election, those with and without opposition, are old; "single party" elections are not the invention of the communist regimes of the 20th century. Yet the open banning of opposition parties - the attempt to stamp out opposition completely - seems to have been more common wherever norms enshrined in constitutions were openly disregarded: 

Figure 11: Presence or absence of opposition according to whether or not a constitution is "in force"

Though note, again, how during peak authoritarianism in the 1970s we see the highest number of cases where constitutions explicitly banned political pluralism of any kind. Incidentally, these were mostly in Africa and Asia, as well as in the communist states of Europe; in many Latin American dictatorships (e.g., Brazil) opposition was  not completely banned, at least not all of the time.

Figure 12: Regional distribution of states with and without political opposition

So the switch towards a norm of universal suffrage has been accompanied (disregarding peak authoritarianism in the 1970s) by a switch towards a norm of political competition; in fact the number of states without opposition seems to have averaged about a quarter of the total, regardless of franchise type, and is quickly decreasing.

Figure 13: Proportion of states with and without political opposition by franchise type

I am not saying, of course, that states that allow some political opposition are "democratic" in any strong sense. (I am coming to dislike the word). Political competition is restricted in many ways around the world, some of them quite subtle, and some of them less so. But it is striking that the normative shift over the last two centuries does seem to have increased the competitiveness of political life, if nothing else, in ways that have not been reversed over the span of two centuries. One can look, for example, at the number of elections where the incumbent party remains in power after the election, regardless of whether or not they "won" the election (I'm telling you, this dataset is fantastic); and here the trend is inexorably towards greater competition, even if elections are still mostly won by incumbent parties around the world. But whereas elections in the 19th century produced incumbent victories between 80 and 90% of the time (or rather, resulted in opposition parties actually taking power only between 10-20% of the time), elections today result in incumbents leaving office nearly 40% of the time:

Figure 14: Electoral outcomes per year, 1788-2008, all countries

So the normative shift is real and reflected in a number of different aspects of political competition. In general (with some exceptions), the longer a history of elections, the lower the degree of incumbent advantage. In this graph, the length of the bar represents the number of elections recorded in the dataset, and the color represents the type of outcome; red indicates an opposition party was able to take power after winning the election (an "alternation" in power, in the language of Przeworski):

Figure 15: Electoral outcomes per country

(The black lines identify the USA, New Zealand, and Venezuela, the three countries that have been "home" to me, all of them countries with long histories of elections, and from where most of the readers of this blog come). Another way of viewing this information is by plotting the percentage of times the incumbent has won an election per country:

Figure 16: Proportion of elections where incumbent party remained in power per country

The USA stands out as a country where incumbent advantages have historically been low - more so than many other places with long histories of democracy; only the Netherlands and the UK, among countries with comparably long histories of elections, have had lower degrees of incumbent advantage. And the regional patterns are perhaps as one would expect. Think of the "green" in the following map as places where it has historically been safe to be an incumbent in an election:

Figure 17: Political competitiveness in elections worldwide, 1788-2008

Incumbent advantage has historically been lowest in the richest parts of the world, though there are some obvious outliers, and the correlation does not indicate any form of causation, even if theory does lead us to expect that the degree of incumbent advantage would be negatively correlated with long-run growth (a test I have not performed, but may later).

Finally, it is worth noting that most people seem to have become more, rather than less, enthusiastic about participating in elections since the 19th century. As the number of people capable of participating and actually participating in elections has increased with changes in the franchise...

Figure 18: Ratio of the number voters in legislative elections to total population

(Each dot represents the ratio of voters to the total population in a particular election in a given country; some very low ratios are due to boycotts).

Figure 19: Ratio of participating voters to total population, by franchise types

The proportion of eligible voters participating has increased, not decreased:
 

Figure 20: Voter turnout per year, 1788-2008, all countries, in elections with and without opposition

(Each dot represents an election in a given country; turnout is calculated as the ratio of participating voters to the proportion of actually eligible voters). 

Figure 21: Voter turnout in legislative elections, 1788-2008, with and without opposition

Turnout nevertheless has varied quite a bit by country:

Figure 22: Voter turnout in legislative elections per country, all years

(Turnouts greater than 100% represent either problems with reported numbers of participating voters, or the fact that more people voted in some elections than were actually eligible according to franchise rules. Interestingly, the USA has always had lower turnout rates than a lot of other countries; and high turnouts do not appear to have ensured good governance. It is also worth noting that the highest turnouts have all been in elections without opposition, where voting is a form of signalling, and is encouraged by coercive mobilization, even if it makes no difference to the outcome).

In sum, we seem to live in a golden age of participation, even as elections are often thought to be disappointing, and voting irrational. Elections are the great ritual of the age, though they certainly don't make as much difference as most people seem to think. The aggregate effect of all this electoral activity seems to be mostly, if marginally, positive; yet elections have not reduced injustice or inequality as much as early proponents of universal suffrage had hoped.

It is nevertheless striking that conflicts that were once fought on the terrain of the norms concerning suffrage and elections have shifted to other terrains; the norm is no longer the object of live struggle. And if elections and universal suffrage did not make as much material difference as its proponents had  historically hoped, they nevertheless seem to have ultimately accomplished a great "redistribution of status." It is no longer possible to  signal unequal status by depriving people of the vote. We seem to have all become democrats at least in the sense that most people everywhere all publicly recognize the norm that all adults are equal citizens who all should have one vote, even if that norm is routinely violated or made meaningless still in many parts of the world.

Data and methods note
First, a thank you to Adam Przeworski for making available the PIPE dataset here. Like most very large-scale historical datasets of political data, the PIPE dataset misses some things, given the patchiness of the historical record (the dataset only aims at full completeness from 1917 onwards, though it does try to go back to the inception of representative institutions in every country still existing today), and some starting dates are a bit arbitrary (for example, the United Kingdom only enters the dataset in 1800, and has franchise information starting only in 1832, with the first Reform Act). Judgments about institutions are sometimes difficult to make. But in general, this is great data.

I nevertheless had to clean it up a bit to create the maps and graphs in this post. I first cleaned up the country names and fixed a few other minor things using Google Refine, added capital cities and their latitude and longitude (mostly using the cshapes R package by Nils Weidmann), added franchise data for Russia (which was missing), and then calculated a number of variables. The record of all this data wrangling is available in this repository, in the file Processing PIPE.R (and the Google Refine JSON extract). The code for the graphs is available in the file Final graphs.R. The code might change as I clean it up; right now it is essentially one big hack.

[Update, 12 September: Fixed some typos and minor stylistic problems]

[Update, 16 September: Code for processing PIPE now greatly simplified - see repository]

Impossible Political Systems: Further Adventures in Rawlsian Constitutional Design

I am somewhat amazed, now that I think of it, that no “serious” political philosopher I know of has ever proposed an electoral system like the one I proposed in this post last week, where individual voting power is inversely proportional to income. (By all means enlighten me if anyone has proposed something like it; I would be delighted to know. I’m pretty certain that among the many forgotten pamphleteers of the 19^th century someone must have come up with a similar idea but I don’t have the knowledge to locate these potentially existing antecedents). This probably means that it is a bad idea (and judging by the few reactions I got, most people think so); but if it is a bad idea, I would like to explore in more detail the reasons why it is bad, since it is not obvious to me that a system like that would not meet Rawls’ principles of justice.[1] (And I sort of would like to see a few more responses).

A recap: I suggested (more or less tongue in cheek) that Rawls’ difference principle could potentially be met by a political system where everyone has a vote, but the formal value of your vote declines the more you earn. There are a number of different ways of achieving this, but the most interesting (at least to me!) version of this system is the following.

We divide voters into n income (or wealth) equal classes (or quantiles). Voters in the first (poorest) class have median income y and a single vote each, whereas voters in the nth (richest) class have median income a_ny (that is, the median income of the richest class is a times the median income of the poorest class) and 1/a_n^x votes each, where x is a number between 0 and 1 that determines the extent of the “disenfranchisement” of high income voters. “Income” here is post-tax, post transfer income.[2] The value of a person’s vote thus depends on their income class; more specifically, it is inversely proportional to the ratio between the median income of their class and the median income of the poorest class. For n > 1, if x = 0 then every voter has one vote, and the system reduces to the normal “one person, one vote” system; if x = 1 then the extent of rich voter disenfranchisement is strictly proportional to the average income of their income class, so a voter in the k_th income class would have 1/a_k votes.

A numerical example may be useful. Imagine that this system had been in place in the USA in 2008, with x = 1 (so the value of the votes of the richer classes is strictly inversely proportional to their income), and n = 10 (so there are ten classes of voters). According to the Luxembourg Income Study, the income ratio between the bottom and the top decile of the income distribution in the USA in 2010 was 6.154 (so a₁₀=6.154). In this imaginary political system, in other words, the poorest decile of the income distribution would have had about six times the voting power of the highest decile. About 75% of these people voted democratic in the 2008 congressional elections, according to the American National Election Study, whereas only about 33% of the people in the highest income decile did so. A very quick and dirty simulation (see code and explanation here) suggests that if this system had been in place in 2008, the Democratic party would have won about 62% of the two-party vote (61% if we assume turnout rates would have stayed the same, with poorer voters voting at lower rates than richer voters), rather than the 54% that it actually won – an 8% difference, which one imagines would have been translated into somewhat different policies. A system like this would thus have amplified the influence of the bottom decile of the income distribution (and of the lower half of the income distribution generally), though of course parties would have behaved very differently in the new environment, so the example is merely illustrative. (A simulation for New Zealand is a bit harder to do given our different electoral system and my inability to use the NZ Election Study, but I’d love to see one).

Note that we could in principle consider systems where x > 1 or x < 0, though I doubt such regimes would pass Rawlsian muster. If x is much greater than 1, the votes of the richer classes are discounted very quickly: with a small number of classes (say n = 4) we then get a “dictatorship of the proletariat”; with a larger number of classes and a very large value for x, we get basically a simple dictatorship of the very poorest people in society. Similarly, if x > 0 and the number of classes is small, we get a régime censitaire, where the rich have more formal voting power than the poor (like the Roman republic of Cicero’s time); if x is much smaller than -1 and the number of classes is large we simply get a dictatorship of the richest people in society.

Note also that if n = 1 then the system reduces to the usual "one person, one vote" system; for n = 2 voters below the median income each get one vote, while voters above the median income each get  votes, where a₂ is the ratio of the average income of voters above the median income to the average income of voters below the median income; and so on. The smaller n, the more abrupt differences in voting power are (though they are ultimately less steep), whereas the larger n, the more gradual and steeper the differences in voting power. So, for n = 2, the superrich end up with the same voting power as the middle class, and the lower middle class ends up with the same voting power as the very poorest, though the poor and the lower middle class end up with more voting power than the upper middle class and the rich; for n = 100, the superrich end up with much less voting power than the middle class, but the middle class in turn ends up with less voting power than the very poorest, even though voters in adjacent income classes end up having similar voting power. If n is high but x is close to zero we have smooth differences in voting power but a small gradient, so that rich and poor end up having similar voting power per person but there are many small gradations. All of this would be easier to show in a simple interactive simulation (a Mathematica notebook, perhaps?) with a couple of sliders for n, x, and some choice of potential income distributions, but that is beyond my ability to do right now; for now, all I can offer is some R code here if people want to play with various choices of parameters.

So how should we choose the parameters n and x? Current voting systems in democracies at least pay lip service to the idea that each elector is formally equal, i.e., that n should be 1 and x should be 0, even if in practice the value of some voters’ votes is larger than the value of others. (In elections to the US senate, the million or so Montana citizens have about 37 times the voting power of the 37 million or so California citizens, a ratio that is much higher than the ones contemplated in the numerical example of this system above. this is an approximation - I should look up the actual numbers of voters, not just the populations - but it will do for a ballpark figure). But would a person choose these exact parameters for an electoral system from behind a veil of ignorance? Rawls himself notes that one must evaluate political institutions by their tendency to produce just outcomes (they are forms of “imperfect procedural justice,” like jury trials); and it is not clear that n = 1 and x = 0 yield the most just outcomes. And the advantages, from a Rawlsian point of view, of choosing larger values for both n and x seem considerable.

Most people (including Rawls) would say that the rich have more influence than the poor in politics, influence that is disproportionate to their numbers (though not everyone thinks this is a bad thing). The reasons are obvious. Standing for elections costs money, and the need for financing campaigns from moneyed private interests may push certain issues to the forefront of the public agenda, and make others invisible. The rich can lobby representatives more easily, and have more ability to coordinate and spread their ideas than the poorest. In the USA, Martin Gilens has argued  that the views of the poor have almost no influence on the actions of their representatives when these views diverge from those of the rich. To be sure, not all of these things are necessarily negative. The ability of the rich to lobby can be construed as an informational subsidy to legislators. If the rich are better informed than the poor, policy that is nonresponsive to the views of the poor might be of better quality by some measures. But it is difficult to deny that political inequalities exist; the question is whether they are arranged to the benefit of the worst off. If they are not arranged for the benefit of the worst off, then it is possible that changing the values of n and x, i.e., giving more formal influence to the poorest, would serve as appropriate compensation for their economic inequality.

The thing about a system where n > 1 and x > 0 is that the value of any one person’s vote changes as society becomes more or less equal. Regardless of how many classes we choose, and what value we give to x, the more income-equal the society, the more equal the value of the vote of rich and poor, and in a perfectly income-equal society everyone would have exactly one vote. By the same token, the higher the level of inequality, the higher the value of the votes of the poor relative to the votes of the rich, and as inequality increases, the more political power the poor gain. x thus represents a kind of “sensitivity parameter”: the higher its value, the more sensitive the political system will be to inequality.

Moreover, a system like this would bypass debates about which economic policies actually reduce inequality or produce the most benefits for the worst off, i.e., which policies would meet the “difference principle” (assuming, of course, that the difference principle is the right principle of justice for socioeconomic matters; and it may not be). It makes no assumptions about which kinds of economic policy actually do help the poor; if laissez faire improves their position, then the poor would be in the best position to approve of it; and if some other policy worsens their relative position, then the poor would get a right of “first refusal.” (As inequality increases in a society, the poorest would gain more and more formal political power). In the spirit of the difference principle, the rich are thus allowed to benefit from (economic) inequality so long as the poor approve (with x and n setting the “approval parameters” of the system). Thus, the higher the level of inequality, the more disenfranchised the rich become, and the greater the compensation to the poor in the form of political inequality (benefiting the worst off the most), which in turn might enable them to change those policies. Of course, if your political theory does not depend on Rawlsian assumptions, this point might leave you cold; but even utilitarians might see potential benefits here. (And your choice of x and n might say something about how much a person is willing to give up for the sake of economic equality).

Now, there are many potential problems here. The rich might underreport their income. (Though this should only be a serious problem if n is large). The poor might choose policies that are not in the interest of society as a whole. (But so can the rich; the question is whether, on average, granting more political power to the poor would result in more just decisions). They might redistribute property. (Which would result in their losing political power as economic inequality decreases). If we start tweaking n and x who knows where we might end up. (We could end up with political systems that grant more political power to the rich). Loss of formal political influence by the rich might have unanticipated consequences in the form of additional corruption and so on. Formal distinctions in voting power are an affront to the equality of citizens, and offend our sense of fairness. (True, though people take very large inequalities in elections to the US senate, for example, completely in stride. Also see next point). Perhaps the most important objection to a proposal like this, which Jay Ulfelder raised in conversation on G+ when I posted the original idea, is that politics is not  only about economic issues; it is also about many other issues, which we evaluate from the point of view of equal citizenship. Issues about religion, civil liberties, etc. should not be subject to the predominant influence of one social group; they concern all as equal citizens.

I grant that this is a powerful objection to a scheme like this. But here’s a refinement that bypasses or at least mitigates it. Imagine a bicameral legislature. The lower chamber is selected through an electoral system like the one described above, where x = 1, and n = 10, for example. We could call this the “Chamber of the Difference Principle.” The upper chamber, by contrast, is selected through an electoral system of universal equal suffrage (x = 0, n = 1), perhaps including some of the “random constituency” ideas I discussed in an earlier post to ensure the representation of suitably general interests. We could call this the “Chamber of Equal Citizenship.” Determining the exact relationship between these two chambers is beyond the scope of this post; but the (Rawlsian) idea would be that these two chambers would represent the two standpoints from which we evaluate social institutions, and work together to produce law and policy.

Now, I myself don’t know for sure whether to take this idea seriously. I lean toward thinking that a system like this is not only too shocking to our normal ideas of fair representation to be ever politically possible, but is likely to have some bad unanticipated public choice consequences. So I don’t know where I would set x and n, if not at 0 and 1, even if I’ve half convinced myself that higher values for both would be somewhat desirable. But I would like to know where others would place these values. Do you think that voting power should be inversely proportional to income? If you’ve read this far, it would be great if you could answer this poll.

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[1] Rawls does say in section 36 of ToJ that the political constitution of the just society would honor “the precept of one elector one vote” as far as possible; but he could be wrong about that, even by his own lights; and anyway a Rawlsian could argue that departures from the one elector, one vote precept are justified in nonideal situations (as Rawls himself does). Furthermore, Rawls does express concern about maintaining the “fair value” of political liberty under conditions of economic inequality, a problem which this system would potentially eliminate.

[2] This is mathematically equivalent to a system in which the members of the richest income class each have one vote, and members of the poorest class each have a_n^x votes; it doesn’t matter which description we use, except that in the second x should perhaps be called an “empowerment” parameter (for the poor) rather than a disenfranchisement parameter (for the rich).

Legitimacy as the Solow Residual of Political Science

Jay Ulfelder kindly points his readers to my (recently updated!) working paper on “The Irrelevance of Legitimacy” in a recent post where he expresses doubt about the explanatory usefulness of the concept of legitimacy. As long-term readers will know, I am entirely in agreement with Jay when he says that

We appeal to legitimacy when we need to explain the persistence of political arrangements that defy our materialist predictions, and when those arrangements do finally collapse, we say that their failure has revealed a preceding loss of legitimacy. In statistical terms, legitimacy is the label we attach to the residual, the portion of the variance our mental models cannot explain. It is a tautology masquerading as a causal force.

It occurs to me that “legitimacy” plays more or less the same role in political science that “technology” sometimes plays in economics. Both are residual concepts that provide an illusion of understanding but do not actually explain much. In economics, talk of “technology” often obscures the fact that we don’t have a very good general theory of what explains economic growth, as Matt Yglesias noted a couple of weeks ago:  

Economists have shown that modern economic growth can't be accounted for merely by growth in the size of the labor force or by accumulation of additional capital. You need to add a third element into the mix. This element is sometimes called "total factor productivity" and sometimes called "technology," but it represents a statistical discrepency, not an inquiry into independently identifiable properties of technological growth. It's like Molière's doctors explaining that opium puts people to sleep because of its virtus dormitiva.

If the discrepency were small, this might not be a big deal and we'd say that economists had shown that capital accumulation is the key to economic growth. But it's not small. What's been found is that economic growth is largely unexplained. Using the word "technology" as a label for the discrepency makes it sound as if the issue is much better understood than it really is.

Technology is here the “Solow residual:” all the different mechanisms by which economic growth occurs that are not accounted for by simple measures of labor and capital utilization. But there are many such mechanisms! Education, changes in political institutions and property rights, the invention of new machines and business methods, new forms of economic organization, changes in social roles, norms, and culture, etc. all can contribute to economic growth beyond increases in labor supply and capital accumulation; but only some of these mechanisms correspond to what we normally think about when we say “technology,” and forgetting this is likely to lead to incorrect inferences. Moreover, we do not actually know which of these mechanisms is the most important in general, and hence which government policies would be most likely to increase growth.

Similarly, “legitimacy” is the label we typically use in political science for all the factors that sustain social order or norms beyond obvious coercion and material incentives. We all agree that the persistence of norms and social order cannot be fully (or even mostly) explained by crude material incentives and obvious coercion; but by subsuming all these “other” factors under a single label we miss the fact that they are really quite various. Collective action problems, rational conservatism, signalling conventions, emotional attachments, habits of discourse and conceptual blinders, identity and affiliation entanglements, sophistry and propaganda, even sincere beliefs in the rightness of the norms or forms of social order in question (for a detailed examination of these mechanisms, read my paper); all of these mechanisms can contribute to their maintenance, and only some of them are close to the folk model of “legitimacy,” in which norms persist because in some sense those subject to them "like" them or at least "accept" them on their own terms. (A model that I take to be false in most relevant cases). Moreover, to the extent that we are interested in changing particular social norms or forms of social order, we will do better to think in terms of how particular mechanisms sustain these norms, rather than in terms of “legitimacy.” 

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.