Inequality Regimes and Rawlsian Growth Rates: Some thoughts on the evolution of inequality 1960-2010, with special reference to Venezuela

(Mostly an excuse to play with the Standardized Worldwide Income Inequality Database, compiled by Frederick Solt, which I just discovered. This post also belongs, loosely speaking, to my long-running series on the quantitative history of political regimes. R code for everything in this blogpost available in this Git repository; you would need to download the dataset separately).

Inequality is difficult to measure. Socially relevant inequalities are manifold, and measurable inequalities in money income are not always especially important. (In the formerly communist states of Eastern Europe income was very evenly distributed; yet this did not mean that there were no important social inequalities). Even inequality in money income is not easy to measure properly. Most existing data is not very comparable accross countries or years, and it is often not even clear to what income concept the sorts of inequality measures people typically use to make a point in political discourse refer to: does it refer to after-tax, after-transfer income or to "market" income? Does it refer to individual or household income? What sorts of things are counted as "income"? How do we account for access to high-quality public services? At best, measures of income inequality are uncertain estimates of an unknown distribution of potential living standards, more or less valid for societies where "money income" is a useful proxy for the ability of people to enjoy various important goods, and of little value outside the context of a conception of a "just distribution" of these capabilities.

Despite the fact that estimates of what is essentially a statistical abstraction often play surprisingly big roles in current political debates (cf. the debate over The Spirit Level some years ago, or recent concern about a rise in New Zealand's gini index), I have recently become more skeptical about the importance of measured income inequality in politics: whatever importance the actual distribution of incomes has for political life in a society, it has to be mediated through complicated processes that refract local lived experience through the prism of context-dependent fairness norms that are only vaguely related, if at all, to the numbers used to measure its skewness.

Yet I'm curious: what sorts of income inequality have in fact increased, and where? How might these changes have mattered? Enter a new and shiny dataset: the Standardized Worldwide Income Inequality Database, which promises to ameliorate some of these measurement problems. The database uses the Luxembourg Income Study - very high quality income inequality data - to calibrate the much larger but less comparable United Nations University World Income Inequality Database. The result: lovely long time series estimates of both the market and the after tax, after transfer (net) gini index of inequality, including standard errors, for 153 countries. My first though on learning about this was: graphs! (Hopefully some non-obvious facts are also involved below).

Let's start by looking at a country that has often been cited as a great success in reducing inequality: Venezuela during the Chavez years. (Also, I was there recently visiting family after a long absence, and I have a personal interest in understanding the changes that have occurred during that time). One question I've been curious about concerns the evolution of inequality in Venezuela relative to other Latin American countries, especially since the coming to power of Chavez in 1999. How do changes in inequality in Venezuela compare to changes elsewhere?

In the following plot, we see changes in both the market ("equivalized (square root scale) household gross (pre-tax, pre-transfer) income", if you must know) and the net gini index of inequality (after tax, after transfer) in 19 Latin American countries from 1999 until 2010, ordered by the estimated rate of inequality reduction (countries that reduced inequality faster appear earlier; read the graph from right to left, top to bottom):

Inequality in Venezuela has indeed decreased relatively quickly since 1999 - the second fastest decrease after Ecuador, which has also had left-leaning governments (though a far more unstable political context, with five different presidents since 1998). Three things are worth noting about the context of these trends, however.

First and most important is that this reduction in inequality is not driven by direct redistribution: there is barely any difference between the "market" gini index (our measure of inequality before taxes and transfers) and the "net" gini index (our measure of inequality after taxes and transfers). To the extent that the reduction in inequality is the result of government action rather than something else, it must have come about through measures like investment in human capital and labor market policies (see Morgan and Kelly 2012, ungated here, for the proper peer-reviewed argument). This is true of all Latin American countries save for Puerto Rico (which is part of the USA in a sense) and (to a lesser extent) Brazil; indeed, redistribution in some countries (Peru) appears to have perversely increased inequality.

Second, most Latin American countries have experienced reductions in inequality during this period, though most remain highly unequal. But Venezuela was already among the most equal countries in Latin America; in 1999, only Uruguay and Costa Rica had lower measured inequality (and the difference in net gini was within the margin of measurement error, so it should probably be disregarded). This surprised me; I had expected higher levels of inequality in Venezuela when compared to other countries, given the level of class conflict on display during the Chavez era. More surprisingly perhaps, if we take a broader look we discover that inequality in Venezuela appears to have been remarkably stable over the past fifty years, fluctuating around a flat trend:

(Lines around dots represent 95% confidence intervals).

In fact, the low level of inequality in Venezuela as of 2010 only returned the country to the level of inequality it last experienced around ... 1992, the year of the February coup which made Chavez famous, and three years after the "neoliberal" paquete of 1989 (which was supposed to have triggered the Caracazo). Inequality did increase after 1992, and poverty had increased before then - the Venezuelan economy had been in decline for a while, as we can see below. Which all goes to show, I suppose, that political unrest and lived experiences of injustice are only very loosely connected, if at all, with measures of income inequality; whereas austerity and large income losses appear more immediately important to political outcomes (as Jay Ulfelder argues here):

(GDP per capita data from the Penn World Table v. 8.0).

Finally, it's probably worth noting that Venezuela's economic fortunes are deeply tied to oil prices, and that the rapid reduction in inequality in the last decade or so should also be placed in the context of the very large rise in the value of oil and gas during this period. Here is an estimate of the per capita value of oil and gas exports for Venezuela, from Michael Ross' oil and gas dataset:

In fact, Venezuela and Ecuador, the countries that have experienced the fastest inequality decreases, have been precisely the two countries that have benefitted the most from oil and gas price increases - money that flows directly to the state (especially since the Chavez government systematically asserted control over the state oil company) and can be used to provide employment and subsidize education, healthcare, housing, staples, and other goods, however inefficiently (e.g., the varios "Misiones" and other social programs created by the Chavez government). At least some of these programs must have played some role in the reduction of inequality, but given the amount of oil and gas money flowing directly to the Venezuelan state (representing most Venezuela's exports, which have become substantially less diversified over the last 15 years) and the typical patterns of clientelism and electoral politics in Venezuela it would have taken a bloody-minded kleptocrat not to reduce inequality by some amount. At any rate, inequality and poverty also diminished quite a bit during the 1970s oil boom, likely through similar channels - massive amounts of money flowing through the state, which increased its ability to employ people and subsidize public services. (I don't mean to sound grudging; though I have doubts about the effectivenes of some of these programs, some of the new housing built during the Chavez years looks decent, for example).

Let's take a broader look, however. How does the Venezuelan experience of inequality reduction compare to some countries outside of Latin America? Just because they've been in the news, let's look at the Venezuelan experience in coparison to Turkey and Egypt; and add the USA and New Zealand to see how two "developed" countries look as well.

That's right: Egypt and Turkey apparently reduced inequality faster than Venezuela in this period (though the error estimates of the gini index for both are also larger), and were less unequal than Venezuela by the end of the period! Also, despite the fact that the degree of "market" inequality was higher in the USA and NZ than in Venezuela, and did not decrease or even increased a little during this period (as measured by the net gini index), both countries remain less unequal than Venezuela (as measured by the net gini index), due to the effectiveness of their redistributive measures.

Now, this is perhaps surprising, but a bit of an aberration, and really, we are dealing with imperfectly estimated quantities (rates of decline) based on measurements with error. So there's really no point in arguing about whether inequality in Venezuela has in fact decreased faster than in Egypt or not; our methods of measuring inequality don't allow us to give a very precise answer to this question (error bars are large, etc.). In any case, it is clear that income inequality has declined pretty fast in Venezuela over the last 15 years, even allowing for some meaurement and estimation error, as we can see by calculating the trend rate of change in the net gini coefficient (the slope of a regression of log(gini_net) on year, to be technical, which yields the estimated trend annual percent rate change in the gini index) for all countries in the dataset:

(I took out countries that had too few datapoints, since the trends didn't look to me like they could be informative. The error estimates in the graph are nevertheless probably too small, since one would need to use the proper rules for error propagation to calculate them, which I have not done. Interestingly, the estimate of the rate of change in the net gini index for New Zealand and the USA since 1998 suggests basically that they have experienced no significant change in measured inequality from 1999 until 2010, contrary to popular belief; their important increases in inequality occurred earlier. More on this in a minute).

What strikes me about this graph is that countries that have achieved very fast reductions in inequality over this period appear to be quite disparate; though left governments are in evidence among these, many countries apparently achieved fast reductions in inequality with supposedly "neoliberal" policies (e.g., Egypt and Turkey) that are now in turmoil. Maybe this is evidence that the gini index does not capture socially relevant changes in inequality; but then it would also fail to capture changes in inequality in non-neoliberal Venezuela and Ecuador. (Of course, other confounding factors may be at work too).

It is also curious that many of the fastest reductions in inequality have occurred in states that do not engage in a lot of explicit redistribution. In fact, a simple correlation between the average redistributive capacity of a state (measured by the percentage difference between the "market" gini and the net gini coefficient) and the rate of decrease in measured "final" inequality over the period is slightly negative (so fastest reductions in inequality have occurred in states that are unable to affect market gini very much at all, or that even increase it through perverse redistribution):

It's probably not worth making too much of this correlation (measurement errors, the relatively short time period under consideration, and confounding factors are not taken into consideration), though it does suggest that many changes in inequality seem beyond the control of most governments. But even when we expand the period of observation all the way to 1960, the correlation does not entirely disappear, though it weakens greatly:

Ultimately, however, the more directly and explicitly redistributive the state has been, the more equal it also appears to be over the long run:

Or, to put it crudely, since 1960 at least market inequality has only been reliably reduced in states that take from the rich and give to the poor. And yet actually taking from the rich and giving to the poor seems to put nontrivial demands on state capacity and political life (witness the existence of robber states that take from the poor and give to the rich). The degree of change in the market distribution of income even appears to be a fair measure of that capacity; from the graph above, it's likely that a state that can consistently reduce gini index of market inequality by at least 30% is a pretty "strong" state (in the "infrastructural" sense of strong), whereas a state that cannot make a dent on the market distribution of income is more likely to be "weak" (with some communist exceptions like the USSR that did not engage in a great deal of explicit redistribution, since, to put it crudely the state owned everything and everyone more or less got paid the same).

And abilities to redistribute income appear to be remarkably "sticky." Few countries appear to become more able to affect the gini distribution over time:

(I've deleted cases with very few data points to make the graph look prettier. See the code for the details). What is striking about this graph is how stable the redistributive capacity of most states has remained over a period of more than six decades: many countries show basically zero change in their ability to change the income distribution. To be sure, some countries have increased their redistributive capacity -- France is a good example -- and others experience wild swings in redistributive capacity, probably related to big political conflicts -- note Bangladesh and Chile, the latter with a big bump around the time of Allende. But at best we can detect a long-term decline in redistributive capacity for the majority of cases (even if the decline is often slight); and often, after a decline, we see long periods of stability rather than change: countries settle into an "inequality regime," with some occasional big bumps which indicate new equilibria.

Note that in many cases the redistributive capacity of the state does not change even while inequality increases: thus, for example, while the net gini has increased over the past six decades in the USA and New Zealand, their capacity to affect the gini coefficient has remained approximately the same (New Zealand has been able to reduce the market gini by about 27%, though there's a slight downwards trend in this number; the USA by about 22%). The structure of their economies changed (by political action, in part), producing more inequality, but their redistributive capacity as states remained basically the same. To decrease inequality by redistribution in cases where the market gini increases substantially seems to require either a big political shock, or a long-run increase in state capacity.

There is another historical pattern that struck me as interesting: both levels of inequality and redistributive capacities seem to be highly correlated accross regions. Neighboring countries appear to have both similar levels of inequality and similar redistributive capacities. Linked economic and political histories seem to produce both the equilibrium level of inequality and the long-run redistributive capcity of the state.

Here, for example, we see the average redistributive capacity of states per region:

(Cases to the right of the solid line are states that on average made their income distribution more equal; the dashed line indicates the median redistributive capacity).

And here is a graph of net gini per region (all observations since 1960):

No great surprises here, perhaps: Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America have been the world's most income-unequal regions over the last six decades, whereas Europe has been consistently equal - the home of both Northern social democracy and Eastern European communism, both of which have been able to keep the distribution of incomes relatively equal through explicit redistribution, though in somewhat different ways.

But perhaps this is of little importance. On one (vaguely Rawlsian) view, what matters is not the income distribution per se, but the ways in which it affects the prospects of the worst off in society. How much does it matter whether or not inequality declines in any given society, especially for the poorest? This will depend on the growth rate of the economy; high growth with declining inequality will be better for the poor than low growth with increasing inequality, though the outcome of the comparison is ambiguous for high growth with increasing inequality or low growth with decreasing inequality.

Now, it occurs to me that with the average income for these countries as well as their level of inequality, we can make an informed guess (technically, a wild guess) about the average income of various deciles for the years in which data is available. To do this properly would be too painful for a blog post, but I assume that empirical income distributions more or less fit a lognormal distribution (even though they fit more exotic distributions better, like the Singh-Maddala distribution or the generalized Beta distribution). With a little help from R, I can then simulate the average income of each decile of every country in the SWIID dataset. (Take a look at the code for the gory details. Also: this is a VERY rough and ready simulation, extremely inefficient to run and cooked up in a day. Do not take these numbers too seriously). We can then provide some vaguely informed answers to a Rawlsian question: which countries have most increased the prospects of the poorest over the last six decades?

The question admits of two more precise formulations, which we'll take on in turn: what countries have had the highest growth rate of income for the lowest deciles of the population? And second, in which countries do the poor have the highest incomes? (The first corresponds to a sort of dynamic version of the difference principle, which I find more interesting). Let's start with looking at the Rawlsian growth rate (the rate of income growth for the lowest decile, which we'll assume represents the group whose position must be maximized in Rawls' theory); the higher the long-run Rawlsian growth rate, the more the country fulfills the dynamic version of the difference principle. Though in theory the long-run growth rate of the economy as a whole and the long-run growth rate of the income of the lowest decile should perhaps converge, in practice they diverge, even over long time periods - some groups do well over some time frame, others do badly. Now, what we would actually want to know from a strict Rawlsian perspecive is the highest long-run growth rate of income for a representative person in the lowest decile of a given country relative to the potential growth rate of the whole economy (in other words, what degree of inequality would produce the highest income growth for that representative person, given the particular structure of that economy), but this is a counterfactual quantity we cannot estimate, so we'll make do with simulating the incomes of the lowest decile for the actual combinations of growth and inequality in existing economies. (I repeat my warning: this is only a simulation!)

First, we estimate the long-run Rawlsian growth rate (for countries with data going back far enough - so we drop countries that don't have long enough time trends, say at least 30 years):

The "Asian Tigers" unsurprisingly top the list: over the last six decades, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea had the highest (simulated) Rawlsian growth rate (in countries with at least 30 years of both GDP and gini data). South Korea and Taiwan are below average in inequality, which makes sense, but Singapore is not. Over the long run, in other words, a high enough growth rate of income seems to compensate for higher than average inequality. But one surprise among the top countries is Egypt - where the poorest decile, if we believe this simulation (and you shouldn't), had a pretty good run over many decades, despite Egypt not being considered a big performer in terms of its average per capita growth. At the bottom, by contrast, we find that Venezuela has essentially experienced zero Rawlsian growth over six decades (in fact, its long-run trend in regular per-capita annual growth is also zero). Though below average in inequality, its income has suffered so many ups and downs (mostly following oil price changes) that the trend is flat; no wonder Venezuelans eventually got tired of all their politicians before Chavez.

Now, there obviously is a correlation between Rawlsian growth and regular growth, as well as between Rawlsian growth and average inequality, but it is not perfect, simply because the Rawlsian growth rate is a function of both the average growth rate and the gini index by construction, and these two things are not perfectly correlated; a high enough growth rate in the whole economy can overcome a large gini coefficient to produce high Rawlsian growth rates and vice-versa. But it's worth noting that extremely high levels of inequality do appear to be associated with plain low growth over the long run, bad for both the poor and everyone else except perhaps tiny kleptocratic elites:

We can now repeat the exercise for the last 15 years and see how Venezuela stacks up since then:

As we can see, the Chavez years (up to 2010; the data does not tell us what happened for the last three years) were quite good for the poor, according to this simulation: the combination of declining inequality and relatively high growth rates (due in great part to rising oil prices) made Venezuela a top ten Rawlsian performer - better even than China, which also had torrid growth rates but increasing inequality during this period. To be sure, this good "Rawlsian" growth rate is only relevant if we ignore the equal liberties principle, which from a strict Rawlsian perspective  is meant to have priority over the difference principle; and increasing disregard of classic liberal rights during this period counts against Venezuela. (I vaguely wondered whether perhaps a "Rawls index" could be constructed, using data like the UDS to measure compliance with the first principle, fair equality of opportunity using the gini index, and the difference principle using the rate of growth of the income of the lowest decile; but since the two principles are supposed to be lexicographically ordered, a combined Rawlsian index would be pointless, useful only if we relax that assumption. Nevertheless, if we relax that assumption, then we would have to face the question of how much the improvement in the condition of the least well off ought to count against the decline in the "equal liberties" of the first principle; and I don't know of any good principled answer).

At the same time, it is interesting to note the countries at the very top are not precisely all left-wing governments; Azerbaijan, Mongolia, and Ukraine appear there. This may be because the simulations are risibly wrong (an important possibility), or the data are wrong; or simply that policies of the kind the Chavez government tried out are not the only possible ones to bring about growth in the income of the poor (and now, with high inflation, sporadic shortages, a large black market premium for dollars, and other problems, they don't look especially sustainable either). Nevertheless, the high Rawlsian growth rate makes it easy to understand why many of the Venezuelan poor felt that Chavez improved their position, regardless of how much responsibility we ought to attribute to his government for that outcome, or how sustainable its policies may be with lower oil prices.

Regardless, a good growth rate for the poorest decile matters: if inequality had remained at its maximum level during the Chavez years instead of declining but the growth rate had stayed the same, I estimate that the a representative of the poorest decile would have earned about $2000 less over the entire period than they actually did. We can call this quantity the "Rawls gap": the amount of income the poorest decile would have gained (or lost) in a given period had inequality remained the same as at the beginning of the period. Of course, since the growth rate would have been different had inequality remained the same, this is merely a fiction; we can't really estimate this counterfactual.

Nevertheless, just for fun, here is the Rawls gap for Latin America, per year:

This allows us to say that in Venezuela, the reduction of inequality that occurred during the Chavez period (assuming, per impossibile, that the growth rate would have stayed exactly the same had inequality remained at the 1999 level) gained a representative person in the poorest decile a total of about $1500-$2500 over 10 years, or about $200 per year, whereas the increase in inequality over the same period in Costa Rica cost a representative person in the poorest decile about $800-$1200 in income, or about $100 per year. This is nothing to sneeze at for the poorest decile (whose average yearly income is only about $3000 per year).

(It's kind of fun, though conceptually pointless and computationally expensive in my system given my crappy code, to calculate various Rawlsian gaps for arbitrary years and countries; for example, the "Rawls gap" for NZ is something like $2000 per year lost in income for the poorest decile if we assume the same growth trajectory but the level of inequality of the early 80s. Which of course we shouldn't - had inequality remained the same, the growth trajectory would have been different. As Adam Przeworski has said, everything is endogenous).

(We could also imagine even more exotic quantities, though I have no time to test them out here. Consider the Rawlsian compensatory growth rate, for example. This would be the growth rate that would compensate the poorest decile for an increase in inequality: if we want to say that some reform x would lead to higher income growth but higher inequality, then the compensatory Rawlsian growth rate is the growth rate where the income growth rate of the poorest decile at the higher level of inequality is identical to their income growth rate at a lower level of inequality but a lower overall growth rate for the economy; you would need a reform to produce at least the compensatory Rawlsian growth rate for it to be justified in terms of the difference principle. Which you may of course think is bogus).

Now, absolute incomes matter too; the difference principle in Rawls is not usually understood in terms of growth rates (though I think that should be the more natural interpretation). But the second version of the Rawlsian question above (where do the poor have the highest incomes?) has a much more obvious and boring answer: the Scandinavian countries, due to both generally high incomes and low levels of inequality due to high redistribution; and most of the countries at the top also score well in terms of the first principle (measured inexactly here by the UDS, which perhaps ought to be discounted a bit given recent developments in some countries). I include it here for completeness:

The roots of that ranking of countries are much older and deeper than this dataset allows us to see.

In theory, both the first ("equal liberties") and the second principle of Rawls' theory ("fair equality of opportunity" plus the "difference principle") ought to go together. In practice, however, Rawls himself thought that they did not always do so, though his reasons for thinking this were not always clear. Though I don't really have the tools to tackle the question of the relationship between liberal rights and the rest of the components of Rawls' theory properly (certainly not here), it looks as if we see a kind of inverted-U relationship in the data:

In other words, over the last half-century, the income of the poor has risen fastest under regimes that have not been on average highly democratic, but also has grown least in these regimes; non-democracy looks like a (potentially quite bad) gamble, though both democracy, long-run inequality, and the long-run growth rate of the income of the poor are probably determined by (or are a reflection of) some deeper social fact, like state capacity, which is not really susceptible to policy intervention. Whatever state capacity is (I have argued it is a kind of development of political technologies) it emerges out of political struggles that take a very long time to work themselves out with many tragic consequences along the way; and in any case the rate of improvement of state capacity is at times immeasurably low.

[Update 12/7/2013 - fixed a reference to a non-existing graph]

Engines of Sacrality: A Footnote on Randall Collins’ Interaction Ritual Chains

(A review of Randall Collins’ Interaction Ritual Chains, with speculative detours into the political theory of ritual)

I have previously encouraged people to read Randall Collins’ work (his infrequently updated blog, The Sociological Eye, is typically excellent), but it is only recently that I tackled his book on interaction rituals. And despite its forbidding title, seemingly promising a work on some technical topic in the sociology of religion, this is a very good book that deserves to be more widely read, especially beyond the disciplinary confines of sociology. (The title is in part a reference to Erving Goffman’s Interaction Ritual; but while “Interaction Ritual” is a great title, easily bringing to mind the rituals of everyday life with which Goffmann is principally concerned, the addition of chains makes the topic of Collins’ book a bit obscure, even if the idea is clearly explained in the work itself).

The book presents an ambitious theory of social action based on rituals and the emotions they amplify – so ambitious, in fact, that it is likely to seem absurd at the margins, much like rational choice theory sounds absurd to most people when pushed to extremes. Skimming the reviews of the book in sociology journals one finds a mixture of admiration and annoyance at the scope of the book’s claims, combined with a desire to put the theory in its place: interaction ritual chain theory cannot explain this or that phenomenon, or it exaggerates the importance of interaction rituals at the expense of meaningful communication or strategic action. But I tend to prefer theories that are ambitious and fruitful even if ultimately wrong, so I will not dwell overmuch on the book’s shortcomings here.

The basic ideas of the theory are deceptively simple, drawn more or less in equal parts from Durkheim, Goffman, and Mead. Collins starts with the idea of a situation of co-presence, or really any physical gathering. A situation of that sort turns into a ritual when those physically present focus their attention on specific people, objects, or symbols, and are thereby constituted as a distinct group with more or less clear boundaries. This obviously includes religious rituals, but also a vast number of interpersonal interactions, ranging from informal small-group conversations and sexual acts at one end to academic lectures, workplace meetings, conference presentations, political rallies, sports events, and other large-scale physical gatherings with a joint focus at the other end of the scale. With a bit of conceptual stretching one can even include here private rituals (e.g., praying alone, having a solitary cigarette or a cup of coffee before working or after working), with only one participant (these are treated by Collins as secondary rituals, where the focus of attention is on the symbols and objects whose meaning and value is produced in primary social rituals); and one may also wish to treat situations of joint focus  but no physical co-presence – mediated interactions, in short – as rituals (though Collins claims, for reasons that will become clear below, that rituals without physical co-presence are far less likely to succeed qua rituals). As should be obvious, the word “ritual” is here being used in a very capacious sense, without reference to the “ceremonial” aspects of many of the activities that we would normally call rituals, or to any hard and fast distinction between the “sacred” and the “profane;” Collins stresses that he wants us to see ritual “almost everywhere” (p. 15). I have no particular problems with this; “ritual”, like “game”, is a family resemblance term. The more interesting move comes when we ask what a ritual is for.

A ritual, for Collins, is basically an amplifier of emotion. (I pause to note that an amplifier of emotion is not necessarily a generator of emotion, though it is not clear whether or not Collins sees any important distinction here). We are literally “pumped up” by a successful ritual – we experience a buzz, exhilaration, enthousiasmos, “collective effervescence.” A great lecture, a sports spectacle in a vast stadium, a great concert, a fire-and-brimstone sermon, the rituals of solidarity among small military units; these interactions motivate us, that is, they set us in motion, send us on our way to act beyond the immediate confines of the group situation (to read the book discussed in the lecture, follow the news of your sports team or music band and wear the team colors, proselytize for your sect, attack the enemy, and perhaps also to do the crappy jobs necessary to gather the material resources to do all of these things). Not every ritual is successful, of course (and not every ritual is equally successful for all participants, even when the ritual is generally successful – more on this point later); some ritual situations bore us, sending our attention wandering, and we end up feeling drained and depressed: think of a boring meeting at your workplace, or an awful lecture:

These rituals are demotivating; as Collins puts it, they sap our “emotional energy.”

Emotional energy (EE) is the all-purpose term Collins uses to talk about the emotions and moods that motivate (anger, righteousness, joy, pride, etc.) or demotivate us (depression, sadness, etc.). A successful ritual generates and amplifies motivating emotions, while an unsuccessful ritual does the contrary. Perhaps Collins’ most controversial claim is the idea that we are basically EE “seekers”: much (all?) of our social activity can be understood as a largely unconscious “flow” along the gradient of maximal EE charge for us, given our particular material resources and positions within the “market” for ritual situations (the set of ritual situations available to us). Our primary “motivation” is the search for motivation; or more precisely, motivation (our “motive power”) is simply a result of emotional amplification in ritual situations, so that we are propelled along “chains” of situations where we achieve high levels of EE and avoid situation chains where the contrary is the case. Thus, our ordinary “interests” cannot be understood apart from the ritual situations which shape and indeed construct them as genuinely motivating values; whether a person cares specifically for material goods, knowledge, or the welfare of some particular group depends on the ritual chains in which they participate and the way these rituals affect their emotional energy. As Collins puts it, “[h]uman behaviour may be characterized as emotional energy tropism. Social sources of EE directly energize behaviour; the strongest energizing situation exerts the strongest pull” (pp. 181-182; he adds that “individuals do not experience such situations as controlling them; because they are being filled with energy, the feel that they [are in] control … When EE is strong, they see immediately what they want to do.”).

In keeping with the “energy” metaphor, Collins argues further that rituals charge symbols, objects, and persons with value (or, in the case of unsuccessful rituals, drain them of value) that then circulate in other rituals (in “chains” of interaction rituals) and in “private” settings (in secondary rituals). Consider a powerful symbol for some group, like the cross. Its power as a symbol – its concentration of meaning and value, and thus its ability to motivate action – is directly related to the success of the rituals in which it is a central focus of attention (church services, prayer rituals, etc.); and it is more powerful for those who participate in these rituals regularly and who are themselves closer to the focus of attention. For these people, the cross becomes an increasingly powerful reminder of their bonds to one another, a genuinely “sacred” object whose violation can engender anger and around which other norms (prescribing forms of display, handling, material sacrifices, etc.) can also develop.  At the same time, the cross obviously does not have the same motivating power for everyone (certainly not for every nominal Christian); its ability to awaken emotional reactions in people outside the ritual situation depends on how it circulates in the various “ritual chains” of people’s lives (whether it is something worn, referred to, exchanged, displayed in painting or art, etc.), and it decays with distance to the rituals that imbue the cross with value.

Thus, once an object or an idea (a “symbol” for short) is “charged” by rituals, it can serve to temporarily reinforce the identities of group members and motivate them to act in accordance with what they take to be the group’s values (defending the symbols that are central to the group’s rituals, for example), even when the group is not gathered together. By the same token, symbols will be inert for those who do not participate in the rituals that invest them with value and meaning; the value and meaning (or more precisely, the motivational potential) of any symbol is always relative to particular groups and their rituals. And, crucially, anything can become a powerful symbol for some group, given a sufficiently successful ritual: a copy of Aristotle’s Ethics or Marx’s Capital, particular places or animals, the image of a person like Hugo Chávez (a charismatic person being simply a person who has been charged with emotional energy in interaction rituals, though we can also think of people who are especially skilled at producing successful interaction rituals), the expression of particular opinions (e.g., the idea that global warming is a hoax or that shape-shifting lizards rule the world); the key point is that these objects and symbols both reinforce the bonds between group members and store reserves of motivation that people can draw on outside the immediate context of the ritual.

Stated more incautiously than I think Collins would, rituals are what I would call engines of sacrality: they produce sacred things the way a generator might charge a battery. There is no room in the theory for a distinction in kind between the sacred and the profane; a sufficiently powerful ritual can make anything that is a joint focus of attention into a sacred object, its sacrality merely the measure of its emotional charge for a particular group. And because rituals are omnipresent in human life, sacred objects and symbols are also omnipresent. (From this point of view, the idea that the modern world is especially “disenchanted” is basically a myth, though I suppose it is possible that rituals in the modern world are more “fragmented” – there are a multiplicity of symbols that become charged with emotional energy and value rather than a relatively small set of such symbols, including the symbol “god”). Or, as the South Indian poet Bavasanna once put it (as quoted by David Shulman):

The pot is a god. The winnowing fan is a god. The stone in the street is a god. The comb is a god. The bowstring is also a god. The bushel is a god and the spouted cup is a god.

Gods, gods, there are so many there’s no place left for a foot.

Though Collins does not say this, this view implies that ritual is prior to belief: belief “in” a cause, or a leader, or a god, or anything of the sort is primarily attachment to particular symbols of group membership that have been charged with value by powerful rituals, and should tend to decay in the absence of rituals “recharging” these symbols. (Collins suggests that a week is a good estimate of the half-life of the emotional charge of most symbols; hence the weekly services of churches or the weekly frequency of many intimate rituals, for example). Moreover, motivated reasoning should be ubiquitous, as indeed it seems to be; for the most part, we do not reason our way to most of our important beliefs, but acquire these through participation in communities with their interaction rituals (which may not look like obvious rituals; note that as long as we are participants in a successful interaction ritual, our focus is on the things the ritual is about, not on the ritual itself). Sociologists time and again find that many (most?) people join social movements before they acquire clear beliefs about issues; we then justify these beliefs ex post and defend them against perceived threats. And when a particular belief becomes entangled with an identity – when it becomes, in other words, a focus in some chain of successful interaction rituals, circulating as a marker of membership in some group– it then becomes more or less immune to rational argument. This is not to say that we cannot on occasion reason our way to various positions; but solid “belief” (in the sense that people most people have in mind when they say that they believe “in” something, ranging from Christianity to socialism) needs a lot of help from interaction ritual chains (understood as repeated, focused interactions that charge certain symbols with value). Belief without ritual and community is typically a fickle thing, discarded just as easily as acquired.

But how do successful rituals manage to amplify emotion and produce sacred objects and symbols? Here Collins draws a picture of human beings as homo saltans. Emotional charge or motivational energy is built up from entrainment: the micro-coordination of gesture, voice, and attention in rhythmic activity, down to tiny fractions of a second. Think of how in an engrossing conversation the partners are wholly attuned to one another, laughing and exhibiting emotional reactions simultaneously, keeping eye contact, taking turns at precisely the right moments, mirroring each other’s reactions; or how a sports event, a sermon, or a concert produces emotional energy through the rhythmic synchronization of the fans or congregants in call and response, or simply in dance. Or consider sexual acts, to which Collins devotes a long and very interesting chapter. Emotional amplification works everywhere through physical resonance; as we become progressively attuned to the physical activity of others, individual emotions (which are, after all, rooted in physical dispositions) come to be shared and amplified. (Consider the difference between listening to a recording of comedian in the privacy of one’s own room and listening to a comedian live while in a room of people laughing; or the fact that one can feel the need to cry when one is surrounded by people crying).

(We might even say that patterns of micro-coordination are the building blocks of macro-coordination: the larger circuits of collective action are nourished by the smaller-scale rituals of collective micro-activity. Though we are not there yet; we have not yet seen how to translate the micro-coordination characteristic of successful rituals to the patterns of macro-coordination that produces what we normally call power).

Reading these parts of Collins’ book on how successful rituals depend on high levels of emotional entrainment brought to mind some very old passages from Plato, who among the great philosophers is perhaps the one most keenly aware of the significance and power of ritual in this sense. Plato’s entire theory of education, for example, is premised on the idea that successful character formation depends on ritual chains that focus attention on the right sorts of symbols and are built up from precise attention to rhythmic elements; character education is inseparable from participation in “musical” rituals, and lack of participation – or the inability to become fully attuned to the rhythms of these rituals – can therefore weaken character. We are situational beings, requiring constant reinforcement of our character through ritual. As the Athenian Stranger in the Laws puts it, using rather more elevated language:

these forms of child-training, which consist in right discipline in pleasures and pains, grow slack and weakened to a great extent in the course of men's lives; so the gods, in pity for the human race thus born to misery, have ordained the feasts of thanksgiving as periods of respite from their troubles; and they have granted them as companions in their feasts the Muses and Apollo the master of music, and Dionysus, that they may at least set right again their modes of discipline by associating in their feasts with gods. … [A]lmost without exception, every young creature is incapable of keeping either its body or its tongue quiet, [653e] and is always striving to move and to cry, leaping and skipping and delighting in dances and games, and uttering, also, noises of every description. Now, whereas all other creatures are devoid of any perception of the various kinds of order and disorder in movement (which we term rhythm and harmony), to men the very gods, who were given, as we said, to be our fellows in the dance, have granted the pleasurable perception of rhythm and harmony, whereby they cause us to move [654a] and lead our choirs, linking us one with another by means of songs and dances; and to the choir they have given its name from the “joy” [chara] implanted therein. (653c-654a, Bury translation, slightly modified).

Or, as Collins puts it, more prosaically, “[i]n general, “personality” traits are just these results of experiencing particular kinds of IR chains.”

Collins follows four basically theoretical chapters (describing the interaction ritual model of social action and providing evidence of how rituals amplify and generate emotion) with five more applied chapters: on “private” thinking and its sources in interaction rituals (technically this is a “theory” chapter, though it felt more like one of the applied chapters), sex and the generation of sexuality in interaction rituals, situational stratification (class, status, and power), tobacco rituals and anti-rituals (which provoked at least one outraged response arguing that Collins is basically an apologist for tobacco companies), and a chapter on the production of “individualism” in the modern world. Not all chapters are equally successful (I liked the tobacco and situational stratification chapters best); and though Collins’ range of scholarship is wide, there is a tendency to look primarily to evidence from the USA and Britain and universalize it rather too quickly.

Rather than describe in detail these specific applications of the theory (though more on “power” in a minute), let me instead speculate a bit on how one might use these ideas to think about politics. Here are a number of potential topics that seem like they could benefit this framework, in descending order of epistemic certainty (later topics I’m less sure about).

1. Cults of personality. I’ve mentioned before that I think cults of personality emerge from interaction rituals. Not all of these interaction rituals will be successful, but it is enough if some of them do produce true believers – people for whom the leader is a sacred object (hardcore Chavistas, Red Guards, etc.) who can then act as norm enforcers and provide a core of supporters enhancing the mobilization of emotion in various settings. Collins’ theory also suggests that, as in many “power rituals”, the “frontstage” performance of worship does not imply anything much about behaviour outside of the ritual context (“backstage”), especially for those people who are at the margins of the ritual and are not energized by its performance. (The world is full of people who feign compliance and drag their feet, in Collins’ presentation). Indeed, the theory tells us precisely where to look for “preference falsification”: among marginal participants in forced rituals, especially low-status group members for whom the ritual is draining rather than motivating, and who derive their sources of motivation from other rituals (e.g., private “niches” of deep friendship in socialist countries before 1989, church services and other intense ritual situations, etc.)
   
   More interestingly, I take it that the theory points to what we might call the “social construction of charisma.” Charisma for the most part does not precede successful rituals, but is built up by them. The charismatic leader is the person who both becomes emotionally energized by being the focus of attention in successful rituals, and is in turn charged as a sacred object by ritual participants. Thus, though some people will of course be more skillful than others at using ritual situations to amplify collective emotion (and hence will be more likely to be considered “charismatic” leaders), the mere fact that someone can compel attention may often be sufficient to produce an aura of charisma, especially if the rituals are otherwise successful (one thinks here of in retrospect fairly uncharismatic leaders like Stalin or Kim Jong-il). I suspect that more skilful producers of charisma are precisely the people who seem to have the knack for putting together already charged symbols produced in everyday interaction rituals into larger narratives and symbols leading to them; Chávez was a master of this art, effortlessly associating himself with “the people.” (By contrast, his chosen successor, Maduro, is not yet a sacred object, charged in an endless series of interaction rituals, since he has not yet been the focus of attention for long in successful interaction rituals; this appears as a lack of charisma, though it could yet change).
2. The mobilization of social movements. Along the same lines, we could understand the way in which social movements are built up in terms of chains of interaction rituals (Collins himself describes one case by looking at growth of social movements against tobacco). Movements grow as charged symbols come to link a larger set of groups whose rituals for the production of solidarity (WUNC displays, to use the terminology of the late Charles Tilly) are sufficiently compatible. (I think also here of Ernesto Laclau’s ideas about  how the “people” in populism – its master symbol – is constituted by linked “chains of demands” – charged symbols that circulate among and link otherwise disparate groups).
   
   The lens of ritual also emphasizes the tremendous importance of physical mobilization; ritual is far more powerful when people are physically together and aware of each other’s reactions. Movements that depend on “social” media can hardly match the power of movements that are forged in physical co-presence. Marches, campaign rallies, etc. are not important because they provide information, or even because they are costly signals of commitment (though they are sometimes that) but because they concentrate and amplify emotion, motivating people to keep going in sometimes quite difficult circumstances. (You don’t go to a campaign rally to learn a candidate’s position, but to show solidarity and renew your commitment to a cause or a person).
   
   More generally, the lens of ritual provides a way of thinking about power as the capacity to mobilize or disrupt collective action rather than as the capacity to enforce orders in micro-situations or to produce calculable consequences in the world. Power in this sense is produced in micro-rituals of solidarity and cemented by strong emotional experiences that circulate in the form of charged symbols (like common experiences of war; hence the strength of political parties forged in warfare as against parties held together only by patronage). Collins mostly discusses power in terms of deference rituals or the ability to produce calculable consequences, but the theory he offers can provide resources for thinking about the sources of collective action more generally.
   
   
3. The (relative) insignificance of ideology. Taken in its strongest terms, Collins’ theory seems to suggest that ideology is generally unimportant. Whether a symbol acquires socially motivating value depends much less on its “generalized” meaning than on its place within chains of interaction rituals; we are not generally the dupes of rhetorical framings and persuasive strategies except in the context of successful ritual situations. (Collins notes, for example, that most advertisement seems to be unsuccessful at actually persuading people to buy products, and is mostly intended to preserve attention space against competitors). From this perspective, the decline of labor movements worldwide, for example, may owe less to any ideological changes (“persuasion” and “manipulation” taken in a very broad sense) than to (intentional or unintentional) changes in the conditions for the ritual production of solidarity. Chris Bertram recently mused on the occasion of Margaret Thatcher’s death that UK society used to be socially more class-differentiated (there were strong institutions where class solidarities and roles were produced) but is now less so (since these institutions have vanished), despite very low levels of economic mobility and higher levels of economic inequality; many people now “feel” that there is more equality. From the interaction ritual perspective, these changes are not the result of the working class becoming simply convinced of lies due to clever persuasive strategies by elites, but of the less central place of rituals and symbols reinforcing class solidarity in their lives. This is in turn due to any number of causes: laws that made labor unions more difficult to organize, structural changes in employment patterns, the decay of rituals of deference, the emergence of rituals focused on celebrities that cut across social class, etc.
4. The (near) impossibility of deliberative democracy. I confess that the interaction ritual perspective makes me feel pessimistic about the prospects for anything like genuinely deliberative democracy. Deliberation is itself a ritual situation, but one that seems particularly fragile and unlikely to produce strong commitments, unlike many other political rituals, since it is premised on disagreement. The basic building blocks of political solidarity – all the rituals inadvertently sacralising various opinions as tokens of membership – seem to cut against the possibility of successful deliberation except in very rare circumstances. But this is something I would need to think more about.
5. The ritual origins of civilization. From reading Peter Watson's “The Great Divide: History and Human Nature in the Old World and the New” I take it that the conventional wisdom in anthropology today seems to be that “civilization” (or perhaps better, cities) did not emerge from agriculture; the first cities are ritual centers, and precede the development of agriculture. Though this idea (including the fact that much early religious practice seems to have also depended on the chemical amplification of experience through hallucinogens) seems to fit within the overall perspective of the theory, I don’t quite know what to make of it yet.

All in all, for me this was one of those books that changes the way I see things; everyday situations – a committee meeting, a lecture, a political event – suddenly appeared in a new light, and even everyday problems – habit formation, how to give an interesting talk, etc. – seemed to benefit from the insights Collins' perspective provides.

[Update: fixed some typos]

The Sun was once New

Here's a bit of interesting speculation I'd never heard before, from Peter Watson's "The Great Divide: History and Human Nature in the Old World and the New". According to Watson, "the second most common myth on earth" is the myth of the "watery creation" of the world:

The chief theme of this myth is the separation, usually of the sky from the Earth. This story is found in a band stretching from New Zealand to Greece ... and it invariably has a small number of common features. The first is the appearance of light. As it says in Genesis, 1:3: 'And God said, let there be light: and there was light.' Nearly all cosmogonies have this theme, where it is notable that neither the sun nor the moon is the source of the first light at Creation. Rather, the first light is associated with the separation of heaven and Earth. Only after heaven and Earth have separated does the sun appear. In some traditions in the east the light is let in because the heavy substance of the clouds that envelop the Earth sinks down to the ground, and the light, clearing the clouds, rises to become heaven. (pp. 23-24).

What might account for the wide geographical distribution of this particular myth? Watson's suggestion is that myths of watery creation represent collective memories of the eruption of the Toba supervolcano about 71-74,000 years ago, just as the first human beings were arriving in South Asia. This was probably the most powerful volcanic eruption in the planet in the last two million years, and it precipitated a global volcanic winter for years, including a prolonged period (at least several months) of complete darkness in some areas. The eruption nearly wiped out the human race; various estimates suggest that the total human population on Earth declined to perhaps 3,000-10,000 individuals afterwards, though of course all such numbers are highly uncertain. (We live, still, "by geological consent, subject to change without notice;" but that consent was nearly withdrawn then). And the myths of watery creation provide a fairly good description of how the aftermath of the eruption would have been experienced:

The 'separation' myth is a not-inaccurate description of what would have happened over large areas of the globe, in South East Asia, after the Toba eruption and the volcanic winter that would have followed ... Sunlight would have been cut out, the darkness would have been "thick" with ash, the ash would gradually have sunk to the ground, and, after a long, long time, the sky would gradually have got brighter, lighter and clearer, but there would have been no sun or moon visible perhaps  for generations. There would have been light but no sun, not for years, not until a magical day when, finally, the sun at last became visible. We take the sun for granted but for early humankind it (and the moon, eventually) would have been a new entity in the ever-lightening sky. Mythologically, it makes sense for this event to be regarded as the beginning of time. (p. 25)

The sun was once new.

The book is full of much other interesting but sometimes hard to assess speculation about human prehistory, including fascinating pages about flood myths (the most common of all myths; as a Platonist, I am reminded of these passages), which appear to represent collective memories of enormous floods 14,000, 11,000 and especially 8,000 years ago caused by the melting of gigantic ice sheets.  (The story is a bit complicated, but apparently 8,000 years ago the Laurentide ice sheet started to melt in such a way that the water was "dammed" by an ice plug at the Hudson Strait. When the plug broke under the pressure of the meltwater, sea level would have increased by "20-40 centimeters" more or less instantaneously, according to Watson, and the shift in the distribution of such a huge mass of water would have triggered gigantic earthquakes and tsunamis as the crust of the Earth essentially "bounced"). There are also discussions of the connections between the domestication of dogs and the discovery of fathers (it is not altogether clear that the link between males and conception was made until it was observed in dogs, which have a much shorter gestation period than women; we might say that dogs, in a sense, created the idea of fatherhood), of the different rhythms of root agriculture (common in the Americas) vs. cereal agriculture, and many other things. Perhaps the oddest claim is the idea that a number of important  differences in "religious" practice between the New World and the Old before 1492 can be traced to the fact that more than 85% of all known psychoactive plants on Earth are found in the Americas. (When read in context and tied to a number of other differences between the old world and the new, the claim makes a great deal of sense, but the jokes about stoned Americans write themselves).

The Normativeness of Democracy

(Contains some work in progress, baroquely complex graphs to illustrate the obvious, rank speculation, and half-baked argument. It also continues this series on the quantitative history of political regimes).

Almost every country in the world publicly acknowledges the “normativeness” of democracy today. Democracy has become a sort of universally invoked standard, even though people vehemently disagree about its meaning. How do we know this? For one thing, almost every country in the world describes itself as a “democracy” in its constitutional documents. Using the data collected by the Comparative Constitutions Project, we can see that as of 2006, only 20 of 184 countries with some kind of written constitutional document did not describe themselves as democratic:

Fig. 1 Countries that do NOT describe themselves as democratic in their constitutional documents

This understates the universality of the norm. As we can see above, many of the countries that do not explicitly mention the word “democracy” in their constitutional documents are countries whose public culture nevertheless asserts and assumes that they are long-standing democracies - a judgment typically confirmed by democracy indexes like the Unified Democracy Scores. (There is in fact a slight negative correlation between the current or the long-run degree of democracy, as measured by such indexes, and whether or not the country calls itself a democracy; almost every country in the map above is represented by a blue dot, which indicates that observers generally regard them as democratic).

At any rate many of the countries that do not describe themselves as democracies in their constitutional documents have constitutions dating back to a time where the word “democracy” didn't carry the positive associations it does today, like the USA and the Netherlands; and some nevertheless use words that are effectively equivalent to the word “democracy” today, even if in the past their usage differed, like the word “republic”. Thus the USA constitution guarantees a “republican” form of government to every state; Singapore and Yemen explicitly describe themselves as “republics” in their constitutional documents, and Yemen asserts its adherence to a principle of “political and partisan pluralism”; the Japanese constitutionstates that “sovereign power resides with the people” and that “government is a sacred trust of the people, the authority for which is derived from the people, the powers of which are exercised by the representatives of the people, and the benefits of which are enjoyed by the people;” Jordan stresses that its monarchy is “parliamentary;” the Netherlands, Belgium, Monaco, Denmark, and Norway all describe themselves as “constitutional” monarchies; and of course almost all of these constitutions guarantee some form of universal suffrage. Indeed, of the countries listed above, only the absolute monarchies - Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Brunei - really refuse to pay any lip service to the norm.

Moreover, the assertion of “democracy” in constitutional documents is almost always accompanied by the assertion of the classical “liberal” norms: freedoms of speech, expression, religion, association, press, and the basic equality of all people. The constitutions of the most repressive countries all proclaim such freedoms. Let's take the basic freedoms of association, speech, religion, and assembly, as well as the norm of equality before the law. Almost every constitutional document in the world (over 90%!) asserts all five of these; and among those countries that don't, most proclaim their allegiance to at least four of these. Only two countries (New Zealand and Libya!) failed to mention any of them as of 2006:

Fig. 2 Constitutions missing one or more "liberal" freedoms as of 2006

In the case of New Zealand, this is basically an artifact of the choice of “constitutional document” coded by the Comparative Constitutions Project - the New Zealand Constitution Act, last revised in 1986, is a purely structural document, setting out the powers of parliament and the governor general and describing various other institutions, while other documents, including the Treaty of Waitangi, play a more important role in setting out the important normative commitments of the country. (Many people would anyway say that New Zealand does not have a written constitution; the Constitution Act is simply one part of the constitutional law of the country, and possibly not the most important part). In the case of Libya, the post-Qaddafi interim Libyan constitutional declaration, article 14, explicitly asserts all of the freedoms that the Qaddafi 1977 amendment to the 1969 “provisional” constitution failed to mention. (Interestingly, the 1969 Libyan provisional constitution did mention some of these rights, but they were apparently excised from the 1977 revision).

I find this striking. The old saw about how “even the constitution of the Soviet Union” proclaimed freedom of the press, expression, association, and the like was not only true of the Soviet Union; it is true today of practically every country, however repressive; indeed, many of the countries that fail to expressly list such rights and freedoms in a constitutional document nevertheless affirm them in their public culture. (Note that all countries not listed in the graph above explicitly assert all five liberal freedoms in their constitutional documents, whenever such documents can be identified, which is almost everywhere today; North Korea, for example, affirms all of them). Yet it is obvious that the mere affirmation of these principles does not imply that they are honored in any way shape or form, and in some places the assertion can only be taken as mockery. If we take the UDS score as a very rough measure of how likely it is that these rights are honored in practice, with higher (“more democratic”) scores indicating more likely respect for these liberal freedoms, then we are forced to conclude that there is basically no correlation between expressing normative support for such freedoms in constitutional documents and actually protecting them.

This might seem unsurprising; a cynic might say that I've only rediscovered the obvious impotence of constitutional restraints in the absence of supportive social and political realities. But it is nevertheless interesting, to my mind, that there is such a widespread need to assert these particular normative commitments, even as they are routinely violated, or interpreted in such radically restrictive ways as to render them politically meaningless. Among authoritarian elites, only the House of Saud and the Sultan of Brunei appear to have the courage of their convictions; everyone else hides behind a banner of rights and liberties.

Nevertheless, only some rights within the larger universe of potential normative claims are universally asserted; if we take a look at the full list of rights that the CCP codes - ranging from freedoms of expression, opinion, and association to the right to bear arms or be granted asylum to socioeconomic rights like the right to own a business, to strike, to healthcare, or to a specific standard of living (about 64 in total) we find a small core of liberal rights that basically everybody asserts (plus a right to own property, in uneasy balance with a right of the state to expropriate it, typically with compensation) and a larger penumbra of other rights, different sets of which are asserted by various sets of countries. In the graph below, each word represents a particular rights provision tracked by the CCP project, surrounded by colored dots representing the countries whose constitutions contain that provision. (A list of all of these provision is available in the codebook here). The number near the word represents the proportion of countries that assert the provision (for example, 90% of all countries assert a commitment to protect freedom of association, “assoc”, in their constitution); the color of each dot shows the UDS score of the country as of 2006, where blue indicates “more democratic” and white indicates the dividing line, more or less, between democracies and non-democracies.

Fig. 3: Rights and countries, fireworks mode

(You come here for the intellectual fireworks, right? There, some fireworks). A perhaps more rational (but less fun!) way of visualizing the same data is this:

Fig. 4: Proportion of constitutions affirming particular rights

(Click to enlarge. Red lines indicate where 50% and 80% of the constitutions of the world explicitly affirm a particular provision; the color of the dot represents the average UDS score of countries that endorse a particular right. It was interesting to note that the right to bear arms appears to be unequivocally endorsed by only about 1.5% of the world's constitutions - the USA, Mexico, and Guatemala).

We might thus say that the “liberal” rights and the associated idea of democracy appear to have a good claim to represent a sort of global “overlapping consensus” in Rawls' sense - rights that are publicly accepted for diverse reasons in very different societies- and may serve as a basis for normative judgment everywhere. (Incidentally, this the case not only for public constitutional documents, which may be thought to be elite-imposed and not always faithful reflections of the normative aspirations of the broader society; though this requires another post, public opinion in most countries also seems to overwhelmingly support democracy and many “liberal” ideals [ungated], at least in the abstract, even if it is not always clear what this actually means in practice. Talk, of course, is often cheap, and abstract support for democracy and liberal freedoms does not necessarily translate into genuine concern for them.) Other rights, however, are still objects of normative struggle at a global level; they are not universally accepted.

But though there is much less consensus about these other rights, it is nevertheless striking that public affirmation of any set of these rights is not obviously clustered in particular societies either. It isn't always clear why a society chooses to “constitutionalize” a particular right, and publicly affirm it in its highest legal document; but whatever the case, democracies and non-democracies are about equally likely to endorse a given right in their constitutional documents. As we see above, the average UDS score of countries endorsing any particular right is pretty much the average level of democracy in the sample, at least for provisions endorsed by, say, more than 10% of the world's constitutions.(We can also see this by noticing that of the fireworks above are especially red or especially blue, save for rights explicitly endorsed by very few countries, like the right to bear arms - USA, Mexico, Guatemala - or the provisions specifying that law contrary to religion is void). Furthermore, there is no correlation between the number of rights provisions endorsed by a constitutional document and either the contemporary or long-run level of democracy, as measured by the UDS score or the cumulative UDS score. In fact, constitutions in general seem to be fairly similar to one another; and to the extent that particular sets of constitutions cluster together (grouping together countries that affirm similar sets of rights) these clusters do not correspond to obvious cultural, political, or other groupings.

One way to see this is as follows. (Please indulge my taste for complicated graphs). We take the list of rights and duties coded by the CCP and calculate the matrix of “distances” between them - essentially, we calculate how similar each constitution is to each other along that set of dimensions, using the Gower similarity coefficient, where 1 means the two constitutions are exactly alike (they affirm the exact same rights) and 0 means they are completely dissimilar. We can then use this distance matrix to plot the world's constitutions as a network and visualize their clustering patterns; highly similar constitutions should cluster together (they are less “distant” from one another). And indeed, we can see some patterns (community discovery algorithms suggest the graph below has about 4 big components when we include all links), but these patterns do not correspond to any obvious groups, like democracies or dictatorships, or poor and rich countries. Indeed, the groups obtained in this way can seem downright perverse, placing, say, Germany and Egypt closer together than Germany and the USA:

Fig. 5: Network of similarities among constitutions (rights provisions only, 85% similarity and up)

Or, alternatively, take a random constitution from a democracy (as measured by an UDS score in the top 33% in 2006) and a random constitution from a dictatorship (as measured by an UDS score in the bottom 33% in 2006) and they will share, on average, about 60% of all rights provisions tracked by the CCP project (and about 80% of the basic liberal democratic freedoms of assembly, association, etc.); take two random dictatorships or two random democracies and they will share similarly about 60% of their rights provisions (and 80% of the basic liberal freedoms). The same is true if you look at the “duties” provisions of constitutions - e.g., whether the state has a duty to provide work, or citizens a duty to work or serve in the military. Or, indeed, any other set of provisions tracked by the CCP; it seems difficult to find any dimension - descriptions of executive power, electoral provisions, etc. - along which the constitutions of more or less democratic societies, or societies in different regions, or at different levels of development, appear to be systematically different (any two random constitutions are about 65% similar, taking all dimensions together). In other words, the normative self-presentation of societies whose power structures are widely different (at least as measured by standard indexes) is pretty much identical; if I'm right, you could not systematically say much about the kind of power structures in a society by looking at its constitution.

(At this point, this thought goes through my head: “Are my methods unsound? I see no method at all, Mr Marquez”)

What might explain this “normative convergence”? The point, it is worth emphasizing once again, is NOT about the effective enforcement of constitutional norms; I take it for granted that such norms -specifically, the norms granting individual rights to citizens, of whatever kinds- are only spottily effective in most places, even in many “democratic” countries, though I think it is reasonable to assume that countries conventionally held to be democracies (as measured by the UDS) will tend to enforce whatever rights appear in their constitutions slightly more effectively than the average non-democracy (if perhaps not much more effectively, and with many exceptions). I'm interested, instead, in the “normative mimicry” on display here, and the process through which some norms achieve near-“fixation” in the population, despite what we might call their fictional status in many cases.

Now, before you accuse me of being willfully obtuse, I am aware of the obvious explanation: modern societies, the story goes, required a new “basis for legitimacy” after the breakdown of traditional forms of legitimacy. Norms of popular sovereignty and individual rights come to replace earlier “legitimizing” norms; and so all regimes now “legitimize” their power by appealing to these norms. But I'm not sure that this doesn't simply restate the problem. Why these particular norms and not others? And why would appeal to “fictional” norms - norms that are known not to have any substance on the ground, so to speak - legitimize anything (in the sense of increasing the baseline level of support for a structure of domination)? It's not that there are no answers to these questions; it's just that the appeal to legitimacy is question-begging if what we are trying to explain is how the norms became dominant in the first place, even when they have minimal impact on what happens in day to day life.

There are more and less “optimistic” stories one could tell about this process. An “optimistic” story could say that there was a sense in which the norms of liberal democracy and its associated freedoms became increasingly appealing to people throughout the world over the last two centuries, while alternative norms became less so. (One might here appeal to increasing literacy, capitalist development, the breakdown of local solidarities, etc. to explain the formation of modern subjectivities; whole libraries have been written on these topics). Normative change outstripped social change; and every political regime now feels compelled to pay at least lip service to these “new” norms, if only because not mentioning them exerts some negative pressure on their survival prospects, perhaps by making those subject to it needlessly dissatisfied. By the same token, this story might continue, the mere existence of the norm puts pressure on governments to live up to their highest commitments, and enables dissatisfied people to coordinate their claims; thus Chinese activists, for example, have (on and off) appealed to the party to enforce China's own constitutional norms guaranteeing basic freedoms of speech, association, etc., and perhaps eventually they will get somewhere. Accordingly, even if normative change feels insignificant at first, it can be utterly momentous in the long run - like a force that exerts only a slight pressure, but does so continuously over the very long run and so ends up accelerating a great mass to huge velocities.

While this story is probably not entirely incorrect, it seems to me that the problem here is that for a norm to have any kind of ability to raise the baseline level of support for a political structure, it needs to be not only widely recognized as a normative standard, but credibly asserted by those in power; and many of these norms are not. (It seems absurd to me to think that the mere assertion of freedom of speech in the North Korean constitution can possibly fool anyone who doesn't already want to be fooled for other reasons, to take only an obvious example). Moreover, it seems clear that many of these norms are liable to lose their force as they become globally dominant simply as a result of adaptation on the part of groups adversely affected by them. There was a time, for example, when it was a matter of live controversy who should be admitted to the franchise, whereas nowadays most adults everywhere are enfranchised, even if their votes are utterly meaningless, since powerful groups have adapted to the mere existence of elections (if not necessarily to the possibility of actually fair elections). Similarly, it may be that as legal freedom of speech becomes increasingly unlikely to genuinely threaten powerful interests, the more easily it comes to be accepted as a global norm. Successful adaptation by groups that are disadvantaged under particular norms reduces their propensity to produce conflict; and the global dominance of a norm can thus mean either that it is ripe for struggles to give it substance (let's turn the fake democracy into a real democracy) or that it has been hollowed out, and live conflicts have relocated to other normative arenas (the right to healthcare, or to a standard of living, or to bear arms, or to enforce one's religion on others, etc., rather than suffrage, etc.).

There are also other complications. Suppose that particular norms become entangled with markers of status; to be a “proper” country, with a “proper” constitution involves asserting some of the norms that powerful countries profess to affirm. As long as the norm is merely one of the marks of status tied to a specific collective identity, it can be asserted by most people in an entirely fictive way. The norm then appears as a sort of ornament, one aspect of a collective identity expressing “far” values, while being ignored or rationalized away in concrete situations. (The modern USA is “the land of the free” to most of its citizens irrespective of particular facts about freedom in the USA; and the idea that Venezuelans have “the best constitution in the world” is entirely unaffected, for most Venezuelans, by the fact that it is routinely ignored). On this view, it is precisely higher-status countries that have the most freedom to mention or not to mention particular norms, which is more or less in accord with some of the data above, though I have not checked properly; and “new” norms should come from relatively peripheral countries with leaders intent on raising their status (e.g., Venezuela, whose constitution is chock-full of rights and institutional innovations, however unenforced). (Incidentally, we know that in fact many “democratic innovations” first emerged and were developed in peripheral countries, not major powers). The power of the norm comes here less from the content of the norm - as in the optimistic story - than from its association with other markers of status. I suspect similar things happened in the more distant past; as James C. Scott notes in The Art of Not Being Governed, the symbols of absolute monarchy were often adopted by peoples who had hardly “states” at all: every two-bit chieftain claimed to be a universal emperor.

The global dominance of “democratic” norms in this "fictional" sense complicates our efforts to make sense of events like the Arab revolutions. Were these revolts “for” democracy? People sometimes argue that the revolts were not “for” democracy insofar as many protesters didn't make “democracy” their principal demand; instead, people wanted jobs, respect, dignity, and many other things. But we need to take into account the fact that the Arab republics explicitly endorsed democracy - the Qaddafi constitution made a huge deal of its participatory democratic character, for example - yet the norm was without substance. The revolts have sometimes attempted to give substance to the norm, but sometimes they have chosen different, more contested normative terrains - over the role of religion in public life, for example - where a norm is not yet universally accepted. This does not mean that “democracy” was not valued; it may mean merely that it was not always understood as something that required normative defence, or as a terrain where fighting over meaning was likely to lead to any interesting places, since everyone already agreed on democracy as the standard, though they disagreed in how exactly to give substance to it. Anyway, more of this would become clearer if we had a better sense of how it came about that these “liberal” rights became so dominant as normative fictions - when and where they first became publicly affirmed throughout the world. But I've run out of steam, and this post is already long enough. More later on the more vexed question of “culture” and democracy, perhaps…

Code for replicating the graphs in this post (plus some additional stuff) is available in this Gist (five files, including one with auxiliary functions and some geocoded country codes). You will also need access to the public CCP data.