Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (23): The Great Leader Theory of Democratization

The death of Nelson Mandela is the perfect occasion to clear up some myths about the Great Leader Theory of democratization. Mandela has become almost the archetype of a great man and a great leader, and deservedly so. He was certainly instrumental and some would say essential in the democratization of South Africa. But what can we say in general about the role of leaders? That’s a lot harder and I’m afraid the answers will reveal some of our deep seated biases.

When countries turn to democracy, to what extent does it help to have a charismatic leader leading the process? Either an insider leading the old system to a new one, such as Gorbachev who in a sense started a top-down transformation. Or outsiders such as Wałęsa, Mandela and perhaps also Aung San Suu Kyi leading a popular opposition movement against those in power, overthrowing the old leaders, taking over from them and riding on a wave op popular support towards a new democracy. The opposite theory is also common: the Great Dictator who almost single handedly destroys democratic forces at home and wards off supposedly overwhelming international pressure. Castro comes to mind here.

Political science has shown that there are many causes of democratization, and that several causes are effective simultaneously, with different weights for each effective cause in each particular case. I hope my blog series on democratization has left no doubts about that. This reality is often obscured by the temptation to give undue weight to the “Great Leader” factor, because that is a cause that can be readily observed, as opposed to many other causes such as internal friction within elites, the economy, outside pressure etc. The appeal of the “Great Leader” theory hinges on the mysterious talent or faculty of charisma: no one knows what it means, what it does or how it does it, but it’s widely believed that charisma yields great power and influence. Combined with a view of the “populace” as dimwitted sheeple easily impressed – for good or for bad – by this mysterious faculty of charisma, it becomes almost self-evident that great leaders must have an overriding effect on regime change (or regime continuation as the case may be). It’s obvious that there are some biases at work here: we give more weight to what we can easily observe and ignore deeper causes that often need both detailed knowledge of specific circumstances and statistical or scientific analysis.

Note that I don’t claim leaders have no role to play. On the contrary. Mandela is a great historical figure – as are the others I’ve cited – precisely because he had an effect. All I’m saying is that we should be aware of our biases. The Great Leader Theory becomes all the more suspect when we look at the long term survival and flourishing of democracy – as opposed to the democratic revolution itself. It’s clear that leaders by themselves play only a limited role in the long term prospects of democracy: institutional development, economic prosperity, rule of law, the diminishing role of violence and of the military, bureaucratic development and other indispensable building bricks of democracy can never result from the actions of a single person. I’m afraid this is all too obvious when we look at Mandela’s country, or many other democracies for that matter.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (22): Arab Democracy, an Oxymoron? Ctd.

I already wrote about and dismissed the claim that Islam is the main reason why democracy seems to fail in Arab countries (see here). Now I’ve found a new study that seems to support my argument:

The Arab world’s so-called “democracy deficit” is not tied to the Islamic religion but rather to the Arab world’s history and the institutions introduced following conquest by Arab armies over 1000 years ago. (source)

Territories conquered by Arab armies during the Middle Ages still have weak civil societies and strong states today. Countries that are predominantly Muslim today but outside of this area of medieval conquest are not more or less democratic than the average country.

If this is true, then we can be somewhat optimistic about the possibility of real democracies emerging from the Arab Spring. If Islam were the problem, we could forget about democracy.

However, I have my doubts about the importance and validity of this explanation. It’s not the historical distance of the causal link that troubles me. You may be skeptical about the long-lasting effects of events that occurred centuries ago, but I think such effects are commonly accepted in other areas: the slave trade still causes poverty in Africa to this day, and poverty and inequality in present-day Peru for example are partly the result of the mita system of the Spanish colonizers.

What troubles me is that I can see other, more or equally important reasons for the democratic deficit in Arab countries: the resource curse, foreign intervention (motivated by the FOTA principle) and, yes, some elements of Islam (Islam’s hostility to equality, to the separation of state and church etc.). The latter point should not be understood as implying fatalism with regard to the prospect of democracy: Islam is only one causal element among many, and it’s a cause that can be eliminated. After all, Catholicism as well was once believed to be an insurmountable obstacle to democracy.

More posts in this series are here.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (21): Education Again

The claim that education leads to democracy has a lot of intuitive appeal. Educated people are probably more inclined to demand political participation, and those in power who hesitate about granting democratic rights will be less hesitant when they have to grant these rights to educated people. The claim is also supported by the fact that democracy requires some level of education in order to function adequately.

And there is indeed a correlation between levels of democracy and levels of education. Furthermore, it seems that the causation goes mainly from education to democracy. Some evidence for this is here and here – although it’s also true that democracies are better educators. There’s also evidence here that it’s mainly primary education levels that drive democracy. The effect of primary education even outstrips the effect of GDP on democracy.

And there’s even more, albeit quasi-anecdotal evidence for this claim. Let’s have a look at the Arab Spring. Although one can’t possible argue that democracy is now the common form of government in the Middle East, a first step towards democratization has been taken, and it’s likely that the push came from the fact that education levels in those Arab countries that have witnessed recent uprisings have risen sharply in recent decades.

[T]he Arab Spring was partly predictable, as Middle Eastern countries displayed levels of democracy that were lower than those predicted by their level of education and income. … [The f]igure [below] focuses on these countries in particular, showing that their levels of democracy as predicted by our empirical model [based on education levels] lie above their pre-2011 actual levels. In other words, the Arab Spring could be expected based on a dynamic statistical model of the factors that drive democracy (interestingly, the same observation holds for Iraq and Cuba). (source)

More posts in this series are here.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (20): Education Again

It’s a common assumption that democracy is driven by levels of education:

• Less educated people are – supposedly – easier to oppress and more willing to accept extreme and simplistic ideologies that authoritarian rulers can exploit. They are also said to be less tolerant, and therefore less willing to accept freedoms and rights that protect outgroups.
• Once people become more educated, they start earning more. And because they earn more, they have more leisure time. And because they have more leisure time, they have more opportunities to engage in various activities. And because they have these opportunities, they start to demand the freedoms they need to take up these opportunities. Better education itself, irrespective of the higher earning potential that goes with it, opens up opportunities to do things, and hence drives the demand for the freedom necessary to do things.
• More educated people are also more aware of the ways in which their governments oppress them and of the liberties enjoyed in other countries, and they are better able to organize and mobilize against their governments.
• Maslow’s theory about the hierarchy of needs also plays a part: when lower needs – such as food, clothing and shelter – are met, then the preconditions are fulfilled for the appearance of higher needs. Higher education levels, because they help to fulfill lower needs, assist the appearance of needs such as self-actualization, self-esteem and belonging, needs that require freedom for their realization.
• Democracy requires a certain level of education among citizens in order to function properly. Of course, it’s not because B requires A that A results in B; claiming that education results in democracy because democracy needs education would mean committing a logical error. However, the fact that democracy needs education does probably increase the likelihood that democracy will follow from more education. At least the absence of some level of education will diminish the chances of democracy.
• And, finally, more education improves the capacity to make rational choices, and democracy is essentially a system of choice. Democracy will therefore intrinsically appeal to the higher educated.

And indeed, there is a correlation – albeit not a very strong one – between levels of education and degrees of democracy.

The correlation may be due to the fact that democracies are better educators, but there are some reasons to believe that part of the causation at least goes the other way. Anecdotal evidence is provided by the recent Arab Spring: education levels in Arab countries have risen sharply in recent decades.

More posts in this series are here.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (19): Psychological Reactions to the Threat of Disease

There sure are many reasons why countries become or fail to become democracies. In this blog series I’ve mentioned climate, geography, inequality, external triggers, prosperity, religion, resources, education etc. An original approach to this question looks at psychological reactions to the threat of disease:

Conventional explanations for a country’s political system would draw on its history, economy and culture. Randy Thornhill from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, however, thinks it might be determined by the threat of disease in a region. This triggers psychological biases, which originally evolved to prevent illness spreading, that also hinder the emergence of democratic ideals. (source)

The logic is that people develop psychological reactions – call them biases – which they need to protect themselves against infectious diseases, and these reactions in turn make it difficult to adopt democracy, individualism and an attitude of criticism of authority.

The starting point for Thornhill and Fincher’s thinking is a basic human survival instinct: the desire to avoid illness. In a region where disease is rife, they argue, fear of contagion may cause people to avoid outsiders, who may be carrying a strain of infection to which they have no immunity. Such a mindset would tend to make a community as a whole xenophobic, and might also discourage interaction between the various groups within a society – the social classes, for instance – to prevent unnecessary contact that might spread disease.

What is more, Thornhill and Fincher argue, it could encourage people to conform to social norms and to respect authority, since adventurous behaviour may flout rules of conduct set in place to prevent contamination. Taken together, these attitudes would discourage the rich and influential from sharing their wealth and power with those around them, and inhibit the rest of the population from going against the status quo and questioning the authority of those above them. This is clearly not a situation conducive to democracy. (source, source)

What is, initially useful for public health, becomes detrimental for self-government:

[S]pecific behavioural manifestations of collectivism (e.g. ethnocentrism, conformity) can inhibit the transmission of pathogens; and so we hypothesize that collectivism (compared with individualism) will more often characterize cultures in regions that have historically had higher prevalence of pathogens. Drawing on epidemiological data and the findings of worldwide cross-national surveys of individualism/collectivism, our results support this hypothesis: the regional prevalence of pathogens has a strong positive correlation with cultural indicators of collectivism and a strong negative correlation with individualism. (source)

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (18): External Triggers

In the previous posts in this blog series, I only discussed internal reasons why a particular country moves towards or away from democracy. But of course, no country stands on its own, unaffected by what happens in the rest of the world. Democratization is hardly ever a purely domestic event or the sole result of internal democratic forces. There are and have been important external triggers, both helping and impeding the transition to democracy.

The fall of the Soviet Block in 1989 and the defeat of the Axis powers after WWII were global events that led to the overthrow of a whole series of authoritarian governments. On the other hand, the Cold War meant that authoritarian leaders everywhere in the world were buttressed or installed as a buffer against communism or capitalist imperialism (“he’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch“). Furthermore, the economic interests of powerful countries often convinced them and sometimes still convince them to support dictators in oil-rich countries (Saudi Arabia for instance). And besides oil there are other strategic interests that may make it “necessary” to support dictators in other countries (for example, concern for the security of Israel led the US to support Mubarak in Egypt).

Sometimes, powerful countries decide that they should use their military to directly intervene in a country and install democracy by force (Grenada may be an example, and people sure try hard in Afghanistan and Iraq and perhaps also in Libya). Another form of intervention intended to support democracy is conditional aid: wealthy countries or international institutions often tie aid to “good governance” requirements.

And a final external trigger for democracy development is the dominance of the West in the international entertainment industry. When people in authoritarian countries consume western entertainment, they learn to associate democracy with prosperity and freedom.

Of course, external triggers alone won’t produce an enduring democracy, and certainly not when those triggers don’t encourage domestic aspirations. For example, it’s futile to force a country to hold elections through the use of conditional aid or military intervention when the rule of law isn’t in place, when there’s sharp polarization between groups or when a democratic culture isn’t in place. Democracy depends on internal support. People have to believe in democracy and participate, and the institutional structure has to be in place. However, the appetite can come while eating: a certain amount of experience with democracy may be required for institutions and mentalities to grow. Hence, it’s just as futile to wait with external triggers until all the preconditions for democracy are in place.

More posts in this series are here.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (17): Inequality

A transition to democratic government is very unlikely when the population of a country is sharply divided in unequal classes or groups. Some of these groups will try to monopolize political power in order to repress rival groups and maintain the distributional status quo. For example, when there’s a division between a landowning class or an industrial class on the one hand, and a group of impoverished rural or urban workers on the other hand, then the former group will fear election victories by the latter group because such victories will lead to redistribution of land or other assets. Privileged classes will therefore work against democracy. As a result of this, the working classes will radicalize and aim for a revolutionary overthrow and the abolition of property rights altogether, thereby also making democracy less likely.

Something like this is arguably a good description of much of the recent history of Latin America. Positively stated: more economic equality – perhaps following the expansion of a middle class – will make democracy more viable, since different groups have less to lose from a democratic power shift.

But polarization doesn’t have to be exclusively economic in nature. Religious or ethnic divisions can also hinder the creation and continuity of democracy, especially when there’s also a spatial division between groups. This is probably what happened in Africa since decolonization. Of course, non-economic divisions are often exacerbated by economic ones, in which case we can hope that more economic equality will take the sting out of ethnic divisions.

More posts in this series are here.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (16): Climate and Geography

There are some contingent reasons why countries’ governments develop or fail to develop a strong system of centralized control over resources. And those that fail to do so tend to be more democratic. The detailed argument is here, but I’ll give you a short summary.

Montesquieu already related differences in human political conditions to climatic differences. And indeed, it’s not uncommon to see the argument that water for instance plays a crucial role. Water makes land valuable, but only in countries where there’s continuous rainfall over the seasons will water be available in sufficient quantities. In other countries, a centrally coordinated irrigation system will be necessary, and this requirement favors a strong central government. In countries where citizens don’t depend on the government for water for their agriculture for instance, those citizens have more bargaining power.

Also, continuous rainfall results in agrarian surpluses, which in turn favor urbanization and taxation. Taxation is a well-known cause of democratization (“no taxation without representation“), and popular mobilization against authoritarian rule is easier in large cities. Urbanization also leads to commerce, specialization and industrialization, phenomena which result in a large and powerful middle class, able to bargain the taxes it pays against more rights and freedoms.

In light of this, it’s not surprising that democracy developed first in North-West Europe and North America, regions with plenty of rainfall. And neither is it surprising that so many non-democracies suffer from the so-called resource curse: countries that are endowed with natural resources that – unlike rainfall – can easily be brought under central control tend to develop governance structures that favor such control. Government will be centralized and authoritarian because the resource rents for the leaders are very high. And when there’s central control over resources, there’s also central control over all the rest: leaders have a strong financial incentive to stay in power and to oppress opposition movements.

But it’s not just climate that favors democracy or autocracy. There’s also geography. A country that is shielded from external military threats as a result of its geography or topography – for example because it’s an island, has a long coastal line, or is situated in a mountainous area – doesn’t need to sustain a standing army at the exclusive disposal of its leader. Without such an army, the leader’s control over coercion is limited and it’s much more difficult to develop a centralized governance system. Perhaps the success of democracy in countries such as Iceland, the UK, Scandinavia and Switzerland can be explained in this way. The army in Switzerland is really a volunteer militia, whereas the army in the UK has long been the hobby of the nobility.

So these are two examples of climate and geography deciding the balance of power in favor of citizens. A government that isn’t favored by climate or geography in its attempts to centralize power faces a stronger citizenry. Likewise, if a government depends on its citizens’ agreement for the use of an important resource such as the military – for geographic reasons – then those citizens have bargaining power. They will only participate in war or conquest if they get something in return, e.g. more rights and freedoms.

Of course, it would be silly to claim that climate factors or geography determine political outcomes, or even that they are the main causes. Democracy depends on a lot of things, especially beliefs and intentional collective action , much more than objective and contingent circumstances. But those circumstances do play a role, as they always do. Other causes are discussed in other posts in this blog series.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (15): Presidential v. Parliamentary Democracy

This post in the series focuses on the “remain” part rather than the “become” part. Juan Linz has famously argued that presidential democracies don’t work, with the exception of the US. To simplify things a bit, in a presidential democracy – where you have of course also a parliament – the executive power is elected directly by popular vote. People elect a president and this president selects her government. The people also elect members of parliament in separate elections. In a parliamentary democracy the executive isn’t elected directly by the people. The people elect only the members of parliament. The political party (or parties) that manage to get a majority of elected members of parliament then form a government (often after coalition negotiations between parties when there isn’t one party that has managed to acquire a majority of representatives in parliament).

One of the causes of the breakdown of presidential systems is the opposition between legislature and executive: both the president and the majority in the legislature have democratic legitimacy since they are both directly elected. That’s not a problem when both are of the same political family, but when they are not, it’s a recipe for stalemate at best and breakdown at worst.

Under such circumstances, who has the stronger claim to speak on behalf of the people: the president or the legislative majority that opposes his policies? Since both derive their power from the votes of the people in a free competition among well-defined alternatives, a conflict is always possible and at times may erupt dramatically. Theme is no democratic principle on the basis of which it can be resolved, and the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate. It is therefore no accident that in some such situations in the past, the armed forces were often tempted to intervene as a mediating power. (source)

On the other hand, parliamentary systems seem to be less stable in countries plagued by bitter ethnic conflict, as is the case in many African countries.

More posts in this series are here.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (14): Assassination

If we agree that democracy is something important, then we need to know why, how and when countries turn to or away from democracy. So, here’s another installment in our ongoing series:

Assassinations are a persistent feature of the political landscape. Using a new data set of assassination attempts on all world leaders from 1875 to 2004, we exploit inherent randomness in the success or failure of assassination attempts to identify assassination’s effects. We find that, on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy. We also find that assassinations affect the intensity of small-scale conflicts. The results document a contemporary source of institutional change, inform theories of conflict, and show that small sources of randomness can have a pronounced effect on history. (source, source)

I guess no need to say that this isn’t a sufficient condition for a democratic transition. More posts in this series are here.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (13): Prosperity

I already mentioned in a previous post how democracy is correlated with prosperity. There’s a much higher proportion of democracies among rich countries than among poor countries. The level of national income is the most important factor explaining inter-country variations in the degree of democracy. If we assume from this correlation that there is a causal link from prosperity to democracy, then low income is the most important barrier to democracy. But the causal link probably goes in both directions. Countries aren’t just democratic – or remain so – because they prosper (among other reasons), but it’s also the case that countries prosper to some extent because they are democratic (disproving the often heard claim that economic development requires authoritarian government).

The correlation between democracy and prosperity is obvious from this paper (at least for non-Muslim countries).

The stronger one of the causal links seems to be the one going from prosperity to democracy rather than vice versa. If you accept that, there’s an additional question (it’s one made famous by Przeworski and Limongi): are there more democracies among rich countries than among poor countries

• because economic development increases the likelihood that countries will undergo a transition to democracy (this is often called modernization theory), or
• because economic development makes democracies less likely to fall back into dictatorship?

Przeworski and Limongi found that affluence makes it very unlikely that a shift from democracy to dictatorship occurs, while Boix and Stokes find that there is an effect of affluence on the likelihood of a shift to democracy. Both effects are visible in this study.

It’s likely that the economic effect on transition towards democracy is a bit smaller than the effect halting the opposite transition. The reason is probably the fact that the transition from democracy to authoritarianism is in se much easier than the other way around. Some even say that democracy is inherently suicidal. Whatever the merits of that claim, it’s obvious that an authoritarian leader has the resources and the necessary lack of scruples to cling to power. Especially when his country becomes more prosperous. He can then use this prosperity to bribe the population into submission, and buy the arms and security forces when this doesn’t work.

Again, economic development isn’t a sufficient or even necessary prerequisite for democracy to appear or to survive. Things are more complicated than that and many other factors are in play, including conscious human activity and volition. People can decide to make or destroy a democracy at any level of economic development.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (12): Arab Democracy, an Oxymoron?

When people look for reasons why countries haven’t made the transition from authoritarian government to democracy, they often mention economic development or culture, or both. And culture usually means religion more specifically. And religion usually means Islam. Now it’s true that if you look at the largest Muslim region, the Arab world (roughly North Africa plus the Arab Peninsula), you won’t find a single democracy. You can check the most common democracy indexes, Freedom House and Polity IV. That’s an anomaly: no other large region in the world is similarly devoid of democratic governance.

The question is of course: why? In our post-9/11 world the obvious answer is Islam, which is believed to be a religion that is particularly incompatible with democratic principles such as separation of state and church, pluralism, rule of law, human rights etc. Some even say that there will never be democracies in the Arab world as long as Islam remains an important force.

However, sometimes the obvious answer is also the wrong one. Some Muslim countries outside the Arab world have reasonably well developed democratic systems of government (Albania, Indonesia, Malaysia, Senegal, Turkey etc.) and are doing much better than some non-Muslim dictatorships out there.

But then, if it’s not religion, what is the reason for the absence of democracy in the Arab world? In an interesting new paper, Larry Diamond has a look at some possible reasons. He focuses on the so-called resource-curse and the correlated lack of accountability (accountability only emerges in countries that have to tax their people), but I think he’s wrong there. Lack of economic development could be a cause, but he rightly dismisses it. If you compare economic development in Arab and non-Arab countries, you see that per capita GDP of Kuwait is on the same level as Norway, Bahrain compares to France, and Saudi Arabia is on a par with South Korea. Conversely, you’ll be able to find non-Arab democracies that are much less developed than the average Arab country.

A more promising explanation of enduring Arab authoritarianism is FOTA: fear of the alternative. moderate opposition groups in Arab countries tend to accept their authoritarian governments. Their dislike of “modern pharaohs” is topped by their dislike of radical Islamist groups that could profit from free elections. Rather than the principle “one person, one vote, one time” followed by theocracy, they settle for the relatively mild yoke of secular Arab dictatorship. Something similar happened before in Latin America, when the feared alternative was communist rule.

Another explanation for the lack of Arab democracy is the large proportion of GDP spent on the security apparatus, and the relative efficiency of Arab security forces. This is probably linked to the support these countries receive from the West, which is another reason for their longevity. And finally, the Arab-Israeli conflict is a very convenient diversion: it allows public frustration to discharge outwards, without internal consequences.

As you can see, none of these causes condemn Arab countries to dictatorship. Compared to religion, these are things that can be changed quite easily, if the will is there. The FOTA is self-fulfilling: it’s likely that radical Islamist movements are encouraged by authoritarian rule, as much as they are restrained by it. So better give it up. And the West could use its leverage, resulting from decades of support, to push for reforms.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (11): The Relative Cost of Freedom and Dictatorship

When dictatorial governments come under international pressure to improve the human rights situation in their countries, they often react by stating that they govern developing countries and don’t have the resources that are necessary to make improvements. Such statements have some plausibility. A judiciary, a well-trained police force, a functioning system of political representation etc. all require funding.

However, to some extent this explanation is no more than an excuse: you don’t need money to stop persecution of dissidents, to lift restrictions on the media, to allow demonstrations etc. On the contrary, you save money by doing so. You don’t need a large police force or paramilitary force; you don’t need strong government controls of every aspect of society and the economy; you don’t need to bride your citizens into acceptance of the state etc. But obviously the goal of dictators isn’t to save money and make the country better off by investing that money in the economy.

On the other hand, it remains true that the adequate defense of freedom, rights and democracy requires money, which is probably why rich countries usually score higher in freedom indexes. And, consequently, governments can save money by limiting freedom and by oppressing people.

So, both oppression and freedom cost money, and both a reduction of oppression and a reduction freedom save money. The question is then: what is, overall, the cheapest? A dictatorship or a democracy? And how can we know? Well, one possible indicator could be government spending as a percentage of GDP. If democracies have a systematically higher percentage, one could say that freedom costs more than oppression (on the condition that there isn’t a third variable explaining why democracies spend more).

However, one look at the data tells you that there isn’t much of a correlation between freedom and government spending, or between oppression and government spending. There are some countries that oppress a lot with not a lot of money – “not a lot” in relative terms compared to GDP. China and Saudi Arabia for example. And there are others that do need a lot of money (a large share of the economy) to keep the bosses in place. Cuba and Zimbabwe for example. But perhaps that is because their GDP is so low, not because they need a lot of money to oppress. In other cases, such as Saudi Arabia we may think they don’t spend a lot on oppression but we are fooled because their GDP is relatively high. And anyway, even dictatorships use some part of their state budget for things that aren’t quite so bad.

Likewise for freedom: freedom comes “cheap” in the U.S., and is “expensive” in Sweden. Between quotation marks because government spending over GDP is a very imprecise measure of the cost of freedom or oppression, for the reasons just given. It’s not because a country’s GDP doubles thanks to higher oil prices that the cost of freedom also doubles. Freedom (like oppression) costs money but not money as a fixed percentage of GDP.

Alternatively, you can also look at the tax burden. Here, the data show that countries that impose the highest taxes are also the ones that are most free (Scandinavia obviously ranks high on both accounts). But is that because freedom costs so much more than oppression? Perhaps the answer is “yes” if you include in “freedom” the things that make freedom possible, such as good healthcare, education etc.

But perhaps a more interesting and useful question would be: what cost considerations or economic incentives would produce a move towards democracy or away from democracy? It’s clear that a crisis of some sort – 9/11, a war, or, more appropriately in the current context, an economic recession or depression (see the Roosevelt cartoon below) – encourages democratic leaders to abridge certain rights, freedoms and democratic procedures. In the case of an economic crisis, the claim is that freedom and proper democratic procedures are just too expensive economically. A swift resolution of the crisis requires strong centralized intervention.

It’s also widely accepted that one of the causes of the demise of the Soviet Union was the unbearable cost of oppression. I think it’s better foreign policy to try to make oppression as costly as possible, rather than trying to make freedom as cheap as possible. Freedom tends not to be very cheap, I guess. And when it is, it’s probably not really freedom.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (9): The Resource Curse

If we value democracy, then it’s interesting to know

• how societies have achieved the transition from authoritarian forms of government to more democratic ones
• why other societies have failed
• and how democracies have avoided the opposite transition.

This knowledge will help us to promote and sustain democracy in the future. Something we already know is that this isn’t simple. There are a huge number of factors at play and there’s no silver bullet. Some of the most widely discussed factors are economic development, levels of education, and religion and culture.

I’ll bracket two important issues here: what kind of democracy are we talking about, and how do we measure transition or development towards democracy? If you want to know what promotes or inhibits democracy and act on this knowledge in order to further the cause of democracy, you can’t avoid these questions, but discussing them here would take us too far.

What I want to focus on here is the so-called resource curse. This curse is believed to be a phenomenon that blocks countries’ development towards democracy. Promoting democracy means lifting the curse. Now, what is this curse, and is it real or just another simplistic explanation of the course of history?

Countries which own lots of natural resources such as diamonds, oil or other valuables that are found in the ground, are often relatively poor, badly governed, violent and suffering from gross violations of human rights. Resource wealth can trigger corruption and grabbing, can give autocrats the means to retain power by buying off opposition or building a repressive state apparatus, or can tempt democratically elected leaders to cling to highly beneficial positions of power.

This sounds good but even a cursory glance at reality reveals some counter-indications. There are many resource rich countries that are governed very well and are pinnacles of democracy (take Norway). Still, that may only disprove part of the resource curse. It may be the case that democracies benefit from resources and are able to solidify themselves, while non-democracies are doomed to remain as they are because of resource abundance. Resources then only create a curse when democratic institutions are absent. So we shouldn’t worry about democracies failing because of resources, but about autocracies failing to transform because of them.

However, there’s an article here claiming that

resource wealth is positively associated with both economic growth and institutional quality.

Much depends, it seems, on how to measure resource abundance. There also is a reversal of the direction of causation, a common mistake in statistics:

There is no evidence that resource-dependent countries end up with slow growth and bad institutions. Rather, countries with bad institutions attract little investment, and as a result they grow more slowly and remain dependent on exports of commodities.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (8): The Resource Curse

The resource curse refers to the claim that some countries with lots of natural resources tend to do worse than countries with less resource wealth, worse in two respects: less economic growth and prosperity and less political stability and respect for basic rights.

Reliance on natural resources is said to inhibit development, political and institutional stability, anti-corruption efforts and legal protection for human rights.

Now, the important thing to stress here is that reliance on resources can lead to negative consequences, but doesn’t necessarily have to. Not all resource-rich countries are “cursed”. There’s a paper here arguing

that the natural resource curse burdens non-democracies, but countries with better democratic institutions are not corrupted by such endowments. For governments accountable to their citizens, resources can be a blessing.

The paper does not demonstrate that there’s a linear relationship between higher levels of corruption and natural resources. The dispersion of countries is very wide. Norway and Iraq are more or less on the same level of resources, but on opposite extreme of corruption, and the same is true for many other countries.

So, natural resources do not produce corruption or a resource curse in any mechanical or deterministic way. Some third element is necessary for the curse to take place. The paper cited above argues

that strong democratic institutions help to moderate the effect of natural resources on corruption. In figures, we split the sample into democratic and non-democratic countries. These suggest that the negative relationship between natural resources and the corruption index prevails in the sample of non-democratic countries but not in the sample of democratic countries… the relationship between natural resource rent and corruption depends on the quality of the democratic institutions… These findings imply that resource-rich countries have a tendency to be corrupt, because resource windfalls encourage their governments to engage in rent seeking. However, history shows that countries discovering natural resources after they have established well-functioning democratic institutions tend to handle the scourge of corruption much better.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (7): Education and Prosperity

There aren’t many questions in political science that are more important than this one: which are the factors that determine whether a country becomes or doesn’t become a democracy, and that determine the degree to which a country is democratic. There are two reasons why this question is important:

• Democracy is an important good. Hence it’s important to know what facilitates or hinders the realization of this good.
• Countries act on this statement in their foreign policy. For example, part of the rationale for invading Iraq was the conviction held by the U.S. administration of the time that promoting democracy in Iraq was both an intrinsic good and in the interest of the U.S.

I gave a short and non-exhaustive list of possible factors promoting/undermining the development/survival of democracy here. In the current post I want to focus on two of them: education levels and income or prosperity levels.

1. Education

This graph compares the Polity IV Democracy Index scores for the countries of the world (average scores during the 1960-2000 period), with the average years of schooling of the adult population in 1960. And there’s obviously a correlation, and the quote below gives an indication about the direction of correlation:

The chart above shows the 77 percent correlation between education levels in 1960 (measured by the average years of schooling in a country as estimated by Robert Barro and Jong-Wha Lee), and the subsequent 40-year average of the Polity IV democracy index. That democracy index runs from zero to 10, where countries with index values less than three don’t look remotely democratic and countries with index values of about seven are reasonably well-functioning democracies.

One way to read the graph is that there are basically no countries with very low levels of education that have managed to be democratic over the long term, and almost every country with a high level of education has remained a stable democracy.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” In 1960, 36 nations had less than 1.74 years of schooling (which happens to be the level that Afghanistan has today). Of those 36 countries, only two — India and Botswana — managed to have average democracy scores above 4.2.

Out of the 19 countries in this sample with more than 5.3 years of schooling (the current level in Iran) in 1960, 17 have average democracy scores above 7.9. Fifteen of these have been perfectly democratic, at least by the standards of Polity IV. Only Poland and Hungary were dictatorships, and one can certainly argue that those places would have been democracies in 1960s if it were not for Soviet troops.

But in the middle ranges of education, between two and five years on average, almost anything goes. Some places, like Costa Rica and Italy, have been extremely democratic, while others, like Kuwait and Paraguay, have not. Iraq falls into this category today, which suggests a fair amount of uncertainty about that country’s political future.

Why do I think that the chain of causality runs from education to democracy rather than the reverse? Democracy in 1960 is essentially uncorrelated with subsequent growth in the levels of education. Education in 1960, on the other hand, does an extremely good job of predicting increases in democracy.

Why is there a connection between human capital and freedom? Giacomo Ponzetto, Andrei Shleifer and I have argued that the connection reflects the ability of educated people to organize and fight collaboratively. Dictators provide strong incentives for the ruling clique; democracies provide more modest benefits for everyone else. For democracy to beat dictatorship, the dispersed population needs to have the skills and motivation to work collaboratively to defeat dictatorial coups and executive aggrandizement.

Education teaches skills, like reading and writing, that enable people to work collaboratively. At younger grades, teachers spend a lot of time teaching children how to get along. In the United States, education is strongly linked to civic engagement and membership in social groups. The ability to work together enables the defense of democracy. Edward L. Glaeser (source)

2. Income

There’s an interesting paper here examining the causal relation between democracy and income. The authors find that

the level of national income provides the most important factor explaining inter-country variations in the degree of democracy with the consequence that low income is the most important barrier to democracy.

They first present the correlation between income and democracy, using not the Polity IV index but the Gastil/Freedom House index.

The authors have two reasons to believe that the causal link goes from income to democracy rather than the other way around:

• Initial income in 1971 correlates with average democracy scores during the 1972-2005 period. This approach is similar to the one above in the case of education and democracy.
• And – simultaneously – there doesn’t seem to be a very strong causal link going from democracy to income. Barro has concluded that the degree of democracy is only a minor variable explaining income levels. So there is only a weak causal link going from democracy to income. This means that the strong correlation shown in the graph above must be explained by a causal link going from income to democracy.

Why do higher levels of income promote the development of democracy? I gave an overview of the reasons here but some of the more important ones are:

• Higher education levels in a population means a higher probability of contestation. Following the Maslow hierarchy of needs it’s natural to expect the appearance of political needs once more basic needs have been secured.
• More income means more complex production. This in turn means that governments find it harder to impose central control over their economies.

Obviously, income is just one of many factors determining the development of democracy. It’s an important one, but clearly not sufficient. The graph above shows the Muslim countries separately. As you can see, all non-Muslim countries with high income levels are in the “high level of democracy” range. Affluent Muslim countries, however, aren’t. This indicates that affluence in itself promotes but doesn’t determine the development of democracy. Other factors are also in play. Culture and religion are perhaps some of them. It’s often argued that Islam is incompatible with democracy, or at least slows down the development of or transition to democracy. I’ll come back to this controversial topic another time.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (6)

Democracy is a human right. If we want to promote universal respect for this right, we have to know how societies have achieved the transition from authoritarian forms of government to more democratic ones, and how democracies have avoided the opposite transition. Once we know this, we can promote the future emergence of democracies, and we can counteract the breakdown of existing ones.

Unfortunately, this is a very murky area of political science. The only thing that’s clear is that there is no silver bullet. There isn’t one thing we can do to transform societies once and for all into democracies. Things aren’t easy or simple. A huge number of factors have been identified as causes of or obstacles to democratic transitions, and existing democracies need constant nurturing and protection. A few of the factors that have been named as either promoting or inhibiting democracy are:

• economic growth or GDP per capita
• protestant culture versus catholic culture (a catholic culture is believed to be more hierarchical)
• levels of education and literacy
• income or wealth inequality (in very unequal societies, the wealthy have a lot to lose with democracy)
• levels of employment in agriculture versus industry (industrial societies are believed to more more urban and less attached to traditional and authoritarian social relationships)
• the presence/absence of neighboring democracies
• export diversity (countries with one major export product such as oil tend to be “resource cursed”)
• is a country a former U.K. colony or not? (former U.K. colonies are believed to be more sympathetic to democracy given their British colonial heritage)
• is there a large middle class or not?
• etc.

Statistical analysis to pinpoint which ones of these many variables really determine democracy – and which ones are merely guesses – has yielded contradictory results, not surprisingly given the low numbers of observations (societies or countries don’t change their political systems very often) and the relative lack of long time series (most classifications of regime types haven’t started earlier than a couple of decades ago). One interesting analysis is here.

So don’t expect me to have an opinion here. What I wanted to focus on in this post is the first in the list. There are two radically opposing views on the effect of economic development on democracy. One view is called modernization theory. Basically, the idea is that as countries develop economically, people will switch to other, higher needs, such as self-government, self-control, and political activity in general. Poverty, on the contrary, forces people to focus on survival and makes democracy seem like a luxury.

However, the opposite view is also persuasive. Countries that do well economically are less likely to become democratic because the population is quite pleased with how things are going and will not revolt. The authoritarian rulers can claim that it’s thanks to them that things are going well. It’s not unlikely that economic collapse rather than success causes authoritarian regimes to break down.

So even if you isolate one of dozens of possible factors causing regime transition, things aren’t very clear. Should we starve dictatorships, or help them develop economically? As a result of this lack of clarity, it’s very difficult to frame foreign policy in such a way that it favors the development of democracies around the world. This may go some way to explain the traditional lack of ambition in diplomatic circles.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (5): The Aid Curse, or the Negative Effect of International Development Aid on Democracy

Via Bill Easterly’s blog, I discovered this paper on the so-called “aid curse“: just as dependence on natural resources has a negative effect on the quality of a country’s governance and democracy (a phenomenon called the resource curse), so has international development aid (or official development aid, ODA), especially in countries which depend heavily on aid (and in which aid represents a large percentage of GDP).

This is surprising, because one of the aims of international development aid is to bolster the quality of governance, directly through aid targeted at this objective, or indirectly on the assumption that better education, health care etc. will ultimately lead to better governance.

It seems now that there is a correlation (and perhaps even a causal link) between high levels of aid and low levels of democracy. The explanation is that foreign aid , like the revenue of natural resources, provides an opportunity for governments and leaders to appropriate funds illegitimately. And, because they benefit from aid, they will try to exclude other groups from power. This obviously destroys democratic institutions or makes it more difficult to establish them.

Foreign aid also reduces the need for a system of taxation. And without such a system, it’s a lot more difficult to construct a well-functioning government, and it’s less likely that forces for representation take root (historically, the principle of “no taxation without representation” has promoted democracy). When a government doesn’t depend on taxes for its revenues, then it will have less incentives to seek accountability.

The levels of democracy in countries decrease while the levels of aid (as official development aid – ODA – over GDP) increase.

None of this proves that we should give less aid to developing countries. Probably the opposite is true. What it proves is that aid is more than just sending money. Donors should check what happens to their money, should target the money, and should bypass the “sticky fingers” in government as much as possible. To some extent, donors should also make aid conditional on democratic reform because this reform is the way to avoid aid inefficiency. However, when doing so, they should be careful not to put the cart before the horse: one of the goals of aid is precisely democratization.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (3): The Resource Curse

Why do countries with lots of natural resources tend to do worse than countries with less resource wealth, both in terms of economic growth and in political, social and human rights terms? We see that countries which own lots of natural resources such as diamonds, oil or other valuables that are found in the ground, are often relatively poor, badly governed, violent and suffering from gross violations of human rights.

There are many possible causes of this curse (also called “the paradox of plenty”):

1. Lack of economic diversification

Other economic sectors tend to get neglected by the government because there is a guaranteed income from the natural resources. These sectors therefore cannot develop and cannot become an alternative when the resources are taking hits. The fluctuations of the international prices of the resources can cause extreme highs and lows in national economic growth. This is bad in itself, but also makes it difficult for the government to do long term planning, since the level of revenues cannot be predicted. Dependence on one economic sector means vulnerability.

Another disadvantage of concentrating the economy on one resource sector, is that these sector often provide few jobs, especially for local people. The oil industry for example needs highly specialized workers, who are mostly foreigners. On top of that, these sectors do not require many forward or backward connections in the economy (such as suppliers, local customers, refiners etc.), which again doesn’t help the local job creation.

Even if the government tries to diversify the economy, it may fail to do so because the resource sector is more profitable for local individual economic agents.

Resource dependent countries also see their best talents going to the resource industry which pays better wages than the rest of the economy or the government sector. As a result, the latter are unable to perform adequately. See point 4 below.

2. Corruption

Corruption tends to flourish when governments own almost the entire economy and have their hands on the natural resources. More on corruption in a future post.

3. Social division

Abundance of natural resources can produce or prolong violent conflicts within societies as different groups try to control (parts of) the resources. Separatist groups may emerge, trying to control the part of the territory most rich in resources. This is often aggravated by existing social or cultural division. Division may also appear between parts of the government (e.g. local government vs central government, or between different parts of the central administration).

The resources therefore may cause divisions and conflict, and thereby cause deficiencies in government, economic turmoil, and social unrest. But the resources may also prolong conflicts because groups which manage to take control of (parts of) the resources may use these to arm themselves or otherwise gain influence and power.

4. Government’s unaccoutability and inefficiency

Countries which do not depend on natural resources are often more efficient in taxing their citizens, because they do not have funds which are quasi-automatically generated by resources. As a result, they are forced to develop the government machinery in an efficient way, hence a reduced risk of government break-down. The citizens in return, as they are taxed, will demand accountability, efficient spending etc.

Conversely, the political leaders in resource-dependent countries don’t have to care about their citizens. They create support by allocating money, generated by the resources, to favored interest parties, and thereby increasing the level of corruption. And if citizens object, they have the material means to suppress protest. They don’t appreciate an effective government administration as this carries the risk of control, oversight and other anti-corruption measures (see point 2). So they have an interest in bad government.

It is obvious that bad government, rights violations and economic stagnation have many causes. The resource curse is only one. There are countries which are blessed with resources and which do well at the same time. And there are mismanaged countries that don’t have any resources. As in all correlations, the causation may go in the other way: bad government can create dependence on exports of natural resources.

“When a country’s chaos and economic policies scare off foreign investors and send local entrepreneurs abroad to look for better opportunities, the economy becomes skewed. Factories may close and businesses may flee, but petroleum and precious metals remain for the taking. Resource extraction becomes ‘the default sector’ that still functions after other industries have come to a halt.” (source)

What to do about it?

Leif Wenar has argued that a strict application of property rights could help reduce or correct the resource curse. When dictators or insurgents sell off a country’s resources to foreigners or multi-national companies, while terrorizing the people into submission, they are in fact selling goods that they stole from those people. They have no right to sell what they don’t own. The natural resources of a country belong equally to all the people of that country. Article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states:

All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources.

And

“the people, whose resources are being sold off, become not the beneficiaries of this wealth but the victim of those who use their own wealth to repress them”. Leif Wenar (source)

One could take legal action in western jurisdictions to try to enforce the property rights of the citizens of resource cursed countries and to charge multinational corporations with the crime of receiving stolen goods.

Western countries, investors and consumers could also boycott companies that invest in resource-cursed countries, or try to pressure campaign them to get out of these countries, or they could stop to invest in these companies.

When people finally get a grip on their resources, they open the path to better government, a better economy and better protection for human rights. Perhaps then they will not have to die trying to recapture a tiny part of the resources that are their lawful property, as happened in many cases in Nigeria, for example, where people often try to tap some oil from the pipelines channeling their property to the west. In doing so, they risk their lives. As a consequence of their actions, the pipelines can explode.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (2): From Prosperity to Democracy

Prosperity creates time and leisure, which can be used for democratic participation, public life and other uses of human rights. We often see democratic aspirations and claims of rights arising almost automatically in states that do well economically (see for example Taiwan, Korea and many South-American countries in the 1980s). People do not live on bread alone. They want something more.

Economic misfortune, on the contrary, forces people to focus on the struggle to survive and forces them to give up rights in exchange for material progress. If the expression of an opinion can cause the loss of your job and if there are not many jobs available, then the choice is simple. Certain classes of people in particular, will not have the time nor the money to participate in politics and will leave democracy to the rich. Seeing democracy degenerate into a tool for the rich, they will reject it and turn to authoritarian alternatives in despair. Unequal wealth or insufficient wealth for some classes of the population is often a characteristic of a lack of economic development and at the same time it hinders the proper functioning of democracy. Those who are rich will monopolize the democratic procedures not only because of the forced withdrawal of the poor, but also because of their privileged access to the media, education, representative institutions etc. Furthermore, large differences in wealth and bad economic performances are destabilizing for any form of government – democracy included – because they cause revolt.

A higher GDP/capita correlates with democracy and the wealthiest democracies have never been observed to fall into authoritarianism. There is also the general observation that democracy was very rare before the industrial revolution. Empirical research thus lead many to believe that economic development either increases chances for a transition to democracy (modernization theory), or helps newly established democracies consolidate. Some campaigners for democracy even believe that as economic development progresses, democratization will become inevitable. However, the debate about whether democracy is a consequence of wealth, a cause of it, or both processes are unrelated, is far from conclusion. (source)

The key findings are the positive and statistically significant effects on electoral rights from real per capita GDP and primary schooling. These results strongly confirm the idea that a higher standard of living goes along with more democracy. Moreover, the effects are predictive. Robert J. Barro

This post focuses on one side of the causation: growth in wealth and prosperity produces more and more stable democracy. In a future post, I will look at the other side, how democracy is good for wealth.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (1): The Free Market

The relation between economic freedom and political freedom is that initial growth in either political freedom or economic freedom tends to promote the other. Milton Friedman in The Wall Street Journal, February 12th, 1997.

This post examines the links between the free market and democracy, especially the causal links. I believe that an increase in the level of one causes an increase in the level of the other. This may be helpful information for those who want to promote democracy around the world without the resort to violence.

I’m sure Karl Marx would have appreciated the irony of finding one of his favorite concepts at the beginning of a post defending the free market: dialectics. There is, in fact, a dialectical relationship between democracy and the free market. They may often contradict each other: the uneven distribution of wealth which one can often find in a free market system tends to falsify democratic political processes because wealth means influence; and democratic decisions often impose restrictions on a free market. However, democracy and the free market often also encourage each other.

Let us first take a look at the way in which a free market can promote democracy. A free market loosens the control of authoritarian states over their societies. If states give up control over the economy, then perhaps they will also give up control in other fields. If a state does not control all economic means, then people will have more freedom to oppose the state because the state cannot as easily take away their jobs or put them out of their houses. A planned and regulated economy usually means a planned and regulated society

A free market also promotes democracy because it requires:

The rule of law

In itself, a free market does not guarantee the rule of law but, in a certain way, it does help to promote it. Private companies like predictability. They want their investments to be protected by the law, they want a state that protects their goods and their personnel, and they want to be able to use the judiciary to enforce their contracts. Companies moreover like to have an international rule of law. They want the same rules applied everywhere. For example, if labor regulations are not the same everywhere, then companies in certain countries have an unfair competitive advantage, because they have to pay their workers less, they have to invest less in safety etc. “[T]he rule of law enforced by an independent judiciary is a condition for modern market economic relations . . . ‘Markets need laws’ claimed a businessman . . . criticizing the pervasive inefficiency and corruption of the judiciary” * . Because the free market requires the rule of law, and because the rule of law is best protected by democracy (this is an empirical fact **), one can conclude that the free market will strive towards democracy.

A limited state and a free society

Both the free market and a democracy require a limited state and a free society. Only a free society can serve as a base for the democratic control and criticism of government, and an unlimited state is the main characteristic of tyranny. The free market promotes a limited state and a free space for society because it limits state regulation and intervention in the economy. The free market is the freedom to produce, to buy and to sell and this kind of freedom promotes freedom in general.

Transparency and free flows of information

Businessmen need free flows of information in order to be able to make the best economic decisions. Hence, a free market promotes democracy, the most transparent form of government and the form of government most dependent on free flows of information.

Means of communication and transportation

A free market economy promotes the development of the means of communication and transportation. It is difficult to image a democracy without means of communication and mobility. Furthermore, increased communication and mobility weaken the power of habit and tradition, which in turn can weaken the grip of traditional authoritarian structures and forms of power.

Social mobility

Traditional authoritarian social structures, and social structures in general, are less stable in a free market, and subject to the free choice of individuals.

International trade

The free international circulation of goods can promote the free circulation of ideas. Inter-cultural communication between people who can trade freely with one another can promote democracy because it can allow people to question their habits, customs and traditional power structures. After all, you start to realize that things can be different when you see that they actually are different elsewhere in the world. In cultures that cannot trade freely and therefore do not communicate much with the outside world, most habits are considered to be self-evident and are accepted without questions. Undemocratic habits are then difficult to change. If we eliminate international trade barriers, then we can open up traditionally closed societies.

A democracy also tends to adopt a free market system. A democracy is a limited state because it necessarily (or ideally) adopts the rule of law and hence creates a space for free economic activity, exchange and competition between a variety of groups and persons. A democracy also – ideally – respects human rights and many human rights, such as the right to private property, promote the free market. It is difficult to imagine a free country, a democracy which guarantees all civil liberties, but does not allow the freedom to produce, to buy and to sell goods and services. However, a democracy may find it necessary to limit the free market, or correct for some of its injustices. It may want to redistribute some of the wealth created by the free market to those of us who cannot use their freedom to become economically successful.

There have been numerous studies measuring the degree of political freedom (or democracy) and measuring economic freedom. If you combine these measurements you can see the correlation.

* F. Panizza, in Beetham, D. (ed.), 1995, Politics and Human Rights, Blackwell, Oxford, p. 179.
** There are also many theoretical reasons to defend the link between democracy and the rule of law.