What is Totalitarianism?

Scene from the movie 1984

It sounds like a somewhat antiquated concept and it may very well be true that it’s useless as a descriptive device for current politics. However, I believe that it remains a necessary tool for the correct understanding of 20th century history. Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and Mao-era China were very different countries and very different political regimes, but it can be argued that what they had in common was more important than what separated them. And what they had in common separated them from all other authoritarian governments before and after them. (Hannah Arendt was one of the first to notice this). That is the reasoning behind the concept of totalitarian government. Those three governments – and perhaps a few others – can be described as totalitarian states and were therefore instances of a separate type of government, like oligarchy or democracy. They were not just particularly brutal forms of dictatorship. We’re not talking about a difference in degree. Of course, some of the elements of totalitarian rule which I describe below can be found in other dictatorial governments as well, but other elements can’t. (Just like some elements of democracy can be found in non-democracies). And what certainly can’t be found elsewhere is the combination of all those elements.

Photomontage of Stalin and Hitler

Totalitarian government is a post-democratic form of government. It couldn’t exist in the era before mass democracy. It’s post-democratic in the sense that it is an outgrowth of modern democratic traditions. Political parties, party ideologies, mass movements and mass mobilization, the pseudo-popular legitimacy of rigged elections and referenda, the mass idolatry, the personality cults, mass indoctrination, propaganda, Potemkin constitutions, show trials etc. all show the totalitarian debt to democracy. The same is true for the focus on re-education and rectification of thought when some parts of the popular will are considered to be deviant: this is proof of the importance of popular consent (when consent is absent, it’s fabricated).

Contrary to older forms of despotism, totalitarianism admits that the state is no longer the natural property of a ruling class, the private tool of a sovereign or a gift of God. It is the expression of the will of the people. Not, as in a democracy, of a divided people or of a people who’s identity fluctuates over time as a consequence of public debate. The will of the people under totalitarian government is permanently defined as a unified whole. The people are defined as a race or a class. The people have a homogeneous project, namely racial supremacy or the liberation of the proletariat. The will of the people, which is also the basis of democracy but which is always kept vague, heterogeneous and fluctuating in a democracy, now becomes a singular, clear and permanent will. All individuals and individual projects or interests are identified with a collective project. Everything which is in accord with this project, is part of the people; everything else is not – is foreign, alien, “entartet”, bourgeois or capitalist – and must be destroyed. If it’s the whole of the people that works towards a certain project, then those with another opinion are enemies of the people and have to be destroyed to protect the people and its project.

That is the origin of the genocidal nature of all totalitarian governments but also of their less extreme forms of exclusion of the other. Every internal division is seen as external. The other is not part of the people. Society isn’t divided but is divided from its enemies. Every sign of internal division is externalized: dissidents are foreign spies, the other is a member of the international jewish conspiracy, a tool of international capitalism, the fifth column etc. For example, long after it was clear that the attack on Hitler in 1939 was the work of a single German individual (Georg Elser) the nazis maintained that the British secret service was to blame. The other attack by von Stauffenberg in 1944 was framed as the work of aristocratic officers who were alienated from the German people. This division between internal and external is consciously cultivated because it confirms the image of the people as a unified whole. If real foreign spies or class enemies can’t be found then they are created. and duly suppressed. Hence everyone can become the enemy, even the most loyal followers.

The fixed will of the people is subsequently represented by the party and the state. The party doesn’t represent a majority, but the people. Hence, other parties have no reason to exist. All people and the whole of the people are represented by a single party. And since this party perfectly represents a perfectly clear and unified popular will, it can infiltrate all parts of society: school, church, labor union, factory, the press, the judiciary, the arts and all other social organizations cease to be independent. The party is everywhere and submits every organization to its will. It believes it can do so because its will is the will of the people. And the party uses the means of the state to be everywhere: the secret service, the department of communications, the police… As a result, the state is also everywhere. Totalitarian government simultaneously bans people to the private sphere – all free and deviant public actions and expressions are forbidden – and destroys the private sphere, to the point that people can’t even trust their friends and family. All private actions are potentially public. Wiretapping, surveillance, public confessions… Even the most private things of all, your own thoughts, are attacked by way of propaganda and indoctrination. Totalitarianism strives for total control of private and public life. All spontaneous and independent individual or social projects are doomed unless they are completely trivial. They can only survive when they are part of the common project, because they make sense only when they are part. When they are not, they are potentially in opposition to the common project.

But we should understand that the identification of the party with the state is only temporary. The state in fact is bound to disappear. That becomes clear when we consider the imperialism that is typical of totalitarianism (to a lesser degree in the case of China). By definition, the projects of totalitarian governments – racial supremacy or a classless society – go beyond the borders of a state. Aryans aren’t only meant to rule within the borders of Germany. They deserve global supremacy in part because they are the best race and in part because the Jews are a worldwide threat. And the classless society can’t exist when it is surrounded by a capitalist world; the proletariat in other countries also deserves to rule.

Totalitarianism is a form of rule that goes beyond the state. A particular state is just a convenient tool for a certain stage in the popular project. The people as well is a concept that goes beyond the group of citizens of a given state. There are also Aryans and workers in other states. In non-totalitarian dictatorships, political rule is essentially tied to the state. A normal dictator may attack other countries, but will do so while enhancing his state or expanding his country. His rule will never go beyond the rule of a state, suitably redefined if necessary. If necessary he’ll redraw the boundaries of the state, but he will never go beyond the state as such. Totalitarian rule, on the other hand, is ultimately larger than the state. It’s the rule of a race or a class, on a potentially global level.

As the people and the state are subject to the rule of the party, so the party is subject to the rule of one individual. The leader makes sure that the party remains unified, because a divided party can’t claim to represent a unified people. So there’s a series of identifications going on: the people is identified with a class or a race; this unified people is then identified with the party that represents it; the party in turn identifies itself with the state because it (temporarily) needs the tools of the state to realize its project (class rule or race rule); the state then takes over society and identifies with it; and ultimately a single leader takes over everything in order to guarantee unity.

The people are like a collective individual, a body with a head controlling all its coordinated movements. State terror and genocide can then be seen as the body removing sickness and parasites. The other is often explicitly identified as parasitical or infectious. Violence and oppression are medicines used to safeguard the integrity of the body of the people and their purpose. The Great Purge wasn’t called a purge by accident. The Jews weren’t depicted as pestilent rats for no reason.

The image of the body also means prophylaxis: why wait with punishment until the crime is committed? We know that certain persons are enemies of the people. Crime in the sense of opposition to the project of the people is a fatality for them, sooner or later. There may be good Jews, but we can’t take the risk that they marry an Aryan and defile the race. And some capitalists may be less harmful than others, but why wait until their presence undermines collectivization or until they betray the country and invite an invasion?

Totalitarian government isn’t like a normal lawless and arbitrary dictatorship. Of course, the laws under totalitarian government are regularly broken or changed to serve certain goals. But there are deeper laws that the totalitarian government has to protect, namely the laws of nature (in the case of Nazism, and more specifically the laws of natural selection) and the laws of history (in the case of communism, more specifically the laws that say that economic and industrial development will necessarily destroy capitalism and inaugurate communist production). Those “deeper” laws aren’t human laws; they are historical laws that drive mankind towards the realization of the project that animates totalitarianism. Totalitarian government serves to facilitate and fasten the operation of those deeper laws. Jews are exterminated because that promotes the ultimate and inevitable supremacy of Aryans. Capitalists, bourgeois, kulaks etc. are exterminated (or reeducated in order to become communists) because that promotes the ultimate and inevitable supremacy of the proletariat (the proletariat is doomed to rule given the evolution of capitalism, but its rule can be hastened).

There is no “regis voluntas suprema lex” as in previous forms of despotism. The legal lawlessness covers a deeper lawfulness. Legal laws have to be adapted to best serve the deeper laws. If terror and violence are required for the realization and hastening of the evolution postulated by the deeper laws, then the legal laws will mandate and require terror and violence. Terror and violence don’t only serve to intimidate, destroy opposition, isolate people from one another and coerce compliance. They serve the project of the people.

I think all this justifies grouping Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and Mao-era China under a separate form of government. That doesn’t mean that everything about those regimes was new and typical only of totalitarian government. Obviously, genocides, terror, show trials etc. have occurred before and since. Those are not inventions of Hitler, Stalin or Mao. There are historical parallels, just as there are parallels between contemporary art and ancient art, but still we prefer to distinguish these two forms of art. We have to look beyond the phenomenology of despotic regimes throughout history, and identify the particular logic of different forms of despotism.

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (44): Corruption

Corruption, or “the misuse of public office for private gain”, is immoral and bad in numerous ways, but it’s not a human rights violation. At least not as such. To my knowledge, human rights law doesn’t contain an explicit right not to suffer the consequences of corruption. However, it is the case that corruption causes various rights violations. For example, it can often be viewed as a form of theft and hence a violation of the right to private property. And in the case of corruption in the justice system, the right to a fair trial is violated.

Moreover, corruption has a negative impact on GDP (see here) – mainly because it’s a tax on investment – and hence also on poverty reduction (given the correlation between GDP and poverty reduction, see here, here and here). And there is a right not to suffer poverty. Corruption also has an impact on poverty on the level of individuals rather than countries. It’s obvious that individuals – especially those who are poor or near the poverty line – can make better use of the funds that they have to spend on bribes.

Furthermore, corruption eats away at the rule of law. Even in the most corrupt countries, corruption is usually illegal. If illegal activity becomes normal practice, the rule of law is obviously undermined, with possible consequences for judicial protection in general, including protection of human rights. The rule of law is also harmed directly by corruption, namely by corruption inside the judiciary and the police force, and this has an immediate impact on human rights. Even more seriously, corruption is associated with political instability since it tends to reduce citizens’ trust and faith in institutions. It can therefore destroy democracy, and democracy is both a human right and a means to protect human rights in general.

So, if we can agree that corruption is a cause of various human rights violations, then the question is: who is responsible for corruption and hence for the rights violations occurring because of it? I would say that it’s the government officials taking bribes (and possibly the banks safeguarding the proceeds) rather than the private persons or companies paying the bribes, at least in general. The latter would presumably prefer not to pay bribes and often find themselves in situations in which they have no choice.

Now, you could say that some corrupt officials, especially those at the lower levels of government, don’t have a choice either: without the proceeds of corruption they may well end up in poverty. Demanding bribes is then the alternative for a failed economy and a failed state. However, I think it’s fair to claim that they still have, in general, a wider set of options than many of those having to pay bribes. If you’re stopped by the police and they ask you for a bribe, it seems that your options are more constrained than the options of the police asking for the bribe. It seems easier for the police to find additional non-corrupt sources of income than it is for you to escape the demands of the police. Of course, this isn’t the case in all types of corruption. For example, a large multinational company may find it relatively easy to pay a bribe, and may have more options than the official who’s asking the bribe (and it may very well solicit the payment of the bribe in the first place as a way to outsmart competitor companies).

cartoon by Michael Kountouris

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Next question: what to do about it? Everyone agrees that corruption is bad, and many believe that it’s bad for human rights, but almost no one seems to know how to stop it. And it is, indeed, a problem that is as old as history. One thing we could do is spell out the issue of corruption more clearly in terms of human rights. However, human rights claims by the victims of corruption are probably not very effective, since one consequence of corruption is the weakening or destruction of the judicial institutions necessary for the enforcement of human rights. In that sense, linking corruption and human rights may seem futile or at least of limited practical use.

However, human rights claims aren’t just legal claims that depend on functioning and non-corrupt institutions to be enforced. They are also moral claims and they can have some effect as such. They can be used to denounce widespread systems of corruption and thereby help to change a culture and a mentality, especially over the long run. But moral claims will not destroy endemic corruption by themselves. Countries that suffer high degrees of corruption probably need external help in institution building. Also, economic development will probably reduce corruption, given the correlation cited above between low levels of GDP and high levels of corruption. Helping countries to develop will then also help them to fight corruption.

This is an interesting talk about ways to fight corruption (the relevant part starts around the 5th minute):

More on governance and corruption. More posts in this series.

Related Articles

• Human Rights Watch: Police Corruption in Nigeria (huffingtonpost.com)
• Report: Bribes fuel corruption in Nigeria police (sfgate.com)

The Ethics of Human Rights (64): Value Pluralism Supports Human Rights

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The justification of human rights – the quest for reasons why they are important and why we need them – is probably the most important topic of this blog (some previous posts are here, here, here, here and here). One element of justification is their compatibility with an important tenet of moral theory, namely value pluralism. Value pluralism is, in my opinion, a principle of morality that comes very close to being a “moral fact“.

In short, the principle says the following. There are many different moral values – or different moral “goods” if you want – such as happiness, liberty, equality, loyalty etc. Those values differ qualitatively from each other and don’t seem to be reducible to one super value. And neither is there a clear ranking of importance so that conflicts between values can be easily decided. Different values can’t be compared to each other. Friendship is not clearly more important or a higher value than loyalty; freedom is not prior to equality; being happy is not better than developing your capacities etc. When two values seem to be incompatible, it’s hardly ever certain which of the two should be favored. And neither is it easy to say that a decrease of x in value v is acceptable if it results in an increase of x or y in value w; it’s often even impossible to determine the x and y in this equation because values are quantitatively and not just qualitatively incomparable. An increase of x in friendship is not comparable to an increase of x in loyalty. What does an increase of x in friendship even mean? Furthermore, there are problems in cases that don’t involve incompatible values: in general, is it better to strive towards increases in value v rather than increases in value w? For example, some say a society and a government should promote equality as the prime value; others prefer to maximize liberty. It’s difficult if not impossible to decide if either of these goals is the most important.

And yet, even if value pluralism is true and moral theory can’t therefore offer guidance in cases of incompatible values or in the choice of the single value to pursue in life, people have to solve conflicts between values on an almost daily basis, and they have to decide which value or values should guide their lives. If moral theory is useless in those everyday decisions, then it’s better to let people decide for themselves about what is good and right. People should be left free to live their own lives according to the guiding values they choose independently, and they should be allowed to decide conflicts between values according to their own conscience. If value pluralism is true, then there is no single way of life that is the highest and the best for all, and then it’s also true that people should be given the freedom to decide for themselves.

This is where human rights enter the scene. Human rights support this freedom in two ways, a direct and an indirect way. They allow people to choose a type of good life independently from the pressures of government or society: minority religions are free, people are free to associate, expression is free, they can use their property the way they like etc. In addition, there’s is nothing in the system of human rights that prohibits self-chosen and self-regarding value decisions, as long as the rights of others aren’t harmed (for example, drug use that doesn’t harm others cannot be prohibited on the basis of human rights).

Indirectly, human rights oppose authoritarian governments which favor and enforce one value or one way of life as the only desirable way of life: communist societies that promote equality at the expense of all other values, Catholic dictatorships that prohibit other religions, Muslim theocracies etc. If value pluralism is true, then there is no basis for coercive policies intended to systematically favor one value or one way of life. (Of course, in specific cases of incompatible values, it may be necessary for coercive government intervention in favor of one value or the other, especially when government inaction would cause more overall harm to certain values than government action; but that is the exception to the general rule that people should be free to solve those issues themselves – a rule that is based on morality’s inability to find good general reasons to favor one value over another. An example of such an action would be a government prohibition on religious child sacrifice).

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One problem with the line of reasoning that I set out here is that the opposite can also be true: value pluralism can support authoritarian government. Not the type of authoritarian government that is paternalistic and that favors the realization of one value above all others, but the type that presents itself as a bulwark against anarchy, instability and factionalization. Governments which take the latter approach start with the presumed fragility of the bonds of community. These bonds, it is said, can only be maintained if society is inspired by a single purpose and a single good. The freedom to let people decide for themselves what type of life they want to pursue can undo the necessary sense of community because it erodes the single purpose, but also because groups of people will turn away from each other in disgust over the other groups’ lifestyles. Conflict and a lack of solidarity will destroy society. One purpose should therefore be enforced, not because this purpose is generally superior to all others, but because otherwise society will fall apart. I’ve argued here against this justification of authoritarianism. The crux of my argument is that you can’t enforce a common purpose; this has to come voluntarily and “from within”, and enforcing it merely encourages violent dissent on the side of those who see their own purposes suppressed. If this is correct, then value pluralism doesn’t support authoritarianism.

More on value pluralism here.

What Are Human Rights? (37): Do Human Rights Point Downwards or Upwards?

Up and down, by M.C. Escher

A common but, in my opinion, shortsighted view of human rights is the following: human rights are minimal standards. They serve to avoid the terrible rather than to achieve the best. Hence, they point downwards rather than upwards. They are the lower limits of tolerable human conduct, not high aims, ideals or utopian visions. They protect us against the worst things that can happen to us, but they don’t help us to achieve the best things that should happen to us. They limit the depths to which governments and our fellow human beings can sink, but they don’t promote the heights we can reach.

If we limit our understanding of human rights to all this, then it’s difficult to integrate the view that human rights are necessary for the search of truth, and that democracy – a human right – is a way of life. Human rights do in fact – also – point upwards. They set a lower limit of tolerable human conduct, and they also point towards higher possibilities and human perfection. This perfection, of course, they will never deliver like they never deliver full protection from horror, but they help us on the way.

More on the dimensions of human rights is here. More on human rights and progress is here. More on utopian thought is here.

Human Rights Maps (174): The “Scramble for Africa” and the Long-Run Effects of Artificial Borders on Ethnic Conflict

Lord Salisbury

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[We] have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s foot ever trod, we have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were. Lord Salisbury

It’s common knowledge that the territories of African countries are an inheritance of colonial rule. These territories correspond to the borders between the old colonial empires, which in turn were the result of occupation, aggression, imperialism and balance of power politics. The “scramble for Africa” resulted in a partition of the continent that took little notice of ethnic groups or pre-colonial African states and that has survived the end of colonialism:

[T]he “Scramble for Africa” … started with the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and was completed by the turn of the 20th century. In this brief period, the prospective colonisers partitioned Africa into spheres of influence, protectorates, colonies, and free-trade areas. The borders were designed in European capitals at a time when Europeans had barely settled in Africa with little knowledge of the geography and ethnic composition of the areas whose borders they were designing. Despite their arbitrariness these boundaries endured after African independence. As a result, in most African countries a significant fraction (around 40-45%) of the population belongs to groups that have been partitioned by a national border. (source)

However, before we get into the story about the link between this historic fact and current ethnic troubles in Africa, I have to make a few general remarks about borders and diversity. All countries, not just those in Africa, are culturally and ethnically diverse. They are all the product of aggression and none of them correspond to divisions between ethnic groups. And this diversity is not in itself a problem. On the contrary: diversity is good because it helps to promote tolerance and it enriches our thinking and feeling. Purity, on the other hand, leads to exclusion and expulsion. The ideal of national purity is therefore not acceptable.

It follows that political states which do not perfectly align with pre-existing ethnic or national communities are not, by definition, problematic. And neither are they “unnatural”. If anything, ethnic diversity is the natural condition of states.

At the same time, we have to admit that national or ethnic groups may desire national self-determination and a state of their own, separate from other groups. This desire may spring from a history of hostility between groups, a hostility which is believed to endanger the cultural, linguistic or ethnic survival of groups. In extreme cases, this hostility leads to more than just difficult cohabitation and results in separatist conflict and civil war. To some extent, this is also the case in Africa. With the emphasis on “also”.

We should also remember that well-functioning democracies can deal with such problems, to a certain extent, and can do so a lot better than alternative forms of government. A democracy protects minority rights, religious freedom, tolerance and local self-government. The idea that a strong government is necessary to keep hostile groups from attacking each other is a myth. Violent suppression of antagonism will only make it worse in the long run.

However, those democratic solutions may not always prevent extreme hostilities between ethnic groups within a political state. Hence, secession or other ways of redrawing borders may be necessary.

The fact that many African countries have their fair share of ethnic conflict is, in part, the consequence of dysfunctional or absent democratic governance, but also of the history of colonialism. The colonial powers imposed the borders of African countries without consulting the populations or their leaders. These powers had neither self-determination nor peaceful coexistence in mind, only their own interests. African national liberation movements took those borders as given and had no interest in questioning them, which was understandable given the risks of conflicts with newly independent neighboring countries.

Because African borders cut across ethnic lines, politics in many African countries has, to this day, a strong ethnic and tribal component. (But, again, the same is true in many countries outside Africa). When combined with dysfunctional or absent democratic governance, tribal politics often leads to violence: minority ethnic groups feel excluded from power or discriminated in other ways; ethnic brethren in neighboring countries may feel the need to intervene; and so on. Difficult to say which is the dominant cause: 19th century map drawing or bad governance, or perhaps something else entirely, such poverty, resources or crime.

When we look at governance, the Europeans share part of the blame for present-day authoritarianism in Africa:

Africans often didn’t live in anything like the absolutist ethnic states which Europeans wanted them to live in — which would have made it easier to govern them [and extract labor and resources] — so Europeans colonial administrators worked very hard to create absolutist ethnic tribal groups and then force Africans to live in them. This is not to say that ethnicity didn’t exist before colonization; that sort of generalization is also hard to sustain, as most continental level generalizations are. But the general rule was that the sort of political state which was suited for organizing and controlling a population’s labor and resources did not exist before colonial rule, and had to be invented, and was, by Europeans. (source)

And Europeans also share part of the blame for the role of ethnicity in present-day conflicts. Not only did they draw the borders without regard for ethnicity, they in a sense enhanced the importance of ethnicity in Africa:

“Gikuyu,” for example, means “farmer,” and it distinguished the people (in what is now Kenya) who lived by farming, and took a pride in it, from the people who lived a more pastoral life in the same area, and spoke a different language. But the groups intermarried, crossed over, and traded with each other when they felt like it, and neither was a single political group anyway; there was no Maasai state or nation, nor was there a Gikuyu nation. That is, until Europeans — with their maps and censuses — decided that there was, and codified it into colonial law. After that, there were such “ethnic” groups. (source)

Not surprising then that there’s authoritarianism and tribalism in Africa today. However, there’s more than that. The colonial experience and the colonial need for authoritarian government created long running authoritarian national structures as well as national feelings and “peoples”, despite the artificial nature of African states. That’s why there are strong feelings of patriotism across ethnic groups in most African countries. Again, just like anywhere else in the world.

So, with this bit of context, I hope we can avoid simplistic and monocausal narratives about artificial African countries torn apart by ancient tribalism, and about the long term effects of 19th century map drawing by ignorant and self-interested Europeans. A lot of other stuff also explains current violence in Africa, and Africans aren’t simply tribalists.

But still, we have to acknowledge that map drawing and tribalism does explain something. This paper (also here) shows

how arbitrary border decisions have affected war and civil unrest in Africa, particularly among split ethnic groups and their neighbors. Not surprisingly, the length of a conflict and its casualty rate is 25 percent higher in areas where an ethnicity is divided by a national border as opposed to areas where ethnicities have a united homeland. Examples of divided (and conflicted) groups are the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania, and the Anyi of Ghana and the Ivory Coast. The conflict rate is also higher for people living in areas close to ethnic-partitioned hot-spots. … Using a 1959 ethnic homeland map from ethnolinguist George Peter Murdock, the authors studied African conflicts from 1970 – 2005 (the “post-independence period”) and found that “civil conflict is concentrated in the historical homeland of partitioned ethnicities.” (source)

ethnic homeland map from ethnolinguist George Peter Murdock, merged with map of current national borders, showing partitioned ethnicities

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Here’s a more detailed version of the Murdock map:

1959 ethnic homeland map from ethnolinguist George Peter Murdock

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And here’s a simplified version of the ethnic map of Africa:

ethnolinguistic groups and national borders in Africa

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The following map shows that African borders correspond less to ethnicity than borders in most other parts of the world:

Average number of ethnic links to a neighbouring country

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More about Africa here. More human rights maps here.

What is Democracy? (60): Is Separation of Powers Compatible With All Types of Democracy?

Westminster, London

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OK, that question is probably way too ambitious for a blogpost. There are dozens of types of democracy, so let’s just look at two types: presidential democracy and parliamentary democracy (PrD and PaD for short in what remains). And that means not only limiting the scope of the investigation but also simplifying it: there are many different types of PrD or PaD (the Westminster model is one form of PaD, the US system is one form of PrD). But that’s what you have to do if you want to keep your blogposts relatively short and readable.

Moreover, separation of powers is an enormously complex topic as well, so again I’ll have to simplify. I’ll focus on two of the three powers that are traditionally distinguished: the executive and the legislative powers and ask how separation between these two powers is compatible with PrD and PaD.

First, why is separation between these two powers an important value? For the same reason that separation of powers in general is important: to create checks and balances and to pit different powers of the state against each other so that there is less risk of tyrannical government and collusion of different powers against the people. The executive power, which normally executes the laws voted by the legislative power, usually also has a veto power against certain acts of legislation in order to limit the risk of oppressive or unjust legislation. Sometimes, when it gets very bad, the executive can also disband the legislative power and provoke new elections. Conversely, the legislative power often has the power to demand accountability and transparency from the executive power. If the legislative believes that the executive power acts in impermissible ways it can vote laws that make those acts illegal. And so on.

What are the main differences between PrD and PaD? In a PrD – 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 PaD, 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).

A PrD seems better able to respect the separation between the executive and legislative powers. A president doesn’t sit in parliament and doesn’t rely on the approval of the legislative for her political survival and hence she is unlikely to always have the same views as the legislative majority. Checks and balances can work. She has an independent mandate from the people and she can have a view that’s different from the view of the parliamentary majority. In PaD, the executive is a product of a parliamentary majority. It’s often even composed of some members of the parliamentary majority who sit both in the government and in parliament. Therefore, it isn’t common in a PaD for the executive to counteract the legislative or vice versa. In a PaD, these two powers are more or less the same. The executive is the parliamentary majority and parliament as such is systematically in agreement with the executive. It’s only the parliamentary minority that can voice opposition. But that’s it: it has a voice but it can’t effectively block executive initiatives, since it’s merely a minority. The act of legislation often originates in the executive that in fact has the power to enact whatever legislation it wants since it automatically has the support of the parliamentary majority. Why is that the case? Members of the parliamentary majority who aren’t part of the executive are often second rate party members who are easily persuaded to approve the legislative initiatives of the executive because their political career depends on the support from the senior party members who make up the executive. For the same reasons, the accountability and transparency requirements are often sidestepped because the parliamentary majority doesn’t want to embarrass the executive.

So, PaD abandons part of the separation of powers in order to gain efficiency. Parliamentary systems, compared to presidential systems, can act in a more decisive and a quicker manner (in theory at least). In a PrD, the president can block legislation coming from parliament or can have her legislative proposals voted down by a parliamentary majority.

However, this efficiency advantage of PaD compared to PrD is often lost when coalitions are necessary. This is why some parliamentary systems avoid proportional representation – which tends to produce more than two political parties with representatives in parliament – and use some kind of district system combined with first-past-the-post elections – which tends to lead to two party systems and hence avoids the need for coalitions.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that PaD doesn’t have any separation of powers at all. It usually has an independent judiciary that can act as a counterweight and that can use for example judicial review to invalidate laws that are incompatible with the constitution. So it really isn’t easy to say which system is preferable. Efficiency is perhaps just as important as separation. Yet the direct election of the executive, which is typical of PrD and also the basis of many of the advantages of PrD compared to PaD, generates more popular control and hence more democracy, and that is important as well. And finally. PrDs are more stable. So on balance I think I prefer PrD.

Cultural Rights (13): Their Place in the System of Human Rights

I know I’ve neglected cultural rights on this blog. That’s not because I think they should be neglected. Cultural rights are indeed important and they deserve a thorough discussion. First, what are they? Cultural rights are the rights of

• indigenous peoples,
• ethnic, racial or linguistics minorities or “nationalities”,
• immigrants
• and perhaps also other marginalized groups.

In certain circumstance, some such groups can legitimately claim cultural rights because without these rights they will be unable to preserve, experience and act in accordance with their cultural identity. This cultural identity includes institutions, beliefs, practices, a way of life, a language etc., all of which can be under pressure from another, dominant culture or from some other hostile forces (e.g. globalization, capitalism etc.). Other, more commonly accepted human rights such as religious liberty, non-discrimination etc. are of course helpful as well but sometimes insufficient for this purpose. For example, a state can’t help but to impose an official language, and the users of this official language have therefore an unfair educational, economic and political advantage. Minority groups can then claim that they need the cultural right to receive education in their own language. Non-cultural human rights won’t be much help.

The background assumption of cultural rights is the equal value of all cultures. All cultures have an equal right to survival and all groups have an equal right to preserve their cultural way of life. The pressures that threaten cultures can take various forms, going from genocide (or ethnocide, or cultural genocide) at one extreme to milder forms of acculturation at the other extreme. Some typical forms of pressure are:

• reducing birthrates through forced sterilization
• forcibly transferring children to other groups
• relocating entire groups
• interfering with education or the transmission of culture to future generations of a group
• forced conversion
• erasing the group’s existence or practices from the historical record
• attacking a culture’s resource base (e.g. deforestation)
• etc.

The concept of cultural rights should be distinguished from related concerns about economic or political domination. Marginalized cultures can indeed suffer cultural as well as other types of oppression simultaneously, and depriving a culture of its economic base can be as lethal as a direct attack on its identity. However, I think it’s useful to isolate the cultural and identity issues. So I’ll focus on those, and I’ll also deliberately sideline the thorny question of the definition of “culture”, a notoriously overbroad concept: which groups can legitimately claim to be a “culture” deserving of cultural rights? Are cultures really distinct and self-contained? Let’s just assume that there are some such groups, and that some of those are threatened.

Which cultural rights?

Apart from the general right to cultural survival, it’s not very clear which are the more specific rights that are bundled together under the general right, and it’s commonly accepted that the concrete realization of cultural rights depends on the circumstances. In some cases cultural rights can imply a right to some form of affirmative action, in other cases a right to regional self-determination etc.

Article 27 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights only mentions a right of groups to enjoy and practice their own culture. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is somewhat more precise, but only somewhat. Hence, cultural rights are often attacked for a double vagueness: vagueness about the specific rights involved, and vagueness about the beneficiaries (which groups qualify as a “culture”?). However, we’ll see below that a more fundamental criticism of those rights is also possible.

Etching of Spanish Explorers and Indigenous People by Bertrand

(source unkonwn)

Justifications of cultural rights

And yet, I do believe that cultural rights are an important addition to the body of human rights. The justification for these rights is based on two things:

• the importance of culture for individuals, and perhaps also some vaguer notion of the general importance of cultural diversity and the “heritage of humanity” (in which case cultural rights are important for everyone and not just for members of threatened cultures)
• the failure of more traditional human rights to protect culture in all cases.

People need a cultural life, a life in a community that transcends time. They want to belong to a group and share a traditional identity. These human values can only be enjoyed collectively and are often neglected in more individualist and liberal theories of rights. Individual human rights such as freedom of religion and association, anti-discrimination laws, tolerance, democratic pluralism etc. are helpful for the preservation of culture and other collective values (such as religion), but not in all circumstances. Take the example I gave before: the simple fact of an official state language and school language puts some minorities in a disadvantaged position, not just culturally but also economically and politically. And indeed there’s nothing that ordinary human rights or tolerance can do about that.

Another justification of cultural rights can be based, not on the value of culture, but on the need for reparations for past injustices. For example, indigenous people can claim that respect for their cultural rights is due to them because of the injustices perpetrated by past generations of the dominant culture, even if there are no present-day threats to their culture.

Criticism of cultural rights

Contrary to the more traditional, individual human rights, cultural rights don’t require the recognition of individuals as equal human beings, equally deserving of respect in spite of their differences. They demand, on the contrary, the recognition of differences and respect for those differences, and differences between groups of individuals rather than differences between individuals. Common identity, group difference and recognition are the keywords behind the notion of cultural rights.

This explains why these rights are often criticized in liberal democracies. Liberalism focuses on the individual. It recognizes group interests but those are typically understood as cooperative, associational and interest based. People, according to liberalism, voluntarily join groups in order to advance their interests. Groups are defined by shared goals and interests, not by the shared identity of the members. Individuals are there first, and groups are secondary. From this point of view, cultural rights can be seen as essentialist: they reduce the identity of members to the identity of the group to which they belong.

Will Kymlicka

This essentialism can indeed be detrimental to individual group members. Because cultural rights are rights aimed at the preservation of cultures, there may be a temptation to use these rights in order to discipline members who deviate from the cultural orthodoxy. Such deviations can be viewed as a threat to the group’s identity and survival. In that case, cultural identity becomes a goal in itself rather than a good for the members. Ideally, cultural rights are valuable because the members of the cultural groups in question value cultural identity, cultural practices and language and can use these rights to protect what they value. It’s those members who have an interest in cultural preservation, not the cultures themselves. (Will Kymlicka has developed this argument). This means that when members lose this interest, they should be free to do so, and cultural rights should not be used to impose an identity, practices or a language. Individual members should be free to evaluate their culture and to reject it if that is what they decide.

It follows that cultural rights should not grant groups power or priority over individuals or over individual rights. If an individual member of a group decides to use her freedom of religion to change her religion, her freedom of movement and residence to physically leave the cultural group, her freedom of expression to decide to start speaking another language etc., then there’s nothing the group can do. The group’s cultural rights can’t trump the individual’s rights. And if individual rights are threatened by cultural rights, the latter should give way. For instance, if a religious group claims the right to oppress its female members or sacrifice its children, that group can’t claim cultural rights as means to protect those practices.

That doesn’t mean a group can never legitimately limit the individual rights of its members. It can, as long as it guarantees a realistic exit right. Individuals can waive their individual rights if they think the rules and practices of their group are more important than their individual rights. This exit right, however, should be realistic and not just formal. There should be no indoctrination and alternatives should not be cut off. For example, Muslim communities should be allowed to discriminate against their female members as long as these members have a realistic right to go elsewhere, realistic meaning that going elsewhere shouldn’t imply abandoning their religion, their family etc., meaning also that they have a real choice and haven’t been indoctrinated into submission (more here).

The priority of individual rights over cultural rights does not force us to adopt an extreme individualist philosophy in which the individual is always prior to the community or in which the community doesn’t count at all. This priority of individual rights is compatible with a communitarian stance. Cultures and cultural rights are important, and they are important for communitarian reasons, but they are not so important that they can trump individual rights. Cultures or other groups have value only in so far as they are of value for the individual members. They can’t have intrinsic value. In other words, they can’t have value for themselves.

The problem of enforced internal orthodoxy within cultural groups, which I mentioned above, may be exacerbated by the possible recognition of cultural rights. Group leaders may believe that they need to enforce orthodoxy and silence “minorities within minorities” in order to present a united culture. Presenting a united culture can make it more likely that the wider society recognizes cultural rights for the minority culture. For example, a leader (or leading class) of an indigenous group may believe that it’s necessary to emphasize the distinctive nature of the group by reviving traditional practices. This revival makes the group seem more valuable from a cultural point of view, and that’s something which will make it more likely that special recognition and special rights are forthcoming. Leaders may even have a personal and selfish interests in those rights, for example their personal leading role may be cemented after the recognition of those rights or during the struggle for recognition. However, some of these traditional practices can be harmful to the individual rights of certain members (e.g. gender discrimination, polygamy etc.) or can go against one particular current of belief within the minority group which is subsequently repressed.

So cultural rights may harm individual rights and may promote internal orthodoxy before they are recognized – and as a means to achieve recognition – as well as after they are recognized – for example, regional autonomy can imply restrictions on intervention by the central authority in the case of rights violations occurring within the regional group. It’s relatively easy to make the granting of cultural rights conditional on respect for individual rights within the group demanding cultural rights (and withdraw those rights when they result in violations of individual rights), but it’s a lot more difficult to avoid the dynamic of groups violating individual rights and suppressing internal dissent in the process of a struggle for cultural rights.

A mid-19th century engraving depicting an Inuit community in northern Canada

(source unkonwn)

Actionability of cultural rights

Individual rights trump cultural rights, but this raises the question of the actionability of cultural rights: when exactly can they be used to protect cultures? They can’t if a culture’s preservation is in danger because individual members decide to leave, for example through voluntary assimilation into other groups, or decide to fashion the group’s identity differently. Neither can they be actionable when a culture dies because of low fertility rates for instance. Artificially propping up fertility rates for the sake of cultural preservation would harm the rights of individuals in a manner which few would accept. A culture that can’t gain the uncoerced adherence of its members or promote the vitality necessary for the reproduction of its members at replacement rates, doesn’t seem to be worth preserving. Again, cultures are important for individuals. And if individuals lose their interest or change their minds, there’s not much one can do.

If one were to limit individual rights in order to prop up a culture, one would violate the principle that culture are important because they are important for individuals. One would have to adopt the unlikely view that cultures are important in themselves whatever people believe, and that they have an intrinsic value even if no one wants to be a member. Of course, it’s sad when a language dies or when some cultural practices disappear, but this sadness isn’t enough to give cultures the right to force people to do something against their will. Even if it would be somehow morally OK to force people, it would be pointless. One may succeed in getting people to speak a language, take part in rituals etc., but that would happen for the wrong reasons. A culture has to come from within. It shouldn’t be an externally imposed duty.

Perhaps cultural rights become actionable when the preservation of a culture is threatened, not by the free choices of individual members, but by economic forces, migration patterns or political oppression. Indeed, it’s not entirely unreasonable for the French government for instance to subsidize French language cinema in order to protect it against the “onslaught” of Hollywood. Or for the Tibetans to complain of Chinese “demographic aggression“. (Similar talk about Eurabia seems a lot less reasonable). Or for native Indians in the U.S. to resist forced resettlement.

Realization of cultural rights

And when we decide that cultural rights are actionable in certain cases, we still don’t know which actions short of violations of individual rights we can take to protect them. Some possibilities:

• An obvious policy could be some kind of federalism and limited self-government, primarily but not exclusively when the minority cultures are geographically isolated and when they haven’t voluntarily chosen to live within a larger political unity (e.g. tribal sovereignty for indigenous peoples).
• Maybe some quota systems in representative bodies could also help to give culture a voice.
• Affirmative action.
• Reparations.
• Special educational provisions (for example the provision of some hours of education in a native language) or other types of assistance to do things that the majority takes for granted (e.g. multilingual ballots).
• Certain veto powers (for example, the right of indigenous people to veto the use of land).
• Some group-based exceptions to general laws (such as an exemption to the rule forcing drivers to wear a crash helmet).
• Granting jurisdiction over family law to religious or tribal courts.
• A politics of recognition (e.g. teaching black history in U.S. schools).
• And perhaps even a right to separate from the political community if nothing else works or if the claim to authority of the central state is weak (as in the case of colonies).

It’s clear from this that cultural rights can in some cases restrict the rights of non-members. For example, the use of English is restricted in Quebec; affirmative action restricts the rights of non-group members; veto-powers over land use restrict the property rights of outsiders etc. However, it’s not the case that cultural rights necessarily restrict the rights of outsiders. Subsidies or regional autonomy for example do not, by definition, involve such restrictions. But if they do restrict some of the rights of outsiders, then we should be very careful. As stated above, cultural rights don’t trump individual rights; the opposite is true. But this general priority of individual rights doesn’t mean that there will never be cases in which it’s better to give priority to cultural rights (the good this will allow us to do may sometimes far outweigh the harm to some people’s individual rights). The general priority of individual rights over group rights doesn’t mean that there can’t be specific cases where the balance goes the other way.

More here.

Measuring Democracy (8): A Multidimensional Measurement

scene outside a UK polling station

(source)

Any attempt to measure the degree of democracy in a country should take into account the fact that democracy is something multidimensional. It won’t suffice to measure elections, not even the different aspects of elections such as frequency, participation, fairness, transparency etc. It takes more than fair and inclusive elections to have a democracy. Of course, the theoretical ideal of democracy is a controversial notion, so we won’t be able to agree on all the necessary dimensions or elements of a true democracy. Still, you can’t escape this problem if you want to build a measurement system: measuring something means deciding which parts of it are worth measuring.

You would also do best to take a maximalist approach: leaving out too many characteristics would allow many or even all countries to qualify as fully democratic and would make it impossible to differentiate between the different levels or the different quality of democracy across countries. A measurement system is useful precisely because it offers distinctions and detailed rankings and because it makes it possible to determine the distance to an ideal, whatever the nature of the ideal. Obviously, a maximalist approach is by definition more controversial than a minimal one. Everyone agrees that you can’t have a democracy without elections (or, better, without voting more generally). Whether strong free speech rights and an independent judiciary are necessary is less clear. And the same is true for other potential attributes of democracy.

Once you’ve determined what you believe are necessary attributes you can start to measure the extent at which they are present in different countries. Hence, your measurement will look like a set of sliding scales:

With all the markers on the right side in the case of a non-existing ideal democracy, and all the markers on the left side in the unfortunately very real case of total absence of democracy.

(The aggregation of these scales into a total country score is another matter that I’ve discussed elsewhere).

Some candidates of attributes are:

• Does a country include more or less people in the right to have a democratic say? How high is the voting age? Are criminals excluded from the vote, even after they have served their sentence? Are immigrants without citizenship excluded? Are there conditions attached to the right to vote (such as property, education, gender etc.)?
• Does a country include more or less topics in the right to a democratic say? Are voters not allowed to have a say about the affairs of the military, or about policies that have an impact on the rights of minorities? Does the judiciary have a right to judicial review of democratically approved laws?
• Does a country include more or less positions in the right to a democratic say? Can voters elect the president, judges, prosecutors, mayors, etc., or only parliamentarians? Can they elect local office holders? Does a country have a federalist structure with important powers at the local or state level?
• Does a country impose qualified majorities for certain topics or positions? Do voters have to approve certain measures with a two-thirds supermajority?
• Does a country provide more or less ways to express a democratic say? Can voters only elect officials or can they also vote on issues in referenda?
• Does a country impose more or less restrictions on the formation of a democratic say? Are free speech rights and assembly and association rights respected?
• Does a country accept more or less imbalances of power in the formation of a democratic say? Are there campaign financing rules?
• Does a country show more or less respect for the expression of a democratic say? How much corruption is there? Is the judiciary independent?

A “more” score on any of these attributes will push up the total “democracy score” for a country. At least it seems so, if not for the conclusion that all these complications in the measurement system are still not enough. We need to go further and add additional dimensions. For example, one can argue that we shouldn’t define democracy solely on the basis of the right to a democratic say, not even if we render this right as complex as we did above. A democracy should, ideally, also be a stable form of government, and allowing people to decide about the fundamental rights of minorities is an expression of the right to a democratic say but it is not in the long term interest of democracy. Those minorities will ultimately rebel against this tyranny of the majority and cause havoc for everyone.

More posts in this series are here.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics (36): Manipulating the X-axis Scale in Graphs

Although less common than its sister lie – manipulating the y-axis in graphs – manipulation of the x-axis does occur.

But first a technical note: “bins” are clusters of subpopulations for which the frequency of some characteristic is measured. Together, the bins form a histogram or a graphical representation showing the distribution of a characteristic for an entire population (like a survey group). Here’s an example:

A survey of 31 black cherry tress revealed that three of them had a height between 60 and 65 feet; 8 had a height between 70 and 75 feet etc. There are 6 bins on this graph’s x-axis, probably because the person analyzing the survey data thought that 6 would be an adequate number. And indeed, dividing a population of 31 into 20 or 2 subgroups would probably not result in interesting numbers, at least not in this case.

Working with bins means that the x-axis shows a split of the surveyed population into smaller groups according to certain ranges of the characteristic that was surveyed (height in this case), making it possible to see how many individuals (trees in this case) belong to a certain range or subgroup. Notice that in this example the bins are

• not too numerous
• not too few
• of equal size (always a range of 5 feet)
• consecutive and
• non-overlapping.

As they should be. (The size shouldn’t always be equal, but often is).

Many histograms have a “bell-shape” like in this example (in which case they show what is called a “normal distribution“), but they can also have other shapes, depending on the population and the characteristic surveyed. A survey of the frequency of a certain disease among the population of a country, with the population divided into bins according to individuals’ age, would be skewed to the left since older people – on the right – may suffer more frequently from the disease.

Since all this is probably old news to most of you, let’s go straight to an example of manipulation of bins. Such manipulation often involves tinkering with the ranges of certain bins, so that the different bins are no longer of the same size. The following example is about income shares across the population of the U.S. Technically, the graph below is not a histogram because the y-axis shows cumulated income for ranges of income groups rather than frequencies, but for our purposes it’s equivalent:

wsj graph of income distribution

(source, source)

This graph is then used by the Wall Street Journal to argue against increased taxation of the rich as a means to close the budget deficit, because supposedly that’s not where the money is. Or, better, the money is there, otherwise they wouldn’t be rich, but there are just not enough of them; taxing the middle class would be better according to the WSJ because it’s they who have all the money … at least if you believe their graph. The problem is that the highest bar in their graph is for people making $100-$200K, whereas the bar immediately to the left of this one is for the income range of $75K to $100K – an income range only one-quarter the size. No surprise that the bar for $100-$200K is so much larger than the rest…

If you want to argue that taxing the rich does make it possible to bring in a lot more revenue, then you could use this alternative graph, made from the same data:

wsj graph of income distribution alternative

(source)

Or this one:

(source)

More alternative presentations of the same data are here.

It all depends what you mean by “rich” and “middle class”, but claiming -  as does the WSJ – that $200K is still “middle class” is stretching the point.

More posts in this series are here.

Crime and Human Rights (14): The Limits of the Law

justice cartoon by Ares

(source)

We need rules to live together in a spirit of respect for each other’s rights, freedom and equality. We need to tell people what they can, cannot or should do in order to respect the rights, freedom and equality of others, and we need to coerce people if they don’t respect these rules.

It seems that the best way to do this is to translate these rule into laws and then to use a justice system and a police system to enforce respect for these laws. That’s obviously not the only way to do it – education, tradition, social control, incentives etc. are other ways – but it’s one that has proven to be successful (yet not perfectly successful since legal prohibition of acts and enforcement of this prohibition never completely prevent those acts and may even backfire). If that is correct, then laws and their enforcement institutions are necessary parts of modern life.

So, these are, in broad strokes, the limits of the law: laws should protect people’s rights, freedom and equality, no more, no less, and nothing else. However, once the institutions of the law and of law enforcement have been created, there’s always the possibility and perhaps even the certainty that they will be used not to protect rights, freedom and equality, but for other purposes, or for the enforcement of controversial and exotic interpretations of rights, freedom and equality. That’s one way in which the law can overstep its limits or, if you want, become corrupted. (I focus here on the corruption of the law, not the law enforcement institutions. The latter is for another time).

Quantitative limitations

Detail from Corrupt Legislation. Mural by Elihu Vedder. Lobby to Main Reading Room, Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C. Main figure is seated atop a pedestal saying "CORRUPT LEGISLATION". Artist's signature is dated 1896.

But a system of law can overstep its limits in several other ways as well. The purpose of the law – rights, freedom and equality – is a limitation, but it’s a limitation that requires other limitations, for example a quantitative limitation. There’s always a tendency for the number of laws to become too large. That’s a problem because a violation of this quantitative limitation has qualitative consequences for the ability of the system of law to serve its purpose, namely the protection of rights, freedom and equality:

• When laws become too numerous, it becomes difficult for people to know what is and is not legal. As a result, people may find that they are ambushed by the law. When people are ambushed in this way, they risk losing their freedom through no fault of their own, and that means that the system of law doesn’t perform its main function, namely protecting rights, freedom and equality. Moreover, after having endured or seen this kind of ambush, people will start doubting the value of the whole system of law. This undermines the credibility of the system, making it again difficult to use it for its intended function.
• When laws become too numerous, the enforcement institutions will have an increasingly difficult task. Some laws will no longer be enforced, or will be enforced in an unsatisfactory or selective way, something which again destroys the credibility and hence the effectiveness of the system of law and again has consequences for the purpose of the system.
• When laws become too numerous, it’s likely that the focus of the law will be lost. People have a limited number of rights, and there are a limited number of ways in which people can infringe on each other’s freedom and equality. Hence, the number of laws should also be limited. When there are more laws than necessary, people will be coerced for other reasons than rights, freedom and equality, and they will rightly resent this. This resentment will again be directed at the law in general, including the laws that are necessary for rights, freedom and equality.

Formal limitations

It’s not only the number of laws that can force the system of law beyond its limits. The nature of laws is also important. After all, just as a vast body of law can coerce too much, so can one very sweeping law. Laws should have certain characteristics if they are to stay within their limits:

• Laws should be precise: they should be targeted at very specific threats to freedom, equality and rights, and not at vague threats or at threats to something else. For instance, a law that makes hate speech illegal, but doesn’t specify hate speech, is too vague. It risks coercing too much and hence destroying rights, freedom and equality rather than protecting those values.
• Laws should also be effective: they should have a proven track record of countering specific threats to rights, freedom and equality. Otherwise they should be repealed. It often happens that laws are counterproductive: rather than countering a specific threat to rights, freedom and equality, they enhance it. For example, capital punishment for murder may make it more likely that witnesses are murdered.
• Laws should be proportional. They should not provide a punishment for those threatening rights, freedom and equality that produces a greater threat to the rights, freedom and equality of the punished criminals (and their relatives etc.). And they should not produce other unwanted side-effects that have an impact on rights, freedom and equality. An example of a law – or better a set of laws – that creates more harm than it prevents is the “war on drugs“. Maybe this is a set of laws that effectively suppresses drugs, but in doing so it disproportionately harms rights, freedom and equality in other places (it leads to excessive incarceration of ethnic minorities).
• Laws should not be secret, retroactive (a retroactive law is one that punishes acts that have occurred before the law came into force) or unstable (they should not change all of the time).  Otherwise, it becomes very difficult for people to respect the law, creating again the risk of ambush and the consequent loss of credibility for the whole system of law.
• Laws should not be bad law. They should not be too complex, incomprehensible or contradictory. Otherwise they will have the same effect as secret, retroactive or unstable laws.
• And, finally, laws should be necessary. If there’s a non-coercive tool to protect rights, freedom and equality that is equally effective and proportional, then this tool should used. A law, after all, because it is coercive, is a violation of freedom. Laws can therefore only be used if they are the only available means to produce more freedom than they take away, or if they are more effective.

Content limitations

Another limitation of the law is that it can only be designed to serve rights, freedom and equality. If people want to waive or destroy their own rights, freedom and equality, the law should not force them to do otherwise. In other words, the law should not be paternalistic, although there may be room for some form of soft paternalism in the case of people who obviously don’t understand their own interests or who have a hard time acting on their interests. If paternalism can enhance autonomy, why not. I won’t develop that point in this post, however.

Some also argue that religious people, or people holding other, non-religious but substantial moral convictions that are very controversial, should avoid using those religious or moral convictions as a justification for laws. Laws should in other words be neutral in order to avoid coercing people in ways that they can never accept. I rejected this argument here, so in my view that’s not a proper content limitation of the law.

If we want to keep the law within the limits stipulated here, we have to be aware of the possible roads to corruption. First, legislators should think, in every legislative decision, about the ways in which the proposed law is necessary and effective for the protection of freedom, equality and rights. Next, they should respect some formal and content limitations, as well as quantitative ones. And finally, they should have a coherent understanding of the nature of freedom, equality and rights. That, of course, in controversial – different people will always have different views of the proper meaning of these concepts. However, democratic deliberation and public reasoning can at least guarantee majority support for a particular interpretation of this meaning, and make it possible to avoid private and self-interested meanings to sneak into the law.

More on the corruption of the law is here, here and here. Something about the corruption of the enforcement institutions is here and here.

What is Democracy? (55): A System For Signaling Disapproval of the Economy

statistics cartoon by R. Crumb

(source)

“It’s the economy, stupid“. The famous phrase suggests that economic basics rather than social or cultural issues, politicians’ personal merit, foreign policy successes etc. determine democratic outcomes. People vote against incumbents when unemployment is high and GDP growth low, whatever the causes of the economic downturn. One can accuse George H.W. Bush of many things but he wasn’t by far the sole or main cause of the recession that propelled Clinton to power.

It seems that people use democratic elections – especially high profile one such as presidential elections – to signal disapproval of the economy, whatever the real responsibility of individual politicians for the state of the economy (it’s silly to assume that individual politicians, even American presidents, have the power to dramatically change the unemployment rate, for better or worse).

This graph shows a clear correlation between incumbent margins of victory in US presidential elections and changes in the unemployment rate:

incumbent margin of victory vs change in unemployment rate

(source, incumbents running for a second full term won when the unemployment rate was falling and they lost when it was going up)

The unemployment rate in 1980 was 7.2%, up considerably from the year before; Jimmy Carter duly lost his bid for reelection. In 1984, the unemployment rate was actually higher at 7.5%, but was on its way down from the previous year; Ronald Reagan was reelected in a landslide. (source)

Granted, the number of observations is low, too low to be certain about the correlation (and others have expressed doubts about the data).

Some more certainty is given by the fact that it’s not just unemployment but also income that is correlated with election results:

(source)

If we assume that the economy does indeed determine democratic outcomes in this way, then we face a problem because some of the traditional justifications of democracy become unavailable. Democracy is supposed to improve the quality of politicians: when a politician has to face popular judgment and has to pass the test of accountability, she will try harder to respect the will of the people, to avoid engaging in corruption and to generally do a good job, because doing so will convince the people that she deserves reelection. Also the freedom of the press is in part justified on this basis. A free press is able to give people the information about politicians necessary to make an informed judgment at the next election. Government transparency combined with accountability as a prerequisite for reelection provides politicians with the necessary incentives to do a good job, or at least a job that is considered good by an informed majority of public opinion.

If, however, democratic election results are determined less by the actual way in which politicians do their job than by the economic basics, then we lose this justification. If a politician won’t be reelected during an economic downturn, even if she does all that’s humanly possible to avoid it or lessen its impact, she has one less reason to do her best. She may still do her best out of a sense of responsibility or public service and remain unconcerned by electoral prospects, but we should not underestimate the motivation provided by the mere fact of having and retaining a position of power.

More posts in this series are here. More on signaling here, and on accountability here.

Are “Social Media” and the Internet in General Good or Bad for Human Rights?

(source, the original is here)

Well, it depends, as they say. “Both” is of course the only correct answer. If you’re an optimist, you would say that:

• Social media make it easier for people to mobilize and coordinate their activities in the event of anti-authoritarian protests; to publish alerts in case of police attacks etc. They are a useful tool in strengthening resolve and confidence, given the fact that people will only turn up at potentially dangerous protest marches when they feel confident that a very large group will turn up (see here).
• Free speech is of course greatly enhanced by the internet, including the right to information (the passive side of free speech).
• The internet improves the marketplace of ideas; see here.

(source)

On the other hand, if you’re a pessimist, you would say that:

• The internet and social media allow governments to monitor dissidents. For example, an authoritarian government can track dissident groups through Facebook profiles and friend networks, through Twitter communications and email etc.
• Those governments can also use the internet to distribute propaganda, while stifling dissenting voices (they have the hardware, the software and the access to providers necessary to censor the internet).
• Terrorist groups also have been successful users of the internet, particularly through video messages and videotaped atrocities.
• There are the obvious privacy concerns. Etc.

The question therefore isn’t “good v. bad” but how to promote the good effects while minimizing the bad ones. In any case, internet euphoria about “twitter revolutions” and such seems very simplistic.

The Causes of Poverty (44): Bad Institutions

(source)

Botswana is a largely tropical, land-locked country with insignificant agriculture in a geo-politically precarious location. When the British granted independence, they left 12 km of roads and a poor educational system. Making headlines for its devastatingly high HIV rate, Botswana suffers from high inequality and unemployment. Officially a democracy, it has yet to have a functioning opposition party. 40% of Botswana’s output is from the diamond industry, a condition that in other countries casts the resource-curse.

Zimbabwe and Botswana GDP per capita

Still, Botswana is a growth miracle. Between 1965 and 1998, it had an average annual growth rate of 7.7%, and in 1998 it had an average per capita income four times the African average. Rule of law, property rights, and enforcement of contracts work; the government is efficient, small, and relatively free from corruption. Indigenous institutions, persisting through colonization, encourage broad-based participation, placing constraints on elites. Institutional quality and good policies are responsible for success against the odds. (source)

Of course, high GDP growth rates don’t always imply low poverty rates, but often they do. About a third of the population still lives in poverty, but this rate has been declining sharply, from 59% in 1985 and 47% in 1992 (source).

(image source)

More posts in this series are here.

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

Mount Rushmore

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.

Related Articles

• Presidential system of government encourages corruption – Awujale (vanguardngr.com)
• You: ‘India’s parliamentary democracy’ – imperilled? (nation.com.pk)

The Causes of Wealth Inequality (13): Deliberate Policy?

(source)

Some say that the increase in income inequality in countries such as the U.S. has been the result of deliberate government policy. That’s quite an accusation. It’s not controversial to assume that tax policy under right wing governments tends to be less burdensome on the rich, and that social welfare policy under such governments tends to be more stingy. If you look at it like this, it’s not crazy to argue that right wing policies can aggravate income inequality. But it’s quite another thing to claim that right wing governments use these policies in order to deliberately aggravate income inequality. That accusation is incompatible with right wing ideology, which claims that the preferred policies also and ultimately help the poor (trickle down economics etc.), and that left wing policies supposedly favoring the poor are in fact self-destructive (unemployment benefits create labor disincentives, taxes create production disincentives, etc.). However, it’s possible that this ideology is just a smokescreen for anti-poor policies. But I guess that’s somewhat difficult to prove.

If we look at the tax rates, it’s true that the rates for the wealthy tend to go down under Republican presidents:

In 1979, the effective tax rate on the top 0.01 percent (i.e., rich people) was 42.9 percent. … By Reagan’s last year in office it was 32.2 percent. (source)

However, things aren’t as simple as that:

From 1989 to 2005, … as income inequality continued to climb, the effective tax rate on the top 0.01 percent largely held steady; in most years it remained in the low 30s, surging to 41 during Clinton’s first term but falling back during his second, where it remained. The change in the effective tax rate on the bottom 20 percent (i.e., poor and lower-middle-class people) was much more dramatic, but not in a direction that would increase income inequality. Under Clinton, it dropped from 8 percent (about where it had stood since 1979) to 6.4 percent. Under George W. Bush, it fell to 4.3 percent. (source)

The tax rate for the rich dropped somewhat around 2005 following the Bush tax cuts, but all the tax effects over the last decades taken together don’t really make a good case that tax policy is the major cause of rising income inequality. So it’s even more difficult to make the case that tax policy was part of a conscious strategy to aggravate inequality. The increase in inequality has been too big compared to the possible impact of taxation. That’s corroborated by the fact that pre-tax inequality in the U.S. rose faster than after-tax inequality.

What’s interesting, however, is that pre-tax inequality in the U.S. tends to rise much faster under Republican rule. See this post for example. So inequality can still be the result of policy, but policy expressed in other ways than taxation. Other policies that may have contributed – deliberately or not – to rising income inequality are anti-labor union policies, decreases in the minimum wage, etc.

More posts in this series are here.

Related Articles

• Did federal government policy create the Great Divergence? (slate.com)
• Mapping Income Inequality (blogs.forbes.com)
• The source of income inequality and a cure? (professorbainbridge.com)
• How income inequality is changing (blogs.reuters.com)
• Slate: A historical look at Income Inequality in the U.S. (americablog.com)
• Our Banana Republic: US Income Inequality Grows (emptywheel.firedoglake.com)
• Income Inequality: ‘The Most Profound Change In American Society In Your Lifetime’ (huffingtonpost.com)
• The Great Divergence – how did income inequality get so bad? (americablog.com)
• What’s income inequality got to do with it? (economist.com)

Hypocracy, a New Form of Government

No, it’s not the common misspelling of hypocrisy. It’s a neologism formed by combining the words hypocrisy and autocracy, describing what I believe to be a typically modern form of authoritarian government that does not want to speak its name. Russia is a fine example: officially a constitutional democracy but rife with authoritarian oppression. When yet another journalist is attacked by “fringe groups”, the president “vows” on Twitter that those responsible will get caught, which they obviously won’t.

Of course, tyrants have been hypocritical as long as they exist, but it seems like nowadays there are only hypocritical tyrants. The days are gone when Saddam Hussein could proudly throw his “opponents” to the lions or have entire sections of his citizenry gassed, and when Idi Amin could enjoy personally decapitating his enemies.

The most likely cause of hypocracy is the ideological supremacy of democracy and human rights. Dictators feel the need to at least give lip service to popular sovereignty and freedom from oppression, since there’s no other readily available justification of political power (outside a few remaining theocracies). Communism is gone, and so are “Asian values”. No more need to fight against colonial empires. And brute force as well is no longer acceptable.

So I’ll make it my hobby to expose hypocracy and post examples of it here.

Human Rights Maps (101): Governance in Africa

The Ibrahim Index provides a comprehensive ranking of African countries according to governance quality. It measures the delivery of public goods and services to citizens by government and non-state actors and uses indicators across four main pillars: safety and rule of law (murder rate, corruption etc.); participation and human rights; sustainable economic opportunity (fiscal policy, free markets and inflation); and human development (education and health care). Together those constitute a proxy for the quality of the processes and outcomes of governance. The following map shows the scores for 2007/2008 (dark blue for low scores to dark red for countries that are better governed):

(there’s an interactive version here and here)

Here’s the ranking for 2010:

(source)

Careful with the data before 2006; there are some methodological problems with those. Also, don’t forget that these are country aggregates and that there may be huge regional differences within countries (a country that scores very badly overall may have regions that do relatively well, and vice versa).

More maps on issues related to governance are here (other posts about governance are here). More maps about human rights in general are here.

Related Articles

• 2010 Ibrahim Index shows a ‘mixed picture’ of African governance (one.org)
• African progress threatened by ‘democratic recession’ (theglobeandmail.com)
• Africa rights advances ‘reversed’ (bbc.co.uk)
• An index of African governance: A rum old mix (economist.com)

Self-Defeating Human Rights Policies (4): Road Safety

I knew I could use this when I saw it:

(source)

This is part of an innovative approach to road safety in West Vancouver, Canada. The local government has decided to paint an optical illusion of a girl playing on the road in order to slow down traffic.

It’s a well-intentioned policy that’s likely to go horribly wrong: initially, there’s a risk that the painting will make drivers brake and swerve and cause an accident, and later on drivers will perhaps mistake real children for the painted ones and just drive one.

Similar counterproductive efforts are quite common in the area of human rights. The most obvious one is the war on terror: while trying to protect the lives, physical safety and bodily integrity of their citizens, western governments have launched themselves into a war on terror and two territorial wars on/in other countries. Those wars not only produce massive violations of the rights of citizens of those two countries, but also of the rights of the citizens of the western countries that initiated the wars. Moreover, these wars tend to produce terrorists rather than eliminate them (see also here).

More self-defeating human rights policies are here.

Economic Human Rights (34): The Cost of Human Rights, and of Economic Rights More Specifically

Human rights cost money. It’s often claimed that economic human rights aren’t really human rights because they are so expensive for many governments in the world that they can’t realistically impose duties: governments of poor countries can’t be expected to respect a duty to provide healthcare, housing, food, work etc. Ought implies can. You can’t be under an obligation if there’s no way you can honor that obligation. It’s claimed, therefore, that economic rights are mere aspirations rather than rights.

Yet, the same argument can be made about the supposedly more distinguished and respectable freedom rights. It’s strange, many countries in the world can’t manage to create the institutions and the governance to enforce freedom rights, simply because they don’t have the means (and sometimes the willingness), and yet this fact doesn’t make people think twice about the reality of freedom rights.

Providing effective and non-corrupt police forces and judiciaries is expensive. Probably just as expensive as providing a good public healthcare system. True, rights have to be enforceable, and duties shouldn’t be farcically unrealistic. But I fail to see the ontological difference here between freedom rights and economic rights.

We also shouldn’t overestimate the cost of economic rights. The purpose of these rights is not to have a government that gives healthcare, food, work etc. to every single citizen. That would destroy the economy. A system of economic rights will require that most people provide these goods for themselves through work and economic activity. It will also require that citizens show generosity and help each other. Economic rights also create duties for fellow-citizens. The government supplies the goods in the remaining cases, when self-help and mutual help are not enough.

As a result, the cost of economic rights isn’t as high as a cursory reading of these rights would imply. Conversely, the cost of freedom rights is often higher than one would conclude at first sight: true, these rights often require abstinence and forbearance (“don’t invade my privacy or inhibit my speech”) and that’s something cheap. But the enforcement and equal protection of those rights and the enforcement of forbearance requires an efficient government, which is expensive.

Read more on economic rights here, here and here. And something about another cost issue related to human rights, namely the relative cost of freedom and dictatorship, is here.

Human Rights Maps (94): Internet Censorship in China

internet censorship in China

(source, click the image to enlarge)

There are more statistics on internet filtering in China here. And a more polemical post on the Great Firewall of China is here. And don’t forget that there is also non-internet censorship in China.

More on censorship and freedom of the press. More human rights maps.

Political Jokes & Funny Quotes (93): Small Government Conservatism

I am an American conservative shitheel. This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US department of energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the national aeronautics and space administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US department of agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the food and drug administration.

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the national institute of standards and technology and the US naval observatory, I get into my national highway traffic safety administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the environmental protection agency, using legal tender issued by the federal reserve bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US postal service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the department of labor and the occupational safety and health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all it’s valuables thanks to the local police department.

I then log on to the internet which was developed by the defense advanced research projects administration and post on freerepublic.com and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right. (source)

I think there’s a liberal equivalent of this somewhere. More on small government here and here.

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. 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.

Larry Diamond

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 petro-politics 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.

More posts in this series.

Political Graffiti (94): Corporate Responsibility

(source)

More here and here on corporate responsibility – i.e. the responsibility of corporations to think about something more than profit, for example human rights. More political graffiti.

Human Rights Maps (83): Where Deposed Dictators Have Settled

There’s an interactive map here showing where some of the recently deposed dictators have ended up after they had to flee the countries they once ruled. This is a screenshot:

where deposed dictators have settled

More human rights maps.

Why Do We Need Human Rights? (12): The Economic Case against Human Rights and Democracy, Ctd.

After completing my older post on the topic – in which I argued that the case is very weak – I found this quote by Bill Easterly which I thought would illustrate my point:

Democracy doesn’t attract as much love as it deserves in aid and development circles. Many wonder if benevolent autocrats might be better for development than messy elections, even though there is no evidence to support benevolent autocracy. There is a strong positive association between democracy and LEVEL of per capita income, which at least some authors argue is causal. (It’s true there is no robust association between democracy and GROWTH of income, but then there is no robust association between GROWTH and ANYTHING.) But even if there had been SOME material payoff to autocracy, why don’t we care more about democracy as a good thing in itself? (source)

Some data about the correlation between democracy and GDP (both level and growth) are here. My argument for democracy is usually instrumental (see here) and prosperity is one of the values that can and should be promoted by instrumental democracy. But I’ve also written about democracy as a good thing in itself. Go here if you care about that sort of argument.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (10): The Curse of High Oil Prices? (Revisiting Friedman’s First Law of Petropolitics)

Thomas Friedman’s so-called “First Law of Petropolitics” states that the price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions. As the price of oil rises and money floods into the hands of a “petrolist state”, the government of this state can use this money to crush the opposition, and also to gain the upper hand in their relations with the international community. They become less dependent on trade relationships with other countries and so they can do what they please domestically and internationally. They also are less dependent on taxation, and hence on democratic representation which normally evolves along with taxation. Revenues from energy sales allow for government spending to keep the population satisfied with autocracy and to dampen pressures for democratization.

I’ve been rather scathing about this “law” in an older post, and I’ve found some data to back me up. There seems to be no empirical evidence that high oil prices undermine democracy, help sustain autocracy, or prevent transitions to democracy.

This doesn’t mean that the West shouldn’t move away from its dependence on oil. It’s just that the reason is simply ecological rather than political: oil dependence isn’t bad because it supports autocrats elsewhere in the world; it’s bad because of the environment.

Other posts about the transition (or lack thereof) to democracy are here, here and here. A post about the related topic of “putinism” is here.

Why Do We Need Human Rights? (11): The Economic Case against Human Rights and Democracy

Some authoritarian governments claim that human rights and democracy have to be sacrificed for the sake of economic development and economic progress. Here are some of the reasons given in support of this claim.

Discipline in production and consumption

Discipline in production and consumption is believed to be more important for economic growth than freedom. This discipline requires discipline in general in society, and therefore also a strong state. The exaggerated attention to rights instead of duties is incompatible with discipline. Duties are much more useful in economic development than rights. Instead of wasting scarce resources on consumption, people should moderate themselves and resources should be used for necessary investments. In addition, the free choice of labor is less important than the ability of the state to direct labor towards certain development projects. There may even be a rationale for forced labor.

"Fully engage in the movement to increase production and to practice economy to set off a new upsurge in industrial production", Chinese poster from 1965

(source)

And finally, if you want economic development, wages need to be low, union activity needs to be minimal, working hours need to be long and perhaps you have to turn a blind eye to child labor. None of this is possible in a democracy that tries to respect human rights.

You need a strong state for all of this, able to force people to be disciplined in both consumption and production.

Discipline in politics

You also need a strong state able to implement and enforce long term plans. Economic development requires consistency, coherence, long term planning and so on, all of which is incompatible with democracy and rotation in office. A democracy doesn’t look further than the next election and is unable to plan economic development. Democracy is the national equivalent of the shortsighted consumer spending everything instead of investing for the future. A democratic government will take measures which guarantee the short term interests of electors and elected, even if these measures are detrimental to the long term economic well-being of the nation.

A strong state doesn’t have to fear election results and can focus on long term planning. It has the power to enforce certain measures which are unpopular in the short run—for example because they imply limits on short term consumption, because they redirect funds towards long term investments or because they entail labor planning—but which yield great dividends in the future.

On top of that, human rights promote individualism and egoism because they are claims of the individual against society. Together with adversarial democracy they hamper national cooperation and harmony which are necessary for economic success.

Radical, not temporary, incompatibility

So according to this narrative, political freedom and human rights have to be rejected because they are by definition incompatible with economic development. And perhaps even with prosperity as such: they may not even be a luxury which poor countries cannot afford yet and which are useless when bellies are empty; they are even less than that. If you choose freedom, then not only will it be impossible to escape from underdevelopment – it will be impossible to maintain prosperity.

Rebuttal

Now, what can we say against this? Let’s take the different arguments in turn. If you assume that discipline in consumption and production is a good thing, then you basically create an export dependent economy. It’s well known that domestic consumption drives economic growth (see also here). If consumption is discouraged (and savings and investments encouraged), and if wages are low and working hours long, then you may get an initial boost in the economy, but this is no strategy for long term success. Not only does it imply dependence on exports and hence vulnerability to shocks occurring in the economies of the trading partners; it also keeps living standards low. And that can hardly be the purpose of economic development. China has clearly understood this and is trying to boost domestic demand (see also here).

The utility of child labor is obviously shortsighted – no economy can prosper without an educated citizenry – and the need for planning and long term consistency in economic policy is also a dubious argument. Centrally planned economies aren’t known for their successes. The state is not necessarily the most appropriate engine for development. Investment and planning decisions are probably best left to the market, and those investments that are best done by the government don’t require an authoritarian form of government. I don’t see how a dictatorship is better placed to plan transport infrastructure or energy provision for example. On the contrary even: the lack of transparency in a dictatorship makes it likely that such investments turn out to be corruption machines.

The argument that democracies are too fickle and shortsighted for economic planning and investments is also a bit weak. It’s difficult to deny that a democratic government, because of the way it comes to power, has more legitimacy and is therefore better placed to take difficult and unpopular decisions. People are more willing to accept or live with unpopular policies if they have a government that can be forced to justify its actions in public. Besides, the point is moot because most authoritarian leaders aren’t the long term planners and do-gooders they are supposed to be: most think only of the short term, namely their own short term financial profit.

What about the lack of cooperation, harmony and unity of democracies, and the selfishness cultivated by human rights? First of all, it’s not evident that national cooperation and harmony are best for economic development. Maybe individualism, entrepreneurship, inventiveness and doing things different are more important. And secondly, why would we assume that human rights are necessarily individualistic and selfish? There can never be an exaggerated attention to rights at the expense of duties. There are no rights without duties. And many so-called individualistic human rights create strong groups (freedom of religion, tolerance, freedom of association and assembly etc.).

Also, why would we have to think that democracy is more adversarial than autocracy? The democratic procedures for changing governments create social stability because they help to avoid revolt. Authoritarian harmony is often only skin deep – if it exists at all – because it’s based on suppression of differences. Things that are suppressed have a habit of popping up later in a more violent form.

The point is that human rights and democracy are magnificent weapons in the struggle for economic development rather than a luxury which poor people can’t afford or a false blessing which will render every economic achievement impossible or short-lived. Read more…

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

I’ve written before on the so-called resource curse: the fact 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.

I’ve also tried to list some of the possible reasons why reliance on natural resources inhibits 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 figure below, from the same paper, plots a measure of resource dependence against the Political Risk Service’s corruption index (all data for 1990) – corruption being an indicator of the resource curse. The figure does not demonstrate that there’s a linear relationship between higher levels of corruption (lower index value on the y-axis) and natural resources (higher value on the x-axis). The fitted line does have a slight rightward slope, but 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 [below], 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.

More on the related topic of good governance.

What is Democracy? (50): Something of the West, Not For Us, Thank You, and the I-Did-It-My-Way Syndrome

(source)

In discussions about the promotion of democracy in those parts of the world where it hasn’t been (firmly) established yet, the sceptical side of the argument usually advances either or both of the following positions:

• Democracy is a political form typical of the West and undesirable or impossible elsewhere.
• Democracy is a political concept which is defined in different ways according to the culture in which it is applied. When promoting democratic government in certain places, we are in fact promoting standard Western democracy when we should in fact be promoting something quite different.

The first position often includes references to cultural or religious preconditions for democracy which are claimed to be absent in certain countries (notably Muslim countries, which supposedly have a hard time accepting the separation of state and religion, the rule of law, gender equality and other elements of democracy). Or it includes arguments about economic preconditions which are absent (democracy being OK for the wealthy West, but not for countries which have other, more urgent economic concerns). And, finally, the size of countries, or their ethnic mix, is said to make democracy very difficult to achieve, or to make it an element which can undermine national harmony and stability. Democracy is viewed as something which reinforces communal or tribal antagonism because the different political parties tend to be formed along ethnic or tribal dividing lines. As a consequence, these parties see it as their role to defend the communal interest and nothing else, and once they are in power they tend to do so by discriminating against other communities. In such countries, democracy degenerates into an ethnic census.

(source)

The second position doesn’t reject the possibility or desirability of democracy in certain countries, but claims that the western definition of democracy can’t and shouldn’t be imposed outside of the West without taking into account the local, cultural, historical and social circumstances. There should be different models of democracy for different parts of the world. The western model is not a panacea and is not adapted to all circumstances.

Needless to say that this second position tends to collapse into the first one: if democracy is a very open concept that can include very different procedures, rules and institutions, then it can also exclude elements of democracy which we normally see as essential parts of democracy. An “African democracy” or “Asian democracy” or whatever, may turn out to be not very democratic. Indeed, such concepts are often mere smokescreens used by dictators weary of rejecting democracy altogether.

However, there is some element of truth in both positions. Democracy is undoubtedly tied to certain preconditions, and is impossible without those. And, in certain specific circumstances, such as a war or a national emergency, democracy – or full democracy – may be - temporarily - undesirable. Moreover, countries have to be able to follow their own path and to organize their societies according to their own views and traditions, and not according to those of the West. The Western model isn’t by definition the only desirable one, or the best one. It is not up to the West to decide what is and what is not politically acceptable in countries with entirely different traditions. Democracy can take different forms. Even among Western countries, there are vast differences between the types of democracy that are applied.

It’s wrong to copy the specifically Western view of democracy “à la lettre” in the rest of the world. Within certain limits, we have to take local and cultural aspects into consideration and we have to be flexible where we can. But there are limits. A democracy can’t be just anything. Otherwise we would be defending nihilism. If some elements are missing – such as freedom of speech, association and assembly, regular, fair and free elections, the rule of law etc. – then we can hardly speak of democracy.

Read other posts in this series.

What is Democracy? (47): Something in Need of Innovation

by Leo Cullum

If we agree that democracy is something valuable, and that speaking about democracy means speaking about a “thick” democracy, a “deep” democracy, a “full” democracy or a maximalist version of democracy as opposed to a democracy characterized only by regular and fair elections (see here), then it becomes important to find ways in which to make our democracies more democratic.

Making a democracy more democratic means designing procedures and institutions that make it more likely that government policy and legislation represent the will of the people, but also that processes that guide the formation of this will are improved. A lot of thinking about democracy takes popular preferences for granted, and merely focuses on the implementation of these preferences. However, you can imagine procedures that do a very good job implementing preferences, but what use are they if these preferences are merely unreflected opinions and when there are no deliberative institutions that help to form preferences?

So, if we want to improve democracy and deepen it, we have to focus on two aspects:

• improve the way in which preferences are implemented
• improve the way in which preferences are formed.

Innovations in preference implementation

In mentioned in a previous post that a purely representative system of democracy isn’t able to accurately implement voter preferences. The argument in a nutshell: it’s more difficult to express preferences while voting for persons than it is while voting for issues. One person, who is a candidate for representative, holds many different opinions, and voting for this person means voting for the totality of these opinions. As a voter, you therefore vote for opinions which aren’t necessarily yours. You cannot express every single one of your preferences. You express your preference for a person, and this will be a person who more or less has the same preferences as you have, but there is some loss. And when preferences can’t be adequately expressed, they can be adequately implemented either.

For example, suppose your opinions as a voter are generally very liberal, but you oppose abortion vehemently. Suppose also that all liberal candidates for representatives are in favor of abortion. What do you do? You either don’t vote – but then you give up on democracy and the premise of this post doesn’t hold – or you vote for the liberal who holds a set of opinions closest to your own. However, when choosing the latter option you will vote for someone who favors abortion. Hence you were unable to express your preference against abortion, and democratic politics will therefore not correctly implement popular preferences.

If we want to improve this aspect of democracy, we should allow people to vote on issues, at least now and again. A modicum of direct democracy should be available. One institutional translation of direct democracy is the referendum. A referendum can be viewed as an innovation of purely representative democracy, an innovation designed to allow a better expression and implementation of popular preferences.

A vote in a referendum may be better than a vote for a representative in some cases – because such a vote means a more correct expression of preferences – but a traditional criticism against referenda is precisely that they simplify issues: they force people to put their preferences into the straight-jacket of a simple yes-no choice. People may not be able to express their preferences with the means of a simple “yes” or “no”. Many issues on which people are asked to express themselves in a referendum may not be suitable for a simple yes-no question. For example, some people may answer the question “should abortion be illegal” with a resounding “yes” or “no”, but other people may feel that their preferences require a longer, more nuanced answer.

However, instead of using this problem in order to reject the referendum as a democratic tool, we may opt for an innovation of the referendum system. Instead of offering a simple yes-no answer, a referendum can be a bit more complicated. Possible answers can take other forms, for example:

• “Answer yes or no”; “If you have answered ‘no’, would you be willing to accept the following, less far-reaching alternative …, yes or no?”, etc.
• “Answer yes or no”; “Since it is likely that the following consequences [...] will result from the rejection of this proposal by the majority, would you be willing to accept consequence 1, 2 etc.?”; “If not, would you be willing to accept…?” etc.
• Instead of a simple yes-no, voters could also be asked to classify a series of options according to their preferences.
• etc.

So there are ways to improve and innovate direct democracy, which is in itself an improvement of representative democracy. But even if we stay within the realm of representative democracy, it’s possible to make it better. For example, it is well known that the political party system is not perfect. The candidates/representatives that are presented to the people for election, are selected by way of opaque mechanisms, involving power struggles within parties, fundraising, lobbying etc. This  distorts the election of representatives as an expression of popular preferences. Moreover, a party system – especially a two-party system – limits the field of debate. Topics which aren’t interesting for the parties or don’t fit within their overall ideology are ignored. One can reflect on a representative system which does away with parties altogether. Also, why should elections be the best way to represent people and their preferences? Wouldn’t a selection by lot of people from the general public not produce a more representative body of politicians? All such innovations and many more are worth considering.

Innovations in preference formation

However, what is the use of having systems that adequately express and implement citizens’ preferences if these preferences are of low quality, if they’re mere prejudice, knee jerk reactions, parrot talking points or unreflected slogans? Preferences should ideally be the result of reflection and deliberation. If preferences are formed through open discussion in which many perspectives on issues and many arguments for and against certain options can be aired, then the quality of preferences will be greatly enhanced, and that is something that benefits us all, even those of us who don’t manage to get our preferences translated into policy and legislation.

Immanuel Kant

I have an older post here discussing the way in which deliberation improves thinking (based on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant).

However, open and fair discussion isn’t the strongest point of our current democracies, and this is another area in need of innovation and improvement (see here). How can we improve the quality of political discourse? The reinstatement of the “fairness doctrine” is an option, but perhaps not the best one. Citizen juries are another option. Such juries, comprised of randomly selected members of the public, are asked to discuss a topic, interview experts, and form an opinion. Either this opinion is then taken to represent the opinion of the public as a whole and implemented into policy, or the public as a whole is asked to take note of the proceedings and conclusions and debate it further in other forums.

And that’s just one way of considering citizens’ preferences not as a given but as something that has be to formed, and that can be formed in a good way or a bad way.

More posts in this series are here.

Human Rights Ads (35): Band of Dictators

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More on Korea, Zimbabwe and Myanmar (aka Burma). More human rights ads.

Political Graffiti (76): South Africa

(forgot where I got this from, sorry)

More on corruption. More political graffiti.

Human Rights Facts (46): A Country’s Responsibility to Promote Democracy Abroad

I believe that there are many good reasons why countries should be democracies (see examples of these reasons here, here, here, here and here), but does this imply that powerful countries such as the U.S. can/should promote democracy in certain other countries when these countries seem unable or unwilling to become democracies? Do countries such as the U.S. have a moral duty or perhaps a selfish interest to do so? Or are these efforts doomed to fail and oxymoronic (the imposition of democracy being undemocratic)? (Remember also that democracy is a human right).

Neoconservatism, a popular ideology in the U.S., is characterized, in part, by the belief that democracy promotion is the U.S.’s responsibility and is in it’s long term interest. One can disagree with the tactics proposed and used by neoconservatives and still accept that there are good reasons for a democratic country to try to democratize other countries (see here and here for these reasons). It’s indeed the case that much depends on the type of efforts that we’re talking about. You don’t have to agree with the militaristic tactics of neoconservatives in order to believe strongly in the universal value of democracy and in less harmful ways to realize this value.

However, it’s important to understand that democracy promotion is a hugely complex undertaking. It’s part nation-building, institutional work, development work, educational work etc. Some countries will move faster than others because more of the prerequisites are present. There are many reasons why countries become/don’t become democracies. Democratization efforts which employ tactics that don’t address the prerequisites or the reasons why a country isn’t a democracy (yet), are doomed to fail and perhaps makes things worse than were before. You can’t just drop democracy from a plane.

Here’s a view on current public opinion in the U.S. regarding this matter:

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What Are Human Rights? (21): Dimensions of Human Rights

It’s common to believe that human rights are rights that protect us against the state. Nothing wrong there, except that it’s a gross simplification. Human rights aren’t one-dimensional. In this older post (as well as in this one), I distinguished between the vertical and horizontal dimensions of human rights: the former one describing the way rights regulate our relationship with our state/government, and the latter one pointing to the fact that it isn’t necessarily the state that violates our rights: our fellow-citizens can do the same, as can citizens of other countries. If rights had only a vertical dimension, it would be difficult, for example, to explain the mayhem caused by so-called failed states in terms of human rights.

With a bit of imagination, we can add a diagonal dimension: rights claims aren’t addressed only at the state and fellow human beings; corporations, cultures, associations and other groups can also violate our rights (think of corporate social responsibility, apostasy etc.). Since these entities are somewhere on a level between the levels of persons and the state, we can call this dimension diagonal.

To make things complete, we have to add a final dimension. Human rights are not bilateral, such as the rights created by a marriage contract or a commercial contract. They are omni-lateral, meaning that they are claims directed at all entities within the previous dimensions: every other human being, every state and every intermediary entity can violate our rights. That is what we mean when we say that rights are rights erga omnes.

If we put these dimensions together, we can present it graphically: every human being is situated in the center of a sphere, and the radius, wherever on the surface of the sphere it points, indicates a human rights claim. If you take the image below, whichever way you turn it, the arrow is a claim.

dimensions of human rights

All this is a rather difficult way of saying that human rights are universal. The advantage of saying it this way, is that “universal” starts to mean something more than merely “shared by every human being”. Another advantage is that it becomes clear that human rights transcend the level of the law. They aren’t just legal rights. If they were, we could not explain their erga omnes character or their power as moral claims.

Human Rights Video (10): Hans Rosling on Poverty, Human Rights and Statistics

Researcher Hans Rosling, the great statistics visualizer, uses his cool data tools to show how countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. He also mentions human rights in general (not just the right not to suffer poverty), fertility rates, life expectancy, child mortality, good governance and other stuff this blog cares about. Watch:

More om human rights and statistics. Roslings website is here. More human rights videos.

Human Rights Facts (44): Support for Intervention in Darfur

Below are some public opinion data which confirm the numbers I posted previously. It’s very encouraging to see that large majorities or pluralities in some African and Muslim countries support some form of international action against the ongoing atrocities in Darfur/Sudan. Both the ICC’s arrest warrant for Bashir and a possible humanitarian intervention are viewed positively, despite the reluctance of most of those countries’ governments.

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More on Darfur.

Human Rights and International Law (18): Responsibility to Protect (R2P)

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The ”Responsibility to Protect“, or R2P in U.N.-speak, is a humanitarian principle that aims to stop mass murder, genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity. It refers initially to the responsibility of states to their own citizens, but in case states can’t or won’t protect their own citizens, other states can step in, respecting the Security Council procedures. However, this is a last resort, especially if the intervention is of a military nature.

The concept is closely linked to, if not indistinguishable from, humanitarian intervention. Often it’s also called the principle of non-indifference, a sarcastic pun on the principle of non-intervention. Some for whom national sovereignty and non-intervention is still the main and overriding rule in international affairs, see R2P as an excuse for Western interference. Noam Chomsky is a notable if unsurprising example. You can read his arguments here. He is, not for the first time unfortunately, joined by a number of governments that risk being a future target.

Noam Chomsky

(source, art by Robert Shetterly)

However, most in the West aren’t jumping the queue to enter into a legal obligation that can force them to undertake expensive and risky interventions in the name of humanity. The fact that these interventions aren’t only expensive and risky but often also without collateral benefits, doesn’t help either. R2P is not yet a legal rule, more a quasi-legal rule. Some legal or quasi-legal texts include the concept. The Constitutive Act of the African Union includes “the right of the Union to intervene in a member state pursuant to a decision of the African Union assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity”. The same is true for the Security Council of the UN. The concept was endorsed unanimously by heads of state during the World Summit of 2005, so it can be argued that the principle is part of international common law (i.e. international law established by coherent and unanimous state practice).

More here. More on humanitarian intervention here and here.

Human Rights Cartoon (61): Corruption

(source, cartoon by Angel Boligan)

Corruption, or “the misuse of public office for private gain”, is not a human rights violation as such (there is no right not to suffer the consequences of corruption), but it is the cause of various rights violations. Notably, it has an impact on economic growth (see here) and hence also on poverty reduction (given the correlation between growth and poverty reduction,  see here). Corruption also has an impact on poverty on the level of individuals rather than countries (and there is a right not to suffer poverty). It’s obvious that individuals can make better use of the funds that they (have to) spend on bribes. As depicted in the cartoon, those that are forced to pay bribes are often people who are already vulnerable.

Moreover, corruption eats away at the rule of law. Even in the most corrupt countries, corruption is usually illegal. If illegal activity becomes normal practice, the rule of law is obviously undermined, with possible consequences for judicial protection in general, including protection of human rights. Even more seriously, corruption is associated with political instability since it tends to reduce citizens’ trust and faith in institutions.

Some statistics on corruption are here, here, here, and here.

Measuring Democracy (4): How, Why and What

(source, photo by Samantha Nicol)

How do we measure democracy?

How do we assess if a country is a democracy or not, or is more democratic than another? Or, in other words, how do we assess the “democraticness” of a country, or the level or quality of its democracy, if any? It’s obvious from this way of phrasing the question that my preferred system of measurement will not be binary or dichotomous. I want to have a measurement system that gives me more than merely an indication of the presence or absence of democracy in a country. I want a scale of “democraticness”, ranging from total absence of any elements of democracy to a perfect democracy, with as many intermediate levels as possible. How this can be done is another matter. Different people have tried to do this in different ways, none of them in a satisfactory way. (Even the one with the best reputation can be criticized). So someone should come up with something new.

Why should we measure democracy?

But apart from how, there’s the question of why. Why would we want to measure the quality of democracy? For two reasons I think.

1. Democracy is said to have a beneficial influence on peace, prosperity, equality and freedom. But the correct measurement of this influence depends on the accuracy of democracy measurement. If we can’t measure democracy, we can’t measure how it is correlated with other measures.
2. Secondly, democracy is valuable in itself. Ideally, it allows citizens to participate in the process that shapes their collective fate. Self-government, self-determination and self-control are aspects of freedom. To the extent that freedom is considered to be valuable, democracy is as well. A better measure of democracy makes it easier to progress towards a better democracy, and hence towards more freedom.

What is it that we want to measure?

This answer to the question “why measure democracy?” hints at another important question: “what is it that we want to measure?”. Democracy is a highly contested concept, and no two people mean exactly the same when they use the word. That doesn’t mean we can’t measure democracy. It simply means that anyone proposing a measurement system – as I won’t do here obviously – must make it perfectly clear what he or she personally and controversially means by the concept. Those who believe that this meaning is nonsense or contains mistakes about the theory of democracy can reject the measurement system.

I already mentioned that my preferred concept of democracy to be used in measurement systems is an “ideal democracy” or a “full democracy”. So the point is not to attempt to measure something which exists in reality. The measurement should attempt to calculate the distance between existing political regimes and the ideal of democracy, as one sees it. It may appear that such a choice makes things even more controversial, and increases the likelihood that a measurement project will be rejected by large numbers of readers who, after all, have probably different views on the nature of an ideal democracy. It’s more likely that there exist different points of view on ideals than on facts. However, the advantage of measuring the distance between actual regimes and an ideal, compared to measuring how many countries share the same, existing regime type, is that the targets of the measurement will be more positive and accepting about it. After all, it comes over better if you are somewhere on a continuum towards full democracy and if you’re being compared to an ideal, than if you are simply classified as a non-democracy/oligarchy/theocracy etc. and compared to a certain country.

More posts in this series.

Migration and Human Rights (21): China’s Demographic Aggression and Provocation of Racism, The Cases of Tibet and Xinjiang

Dalai Lama

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If only Han Chinese inhabit Tibet, what is the meaning of autonomy? Dalai Lama (source)

The recent protests and violence by Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang province are reminiscent of the March 2008 protests in Tibet. Like the Tibetans, the Uighurs believe that they are colonized by Han Chinese who have settled in the Tibetan and Uighur provinces in large numbers, and continue to do so. (92% of Chinese are Han). As a result, the ethnic Turkic Muslim Uighurs now make up less than half of the 20m population in their province, and probably less given the tendency of official Chinese statistics to underestimate internal migration flows. This is compared to 75% in 1949. (In Tibet, the indigenous population is still the majority according to official statistics, but this is likely to change with the new train link to the province).

It is widely accepted that these migration flows are part of official Chinese government policy. Populating border regions with Han Chinese is believed to lessen separatist tensions and demands for autonomy, and is handy when it comes to expropriating the local resources. The local populations however see this as demographic aggression and an attack on their culture. If their land is taken over, so will their culture, language, traditions and religion. In Xinjiang, evidence of this is the prohibition on headscarves, the languages used in schools etc.

Not surprisingly, these policies of demographic aggression – which the Dalai Lama has called a form of cultural genocide – combined with other authoritarian policies, provoke a reaction, and unfortunately, this reaction often takes the form of anti-Han racism. (Most victims of the recent clashes in Tibet and Xinjiang were Han, although – as usual – the victims of the government’s reaction don’t get mentioned).

More on Tibet.

Measuring Democracy (2): Polity IV, and Some of Its Problems

I mentioned some of the most popular measures of democracy in this previous post, but somehow managed to forget Polity IV. This is, like Freedom House and others, a project ranking countries according to their political regime type. It’s extensively used in comparative and causal analysis that require a distinction between democracies and non-democracies, partly because its time series start from the year 1800.

Its

perspective envisions a spectrum of governing authority that spans from fully institutionalized autocracies through mixed, or incoherent, authority regimes (termed “anocracies”) to fully institutionalized democracies. The “Polity Score” captures this regime authority spectrum on a 21-point scale ranging from -10 (hereditary monarchy) to +10 (consolidated democracy). (source)

An example of the output:

The Polity Score is the aggregate of 6 component measures that aim to record what are called key qualities of democracies: executive recruitment, constraints on executive authority, and political competition.

However, it seems that Polity IV doesn’t adequately measure what it claims to measure. Its concept of democracy is quite thin, resulting in a fair number of “perfect democracies”, whereas we all know that there is no such thing in the world we live in. And other countries, which are obviously dictatorial, are classified as fairly democratic. A quote from this paper (which is an attempt to improve Polity IV):

Polity’s 21-point democracy/autocracy scale, illustrated by the dashed line [in the figure below], tracks the major changes in British political history, but only roughly. The Reform Bill of 1832 revised a complicated system of determining the franchise by increasing the number of voters from 500,000 to 813,000. Despite the modesty of this expansion, changes in the Polity Score for Britain give a sense of greatly expanded democracy, moving from a -2 (democracy=4, autocracy=6) to a +3 (democracy=6, autocracy=3).

However, as illustrated by the solid line, only six percent of the adult population voted even after the reform.

While the male franchise had broadened considerably by 1884, suffrage still excluded agricultural workers and servants. Actual voter turnout reached 12% of the population only in the election of 1885 before falling, and didn’t return to that level again until 1918. All the while, Polity scores for executive recruitment and competition increased while institutionalized autocracy decreased. In 1880 the Polity democracy score stood at 7 (autocracy=0). By 1901 the democracy score rose to 8 and by 1922 Polity suggests that Britain was a “perfect 10″ democracy, even though full male suffrage was not achieved until 1918 and full female suffrage until 1928.

Britain has received the highest democracy rating ever since, even though the voting rate has never exceeded 60% of the adult population.

The high scores that Britain receives from 1880 on are misleading and, with respect to changes in participation, mistimed. As Figure 1 illustrates, participation doubled during a period Polity records as unchanged and doubled again during a modest 2 point move in Polity.

The racial exclusion in South Africa also demonstrates the danger of conceiving democracy without taking account of the breadth of citizen participation. According to Polity, South Africa was a relatively stable democracy from 1910 until 1989. It was coded a 7 out of 10 on democracy and a 3 of 10 on autocracy, bringing its score to +4. A positive score is surprising because it ignores the exclusion of the 90 percent of the population that did not – most could not – vote.

Switzerland, our final example, has scored a perfect 10 out of 10 on democracy in the Polity dataset since 1848, even though women – roughly half the population – were not granted the right to vote until 1971, 123 years later. Furthermore, electoral turnout has hovered around 30% recently, despite virtually universal suffrage. One reason is that Switzerland’s collective executive is an organizational form that diminishes voter motivation by minimizing the significance of election outcomes. Surely such a system should be regarded as less democratic than one in which most citizens participate in elections that actually make a difference in the leadership and policies of the nation.

More on measuring democracy.

Satellite Evidence of Human Rights Violations (3): Burma

From USA Today:

satellite evidence of rights violations in Burma, click to enlarge

The top photo was taken Jan. 14, 2000. The bottom one, taken Feb. 1, 2007, shows that 17 structures disappeared. This corresponds with reports that villages in this part of Shan were attacked between mid-2005 and mid-2006, the American Association for the Advancement of Science says in its report.

There’s a whole slideshow of pictures on Burma here. More satellite pictures of rights violations elsewhere are here and here. More on Burma here.

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (14): The Influence of Democracy on Human Rights

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I’ve stated many times before (here and here for example) that I believe human rights and democracy are interdependent and cannot be properly understood if they are separated from one another. A democracy without human rights, without for example the freedom to speak and to organize, is not really a democracy, and the system of human rights is incomplete when political rights – i.e. rights which ground democracy – are left out. Rights and democracy are prerequisites for each other. What use is the right to vote if people don’t have the right to speak, to have an education etc.? And what use is the right to speak if you’re not allowed to vote? (See here). And there’s a dynamic aspect to this: a certain level of protection for human rights will lead to the development of (a stronger) democracy; and, vice versa, a certain level of development of democracy leads to better protection of human rights. It’s the latter point that I want to deal with in the current post.

Why do I assume that more democracy leads to better human rights protection? For several reasons. Democratic rulers know that they can’t get away with repression. They’ll be voted out if they try, or, worse, they’ll suffer the consequences of the rule of law, imposed on them by other branches of power in a system of checks and balances and separation of powers. Democracies also have powerful non-violent mechanisms for dispute settlement. And, finally, democracies need human rights to function adequately, so they have an added incentive to respect them.

However, all this isn’t just my personal assumption. Most of the political science literature supports the statement that democratic political systems decrease rights violations and repression (see here for an overview). What the literature doesn’t agree on is the pattern of the influence of democracy on rights. There are mainly 3 models doing the rounds: a linear one, an inverted u-shape model, and a threshold model.

1. Linear model

This model, which is the most popular one, states that every step towards democracy is a step away from repression and rights violations (perhaps with “diminishing returns” for human rights once democracy has reached a certain – high – level of development, in which case the linear pattern would be slightly bended downwards, as in the image below).

linear influence of democracy on human rights

2. Inverted U-shape model

This model states that well-developed democracies do indeed offer better protection of human rights, but it also states that very authoritarian regimes are also not characterized by high levels of repression since these regimes enjoy such a high level of regime security – perhaps through previous repression – that repression is no longer necessary. This model is also called MMM or “more murder in the middle”. Regimes in the middle are unstable, mixed, and perhaps in a transition to democracy or to strict authoritarianism, and therefore may feel it is necessary to use repression.

inverted u-shape influence of democracy on human rights

3. Threshold model

This model, contrary to the first one, states that not every step in the development of democracy improves the rights situation. Only after democracy has reached a certain level of maturity (a “tipping point”) will repression diminish.

threshold influence of democracy on human rights

Examples

Examples of model 1 are here and here. Other examples are cited here. Examples of model 2 are here and here. An example of model 3 is here.

Bottom-line?

So, which one is closest to reality? Difficult to say. Much depends on the data used, but still more on the definitions. All 3 models have some intuitive appeal, but only if use different definitions. Model 2 for example is convincing, but only if we limit “repression” and “rights violations” to attacks on physical integrity rights. A well-established and very authoritarian regime will probably not need to go to such extremes. On the other hand, a weak authoritarian regime, threatened by a strong internal (democratic) opposition will be more likely to use force and violence. But all other human rights, apart from the physical integrity rights, are still heavily violated in a “safe” authoritarian regime. So it’s a bit dubious to say that such regimes are not “repressive”.

Terrorism and Human Rights (15): Does Respect for Human Rights Reduce Terrorism?

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Here is an extremely interesting paper by James Walsh and James Piazza. Quote:

Some hold that restricting human rights is a necessary if unfortunate cost of preventing terrorism. Others conclude that such abuses aggravate political grievances that contribute to terror. We demonstrate that theory and data support the latter position. (source)

They focus on what they call physical integrity rights, or rights which protect people from physical harm. The more a state respects these rights, the less terror attacks it suffers. It will also be less engaged in some way or other in transnational attacks.

These findings are opposed to two similar and widespread beliefs: unstable states can only guarantee security is they are authoritarian (see here), and even well-developed democracies have to limit some human rights in order to fight a terrorist threat (see here). In the former case, the threat comes usually from within; in the latter case from abroad.

States that seek to preserve human rights and political freedoms are limited in their ability to monitor and detain terrorism suspects, are prohibited from making broad police sweeps to catch terrorist perpetrators and their sympathizers, limit coercive interrogation of suspects, and must afford suspected terrorists access to a lawyer and a public trial. Freedom of assembly and of the press allows terrorists and their supporters to publicize their grievances. … The implication is that states that protect human rights are more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. (source)

In fact, the opposite is true. Protecting human rights, and especially security or integrity rights, reduces terrorism, and violating them promotes terrorism. Terrorism is a complex phenomenon, but I think it true to say that grievances and injustices (and many of those are caused by rights violations) are important motives. Democracies and states that respect human rights supposedly give too much freedom to terrorists, allow them to organize, recruit, mobilize and plan, and make it very hard to efficiently combat terrorists (rule of law, free speech, humane treatment and torture prohibitions etc. are all said to hamper counter-terrorism). But authoritarian regimes create injustices on which terrorists feed. They also make it hard to express and redress grievances in non-violent ways,  and use ruthless methods that only make their opponents more radical, fanatic and popular.

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The authors back this up with data. They link the MIPT measure of terrorism (Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism) with the Physical Integrity Index:

More here and here.

Political Graffiti (43b): Zimbabwe’s Inflation Turns Money Into Wallpaper

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More on Zimbabwe.

What is Democracy? (42): A Luxury That Some Countries Can’t Afford?

(source, picture of the violence following the 2007 elections in Kenya)

Are some countries better off with a dictatorship? With a strong man able to make tough and unpopular decisions without fear for the next election? Are some populations willing to accept this and trade some political freedoms for more security and physical safety?

A first sight: of course. Both democracy and security are human rights, and I’ve often discussed, on this blog, cases where different rights contradict each other and where a choice has to be made (see here and here).

However, it’s not obvious that there is such a conflict in this case. In what way is democracy deficient in delivering security? And is dictatorship better equipped? Let’s look at these two questions in turn.

Democracy and human rights are said to promote discord, chaos and even violence, especially in ethnically or religously divided countries. Indeed, rights such as free speech can be used to incite communal hostility and violence, and democratic elections cannot function if there is no division and contest between groups. The adversarial aspect of democratic elections often results in communal tension and even violence, especially in what we could call immature or imperfect democracies.

The argument for stability and security seems stronger when it is used against democracy than when it is used against human rights. It is evident that most groups that use violence do so because they feel that their rights are somehow violated; respect for human rights will therefore diminish rather than increase violence.

Regarding democracy, it is obviously adversarial and it does divide society into different, antagonistic groups. However, it does not push divisions to such an extreme that living together peacefully becomes impossible or undesirable. The unwillingness to live together is not caused by democracy but by fundamental convictions concerning religion, morality, justice etc. Democracy does not even enhance this unwillingness. On the contrary, it offers ways to bridge fundamental differences between groups (e.g. it offers places of discussion and negotiation) and it creates mechanisms which guarantee peaceful coexistence when it is impossible to bridge differences (such as federalism, power sharing, tolerance, religious freedom etc.).

We can see a two-way causation at work here: although democracy undoubtedly needs national unity, it is also a prerequisite for this unity. A group will question the national unity, will revolt, will cause violent conflicts or will try to separate only if it is discriminated against, if its human rights are violated, if it does not enjoy tolerance and respect for its difference, if it is excluded from power or if it is not granted local autonomy. If, in other words, it does not live in a democracy. National unity, the conviction of belonging to the same group and of sharing the same destiny whatever the differences, can only arise as a result of debate. Freedom of expression and elections can indeed be dangerous in a divided society, but without it, it is hard to see how divisions can be overcome or accommodated, as opposed to merely suppressed.

And this suppression is precisely the so-called major advantage of authoritarian regimes, compared to democracies. An authoritarian state is undoubtedly better equipped to suppress communal hostility. The ability to maintain communal peace is a classic argument in favor of authoritarian forms of government. Indeed, these forms of government seem to be able to separate warring factions, to avoid chaos, violence, separation and disintegration and to focus attention on loyalty, patriotism and the community. They limit the use of rights because rights are a means to incite or aggravate divisions. These regimes are able to violate rights if this is deemed necessary in order to keep antagonists apart.

However, what is the cost of authoritarian peace? Grave violations of human rights in the first place, and more violence than before. Rights violations often create more violence than the violence which was the initial reason to violate rights. Violating rights in order to suppress communal tensions is counterproductive in the long run. A strong hand always causes revolt and violence, the opposite therefore of what is intended. Rights violations, which are deemed necessary for the preservation of communal peace, cause violent opposition and revolt. They can lead to violent revolt even when they do not imply the use of violence. Without human rights, it is impossible to express claims and people who cannot claim something will resort to more extreme means in order to get what is theirs. Authoritarianism promotes the evil it wants to combat, although in the short run rights limitations and the use of violence may seem the only alternative.

Democracy is necessary in a divided society because the alternative – oppression – only reinvigorates what is tries to eliminate.

Also, as an empirical fact, name me 1 dictatorship that guarantees communal peace, and I name 5 democracies that do the same, and better.

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (13): Rights Suffering Under the Law, The Problem of Legal Human Rights Violations

This post is about the law violating human rights. I understand that this is only one of many ways in which rights can be violated, and certainly not the most important one. Genocide, poverty, torture, war etc. are all major human rights violations, but only rarely if ever do they occur because a law instructs people to kill, maim or impoverish their fellow human beings. On the contrary, many human rights violations result from breaking the law, and the law has often been the last refuge for human rights.

So we have two different types of rights violations, illegal and legal violations.

1. Illegal violations

Illegal violations are acts that violate human rights and at the same time break laws that make these violations illegal. This type of rights violation always implies some kind of inefficiency in the national justice systems. These justice systems are supposed to prosecute illegal rights violations, but often fail to do so, for two possible reasons: inability or unwillingness. They may be grossly inefficient, or they may be corrupt and complicit with the rights violators. So illegal violations may be divided into two subtypes:

1.1. Illegal violations caused by government incompetence

These violations occur because of the government’s inability to stop them. An example would be robbery or murder.

1.2. Illegal violations caused by government complicity

These occur because of the governments unwillingness to stop them. The judicial and police systems are covering for the rights violators. An example could be torture in Guantanamo.

2. Legal violations

Legal violations, on the other hand, are rights violations that are condoned or imposed by the law and by the justice system. This type as well can be further divided into two subtypes:

2.1. Violations that are imposed by the law

Some examples: capital punishment, jim crow, some aspects of Islamic law, blasphemy laws, lèse majesté laws, homosexuality laws…

2.2. Violations that are not punished by the law

These are acts which are not illegal because the law remains silent on them, but which violate human rights. This type can be further divided. Violations are not punished by the law

• either because it is believed that these violations should not be considered a crime (the contrary act is then often believed to be a crime) (case 2.2.1.)
• or because it is difficult to determine the party responsible for the violations (case 2.2.2.).

Some examples of case 2.2.1.: in some countries there is no legal concept known as marital rape; other countries do not outlaw abortion (for those who agree that abortion is a human rights violation). Some examples of case 2.2.2.: poverty, famine…

One caveat, however. “Legal” in this setting means “legal according to national law”. One could justifiably claim that there is no such thing as legal human rights violations since international law makes all violations illegal and renders national laws condoning or imposing violations, null and void. However, this is theory. In practice, national legal systems continue to impose and enforce, sometimes quite effectively, laws which either condone or impose violations.

Human Rights Quote (69): Should We Stop Giving Aid to Africa?

Paul Collier

A quote from Paul Collier (author of The Bottom Billion and Wars, Guns, and Votes), on Dambisa Moyo‘s controversial argument that foreign aid to Africa should be reduced because it engenders dependency and undermines entrepreneurship:

Dambisa was my student, and I am delighted that young Africans are no longer prepared to have their continent defined by victimhood. They recognize that Africans can shape their own future. However, I don’t agree with her that aid is useless. Especially with the drying up of private finance, now is the hour for public international money; it is needed. It is, however, often badly used. Paul Collier (source)

More aid criticism can be found on Bill Easterly’s blog. Some of my own critical posts here and here. A more general post on the human rights situation in Africa is here. And for those interested in numbers, statistics on development aid are here.

Human Rights Maps (47): Rule of Law

(source)

More on the rule of law.

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (12): The Scope of Criminal Law in Different Countries or Cultures, and Its Effect on Human Rights

Different countries and different cultures make different choices about the appropriate scope of criminal law. Some actions which are legal in one country are illegal in another.

The two tables below list a number of action types (certainly not all) and whether they are legal or illegal. This table can be used to classify countries or societies according to the degree of freedom that they grant their citizens. The legalization of some actions makes countries more free, the legalization of others less free. (And the same for the choice whether or not to criminalize certain actions). This table can therefore be used to distinguish between countries or societies that are more free or more ”liberal” than others which are more authoritarian or more ”illiberal”.

The distinction between countries can be made by attributing a certain score to each action and then making the sum. The scoring could be done like this: add a point when a country or society is best described by the right column, and subtract a point for the left column. Countries with high marks are then liberal, countries with low marks illiberal.

For example, if we would like to score the U.S., this country would be given one point for allowing gun ownership, making it a bit more “liberal” (I know this label doesn’t really fit U.S. politics, in which a favorable view of gun ownership is a rather more “conservative” than “liberal” position. But “liberal” here should be understood not in the context of U.S. politics but simply as meaning “more free”). However, the U.S. would lose a point because it has allowed torture. Done for every type of action, this scoring should then give an overall impression of the country, or of any other country.

View tables: types of societies, liberal and illiberal, types of societies liberal and illiberal 2.

I don’t intend to attach any moral significance to these terms, “liberal” and “illiberal”. One isn’t necessarily good or the other bad. More freedom isn’t always a good thing. The terms “liberal” and “illiberal” merely describe the degree of freedom in a country.

Now, the interesting thing from the point of view of human rights, is that liberal societies, in general (as can be seen from the tables) are more favorable to human rights than illiberal ones. So the table can be used to classify societies according to their respect for human rights (and then the distinction does take on a moral character). But this isn’t completely true, for two reasons:

• Some human rights issues, such as health or poverty, aren’t included in the table, because they aren’t relevant from the point of view of criminal law. But they can and should change the score: a society that scores as “illiberal” from the point of view of criminal law, can improve its score as a “human rights respecting country” when it offers its citizens good health care and income (but of course this doesn’t excuse the human rights violations resulting from its criminal law). Or vice versa.
• It’s debatable whether more freedom for certain actions results in more respect for human rights. One can think of pornography or abortion. So an extremely liberal society is perhaps not the best one from the point of view of human rights.

A correct distinction between more or less liberal countries should not only include the scope of criminal law, but also the severity of punishment when a crime is committed. Societies that have the same scope for criminal law as others, but use capital punishment, corporal punishment, mutilation, stoning or torture as methods of criminal punishment, should be classified as less liberal.

Readers can also use this table, not to score countries, but themselves. For example, I did it for myself using the scoring system proposed above, and this was the result (this image is unreadable because it is reduced in size to make it fit in this blogpost; click on the links to the tables above if you want to see the real size tables):

If you consider that the scoring system goes from -37 to +37, for respectively the most illiberal and the most liberal point of view, my score of +23 is quite liberal, but not extremely liberal.  Compared to the mist liberal position, I “lost” points because of my opposition to pornography, obscenity, gun ownership, holocaust denial and hate speech, and because of my favorable views on affirmative action and sweatshops.

More on criminal law here and here.