Nobel Taagepera

Great news!

Our colleague Rein Taagepera (University of California at Irvine and Tartu University, Estonia) has been awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science “for his profound analysis of the function of electoral systems in representative democracy”.

The Skytte Prize was commented in one of the first posts of this Blog (10 September 2006) as “the most significant attempt to create a worldwide prize in Political Science with similar prestige as the Nobel Prizes”.

Rein Taagepera has participated in at least six occasions in the discussions in this Blog. A brief summary of his comments can enlighten the reader about his analytical insights and the broad scope of his intellectual and other interests.

1) In the post ‘Academics Entering Politics’ (22 October 2006), I included Taagepera’s account of his running for President of Estonia in the first post-Soviet election in 1992 and his further part-time political activism there. Among other things he said to have learned from the experience that: “A scholar chooses the problems s/he wishes to work on; while problems choose the politician whether s/he wants to deal with them or not. However, a scholar doesn't take a position unless s/he is pretty certain; a politician has to take a stand even when s/he is less than 50 % certain of the option advocated.”

2) In the post ‘Estonian Political Laboratory’ (03 March 2007), written on the occasion of a parliamentary election there, I summarized Taagepera’s influence on the design of the electoral system and other institutional rules in the previous process of democratization.

3) The post ‘Freedom for Scotland’ (05 May 2007) finished with the statement that: “Small nations like Scotland are now viable and, at the same time, better fit than large, heterogeneous states for democratic self-government.”
Taagepera responded: “Of course. I very much agree that the national state no longer represents the optimal or actual unit on all dimensions --cultural, economic, military, etc. It always was a somewhat artificial pretension… Why should Scotland, Catalonia, Bavaria (who still had its own stamps less than 100 years ago), Corsica and Mezzogiorno be forced to deal with the European Union through some intermediary centers, if they should prefer direct access? This is not to say they MUST go separate. The decision should be up to them --and only them.”

4) On the post ‘Bringing the Empire Back In’ (02 June 2007), where Taageppera’s works on historical empires were cited, Taagepera said:
Yes, [Samuel] Finer's work [The History of Government from the Earliest Times] is "impressive, indispensable and irregular "-- inevitably the latter, given his death before he could tidy it up… Yet it would be a superb challenge to turn Finer into something more systematic, preferably with a quantitative backbone, for which he has bits and pieces.

5) The post ‘Brussels, Federal District' (16 September 2007) ended with the bet that “If Flanders and Wallonia stay ruling on their own, Brussels could just become the federal district of Europe, located as it is --somehow like Washington DC is in America-- at the meeting point between the North and the South of the Union.” To which Taagepera commented: “Yes, it's quite likely”.

6) Finally, in the post ‘Large Assemblies, Small Districts’ (13 January 2008), I extensively commented and drawn on Taagepera’s most recent book Predicting Party Sizes focusing on his formula relating the number of parties in parliament, P, with the average district number of seats, M, and the total number of seats in the assembly, S; in his notation:
P = (MS)1/4
This opened one of the most lively, long and interesting discussions in this Blog so far.

So thank you, Rein, for everything !!!

COMMENTS

Matthew Shugart said...

This is such a richly deserved honor for Rein.
San Diego, California

Rob Richie said...

Noble and Nobel indeed!
Thanks for this good news, Joseph, and big congratulations, Rein.

Rob
Fair Vote
Maryland

What to Talk About

In the ongoing American primaries, voters unmistakably declare that their main concerns are the economy and Iraq. But the three surviving candidates try to talk also on immigration, health care and the environment. There is an election in Spain this Sunday. Most people declare that their highest concerns are inflation, housing and terrorism. But the two main contenders try to focus on immigration and the unity of the motherhood. Politicians do not necessarily focus on the issues that worry the voters the most, but rather on those on which they can expect to have an electoral advantage. It is more important what they talk about than what they say.

With my colleague Humberto Llavador, we have built a model of electoral competition focusing on the selection of issues by parties and candidates –see the full paper below. Against standard ‘spatial’ models, we do not assume that parties or candidates compete to win an election by ‘moving’ their policy positions across the policy or ideology space and fighting for the ‘center’, but rather by shaping the space with choices of issues to which they try to give salience during the electoral campaign. Giving salience to an issue implies proposing an innovative policy proposal on the issue as an alternative to the status-quo policy, as well as talking about it, usually with a value or argument, and making it news with some effort investment in order to making it relevant for voters’ electoral decisions. The new proposal does not need to be ‘centrist’ but rather the opposite, it must be significantly distant from the status-quo.

Of course, party leaders choose to give salience to an issue because they may think their policy position on the issue will be capable of gaining the favor of the majority of the public. Each party expects a higher probability of victory if its chosen issue becomes salient in the voters’ decision. But parties have to trade off the pre-campaign salience of each issue in voters’ concerns and the voters’ support or consensus in favor of the policy alternatives on the issue.

If one issue is highly salient in the voters’ concerns, but there is uncertainty about which possible policy proposals is better, choosing to campaign on the issue may be risky –as is probably the case, for example, with the housing crisis right now. If, on the contrary, there is broad social consensus about the best policy alternative to an unsatisfactory status-quo on one issue, but the issue is not a priority for voters’ electoral decision, running on that issue can attract little attention –as might be the case with the environment.

We have found that, although parties do not compete on irrelevant issues (those with both low salience among voters and doubtful or divisive policy proposals), indeed the issues which are considered the most important ones by a majority of votes may not be given salience during the electoral campaign. The equilibrium results depend only on the probability of victory of the best policy alternatives that parties can propose.

This may be a surprising result, but it may be a reasonable one after all. Even if there is extensive public concern on some issue, if there is not a single policy proposal on the issue which can attract broad consensus, focusing on that issue might produce division and polarization among both parties and voters. Important issues in people’s concerns can, thus, be solved through electoral competition only when a policy alternative appears as clearly superior to voters’ eyes. In the absence of a likely successful policy alternative, parties can choose not to give salience to the issue, thus maintaining the status-quo policy even if it is unsatisfactory for voters.

In the short term, mediocre policies broadly rejected by the electorate, as well as incumbent parties with bad performance in government, may survive for lack of a sufficiently convincing alternative –this is indeed likely to happen in some elections ahead. In the long term, broad policy consensus can be accumulated on an increasing number of issues, although not in the order of importance in voters’ concerns. After a long period of elections in a stable institutional and contextual setting, cumulative consensus may deprive parties from worrying issues and broadly appealing policy proposals. Then they may have to focus on relatively low relevant and divisive issues –such as abortion, for instance, just to mention one.

REFERENCE

Josep M. Colomer and Humberto Llavador, 'An Agenda-Setting Model of Electoral Competition', Working Paper, 2008.
CLICK

Electoral systems, Majority rule, Multiparty systems

The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences is just published. It is presented, in nine volumes and 4,000 pages, as the second edition to replace the one published in 1968. According to its own introduction, "it covers scholarship and fields that have emerged and matured since the publication of the original international edition. Highlights the expanding influence of economics in social science research and features new articles and biographies contributed by scholars from around the world on a wide array of global topics in the social sciences."

Here are my articles on:

Electoral systems

Majority rule

Multiparty systems

To see them: CLICK

REFERENCE

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. William A. Darity, Jr., ed. 2^nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008. 4000 pp. 9 vols.

The Super Tuesday Game

This long American election year has just started but it is already raising high interest and passions, not only in America but worldwide. Three different approaches can be identified in the study of the U.S. presidential primary elections, but none seems good enough to make accurate predictions this year.

The first approach remarks that primary voters are typically more extreme or eccentric than the average voter in the general election, thus pulling candidates away from the center and generating higher polarization between the two final contenders than in the whole electorate. The first elections with generalized primaries in the Democratic party, with McGovern and Carter as winning candidates, seemed to give support to this view.

However, other authors remarked that the outcome of primary elections is, above all, unpredictable. According to social choice theory, the procedure would be ‘fundamentally flawed’ and vulnerable to the indirect influence of irrelevant candidacies. Surprise in early caucuses and elections, momentum, media attention, endogenous formation of preferences and the bandwagon effect would be characteristic elements of this kind of elections. Even the formal-model oriented book on the presidential election game by Steven Brams (which is now just reprinted) inconclusively concludes that ‘the strategy of ambiguity may be productive or unproductive’, ‘there is no set of policy positions… that is invulnerable`, and ‘primaries so often seem to yield topsy-turvy outcomes’.

Note that unpredictability means that sometimes the two major presidential candidates can be more polarized than the electorate, but sometimes they may not. Actually more recent emphasis has been put on the electability of the candidates. According to some empirical models, any candidate with national-poll support above 40 percent before the Iowa caucus is likely to win the party selection. In the so-called ‘invisible primary’, each party leadership, driven by strong electoral motives, would coordinate on a widely acceptable candidate and organize support through fund-raising and endorsements by state governors, influential media and interest group leaders, while primary voters would have also learned to elect the electable in the general election, not a more extreme candidate than the party supporters. This might be helped by more widely diffused and accessible information and communication, which make the primary season no longer a collection of separate local events but a big national debate (and international spectacle). According to this view, electability, rather than extremism or hazard, would have driven the choice of Republican candidates Reagan, Bush Sr., Dole and Bush Jr., as well as Democrats Mondale, Clinton, Gore and Kerry. A negative case would have been Dukakis in 1988, but this case would also support the model, since no candidate was sufficiently popular at the beginning of the process among Democrats that year. In fact, a majority around a candidate has been formed increasingly early in the process in successive elections.

Nevertheless, this year no model seems to help much. The crucial point is that it’s not clear who the most electable candidates in the general election are. One could say that now that we had learned how to use the machine, there is no fuel. On the Democrats’ side, Hillary Clinton overtly fears that a more-extreme-than-the-average candidate could win, only to confirm the traditional negative evaluation of the procedure. On the Republican side, no candidate had, by far, more than 40 percent national support before Iowa. The party leadership seems to hesitate and may have less control over the ‘invisible primary’ than in the past. Even if this year the electoral calendar is earlier than ever, majority support for a pair of candidates may emerge rather late.

REFERENCES

Steven Brams. The Presidential Election Game. Yale UP. New edition 2008 CLICK

The Forum. Special Issue: The Politics of Presidential Selection: 2008 CLICK

COMMENTS

Matthew Shugart said...

I don't see how the nomination of Carter supports the notion that primary electorates tend to be "more extreme." Carter didn't exactly represent the party's McGovern wing.

And, of course the argument for polarization seems to assume closed primaries and caucuses, yet most of the early contests in 2008 are open (at least to independents, and often to any voter).

On the other hand, the more open process should encourage the nomination of the more 'electable' candidate (on the presumption that the one that attracts independents and cross-party voters is indeed more electable in the general). Yet, fears by party regulars of meddling by "outsiders" may produce a polarizing backlash (see McCain vs. Bush, 2000; perhaps something similar is underway with Obama vs. Clinton).

No wonder no model helps much!

MSS
U. California, San Diego


Gilles Serra said...

Dear Josep, thanks for this very interesting entry.

I wanted to suggest a fourth feature of primaries, which is their ability to reveal information about relevant characteristics of the candidates. In particular, competition within a party is an effective way to test the candidates’ campaigning skills before they are nominated: primary candidates are forced to debate on Television, run advertisements, and they are thoroughly scrutinized by the media which allows party members to discriminate which of them would withstand a similar treatment during the general election.

Primaries can therefore uncover some appealing politicians who were previously underestimated or marginalized. A classic example is John F. Kennedy, who was relatively unknown in 1960, but whose victory in West Virginia’s primary revealed his ability to win protestant votes and convinced his party to grant him the nomination. Other examples of candidates whose surprising appeal to voters was unveiled thanks to a primary election are Ségolène Royale in France, Carlos Menem in Argentina and Felipe Calderón in Mexico. We could speculate that Barak Obama would not have been able to come forward as a credible candidate if he had not had the chance to prove his rallying capacity during the invisible primary.

Primaries can also reveal undesirable features of candidates, like potentially scandalous secrets or a propensity to make blunders (of the style of Howard Dean’s primal scream). The party obviously prefers those negative characteristics to be revealed during a primary where that candidate can be discarded, rather than the general election when it is too late to replace her.

You say, correctly from my point of view, that it is not yet clear who the more electable candidates are. One prediction of this fourth model of primaries is that such information needs more time to flow, with the primary season still having a long way to go. I think we can hang on to our seats for upcoming blunders, screams, tears, and exploding scandals that will leave only one man (or woman) standing in each party.

Oxford University, Nuffield College

Large Assemblies, Small Districts

Almost twenty years ago, Rein Taagepera and Matthew Shugart published an innovative book, Seats and Votes, which they dared to present as a potential ‘Rosetta Stone’ not only for electoral studies but for other branches of political science as well. Now Taagepera has published a book-form of his further work with still more provocative ambition and potential impact,
Predicting Party Sizes. In this and other works, the physicist-trained, political scientist turned Taagepera campaigns for both scientifically cumulative and practically applicable knowledge in politics, which, in his view, requires making relations between variables precise and quantifiable. He wants to “present scholarly results in a way practitioners of politics could use”.

To show the potential of Taagepera’s approach, let me just draw a little on what I think is his central finding: a formula relating the number of parties in parliament, P, with the average district number of seats, M, and the total number of seats in the assembly, S; in his notation:

P = (MS)^1/4

The title of Taagepera’s book might be a little misleading because it may suggest that the number of parties is always a dependent variable of the basic elements of the electoral systems –a statistical-regression approach that Taagepera characteristically scorns as too limited. Actually his formula accepts two-direction lines of causality. It can indeed be turned the other way around in order to present the electoral system as derived from the number of parties. Specifically:

M = P⁴/S

Since, according to Taagepera, the number of seats of the assembly depends strongly on the country’s population (in a cube root relation), we can deduct from the above formula that, for similar number of parties, P, the larger the country, and hence the larger the assembly, S, the smaller the expected district magnitude, M. Very large countries, precisely because they have large assemblies, should be associated to small (single-member) districts. The institutional designers in India, for example, are likely to choose single-member districts, while the institutional designers in Estonia are likely to choose multimember districts, typically associated to proportional representation rules. Thus we should usually see large assemblies with small districts, and small assemblies with large districts. Which is what we indeed usually see.

The interest of this finding is that it is counter-intuitive, since apparently small countries should have more ‘simple’ party configurations, so that they could work with simple electoral systems with single-member districts and majority rule in acceptable ways (actually this tends to happen in very small and micro-countries with only a few dozen thousand inhabitants in which only one or two significant parties emerge). But now we could have an answer to the very intriguing question of why large countries, including the United States, in spite of the fact that large size is typically associated to high heterogeneity, keep small single-member districts and have not adopted proportional representation. The answer may be that in large countries such as Australia, Canada, France, India, the United Kingdom and the United States, a large assembly can be sufficiently inclusive, even if it is elected in small, single-member districts, due to territorial variety of the representatives. By contrast, in small countries, including Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and so many others, the size of the assembly is small and, as a consequence, the development of multiple parties has favored more strongly the adoption of more inclusive, large multimember districts with proportional representation rules.

A relevant implication for political practitioners of institutional design is that if the size of the assembly is rather stable and depends on the country's size, for a small country with a small assembly just a few parties can be sufficient to produce a change of electoral system in favor of proportional representation. In contrast, for a large country and a large assembly, many parties would be necessary to produce such a result --as some of our colleagues in Britain, for instance, know very well.

REFERENCE:

Rein Taagepera, Predicting Party Sizes: The Logic of Simple Electoral Systems, Oxford University Press, 2007. CLICK

COMMENTS

Jan-Erik Lane said...

I will check this model by looking at the UK, Sweden and Russia.
The problem with this approach is that social reality is not CONSTANT like the universe.
How can you be sure that
(1) P = (MS)^1/4
does not change to 1/3 or 1/5 in the future? But of course the speed of light c or strength of gravity G does not change!

jan

Rein Taagepera said...

Thanks for the publicity!

Yes, P = (MS)^1/4
is at the core of the model. An acquaintance dealing in ceramics offered to put one of my equations on a plaque, and I proposed precisely that one.

And yes, M=P⁴/S is as valid, and can be expected to be at work in constituent assemblies.
(Could it be tested?)
To avoid an impression of directionality, MS/P⁴=1 or P⁴/MS=1 might be the safest way to express it.

The range of P is roughly 2 to 10. Hence P⁴ ranges from about 16 to 10,000.
In comparison, S ranges from about 20 to 700 in present democracies.
Hence the impact of S on M is appreciably smaller than that of P.
Even for S=700, 10 parties in the constituent assembly would push toward M=10,000/700=14.
Even for S=20, 2 parties in the constituent assembly would push toward M=16/20=1.

At present, the strongest predictor for M=1, at any S, from St Kitts to India, is British heritage (cf. p. 45 in Predicting).
It may come about through imitation of Westminster and also through imitation of two-party system in the constituent assembly (or its equivalent).

Re Jan-Erik's question: “How can you be sure that 1/4 in P = (MS)^1/4 does not change to 1/3 or 1/5 in the future?”
The exponent 1/4 is not empirical but theoretically derived.
In this respect, it is more akin to the "2" in E=mc² than to the numerical value of c.

Greetings,

Rein

Jan-Erik Lane said...

If you take the root out of big numbers, then you arrive at small numbers for sure.
But can this fomula capture the difference between Norway and Poland, between France and Italy?
There is a GREAT variation in the number of parties WITHIN the PR family.

jan

Rein Taagepera said...

Dear Jan:

I am referring to Chapter 8 in my book.
Please note that:the relationship applies directly only to "simple" electoral systems -- those where all seats are allocated in districts, without thresholds, runoffs and other complications. Even so, it expresses only the average mean trend. Individual electoral systems may be off by a factor of 2 (= multiply or divide by 2), and individual election results are off by even more. Table 8.1 (which is in the attachment) shows that the law N-zero=(MS)^1/4 applies within 20 % to the mean outcomes of all simple within-district formulas. It doesn't apply to the non-simple Two Rounds nor to SNTV.

What is the use of a law that fits only to the means of simple systems, with a large random error range?
It is better than nothing, a first approximation upon which further factors can be grafted.
Recall that Galileo's law of falling bodies accounts very imperfectly for the path of a falling leaf.

Greetings,
Rein

Jan-Erik Lane said...

You can estimate the true functional form for this “invariance” if you plot the line through the data. What they need is information about:

1) number of parties (real or the effective number)

2) average size of constituencies

3) number of parlamentarians

That should not be too difficult to get hold of. For UK, we would have:

1) 5-6 parties

2) 1

3) 650

Taking the fourth root gets us to about 5-6. So the formula works.

Gianfranco Pasquino said...

Italy: Large Assembly, All Kinds of Districts. At this point, it would be quite interesting to know Colomer's and Taagepera's prediction on the features of the next (if any) Italian electoral law. Please, however, refrain from saying that Italy is, as usual, an outlier...

Gianfranco Pasquino

Rein Taagepera said...

I'm loosing track of what the current Italian electoral laws are.

Iff all seats are allocated within districts according to a simple PR of FPTP rule (no thresholds, no second rounds, no parties within party blocs...), give me assembly size and distribution of district magnitudes, and I'll make a prediction for number of seat-winning parties and their size distribution.

If and only if...
Rein

Gianfranco Pasquino said...

House of Deputies: 630 seats; 27 districts (Puglia 44 seats; Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy 2, each 43 seats; Lombardy 1, 40 seats, Tuscany 38... Electoral sytem PR with majority bonus.

Gianfranco Pasquino

Rein Taagepera said...

Thanks.

On the basis of this information, the best quantitative guess would be based on
average M = 630/27 = 23.3; hence MS = 14,700.

It assumes that all seats are distributed in districts, with no thresholds, and parties do not form alliances.
Estimated likely error range (plus or minus) is indicated as +.

No. of seat-winning parties: N-zero = (MS)^1/4 = 11 + 3
Effective no. of parties: N-two = (MS)^1/6 = 4.9 + 2
Minimum measure of no. of p.: N-infinity = (MS)^1/8 = 3.3 + 1
meaning largest seat share s₁ = 1/N-infinity 0.30 + 0.05

Qualitative adjustments:
The many double-the-average districts make it slightly easier for small parties, enhancing N-zero.
Majority bonus reduces all N and enhances s₁; it depends on how strong this bonus is.

I have not looked up the actual results for Italy 2006 --let someone else do it.

Rein

Josep M. Colomer said...

The actual number of parliamentary parties in Italy changes constantly due to splits and migrations. But currently there are 12 parties, basically corresponding to electoral candidacies, plus a small 'mixed' group of independents. Taagepera predicts 11 + 3.

And there may be anticipated elections very soon!

Matthew Shugart said...

Josep, this is very interesting. I wonder about the following, however, from your post:

"in large countries such as Australia, Canada, France, India, the United Kingdom and the United States, a large assembly can be sufficiently inclusive, even if it is elected in small, single-member districts, due to territorial variety of the representatives."

I wonder because that list of countries includes two with significantly under-sized assemblies, according to the cube root (India and the USA). The UK, on the other hand, has one of the world's most "over-sized" lower houses.

So, I can see where the argument works well for the UK: Many more districts than would be the case for an assembly closer to the cube root, and hence a lot of "territorial variety of the representatives" (e.g. Scottish and Welsh nationalists, as well as LibDems). India has a high territorial variation, despite a "small" assembly, due to numerous state-based parties (most of which aggregate into one of two pre-electoral blocs).

The USA, on the other hand, has a lot less room to represent territorial variety, because the districts are so big in population terms due to the small assembly (for the country's population), and because its party system is much too small (just two parties would not be predicted even with the small assembly, according to Rein's models).

Josep M. Colomer said...

Matthew, Thanks a lot for your comment.

I think the point is about absolute size of the assembly, which permits variety of representatives, even if it's small relatively to other variables (country size...). The so-called two parties in the USA are really very varied --these days, with the primaries going on it's crystal clear: the variety of presidential candidates, as well as of representatives and senators, is as great as in most countries in Europe with multiple parties. This may make many people in the U.S. feel proportional representation is not necessary because many different tastes are already represented.

Matthew Shugart said...

As for variety, of course the only kind of variety that can be represented with SSDs [single-seat districts] is that which is regionally concentrated and even then, they are not accountable to any sympathetic voters outside their districts. There is systematic bias against those that are not even able to win a district plurality (which is almost always majority in the US, unlike all other relatively large FPTP countries), and still greater bias against them the more the number of seats is small. So, I agree that the argument you are making "works" on absolute size of the assembly, but the greater the geographic and population extent of SSDs, the less likely minorities are to find a regional concentration sufficient to win a seat. So, the argument you are making must also depend on the size of the assembly relative to total national population.

Thanks for the exchange!

--m

Rein Taagepera said...

S = P^1/3 [S: Size of the assembly; P: Population] visibly accounts for most of variation in S empirically --and even offers a logical process to explain it. Other factors should stand out as one considers the residue r = S/P^1/3, after the effect of S is taken out ("controlled for"). Better use log r, because it can be expected to be symmetrically distributed around 0, if there are no other factors except for random scatter. Actually, it shows a tail, which is largely corrected for by introducing literate adult population.

In short, play around with log r. As long as you stick to S, the huge effect of P keeps confusing you.

Rein

Institutional Design

My contribution to the forthcoming Handbook of Comparative Politics:

Institutional design is the choice of rules for collective decision-making. At the moment of designing institutions, two main questions have to be addressed: who can be entitled to participate, and how decisions can be made. The first question points out to the design of the community. Collective decisions can be enforceable if people within some boundaries think or accept they share enough with the others to abide by the outcomes, even if they find themselves to be losers or in minority on some issues, or if the costs of not complying are too high. The West European model of nation-state building has been too often taken as the only reference and interesting path for building a political community. Political science is still very state-centered. However, recent and current developments, in both Europe and the rest of the world, demand for a more diversified menu, as we will discuss in the following pages. The second question –how decisions are made—implies at least to major issues: what can be decided on each occasion, which refers to how decision powers are divided among different bodies or branches of government, and how people’s preferences are transformed into collective outcomes, which basically involves choices on voting and electoral rules.

Many years ago, David Hume advised institutional designers with these words:

‘In contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, but private interest. By this interest we must govern him and, by means of it, make him cooperate to public good, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambition.’ (Hume 1741).

In this chapter we will prove that the assumption that people seek their own interest not only at making private or public policy decisions, but also at choosing the institutional rules for making those decisions, is broadly shared and analytically fruitful. Institutional designers, while tend to deploy their ‘ambition’, they often aim at putting levers of rule at their easy disposal in order to concentrate, rather than check power. However, an efficient institutional design –that is, one making rulers “cooperate to public good”, in Hume’s terms-- can result from circumstances in which no actor has sufficient influence to impose its own project and diverse ambitions counterweight each other. Not surprisingly, this is a relatively frequent situation in a complex world, which may explain why major institutional choices are increasingly made in favour of formulas able to produce power-sharing and to satisfy broad groups of people, which is just another way to refer to ‘public good’.

The following review shows that, in the current world, the number of small, sufficiently homogeneous communities to make consensual and enforceable collective decisions increases; the number of democracies also increases; institutional choices tend to favour division of powers rather than concentration on a single body or party; and electoral rules are increasingly chosen to permit multiple parties to participate and share government. Institutional choices during the last decades tend to produce small countries, more democracies, division of powers, and electoral rules favoring multiparty representation. As actors’ self-interested behaviour leads to broadly efficient and satisfactory institutional choices, it seems that a kind of ‘invisible hand’ in the field can be identified –actually in a not very dissimilar way as a pattern of unintended consequences for private decisions was also identified by Adam Smith, in truth David Hume’s favourite disciple.

The chapter is divided in two parts. In the first, the problems of building a community are addressed with the help of the categories of ‘state’, ‘nation’ and ‘empire’. In the second part, we review the state of the art regarding the choice of institutional rules for division of powers and elections. A few remarks conclude.

See the full article: CLICK

This Blog is being censored in mainland China. Internet users cannot access to this Blog. This fact may illustrate some features of the current Chinese government and politics which are being discussed here during the last few weeks.

One Country, Three Systems

About twenty years ago the Communist government of China (officially People’s Republic of China) offered the Nationalist rulers in Taiwan (officially Republic of China) a formula for reunification similar to the one arranged for the handover of Hong Kong, which was labelled by Deng Xiaoping “one country, two systems”. However, during the last period Taiwan has liberalized and democratized and now it is much ahead of the institutional formulas which are really implemented in Hong Kong. The Hongkongers might prefer, in fact, to enjoy constitutional rules similar to those in Taiwan.

Ten years ago Hong Kong ceased being a British colony and became a “special administrative region” of China. The Chinese communists accepted that for 50 years, that is, until 2047, they would facilitate the development of the capitalist economy in Hong Kong (which is actually what they are trying to do in mainland China too) and would give Hongkongers broad political autonomy except in defence and foreign affairs. In reality Hong Kong looks much as a different country, having not only an outstanding economic and urban development, but its own passport, borders control, currency and co-official languages (Cantonese, more different from Mandarin than one could expect, and English, less popular than one could expect), while it is being submitted to close political control by the rulers in Beijing.

There were virtually free elections in Hong Kong in 1995, just two years before the British handover, for the first time in 150 years of colonial rule. But the invention was quickly dismantled by the Chinese government when it took over. Now Beijing maintains in Hong Kong a framework similar to the previous colonial experience. The Chief Executive of Hong Kong has formally wide powers analogous to those of the former colonial Governor. He is chosen every five years by an Election Committee formed of 800 members, mostly elected or appointed by business, professional, social and religious groups whose total number of voters encompasses about 5% of what would be universal suffrage. The Chief Executive is accountable and must report regularly to Beijing. Besides this, the Legislative Council is formed of 60 members, of whom 30 are indirectly chosen in “functional” constituencies of corporatist profile and limited franchise and 30 are elected in territorial constituencies. The pro-democracy parties usually collect about 60% of popular votes in the latter elections, but they find themselves in minority in the Council in front to the mostly pro-Beijing “functional” delegates.

Roughly speaking, during the last ten years Hongkongers have replaced the British colonial administration with the Chinese one. But the Basic Law of Hong Kong which was agreed by the British and the Chinese governments establishes that the “ultimate aim” of the system is to introduce universal suffrage elections. A few months ago the current Chief Executive released a ‘Green Paper on Constitutional Development’ proposing cosmetic changes, while pro-democracy legislators managed to agree on a plan to abolish the ‘functional’ constituencies by 2012 and elect all seats by a mixed system of proportional representation and plurality rule. In the midst of some open discussion, pro-Beijing officers are suggesting, however, that universal suffrage elections for the Chief Executive should be postponed to 2017 or perhaps 2022 and for the Legislative Council to 2020.

Meanwhile the political process in Taiwan has accelerated. For a long period the nationalist Kuomintang party maintained in the island an authoritarian regime, artfully supported by the fiction that most members of the Assembly represented mainland China –actually the same people who had been elected in 1947 remained in their seats for more than 40 years without re-election. They, however, eventually resigned, and the system was open to multiparty competition. In 2000 there was alternation in government and the first non-Kuomintang president was democratically elected.

The paradox is now this. In the coming year 2008, there will be democratic elections in Taiwan with high rivalry between candidates still pro-Chinese reunification and others pro-independence. A few months later in the year there will be nondemocratic legislative elections in Hong Kong too, with pro-Beijing and pro-democracy candidates running. For the Taiwanese, the existence of “two systems” is leading to “two countries”, while for the Hongkongers two actual countries are submitted to one system. Deng Xiaoping’s original formula has been dismissed on both fronts.

REFERENCES

Lam Waiman, Percy Luentim, Wilson Wong and Ian Holliday eds. Contemporary Hong Kong Politics: Governance in the Post-1997 Era. Hong Kong University Press, 2007.

‘The First Ten Years of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China’, special issue of The Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration, 29, 1, 2007.

Carine Lai and Christine Loh, From Nowhere to Nowhere: A Review of Constitutional Development. -Hong Kong 1997-2007. HK: Civic Exchange, 2007.

Green Paper on Constitutional Development, 2007: CLICK.

François Briatte said...

Hello Josep,

My blog is not blocked in China (or at least I believe so, but have not found a proper test to confirm it).

I have assembled three of your texts into a single PDF file, downloadable from this blog, which brings weekly news to French political scientists about their profession and its research agenda:

CLICK

My next step will be to host the file on my personal blog, phnk.com.
Both blogs should be allowed in China, although I suspect that they will not stay allowed for very long. I will keep you informed of any development.

Best regards,
François

http://sciencepolitique.wordpress.com/2007/12/09/sur-le-regime-politique-chinois/

Science politique en ligne

Sur le régime politique chinois

9 décembre 2007

Cette recension vient en soutien à Josep Colomer, dont l’excellent blog vient d’être censuré par les autorités chinoises. Le fichier qui suit est un copié-collé de trois de ses textes récents [1,2,3], réalisé avec son accord, et diffusé via ce blog afin de contourner l’interdiction chinoise. Les textes concernent la nature du régime politique chinois et ses changements concevables.Télécharger : colomer.pdf [13 pages] Cette recension est peu de choses – l’hébergeur de ce blog a déjà eu maille avec les autorités chinoises, et la diffusion du fichier en Chine restera limitée en toutes circonstances. Cette recension nous éloigne aussi de la science politique française. Mais je tenais à faire passer l’idée, en creux, qu’il manque une démarche revendicative et internationaliste au sein de la discipline.

The Chinese Empire Could Burst

The unavoidable comment in China is that political liberalization might threaten the unity of such a huge country. The empire could burst (‘éclater’, in a comparable manner as had been predicted by Carrère d’Encausse for the Soviet Union).

As a very old empire, China has indeed expanded and contracted over the territory with no a priori fixed boundaries. Still during the 20th century the boundaries of China have been redrawn a few times, in particular after the formation of a new republic of Mongolia in 1911, the separation of Taiwan after 1949, the annexation of Tibet in 1951, and the handover of Hong Kong and Macau in 1997 and 1999. In China the appearance of some high degree of ethnic homogeneity may be only the perception of the ignorant external observer, since relevant religious, race and language differences exist among its inhabitants. Although about half of the population officially reports no organized religious affiliation, apparently hundreds of millions practice folk religious traditions and have informal ties to local temples and house churches. While Han Chinese makes up the vast majority of the population, its distribution is highly uneven with large parts of western China having Han Chinese as a minority. The common written language acts as the standard used by an actual minority of the population over a continuum of spoken languages and dialects –apparently with differences as notable as those between, say, different Latin-derived languages in Europe, which may make people from different places unable to understand each other.

So far, villages are the only level of the institutional structure that has been open to people’s direct elections. Village committee elections were introduced to curtail growing unrest in rural China after the communist system of ‘production brigades’ was abolished. The new village committees, each formed by three to seven members, oversee most of the daily affairs of the village people. According to official estimates, about 600 million people may have participated in direct village elections at least once since 1999. These elections imply direct nomination of candidates, more candidates than seats to be filled, secret ballot, several ballot procedures of voting for individuals, and majority rule. It should be noted, however, that the average number of inhabitants in a village is below one thousand people, so making these elections a local affair with no visible impact on the general party’s and institutional structure. Certain analyses pretend that village elections may mark the beginning of a process of democratization from below. But in order to do so, the crucial step would be the implementation of elections at the township level and above, on which there have been only a few experiments and much resistance.

The strategic decision of democratizing a complex multilevel structure, either ‘from below’ or ‘from above’ may have important consequences on the outcome of the whole process. This issue has been widely neglected in the literature on democratization. But, as it was addressed some time ago by Juan Linz and Al Stepan, “the sequence of elections, per se, can help construct or dissolve identities… [because] elections, especially ‘founding elections’, help create agendas, actors, organizations, and most importantly, legitimacy and power”.

Specifically, if during a process of liberalization or democratization, the first elections are local or regional, as happened in the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there are strong incentives for people participating to focus on local, regional and ethnic issues, organize local, regional and ethnic parties, and as a result weakening the legitimacy of the union. This effect can be stronger if the general design in the center does not include unambiguous democratization, but only some degree of liberalization, since this can give more open regional and local elections and the subsequent representative structures higher levels of legitimacy. In contrast, if all-union elections are held first, there are strong incentives to create all-union parties and an all-union agenda enabling the elected representatives to make binding decisions about the future of the union. Precisely because China is a so vast ‘empire’ with significant economic and territorial inequalities and high levels of ethnic pluralism, democratizing the ‘center’, that is, the all-China institutions, may be a priority to keep the union up.

REFERENCES

Diamond, Larry, and Ramon H. Myers. 2000. ‘Elections and Democracy in Greater China’, special issue of The China Quarterly; particularly the articles by Kevin J. O'Brien and Li Lianjiang, and by Robert A. Pastor and Quinshan Tan.

Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. 1992. ‘Political Identities and Electoral Sequences: Spain, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia’, Daedalus, 121, 2, 123-139

COMMENTS

Rein Taagepera said...

Rearranging the order of elections could not have preserved the Soviet Union any more than Spain. It lacked the essential cultural glue.

Portuguese still is the prestige language in Angola (not to mention French in Morocco), but Russian lacks any cultural prestige in Estonia.

This degree of imperial failure is quite remarkable.

How is it in Tibet or Siankiang? -- I have no idea.

Rein
Irvine, California, and Tartu, Estonia

Josep Colomer said…

The official version is that people from Sinkiang and from Shanghai, if they ever met, they would understand each other. But I read a few books on Chinese language (fascinating subject!) and I doubt so very much. At least Cantonese in Hong Kong is completely unintelligible for Mandarin-speakers and viceversa.

Rein Taagepera said…

It depends on whom one counts as "people". Native Uighurs, if they know only their own (Turkic) language,would not understand a word from a Shanghai person. But the central coast (Shanghai) version of Han is the likely lingua franca of Han colonists who have immigrated to Siankiang from all corners of China. Those Uighurs who have mastered some Chinese probably would also have been taught that version. It's a far cry from mutual non-understanding between Cantonese and Pekinguese, where the differences are age-old. So the east-west dimension rather than the north-south dimension would be chosen as an apparently neutral example by those who stress uniformity, but they do so at the cost of counting only Han speakers as "people". I wonder if those Han colonists in Siankiang order Uighur speakers to "speak a human language" when interacting with them, the way Russian colonists did in Soviet Estonia.

Salvador Giner said...

It will burst!

I predicted in 1982, that the Russian system would break down, and precisely how it would. (La Vanguardia, 4 December 1982).

Jan-Erik Lane said...

Like Max Weber, you underestimate the role of naked power.

Perhaps it could be of interest to other scholars to realise that Weber left out naked power when theorizing political regimes. The most employed macro model in political science is still Max Weber’s theory of legitimate authority or domination, which all undergraduate students all over the world are being told. Scoring high on conceptual parsimony and empirical richness, it merely uses a couple of ideal-types to cover the historical variation in rulerships, from Ancient times to the early 20^th century when presidential and parliamentary democracy was becoming the most relevant choice of a regime. Weber wrote down his theory twice, one shorter version and one longer version – both published in his posthumous Economy and Society (1978). The incredible coverage of empirical details does hide the implicit model, which is true of any text by Weber, attempting to reconcile the historical method with the new tools of sociology.

Now, Weber claims as his basic assumption that naked power cannot last. When a government uses merely the tools of repression, then it is bound to disintegrate and the rime will go down under. The cement between rulers and the ruled is the belief in legitimacy –a special value orientation that confers moral acceptance upon the government from the population. And we all know that Weber identified three types of legitimacy: legal-rational or modern, charismatic or revolutionary, and traditional or customary.

Yet, naked power is more than a mere category to collect a few border line cases or outliers. Naked power can accomplish tremendous results, as with 20^th century totalitarianism, not withstanding all the horrors involved in The Final Solution, the Gulag camps, the Cultural Revolution and bizarre North Korea. Naked power works to some extent in several Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, although carefully hidden behind Wahabism. Saddam Hussein, using somewhat unsuccessfully first Arab nationalism and later on Sunni tradition, could not be brought down except by military intervention. And Iran will not change, perhaps in hundred years, as Shi’ism together with naked power will prove irresistible. When naked power is employed, the outcome may be derisory, as in Latin America and Africa, when military regimes have proved incompetent. But that does not entail that all forms of naked power is inefficient. Far from it. Authoritarianism in China may prove long lasting, especially when combined with stunning economic advances. The present Chinese regime will not hesitate to use a clever employment of the tools of repression, when confronted by a crisis. Naked power is not ridiculous, but offers a basis of regime duration. And it can be brought to high levels of efficiency employing more and refined methods of intimidation and repression.

Naked power does not employ religion or ethnicity as the rationalisation of its domination. It just neutralises or eliminates whatever opposition comes its way.

Jan-Erik Lane

University of Geneva
University of South Pacific

Can China Become Democratic?

I have participated in a three-day international workshop in Shanghai Jiaotong University focusing on the prospects for democracy in China. Let me say, first of all, that the visitor's impression regarding the current process of urban and economic growth and development in cities such as Shanghai and Beijing is even more impressive than what one can expect from reading and looking at pictures. The success of the economic course launched by Deng Xiao Ping since 1978, and especially during the last fifteen years or so, is out of question. How such a radical turn has been accepted by so many millions of people without major political resistance tells much about the disaster of the previous period and especially the destruction generated by Mao's 'cultural revolution'€™. However, the prospects for the current economic process to lead to significant political liberalization and democratization look grim.

Our Chinese colleagues basically transmit, with some twists and elaboration, the official message: China can become democratic only after a long period of economic growth which is still in an early period. Deng had said that there would be national elections after fifty years of development, so about 2037, while the most optimistic academics would bet now for about 2020. The echoes of the traditional political sociology on the 'preconditions'€™ for democracy are obvious. Actually this outlook is usually presented under the vest of political '€˜modernization'€™, which implies that economic growth produces increasing social complexity and an educated middle class which, sooner or later, require political pluralism and accommodation. In China, while the benefits of foreign investments and the expansion of mass consumption were nearly-universal in the first years of economic opening, they are now increasingly mixed with broadening inequalities, continuous migrations from the countryside to the cities and underlying distress. What Przeworski labels 'redistributive fights€' could indeed spread during the next few years. However, as recently noted by Bueno de Mesquita and George Downs, in China as in other countries we also observe the "€œominous and poorly appreciated fact that economic growth, rather than being a force for democratic change in tyrannical states, can sometimes be used to strengthen oppressive regimes"€ (CLICK). In the typical exchange under an authoritarian regime, the subjects can renounce to choose or control the rulers in return for some favourable economic policy. In China a crucial element of the rulers’ hold of power is, of course, the warning lesson implied by the Tiananmen Square slaughter in 1989 --€“an episode which has become a kind of taboo and whose sole mention makes educated Chinese of these days very embarrassed.

The authorized discourse points to the internal evolution of the Communist Party as a promising march. A few years ago the party was defined no longer as of workers and peasants, but of "€œthree represents"€, including intellectuals and entrepreneurs. Yet some people say that rather than entrepreneurs joining the party it's party members who become entrepreneurs and get rich --a "€œglorious" achievement, in Deng's doctrine. A crucial issue in all dictatorships is the leader's succession. The Chinese have established some non-written rules to rotate the party leader every ten years, that is, every two party congresses, as they did successfully with the appointment of Jiang Zenin in 1992 and the current leader Hu Jintao in 2002. However, in the party congress held a few weeks ago there was no agreement on the future leader to take office in five years from now and two candidates seems to have been placed in potential rivalry. I was amazed by several positive references during our workshop to the example of the Mexican PRI, a former revolutionary, neatly authoritarian party which, relying upon some degree of economic success, was able to proceed to consecutive orderly successions of the leaders in power during several decades. The so-called 'limited pluralism' within the Chinese party is, in any case, extremely limited. Official data shows that in the previous party congress five years ago there were 6 percent more candidates to the Central Committee than seats to be filled, while this time there were 8.3 percent more. At this rhythm, the prospects for having two candidates per seat would definitely be placed in about thirty years from now.

An alternative hypothesis for a major political change should be based not on modernizing and liberalizing pressures derived from economic success but on failure. Some insiders predicted a few years ago "€œthe coming collapse of China"€, which was expected precisely for 2007 as a consequence, among other factors, of China's new membership to the World Trade Organization and the subsequent external competition, business failures and social unrest. Most authoritarian regimes fall because they fail, not because they succeed, and then a democratic regime can be established by default even if the maturity of civil society and the diffusion of democratic values are meagre. This is what more or less happened in several Asian '€˜tigers'€™ in the 1990s, including South Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia, which turned to be, to be put in typical Maoist jargon, '€˜paper tigers'. The Chinese regime is also vulnerable, especially because, as one Chinese colleague remarked, the 'party-state'€™ is becoming a 'state-party'€™. Corruption is widespread and rather than greasing the wheels of business it might have a negative impact on growth. External shocks on energy or commerce are certainly possible. But against the implications of modernization theory, as far as considerable rates of economic growth will be maintained, I am afraid that what communist rulers and academics call "€œpeople's democratic dictatorship"€ will keep flourishing in China.

COMMENTS

Ronald J. Hill said...

"Most authoritarian regimes fall because they fail, not because they succeed"

A variant on this would say that the Soviet regime, as an example, was a victim of its own success: it succeeded in generating the kind of society that could no longer be governed effectively by the methods used to promote the initial development.

Convinced by this success that the methods of rule were valid, the regime refused to adapt to cope with the complex society that it had brought into being. Its failure was a failure even to act on the logic of its own ideology, which posited that change in the economic base leads to change in the superstructure (the political system).

In refusing to countenance adaptation of the political system to cope with a complex economy and society, it was rejecting both Marxist theory and Western political sociology of the 1960s.

The Chinese, by contrast, appear to have solved that problem by relinquishing political power over the economy, which now relies on the market for direction, not on instructions from the state.

But the logic of both Marxist theory and political sociology remains - and to it should be added the experience of hundreds of thousands of Chinese who have experienced life in different societies and political systems (and even studied Western social science). The lesson of 1911 (and of imported ideas in other historical contexts) is that authoritarianism may be unable to survive indefinitely when there are competing values. 'Comrade Transistor' deprived authoritarian regimes of control over the circulation of ideas, and 'Comrade Internet' is potentially even more powerful.

Unless we believe that ideas and experiences count for nothing in politics, change is surely inevitable.

Trinity College, Dublin

Jack said...

This is a fascinating post. I'm surprised you can have a panel discussion like that in China. Then again, I've never been there.

I suspect China is more likely to see flagging economic growth than democratization in the medium term. The argument that China needs more "development" before it can become democratic is not a stupid one. The problem is one of thresholds; when is China developed enough? Who decides?