Oxford economist Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion and more recently Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places, came to speak at Stanford for the Arrow Lecture about the challenges facing countries of the bottom billion as they attempt to implement ‘democracy’. Having read the Bottom Billion last year, I was very excited to hear him speak. Unfortunately, his talk wasn’t advertised well at all and so the lecture hall was only sparsely populated. I ran into some of Charles’ IPS program friends, and Peter Frykman, a graduate student in ME (joint program in design too) who is working on a very promising social enterprise in drip irrigation technology. I always really enjoy my conversations with Peter. The following are my notes from Collier’s talk:
Being named after Ken Arrow (who was in attendance), the Nobel Prize winning economist who has done work relating to developing countries, Collier began by almost having a direct conservation with him, remarking how one phenomenon he wanted to explore was ‘de-skilling’, or the idea that a society undergoing long periods of civil war or turmoil can start to ‘forget’ how to do things by simply not doing them. This was a play on a economic frame ‘learning by doing’. This of course, impacts productivity growth, particularly with respect to the ability of a state to provide public goods. One can then argue that the absence of such goods posits international supply of them can be both ethical and feasible.
Collier takes a step back and outlines the typical creation of an effective state, using Charles Tilly’s theories as a framework. Being in a rivalry of states results in an increase of a military spending within a given state, money that is created via taxation. An increase in taxation provoked the citizens to demand greater accountability of the government for the higher taxation. Additionally, this rivalry created a sense of nationalism, national identity and unity which helped maintain state cohesion. States who didn’t do this got swallowed up.
It is clear that the states of the bottom billion haven’t gone through this process. One issue is that their borders are frozen, an ugly remnant of the decolonization process. A critical problem (and one I have heard Naman mention on several occasions, with exasperation) is that these countries are too large to be nations, too small to be states, with the test being the ability to provide public goods. How can a country to be too large to be a nation? Countries of the bottom billion feature extremely diverse groups often divided by ethnicity, language, religion, etc. The country is so large that it has too many of these groups and thus cohesion and national unity struggle. In general, diverse societies find it harder to provide public goods.
Collier states that two public goods you can’t get very far without are security and accountability. Countries of the bottom billion are very fragile internally, and are prone to civil war. Broadly, the characteristics of these states include poverty, stagnation, natural resources rich, ethnically divided, and small populations. Adverse legacy effects tend to exacerbate political disputes into all-out violence. Accountability is an interesting one, because democracy is neither required nor sufficient to have development – take China, for instance. Very little accountability, but improvements in development. This hasn’t happened in Africa; Tim Besley has written about what makes autocracies work and shows that autocracies can go in one of two paths: the selectariat chooses to improve growth overall, or chooses just to be nice to the elites. Again though, in countries with diverse populations, natural resource rich, and small size the autocratic governments favored the latter.
So is democracy the answer if autocracy is too risky? Ethnic diversity makes democracy harder to implement. For instance, Collier mentions the recent Kenya elections, where surveys showed the a candidate having 60%+ approval ratings from those in the opposite tribe, yet that tribe would vote 98% for their tribe member in the election.
Collier stresses that the idea of ‘elections’ being an exit strategy for nation building is completely flawed. They don’t in anyway guarantee a real democracy, which brings Collier to illicit election tactics. These include voter bribery, voter intimidation (directed from the top), and ballot fraud. And these methods are highly effective. Collier and team had access to a dataset showing incumbent presidents and quality of elections for 40 years. Illicit tactics helped incumbents stay 3x longer in office.
Elections must take place in the context of checks and balances. If there are no checks and balances to guide an autocractic regime into a democratic one, then there is simply no incentive to be better. Another thing Collier’s group found is that illicit tactics remove prevailing economic conditions as a factor in the election outcome.
The most severe effect of illicit tactics, Collier views, is the souring of the crop of good leaders which these countries truly need. If illicit tactics work, good people don’t want to take part of the system, and instead the crooks and thieves gravitate to the system because they can succeed. Plus, by being in the government these crooks gain impunity from prosecution. Another point Collier made is that while the presence of rich natural resources provides an avenue for a nation to lift itself up, it is harder to do so. Rich natural resources corrupt democracies by removing the taxation to accountability link. Collier says that in Kenya the most corrupt governors had the lowest tax rate; they were making their money off oil, not the people, so why should they be accountable to the people?
Here Collier switches to discussion what could be done here. How does one intervene and ensure a better path to providing security, accountability, etc? He brings up Canada and Belgium as two countries with very diverse groups yet still get along enough to form a ‘federation’. Can a form of regional cooperation be instilled in Africa? One issue that arises is national sovereignty – if a regional authority was to enforce desirable outcomes, then such a move would infringe on a nation’s sovereignty. Could neighbors do something like share sovereignty? Perhaps then the provision of public goods could be achieved.
A characteristic of an effective state is conflict prevention. Collier notes that in Francophone Africa, the incidence of civil war was 1/3rd that of the rest of Africa; largely because France continued to play a role in suppressing coup d’etats, thus improving stability. Coup d’etats are like unguided missiles – one can never be sure of the outcome. A quick note on peacekeepers too – do peacekeepers work? Yes, in post-war conflicts. But elections aren’t the milestone for withdrawal of peacekeepers – economic development is.
Collier concluded the talk by proposing a ‘novel’ idea of putting integrity back into elections. The EU and the Carter Center sends out election inspectors who can deem if an election is “free and fair”, but these judgments are not linked at all to consequences for the winning regime. They must be linked, and it cannot be via aid, and outside military intervention wouldn’t be feasible either.
One solution: adding a guidance system to the unguided missile that is the coup d’etat. Collier offers that regimes can voluntarily join an international standard for elections. If you agree to the standard and meet its expectations, then the international community will help if you if a coup d’etat attempts to oust you. If however, you fail to uphold your end of the bargain, we let the coup d’etat play out. This is in effect a redlight/greenlight idea, but it actually attempts to dispel the notion that all coup d’etats are inherently illegitimate.
To this end, Collier offers an instance where this has sort of happened – the elections of Senegal back in 2000. The incumbent president lost and stepped down. Even stranger, the president’s support was in the rural areas, while the opposition was strong in the cities. The city votes came in early, indicating a big win for the opposition. Before even waiting for all the rural votes to come in, the president still stepped down. Just 3 months earlier, President Jacques Chirac of France declined to intervene in a coup d’etat in nearby Cote d’Ivoire, and the Senegalese Army knew this well. They told the president ahead of time that if he failed to adhere to the elections outcome, they would oust him – and this time the French legionnaires wouldn’t be coming to help him. And the threat of internal coup d’etat worked.
Still, a pretty ‘interesting’ idea. I’m really looking forward to reading Collier’s latest book. I was lucky enough to ask him a question and later shook his hand, thanking him for coming.
As you can see, it shows the time between messages, the way people reply to messages, etc. The colors are coded for various people involved (red is for me), the brightness is related to how immediate the messages are. What’s also nice is that you can click on the nodes and go to that message in question. Kinda neat, I’m gonna give this a try.
