Paul Collier - Wars, Guns, and Votes

by Democracy in Dangerous Places (pdf)

  simple way of checking the reliability of the results.

  We then asked how the amount of time left until the next elec-

  tion affected whether policy and governance improve or worsen.

  We found a clear and unambiguous relationship. For the first few

  years after an election the chances of policy improvement got better,

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  year by year. And then, as the next election approached, the chances

  of reform started to get worse again, year by year. Two years before

  the election the chances of reform slipped, and the year before the

  election reform was highly unlikely. What the results were telling us

  was that the chances of reform were at their peak when the society

  was as far away from an election—in either direction—as possible.

  Why might this be? Perhaps, in the first year or so after an election,

  the government was too new to be able to implement reform, and

  as the election approached it was too preoccupied by the need to

  win the election to bother with reform. After all, the payoff to most

  reforms takes several years, and any payoff that does not arrive until

  after the election has little political benefit.

  This was not really encouraging: it suggested that elections

  were to an extent a distraction rather than a stimulus. I recalled my

  friend Ngozi Nkonjo-Iweala telling me when she became Nigeria’s

  finance minister that although the government was at the start of

  a four-year term, she had been given only three years for reform.

  “The last year will be politics,” the president had explained to her,

  and, as I have just described, so it had proved. However, it might

  nevertheless be that all the election effect showed was a variant of

  the political business cycle. The political business cycle was the game

  that rich-country politicians used to play with their own electorates,

  pumping money into the economy just before an election: whoever

  won would then have to clean up the mess in the next couple of

  years. Damaging as the political business cycle was, it did not mean

  that democracy was worse than autocracy. It just showed that it

  wasn’t perfect. So the election results in themselves did not say any-

  thing about whether, if your society needed reform, democracy was

  better or worse than autocracy.

  To investigate this deeper question, Lisa and I then introduced

  measures of the polity. How democratic was it? Was government

  power limited by checks and balances? In particular, were elections

  well conducted? Fortunately, all these characteristics are now classi-

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  fied and coded by political scientists. For example, we used a standard

  measure known as Polity IV, which you have already come across.

  This arrays the degree of democracy on a scale from 0 to 10, alongside

  a scale for autocracy, which is ranged from –10 to 0. So the people’s

  paradise of North Korea scores –10, the squeaky clean democracies of

  Norway and Switzerland score +10, and a messy electoral competi-

  tion typical of the bottom billion would score at best around +2 or +3.

  Prior to the wave of democratization the societies of the bottom bil-

  lion had on average been around –6: in other words, they were mostly

  autocracies. Currently, the average score is around zero. When we

  added these characteristics they mattered: the electoral cycle overlaid,

  and potentially confused, these deeper effects. Elections can poten-

  tially spur a government to adopt reforms, but they can also drag it

  further down the road to bad governance. Which effect predominates

  depends partly upon structural features of the society, and partly upon

  the design of the polity. Elections tend to work better in societies that

  have larger populations and fewer ethnic divisions. They also tend

  to work better in polities with checks and balances on the power of

  government, and in particular where the elections are properly con-

  ducted. On the evidence, elections without properly enforced rules of

  conduct in small, ethnically divided societies typically retard reform

  rather than accelerate it.

  So the implication is that to date the process of democratiza-

  tion in the bottom billion has remained within the range over which

  better is worse: the increased democracy has quite probably re-

  tarded the reform of economic policies and governance. It has gone

  far enough to lose whatever might be the advantages of autocracy,

  while not yet having gone far enough to gain the benefits of democ-

  racy, and the typical society of the bottom billion remains well short

  of the point at which democratization would lead to improvement.

  It has proved much easier to introduce elections than checks and

  balances. Presidents quite enjoy being anointed by the holy oil of an

  electoral victory, whereas they find the prospect of effective checks

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  and balances truly alarming. But above all, they have woken up to

  implications of the lack of checks and balances for their ability to

  survive elections.

  Taken together, the results on elections and democratization are

  consistent: if democracy means little more than elections, it is dam-

  aging to the reform process. I do not like these results. It would be a

  much happier story if at every step along the way to fully fledged de-

  mocracy the consequences got better and better. But unfortunately

  this does not seem to be the world as it is.

  The results on the dysfunctional consequences of partial de-

  mocracy for reform are also consistent with the evidence on how

  elections are actually won in the societies of the bottom billion. The

  six nefarious options for winning an election not only dominate the

  option of trying to be a good government, collectively they consti-

  tute an alternative. So why don’t more governments hedge their bets

  and do both: win by foul means, but improve their chances that ex-

  tra bit by also trying to be a good government? I think it is because

  the other options depend upon bad governance. If you want to use them you have to sacrifice the strategy of being a good government even

  if you recognize that otherwise it might be worth doing.

  One reason for the conflict between decent governance and the

  other options is money. When President Obasanjo realized that he

  would not be able to stand for a third term, he knew that he was in

  for a very tough contest. How do you win a Nigerian election for an

  unknown candidate in only a few months, facing an entrenched op-

  ponent? The answer is you probably need a lot of money. Yet over the

  previous three years President Obasanjo had started to put in place

  the rudiments of accountable government finances. He had entrusted

  the ministry of finance to Ngozi Nkonjo-Iweala, and public procure-

  ment to Oby Ezekwesili. These two tough, able, Christian women

  had shut down the sources for the sort of slush money that a political

  campaign was likely to need. Within a month of the Senate decision

  to deny President Obasanjo a third term, he had shifted bo
th of them

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  WARS, GUNS, AND VOTES

  well away from control of government money. The one high-profile

  fighter against corruption who was not shifted was Nuhu Ribadu,

  head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. Bravely,

  in late 2007, he launched a prosecution against James Ibori, the key

  financial backer of President Obasanjo’s chosen successor. Ribadu

  lasted only a further three months before being ousted.

  The more effective strategies are also incompatible with the

  rule of law. When President Mugabe discovered that he had lost

  the referendum on removing the term limit, and so realized that he

  would lose the next election, he set about the process of dismantling

  the rule of law, starting by forcing the chief justice into early retire-

  ment and appointing a placeman. As the rule of law was gradually

  lifted, new options opened up for snatching revenues at the expense

  of the economy and President Mugabe duly took them: property

  rights were ignored, and finally he resorted to hyperinflation. In

  other words, the government needs to remove checks and balances

  in order to use the other electoral options, and with checks and bal-

  ances removed, other policies are very likely to deteriorate.

  This is, unfortunately, consistent with some new work by Mas-

  ayuki Kudamatsu that carefully tries to investigate whether the

  introduction of elections in Africa has led to a reduction in infant

  mortality. Reducing infant mortality is surely about the most basic

  concern of ordinary citizens, and across the bottom billion, infant

  mortality has been avoidably high. An election should surely em-

  power citizens to force governments to reduce the risk that their

  young children will die. He concludes that only following those rare

  elections in which the incumbent president was defeated did infant

  mortality fall. In the more normal situation of incumbent power,

  elections achieved nothing.

  So both the evidence on how elections are actually won, and the

  actual policy performance of democratic governments in the bot-

  tom billion, point to the same conclusion: in the conditions of the

  bottom billion, electoral competition is not producing accountable

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  government. I started by noting that there had been a considerable

  improvement in economic policies and governance across the bot-

  tom billion coincident with the spread of electoral competition. So,

  if elections have not caused the improvement, what has?

  I think there are two likely explanations. The simpler, and

  therefore probably the better, is that societies have learned from past

  mistakes. Experience is a hard school, but all the societies of the bot-

  tom billion have been through it. The high-income world has obvi-

  ously learned from its mistakes: the inflation of the 1970s is a thing

  of the past because electorates in the high-income societies will no

  longer put up with it and governments have learned how to tame it.

  Quite probably the same process has been going on in Africa. With

  the exception of Zimbabwe, inflation rates are now far lower than

  they used to be. Whether or not electorates in the bottom billion

  have much influence on their governments, elites may well have

  woken up to the fact that inflation and some other dysfunctional

  economic policies are not worthwhile.

  The other possible explanation is that donor conditionality has

  imposed discipline on governments, forcing them into reform even if

  they did not want to do it. I do not entirely discount this explanation.

  It is very difficult to sort out the motivations behind actions. To an

  extent donor conditionality might have forced reform. But the statis-

  tical evidence if anything suggests that it has delayed reform rather

  than accelerated it. Governments do not like being made to do some-

  thing against their will and they are remarkably ingenious at finding

  ways of not doing it. Donors are also amazingly bad at enforcing their

  agreements with governments. So my own judgment is that donor

  conditionality on economic policies is not the explanation for policy

  improvement. I would put my money on learning from failure.

  I r e a l i z e d t h at i f t h i s critique of electoral competition was right it had huge implications. The whole modern approach to-

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  ward failing states had been based on the premise that they would

  be rescued by democratic elections. The approach had seemed to be

  vindicated by the enthusiastic take-up of elections even in the most

  unpromising circumstances. Afghanistan, among the most back-

  ward societies on earth, was able to run an election within months

  of the expulsion of the Taliban. Iraq, about the most violence-torn

  place on earth, was able to conduct an election with quite a high

  turnout. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, a society with the

  staggering misfortune of Belgian colonialism, followed by Mobutu,

  followed by civil war, was still able to hold a competitive election.

  The dread shown by the Soviet authorities to any form of competi-

  tive election has, I think, confused us into thinking that achieving a

  competitive election is in itself the key triumph. The reality is that

  rigging elections is not daunting: only the truly paranoid dictators

  avoid them.

  Why is it so easy to hold elections even in unpromising cir-

  cumstances? Surely it is because both political parties and voters

  face strong incentives to participate in them. For political par-

  ties the incentive is that the election is the route to power. For

  the governing party it is a fair bet that the election will consoli-

  date power and gain legitimacy in the eyes of the donors. For

  opposition parties there is at least a chance of power, and with

  the governing party mobilizing its supporters, even if victory is

  unlikely it is important to have a countermobilization of sup-

  port, otherwise it will drain away. Why do voters bother to vote?

  Economists have tied themselves in knots here, missing the obvi-

  ous. We are so wedded to the notion that people’s actions must be

  in their material self-interest in order to be rational that our ap-

  proach is largely confined to what is known as instrumentalist—

  or, more colloquially, “What’s in it for me?” A young Northern

  Irish economist at Oxford, Colin Jennings, helped me to think on

  more realistic lines. Obviously influenced by his Northern Irish

  experience, he emphasized the satisfaction that people get from

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  using their vote as a way of expressing their identity: voting is

  satisfying in the same way that wearing a football scarf is satisfy-

  ing. And so voter turnout is likely to be particularly high where

  identity politics rules. Paradoxically, the less politics is about

  policies, the stuff of instrumental voting theories, the stronger is

  people’s incentive to vote. In America voting may be instrumen-

  tal. Indeed, perhaps that helps to explain the low turnout; but
in

  the divided societies of the bottom billion, voting is likely to be

  primarily expressive.

  I t i s t i m e t o s u m up where we have got to, and it is not attractive. Democracy, at least in the form it has usually taken to date

  in the societies of the bottom billion, does not seem to enhance the

  prospects of internal peace. On the contrary, it seems to increase

  proneness to political violence. Probably related to this failure to se-

  cure social peace, democracy has not yet produced accountable and

  therefore legitimate government.

  Incumbent politicians have won elections by methods that re-

  quire them to misgovern. This is supported by the evidence that

  democracy seems to retard reform.

  In promoting elections the rich, liberal democracies have basi-

  cally missed the point. We want to make the bottom billion look

  like us, but we forget how we got to where we now are. We did

  not do it in a single leap: dictatorship to liberal democracy. We

  have been unrealistic in expecting that these societies could in one

  step make a transition that historically has been made in several

  distinct steps.

  Perhaps, in encouraging elections, we have landed these so-

  cieties in an unviable halfway house that has neither the capacity

  of autocracies to act decisively nor the accountability of a genuine

  democracy. Soon I am going to argue that it is not as hopeless as it

  might appear. But we have not yet done with the upsetting material:

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  the story is going to get worse before it gets better. I will close with

  the comment, made the day after the Kenyan election by Michael

  Ranneberger, the American ambassador. “It’s a sad day for Kenya,”

  he lamented, but then came the acid: “My biggest worry now is vio-

  lence, which, let’s be honest, will be along tribal lines.”*

  * “Tribal Rivalry Boils Over in Kenyan Election,” New York Times, December 30, 2007.

  C h a p t e r 2

  E T H N I C P O L I T I C S

  In those Kenyan elections the opposition candidate,

  Raila Odinga, was a Luo, one of Kenya’s forty-eight ethnic

  groups. He secured 98 percent of the Luo vote. This was iden-

  tity voting with a vengeance. Does it matter?

  Everyone has some subnational identity and usually several of