Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places

It seems natural that introducing democracy should be a key step along the way to better governance and more prosperity in the Third World. But is this true in practice? Collier is a Professor of Economics at Oxford who has performed detailed statistical analysis on the practical consequences of elections. He asserts that introducing elections in poor nations tends to leads to increased political violence and misgovernance. The opposite is true for wealthier countries: there democracy tends to lead to more responsive and honest governance. This difference in outcomes is rather dismal news for the Third World, but as Collier carefully points out, we need to understand what is actually happening, which may be very different from what we would like. His analysis is that when a poor autocratic government decides to hold elections it is heavily motivated to win them. In countries without adequate checks and balances, elections tend to be winner-takes-all affairs, with few constraints on the victors. The autocratic incumbents reluctantly realize they are not popular and will need to "adjust" the electoral balance. To do so, they resort to a variety of techniques, including various forms of bribery, electoral fraud, coercion, elimination of opponents (by dubious legal trickery, or worse) and last but not least, by playing the ethnic identity card to rally the majority ethnicity against its "enemies". Unfortunately the net effect of these maneuvers is to make a bad situation worse. The regime retains power, but their tactics reinforce popular skepticism and distrust, and increase internal tensions. After a civil war, the international community typically insists on post-conflict elections to put the seal on the new settlement. Unfortunately such elections suffer from all the issues above and risk inflaming the situation. Typically the situation improves ahead of the elections, as they provide a temporary focus for orderly conflict, but the elections themselves tend to reflect the same issues that drove the civil war. So the losers do not accept the legitimacy of the winners. Collier reports that a variety of factors influence the likelihood of political violence. Bad elections are one. But so is poverty and small country size. (Smaller countries have more trouble meeting security goals.) Unfortunately a prior civil war makes a subsequent one more likely. Similarly with coups. Collier observes that one of the key vehicles for introducing true democracy seems to be increased prosperity. As countries become wealthier they seem to accept more of the package of legal norms that allows for more honest elections and eventually for regime change. Collier also argues that investing in building a strong sense of national identity (as Nyerere did successfully in Tanzania) can help diminish regional and ethnic tensions. However Collier's core analysis is extremely disheartening for the poorest countries. In an effort to end on a positive no

As a soldier on the ground during the Sunni Awakening in Iraq in 2007, this book is perfect for bridging the gap between academia and field work in post-conflict areas. My team focused on micro-loan programs, encouraging local government to fight corruption, and finding funding for a canning factory to get back on its feet to re-employ hundreds of out of work Iraqis. If I would have had this book back then, I could have convinced more higher-ups to follow our lead and focus on economic and political stability in our area instead of 90% security focus. Kudos to Paul Collier. He backs up this qualitative approach with many quantitative studies, explaining the results without dumbing it down or getting lost in the numbers. Very difficult balance to achieve, and Collier pulls it off. As military, we need "this is what works, this is what doesn't work, and this is why" information to conduct post-conflict stability operations. "Wars, Guns and Votes" provides exactly that.

Once again, Collier has managed to summarize a line of quantitative macroeconomic research in a way that is lively and engaging for a general readership. Wars, Guns, and Votes is more limited in scope than the Bottom Billion, and I found it more convincing as a result (though I did like Bottom Billion as well). The focus is on the causes and consequences of political violence, and Collier uses both theory and empirical work to advance a number of provacative conclusions. Some highlights: -Elections are not enough to generate accountability and legitimacy for governments (something readers of the New York Times Letter to the Editor Page have known for over a decade). But it's even worse than that- in very poor countries, holding elections appears to lead to worse policies and governance outcomes, and increase the risk of civil war. -About 12% of foreign aid ends up financing militaries, regardless of what the aid money is actually going towards. Governments of beneficiary countries simply spend less on whatever issues donors are involved in, and more on their militaries. -Most interesting is Collier's "feasibility hypothesis" of civil war. The idea is that the best way to understand civil war is to look at whether rebellion (as opposed to peaceful opposition) is a feasible means for the opposition to contest the ruling government's authority. He makes the case by showing that you can actually predict whether or not a country will have a civil war fairly well just by looking at the circumstances that make it feasible (access to resources that rebels can exploit, mountainous terrain that is more difficult to police, etc.) This is a bolder statement than it sounds, because it implies that preventing civil war is less a matter of understanding or fixing the underlying grievances, and more a matter of making it harder to pull off (more on this later). Wars, Guns, and Votes is a fine illustration of how the methodology of economics- rational agent models and econometric analyses of data- can yield important insights when applied to other fields, such as political science. The book also illustrates the critical importance of contextual knowledge in this kind of thing. Collier's expertise in African politics is evident, and it is only in bringing this expertise to bear that the results of his economic analysis are convincing. Some have criticized Collier for "data mining," and undoubtedly some of the details of his findings will not bear further empirical scrutiny. However, what seperates Collier's work from other more egregious data mining exercises is that Collier's empirical findings are supported by both coherent theories and an extensive knowledge of context, and as a result his stories tend to tend ring true.

Here's an excerpt from an article I wrote comparing Collier's book with one by Fareed Zakaria ('The Future of Freedom'): Collier's main argument in his book is that a successful transition to democracy requires the supply of two basic public goods--security and accountability--and that such should be supplied internationally since most developing countries lack adequate internal checks and balances and security mechanisms that guarantee the provision of both. Furthermore, security and accountability can mitigate the three factors listed above that undermine democracy: lack of economic growth, large ethnic diversity, and the abundance of natural resources as a hindrance to accountability. Now for the first public good, security. When a Third World dictator announces that he wants to transition his country to democracy, the usual carrot used by the international community is that of aid. However, as Collier demonstrates, the increase in aid often increases violence as aid money leaks into funding armies, and the embezzlement of aid along ethnic lines foments jealousy and conflict. (Collier 2009, 121-123) Rather, he asserts that a more effective carrot is a security guarantee, specifically against coups, on the basis of clean elections. "Key members of the international community [should] make a common commitment that should a government that has committed itself to some international standard of elections be ousted by a coup d'état, they would ensure that the government was reinstated, by military means if necessary." (Collier 2009, 204) The main objection to this idea, especially by non-interventionists, is that security guarantees obligate countries to go to war when it is not clearly in its interest to do so--no "clear and present danger," as it were. However, the likelihood of costly intervention decreases if security guarantees are credible, and could also be potentially less costly than the usual carrot of financial assistance. This works in two ways. First, a rebel movement would be less likely to undertake a coup if the regime is protected by a more powerful patron state. Further, the opposition, knowing that such protection rests on the regime's adherence to election standards, would be more likely to choose running for office over a coup, knowing that it lacks the resources to fight a more advanced foreign military and that there is always the chance that it might even win the election. Violence, then, appears less savory. Second, if the regime commits itself to hold an election and transfer power to whoever wins, but in the end does not honor the election results, then the patron states are under no contractual obligation to come to the rescue of the regime in the subsequent event of a coup. Given that sham elections tend to foment coups, it is in the interest of the regime to honor the election and transfer power rather than be left alone to deal with a potentially violent opposition. Thus, democracy becomes more savor

I read Collier's previous book (The Bottom Billion) and found it very wise. Here the mood is darker. Why give money when (by all reasonable estimates) between 50 and 90% of it is wasted and much ends up in the pockets of dictators? Paul Bauer (is his work still in print?) wrestled with this problem 30 years ago. Maybe it's better to accept the waste if some of the money gets to the destination. This is arguable, since if only 50% is wasted, and return on investment is 7% (both optimisitc assumptions) it would take ten years just to get back where you started. Here the question is posed from another perspective. Does aid contribute to democracy? Giving money to "big men" does not seem likely to promote democarcy or any sort of freedom. Does it at least limit misery and infant mortality, and allow soe of those saved to grow up to be ... well, gangsters, maybe. Politics and economics like this make us face hard choices, which in the end are ethical not mathematical. I could accept the waste, if the waste did not contribute to the persistence of misery and injustice. I could bear not to pay for starving children, if I thought that their sacrifice was "worth it". Aid is a dilemna, but we should remember the poor. We should be thankful we have a democracy where we can simply vote the rascals out. (Especially now.) And hope that the same privileges can be extended to the billion which the G20 forgets. I fully intend to read this book.