My Democracy is Bigger than Your Democracy

About a dozen blog posts previous, I noted my intent to raise the awareness of you the reader regarding my field of relative expertise, political science. Since that time, I seem to have dodged any serious attempt at doing so. In large part, this is because I’m easily distracted (like a lab monkey intrigued by tin foil). In smaller part, it’s also because the field can be somewhat abstract and esoteric (often needlessly so, per snooty academic convention). Having had the chance to teach undergraduates this semester, and having been relatively successful at the effort, I feel a little more confident in my ability to articulate the concepts. That said, this post is a long one. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and put the kids to bed.

One of the most frustrating aspects of being a political scientist (albeit an amateur) is trying to convey to the uninitiated what it is exactly that you actually study and research. So let us start with what political science is not. Political science is not opening the newspaper in the morning and keeping up with current events. For the most part, it is not the “politics” section at your local book store. Some of those books may be written by trained political scientists, but most tend to be punditry and less-than-rigorous quasi-academic diatribes regarding whatever happened to be turning the author’s stomach that week (not entirely unlike like this blog…hmm).

This is not to say that political science is free from ideology or bias (as with any academic discipline), or that political scientists aren’t carefully (or more likely, obsessively) attuned to the current goings-on, so to speak. However, there is more structure and focus to the field than most people recognize or give it credit for. To oversimplify, political scientists are in the business of searching for broad patterns in human political phenomena. Through a sometimes loose, and at other times highly rigorous, application of the logic of the scientific method, we seek to explain political outcomes through empirically informed and tested theory. Stated more simply, we try to explain politics with abstractions, and then weigh the validity of those abstractions against the evidence. Perhaps that wasn’t stated more simply. You can nod yourself awake and wipe the drivel off of your lower lip, young polisci Jedi. I now promise to give you something more concrete.

Not long ago, my good friend at Scalpels and Cephalopods sent me the following article from the Onion, one of the finest modern-day purveyors of socio-political satire (filling out a media triad shared by the Daily Show and The Colbert Report). It’s only a few paragraphs. Go ahead. Give it a quick read. Maybe even take a potty break. Just don’t wuss out on me. You’re so close to intellectual revelation. Yes. That close.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/political_scientists

Now, that piece of humor isn’t too far from the truth regarding the life's work of many political scientists. In fact, it hits quite close to home. The classification and indexing of variations in government (or “regime type”) is a fundamental endeavor in the discipline. Regimes around the world, past and present, run the gamut from highly centralized and personalistic dictatorships (think Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea), to highly pluralistic democracies (the United States, France, Japan, etc…), and everything in between, varying in terms of their levels of citizen participation, accountability of leadership, or institutional design (e.g. UK parliamentary democracy vs. U.S. presidential democracy).

No sh*t, you might say; what does this have to do with anything? Big sh*t, I say to you; it has to do with everything and anything. A number of political scientists have concerned themselves with determining the extent to which these variations in governance are associated with particular political outcomes. To what extent are dictatorships or democracies more likely to engage in war? (The answer is actually somewhat surprising, depending on with whom you speak) Which regimes achieve better economic performance? Under which variations are revolution, civil war, and general anarchy more likely? (Again, the answers are potentially surprising)

But how do we compare two governments? By what yardstick do we measure the variance? What makes one country more “democratic” than another, or more “autocratic”? A consensus on these questions does not exist within political science. Numerous statistical data sets have been constructed attempting to pin democracy to numbers. Nobody can agree which one does the best job, and some of these data sets yield very different statistical conclusions than others.

One of the most fundamental debates inherent in creating these quantifications of democracy is to what extent what we are measuring should be institutional or normative. Let me rephrase in non-self-important-academic terms. To what extent is “democracy” as you and I know it characterized by formal features of its design like elections, legislatures, or presidencies (the institutional), and to what extent is it embodied by more idealistic and value-laden concepts like freedom of speech, freedom of association, equality, or civil liberties (the normative)? The extent to which one includes or weights these features in the measurement can yield very different evaluations of different countries, and consequent outcomes. The conclusions drawn from such research have potentially enormous implications, given the state of flux that much of the world’s governments continue to experience, and many of the international issues that our own country and others presently confront.

I presented on this topic earlier in the week for one of my classes, which brought the Onion article to mind, and seemed like a useful starting point for the political scientific conversation I hope to perpetuate from time to time via this blog. This issue of measuring government, and particularly democracy (putting aside the complication of the mathematics), hits at many issues salient to every one of us who lives under some sort of political hierarchy, I contend.

Further putting aside the research agenda of political science, it seems that these are questions that should be at the intellectual forefront for all of us in the present day, even if only in the most basic of terms. An election of immense historical and political significance is rapidly approaching. In a sense, we should all be more carefully “measuring” the democracy we live within. To what extent does the current situation reflect our institutional, and probably more importantly, normative ideals? Does the current election discourse in the media really reflect our concerns as citizens regarding these measurements, or are we being spoon fed a less-than-lowest-common-denominator political debate? I scornfully frown in your general direction, Network and Cable News. And shout out mad props to you, PBS and CSPAN. Fershizzle.

Additionally, our country is directly engaged in the reconstruction of regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the results of which will be of immense regional and global consequence. How should the success or failure of these regimes be “measured”? Do we as a country really have much of a say over the institutional or normative outcomes, beyond the initial system shock? How should citizens in these conflicted countries measure their own governments when showing up to the polls (in percentages sometimes rivaling those of U.S. elections, we should note)? Clearly, this issue of democratic measurement is not merely an academic exercise. The consequences fundamentally affect every one of us.

You can catch your breath now. I know all the excitement has probably left you a little woozy. At the least, hopefully I’ve conveyed some sense of why it is I find political science intriguing. With the introduction out of the way, future posts on the topic should hopefully be significantly shorter.

Stay tuned. Next installment, I’ll let you in on how game theory ruined my life.

Vaya en paz.