Measuring Democracy

The blogging concept was such a great aspect to this class, and it was good to see everyone participating online. I have made a resemblance of a “career” from blogging and goofing around online, and I liked being able to do just that with my classmates.

I liked Kate’s blog on restaurant reviews from Urbanspoon and Dinehere. I personally use yelp (as I tend to gravitate towards the establishments that serve the best adult beverages), but her comparison between the two websites was pretty interesting.

It was tough for me to pick my favorite blog post, as every thing I wrote on here has been pure gold.

Only  kidding.

Looking back, I realized that I struggled the most with posts on the readings, especially when it came to the empirical stuff. Numbers freak me out.

My favorite post has to be the one where we had to pick a blog post that we did and did not like.

This assignment was so great because I found a bunch of awesome political blogs I had never heard of before. The article by Holbo I posted was one of the most stimulating I have read online in a long time.

I also found some great content to hate on, as well. The exchange between the author of my disliked post and I was really entertaining (I refrain from using his name, as I know he is watching, and I don’t have time to duke it out again). It was awesome to see someone to adamant about defending his online honor.

I also loved how inherently flawed the guys argument was, yet he was so committed to making the people he disagreed with look incompetent. He even assumed I was incompetent (absurd, I know) when he told me how to clink on a hyperlink. That made my friends and I laugh.

Next time, I might refrain from using the term “benchmark for stupidity”. I mean, his argument was stupid, but at least he could form coherent sentences. Got to be stupider out there. Got to be.

The Ivory Coast has yet to fully realize democracy, and in the past few days people have resorted to violence to settle an ongoing dispute between two presidential candidates who claimed victory in a country wide election held of November 28.

Apparently both Laurent Gbagbo and Alassane Ouattara think they have the right to the presidency based on the elections late last year. It’s difficult to determine who really won, but the United Nations is backing Ouattara, as they believe he was the sole victor.

Gbagbo refuses to give up the presidency, and as of yesterday, Ouattara backed troops have been the attacking the presidential compound in an effort to oust the man and his followers. Interestingly enough, this BBC article says he might not even be in there, and that no one has actually seen him for weeks.

I think this is a good example of the idea in democratic theory that democracy has to be recognized and accepted by the people in order to be fully realized. Clearly the people of Ivory Coast are still skeptical of their democratic institutions. As a result of this insecurity, there have been citizens dying at the hands of guns and mortar blasts.

A piece on the Huffington Post does a great job of outlining the problem: it also shows the uselessness of the UN in these types of situations. The author actually calls for a US led front against Gbagbo, likening the situation there to the conflict in Libya.

I find it hard to believe that the US would intervene in such an instance, as there are few ties between the Ivory Coast and the Americans. It does sounds like more can be done from the side of the UN in limiting civilian fatalities, though.

Zanger’s piece focuses on the relationship between democracy and repression: more specifically, he looks at how regime change affects life integrity violations.

I found the author’s conception and definition of these “life integrity violations” to be a bit perplexing. He says that he intends to use the terms “repression, state terrorism, and life integrity interchangeably”. I don’t think they should be: it seems state terrorism is a but of a different monster than repression in general. He does outline a few past definitions of the term, but I think the issues of terrorism since 2001 (after Zanger wrote this piece) may change his mind on using the term.

Zanger does use Polity scores to in his analysis. This is the measure of democracy I found to be most useful in my work with the Balkans. His points out the fact that Polity focuses on institutional characteristics, something I also found to be useful in my report.

I always like these type of articles that make an argument that seems like common sense and backs it up with empirical evidence. For example, I can’t say I am too surprised to see that during changes toward democracy, human rights abuses decrease. But to see it through statistical analysis makes it even more concrete. Pair this with Zanger’s theory, which is sound and well articulated, and I found there to be few holes in the piece overall.

The use of fallacies in the media are everywhere. A classic rhetorical fallacy is one appealing to an authority. This is the claim that an assertion is true because of the authority or superiority of a person making the claim. In this article, the author submits that it must indeed be true that Hillary Clinton is subverting the authority of the Commander in Chief, as long as “El Rushbo” is saying it. The quote from Limbaugh is meant to be actual evidence that Clinton is working around Obama, when really, the author provides little to no proof on the matter.

An example of a logical fallacy can theoretically be found in some assumptions of the democratic peace theory. If I claim that democracy leads to either free trade or trade isolation, and I find that it does lead to free trade which leads me to submit that it does not lead to trade isolation is an example of “affirming the disjunct”. This is when a disjunct is claimed to be false because the other disjunct is found to be true, i.e. “A or B: A, therefore not B”. Just because I found that free trade may be a consequence of democracy does not mean isolationist policies never happen.

God I love The Economist. Not necessarily because we always seem to see eye to eye ideologically (say that 5 times fast), but because they offer some of the best news combined with commentary anywhere on the internet.

The Reluctant Warrior speaks to a number of issues with the recent American and UN intervention in Libya.

With both sides of Congress coming down hard on the President, I liked the fact that the author actually backed Obama on this one:

When he collected his Nobel peace prize from Oslo in December 2009 he made a point of saying that he accepted the case for using force on humanitarian grounds, as Bill Clinton did in the Balkans in the 1990s. But justifying a war on such grounds depends on some large atrocity looking imminent—as it did by the time Colonel Qaddafi reached the gates of Benghazi and not, arguably, very much earlier.

What did he do wrong here? He sought UN approval, he didn’t send ground troops… yet Prez-O is still getting bashed from both sides of Congress. What good does that do the American people at this point? None what so ever.

This is the problem with democracy in the States right now: the only real reason the politicians are going hard against Obama is because there is an election year coming up. As there is every year. They are truly serving the interests of themselves, and themselves alone. Fueling bi-partisan resentment doesn’t do anyone any good.

The article also points to the fact that the principles behind Obama’s decision will largely escape the average American voter (yeah, we’re stupid, I get it). It’s a fair point, but it makes it even more crucial for our politicians (the Dem’s, at the very least) to back Prez-O and help explain what is going on to the public.

Pardon me for being an ideological softy, but I’d much rather see us together on this one. Constantly bickering across party lines isn’t getting us anywhere.

“The government is telling us that the street is not the place for things to be solved, but I say the street was and is the place. The voice of the street must be heard.”

These were Alexander Dudcek words during the liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1979. and thirty years later, they still hold strong, and the voices of the street continue to be heard and continue to ignite change.

But what ignites this change? How and why has the Arab world suddenly revolted against the authoritarian regimes of the past? This is the question Rebecca Solnit attempts to answer in her piece called The Butterfly and the Boiling Point.

One piece of evidence the author suggests as sparking revolution in Tunisia was the WikiLeaks cable that outlined the US unwillingness to back Ben Ali, the previous dictator of the country. It was truly insightful to connect these two issues, as I felt like a lot of the WikiLeaks stuff was lost in the debate of whether Wikileaks is a positive or negative force in society.

Soltin does not attribute the recent revolutions to Facebook or Twitter. She recognizes that they were around before, and although they might have helped organize protests and garner resentment against the regimes, these new forms of media have been around for years now.

The author doesn’t really say the revolution was caused by x,y,z. Rather, she shows how any one person can be the starting point for a massive uprising. The article concludes that this type of movement is one that could upend the watered down democracy of the United States.

I tend to find a revolution in the US hard to believe. Her piece is far too ideological in the sense that it does not identify particular factors that led to the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. The average person in the US is not in the same boat as the average Egyptian or Tunisian. Americans are far to complacent, and the problems that face them on a day to day basis are entirely different than the poverty and social challenges that citizens of Tunisia had to deal with.

I’m a bit delirious after doing this reading: a lot of information and numbers that I don’t quite know what to do with. I am going to do my best to unpack what the guy is trying to say and attempt to find some areas of contention.

The standard interpretation of democratic peace theory holds that countries that are democratic are less likely to go to war against one another. The emphasis in this view is that the political regime type is the cause behind the peace between these countries. Gartzke takes a contradicting view: he thinks that economics and free market capitalism has as much if not more to do with peace among liberal states than the regime type.

I got pretty lost when the author started going through the different “traditions” of liberal peace. In truth, I skimmed the section: I’m not convinced it was even necessary.

The heart of the article is Gartzke’s data and regression tables. His dependent variable is a militarized interstate dispute variable, which essentially measures whether or not two states were in conflict in a given year (1 is coded as conflict, 0 otherwise). He uses Polity IV scores (my Balkan-approved measure) to measure “democracy” among countries. He uses 4 other independent variables: markets, development, and interest similarity.

The results are expected: two states that are democratic are less likely to fight each other. From here, more liberal economic variables are added to the regression. The effect of development on disputes is not statistically significant, which means it is not a huge determinant of whether or not a country in going to go to war with another. States with similar interests (based on UN voting) are less likely to go to war with one another.

So… how is Gartzke really going against democratic peace theory if every successive regression he ran was one which included democracy as an independent variable? I need to go over this in class before I really make a claim against what he is trying to do.

1. Bread and Butter Issues by Amr Hamzawy

The author identifies a number of different factors that led to the revolution in Egypt. The general feeling in most of the world is that the initial protests in Tunisia sparked a mood of change in Egyptian society. Hamzawy echoes that sentiment, and explains how that revolution helped Egypt get over the fear of dissent and stand up against the authoritarian regime.

Another more general factor instigating the protests was the economic hardships born out by the Egyptian people. The focus on more general issues affecting the day to day lives of all of Egypt made the movement even  bigger, as it appealed to a broader range of everyday citizens.

2. Three Economic Reasons Behind the Protests in Egypt by Michael Sanibel

A bit of a random news source, but this article does a good job of detailing the specific economic reasons for the protests. The three factors include corruption within the government, widespread poverty among the citizenry, and a high rate of inflation.

Sanibel backs up all of his points with data and links to their sources. He takes a more direct approach at displaying the problems that plagued Egypt prior to the revolution. Hamzawy did raise important issues, but failed to back them up with any sort of hard evidence.

Really, though, I find it hard to believe that any major news source would attempt to include hard evidence of any of their arguments. It seems like most just take the stance that if they are a news source, we are supposed to take whatever they say as fact. That is part of the problem with major media right now: the readers aren’t really supposed to ask questions, rather, just assume the story being read is valid and factual.

Now that the dust has settled and the past regimes have been overthrown, Egypt and Tunisia are in transition. All eyes are on these countries as they attempt to reform their institutions and politics. And given the fact that our class is on democracy, how it is measured, and what consequences democratization entails, Egypt and Tunisia can serve as an excellent case-study in it’s attempt at political reform.

Both countries have put in place interim governments, purged of officials from the old regimes. But much debate still remains on how drastic change should be, as either could simply reform the current institutions or do away with them all together. There is also much debate on how and when to run elections, as if there can be complications if they are run too soon without proper rules and regulations in place.

In light of the readings for this week, I keep thinking back to the Carbone’s piece on consequences of democracy:

In order to survive and consolidate over the long term, any new democratic regime will need to undergo (among other things) a process of gradual legitimization. Legitimacy, in turn, can be acquired in two fundamental ways. The first is normative: people hold values and beliefs that assert democracy’s inherent superiority and value it for “its own sake”. The second is performance based: people come to accept democracy because it helps attain valued goals such as material well being or social peace.

With this in mind, if I were to consult with the leaders in Egypt and Tunisia, I would caution them to move slowly. The people have to believe that democracy is the best way to move forward. They have to believe in it’s legitimacy, in the fact that it will indeed make the society they live in a better place. As Carbone explains, this takes time.

It seems like in Egypt, at least,  some of the institutions are helping to instill confidence. The media, once controlled by Mubarak appointed editors, is now more independent of government and finally allowed to report the news as it pleases. Even the judiciary branch is moving in the right direction, prosecuting Mubarak and his associates as well as getting rid of bans on certain political parties.

Measures like these will definitely help make the transition in Egypt and Tunisia more successful. Time will tell how democracy will be accepted within either country.