The Power and the Money

Is Venezuela a democracy?

Let me caveat the rest of this post with a reiteration of the fact that I am not a defender of the Venezuelan government. Nor should you be. Mark Weisbrot, a smart fellow, makes a bit of a fool of himself by trying. (One of our commentors makes a rather better effort, but ultimately fails.) I am on the record as thinking that the current bout of violence and repression is both the government’s fault and rather inexplicably stupid.

Had Maduro held his calm, the violence would have been minimal and passing. The fact that he did not and put gasoline on the flames comes as a surprise to me.

In short, the Venezuelan government is run by incompetents. But is it a dictatorship?

To my surprise, I discovered on Caracas Chronicles that one of the most-prominent political databases, Polity IV, says yes, the Bolivarian Republic is a dictatorship.

What is Polity IV? In the words of Anabella Abadi and Bárbara Lira it is “a project of the Center for Systemic Peace, which codifies characteristics of political regimes in order to classify them — in opposite extremes — as ‘Institutionalized Democracies’ or ‘Autocratic Regimes’. To formulate the indicator, Polity IV considers the election mechanism for the Executive Power (meaning regulations, competition and open participation); institutional constraints on the exercise of power by the Executive Power; and the degree of regulation and political competition.”

It is a good database; I have used it myself in academic work. But something seemed odd about the rapid decline in Venezuela’s polity score after the establishment of the Bolivarian Republic:

So I decided to dig into the numbers and see what was going on.

The basic polity score has two components: democracy and autocracy. The total score is determined by subtracting one from the other. In 1998, when Hugo Chávez first won election, the democracy score was 8 and the autocracy score was zero, for a total score of 8. That made it a solid democracy: France was 6 in 1958 and ranks at 9 today.

So what happened?

Well, in 1999 the score dropped by one. The fall was due to a fall in the “executive constraints” score from 6 to 5, presumably as a result of the new constitution. The highest value is 7. By definition, the index gives all parliamentary systems a value of 7, since the legislature can depose the executive. The U.S. also gets a score of 7, since the president cannot introduce legislation. A value of 5 is defined as “substantial constraints on the executive” and still falls well within democratic norms. (Page 24.)

There is a little bit of wiggle room here since a ranking of 6 on “executive constraints” is just an intermediate placeholder. In other words, the difference between 6 and 5 is not defined. But to be honest, the drop was fair: the 1999 constitution gave the president the power to dissolve the National Assembly, which is a powerful tool. (One might not consider executive constraints to be the best measure of democracy and quibble with the way parliamentary systems get the highest score, of course.)

OK, then, fall in 1999 explained. No problem.

In 2001 the score falls again by one point. This time, the fall in the was due to a fall in the “competitiveness of participation” score from 4 to 3. This variable is a little odd. The top value is 5, or “competitive.” OK, gotcha. A value of 4 is an ill-defined transitional category. A score of 3 means that “parochial or ethnic-based political factions that regularly compete for political influence in order to promote particularist agendas and favor group members to the detriment of common, secular, or cross-cutting agendas.” (Page 26.)

I am not entirely sure that I understand what that means in the Venezuelan case.

Even if I did, the fall does not have to do with the Second Enabling Act of 2001, under which the Assembly gave President Chávez temporary decree power. That should have changed the executive constraint score, not the political competitiveness score. (The law did not change the executive constraint score because the Act was constitutional; moreover the previous constitution contained a similar provision.) Anyway. the Second Enabling Act had been preceded by the First Enabling Act in 2000.

But what did happen in 2001 to cause the fall in the “competitiveness of participation”? I do not know. The drop is a bit mysterious. Not necessarily wrong, but not immediately obvious. Help?

In 2006, the executive constraint variable drops by another point. Now, one problem is that a score of 4 is still an undefined transitional category (page 24) but it seems justifiable. The Bolivarian Republic is still a point above the early years of the French Fifth Republic on the executive constraint tip, meaning that Hugo Chávez was more constrained than Charles de Gaulle.

A bigger problem is that the drop seems a little inexplicable. The Chavistas won a two-thirds majority in 2005, so the timing is off. Is it the scale of the Chavista presidential victory in ‘06? A score of 4 still involves an independent judiciary and some legislative autonomy, so it is not unreasonable, but it has a Potter Stewart feel to it.

Thus, 2006 is when Venezuela loses its status as an institutionalized democracy, but not as a democracy. Such a loss does indeed pass the Potter Stewart test, even if the timing is odd.

I am not entirely sure I understand it, but it is not unreasonable. Opinions on what happened in 2006? Right move, wrong timing?

Things fall apart in 2009, though, and that is where I get confused.

First, the summary. The polity score plunges eight points from 5 to −3. How do we get there?

1. A one-point rise the “regulation of participation” variable from 2 to 3 raises the autocracy score from 0 to 1. (Polity = 4.)
2. A one-point fall in executive constraints takes off two points by dropping the democracy score from 5 to 4 and raising the autocracy score from 1 to 2. (Polity = 2.)
3. A one-point fall in “regulation of chief executive recruitment” from 3 to 2 drops democracy from 4 to 3. (Polity = 1.)
4. A two-point fall in executive competition (to be explained) gets us the rest of the way there by dropping the democracy score from 3 to 1 and raising autocracy score from 2 to 4. (Polity = −2.)

How reasonable are these changes? From most to least:

1. The first one makes sense, even if the timing is off. A value of 2 for “regulation of participation” means that “there are relatively stable and enduring political groups which compete for political influence at the national level — parties, regional groups, or ethnic groups, not necessarily elected — but there are few, recognized overlapping (common) interests.” (Page 26.) It also implies that political parties are unstable. The new value, 3, indicates that “political demands are characterized by incompatible interests and intransigent posturing among multiple identity groups and oscillate more or less regularly between intense factionalism and government favoritism.” That sure does define Venezuela under Chavismo! I might disagree with the timing, but not the change.
2. The fall in executive constraints from 4 to 3 is still in the democratic zone, more or less, since it allows for an independent judiciary. But I am not sure that the constitutional changes approved that year justifies the drop. It seems reasonable, but once again, why 2009? There is an ad hockiness to the fall that I do not like.
3. The fall in “regulation of chief executive recruitment” does not seem reasonable. A score of 3 means that chief executives are selected by a constitutional process, democratic or not. A score of 1 means violent transition. Venezuela moved from 3 to 2 in 2009, meaning that “chief executives are chosen by designation within the political elite, without formal competition (i.e., one-party systems or ‘rigged’ multiparty elections).” (Page 21.) I do not buy that Venezuelan elections were rigged after 2009.
4. Finally, the drop in executive competition from the highest score of 3 to the lowest score of 1 means that the Polity IV index-makers believe that there was no democratic way to vote the president of the Bolivarian Republic out of office from 2009 onwards.

Really?

A skeptical analyst could argue that the one-point drop in 2001 and five of the eight-point drop in 2009 do not make sense. That would give Venezuela an overall polity score of 3. That is low. It would put the Bolivarian Republic in the same range as Gabon and Iraq, a point below the Russian Federation and Sri Lanka. It is a bad score. But a believable one.*

The putative −3, on the other hand, puts Venezuela with Ethiopia, Jordan, Burma, and Tajikistan and one point worse than Angola, Chad, Mauritania, Sudan, Togo and Singapore.

All ten of the countries in the above sentence are far less democratic than Venezuela. For all the incompetence of the Maduro government, a score of −3 does not pass the smell test.

Am I wrong?

The E.U. just put the nail in the coffin of Scottish independence

I have been bemused at the debates over Scottish independence at Crooked Timber. I mean, uh, well, there is this:

So it isn’t likely to happen.

And now it is less likely to happen with E.U. Commission President José Manuel Barroso saying what we all knew already, which is that an independent Scotland would have to apply for E.U. membership, just like Iceland or Norway. The negotiations will not be easy, even through Madrid will likely agree to allow the application.

I am opposed to Scottish (or Catalan or Texan or Québécois or Regiomontano or Camba or whatever) independence because I am opposed in-general to secession from democratic states. First, secessionism generally requires a cramped nationalism that is too close to tribalism for comfort. Second, it smacks of democratic failure: you don’t like national policies, but instead of trying to build a majority to change them you pack up your marbles and leave. Finally, it is (albeit probably not the Scottish case) selfish, a way for richer people to dissolve their historic bonds of community with poorer ones.

I read the Crooked Timber thread. The positive arguments for smaller states boiled down to (1) We do not like the way that the U.K. votes as a whole, so screw it; or (2) nationalism, just because. (By that definition, I should be a huge proponent for the Republic of New York and New Jersey Only with the Annoying Bit of New York Removed and Maybe Horse Country Too.)

If there are unreconciliable historical wrongs in play, then I could be persuaded to support the partition of a notionally-democratic state. For concrete examples, see Ireland circa 1922, Algeria circa 1961, or Kosovo circa 2008. But those are extraordinary cases that involved a horrible combination of long-standing ethnic discrimination and very recent bloodshed. Moreover, electoral democracy in the modern sense was a recent arrival to all three mother states: the U.K. in 1918, France in 1958, and Serbia in 2000.*

Absent that, however, I say no. Secession should be off the table.

But I might be wrong to say no! Counterarguments very welcome.

* The Fourth Reform Act of 1918 introduced more-or-less universal suffrage to the U.K., although female suffrage remained limited until 1928. The French Constitution of 1958 granted full voting rights to all Muslim residents of the Algerian departments. Slobodan Milošević fell in 2000, after which Serbia (which remained notionally united with Montenegro until 2006) has held basically free elections.

Why is President Maduro ratcheting up the tension in Venezuela?

The thing that has always gotten to me about the Venezuelan government under Chavismo has been the incompetence. It is just a mess. You did not need to have electricity shortages caused by freezing rates to the extent that power consumption became free. (Rates have been frozen since 2002. Electricity in Venezuela costs 0.11 bolívares per kWh — at the black market exchange rate, that’s ... uh ...  0.13 cents. This is down from 18.4¢ when the government froze rates.) You did not need to create a crazy exchange rate scheme. You did not need to allow inflation to accelerate. You did not need to send all this money overseas to no political benefit.

The problem isn’t that the goals of the Bolivian Revolution necessarily involve a bad economy or high crime or a stupid foreign policy. It is that they cannot figure out how to accomplish whatever goals they may have. Hell, if you tasked me with building socialism or uniting with Cuba or whatever, I could do a better job. It’s just a mysterious incompetence.

Which brings us to the recent tragic deaths. It is terrible. But demonstrations do get out of control. So it would be very easy for the government to regret the deaths, blame the protestors and continue its crackdown without screaming treason and issuing warrants for opposition leaders. Or censoring Twitter ... which gains you nothing but bad press.

Why ratchet things up? One possible answer, consistent with everything else, is incompetence. Chávez was never incompetent at domestic politics. Maduro is not so skilled. So maybe he is just making mistakes.

Or perhaps he is acting quite deliberately. Javier Corrales, a very smart guy, thinks that ratcheting up the tension will allow Maduro to unite his coalition.

For that to be true, however, you would need to believe that the one-two punch of the economy and crime was on the verge of destabilizing his coalition.

So ... how would know whether that was true?

How deep red Nebraska (may have) killed the Keystone Pipeline

One of things I teach my students is that it is very important to know what you don’t know when operating in a foreign country. If you have a native-level understanding, great! Play the political game. But if you don’t, then it’s best to be completely hands-off (e.g., letting local partners do the work) or stay away.

The worst thing is to think you understand something you don’t.

This is a problem that Canadians often suffer.

Our case on the Keystone pipeline highlights this problem: TransCanada was prepared for national resistance to the pipeline, but never expected a problem with deep-red Nebraska. But they got one! Oh, boy, did they get one.

Our HBS case goes through that all in depth, but Karl Sigwarth, a former student, just sent me a great story in McLean’s that tells it all far more readably. (Cases, remember, are meant to be slightly cryptic!)

My favorite part:

Back in his office tower in Calgary, Alex Pourbaix, the affable, rosy-cheeked head of pipelines for TransCanada, still marvels at how a western Canadian oil company came to be so hated by ranchers in Nebraska.

“TransCanada didn’t just dream up the route out of thin air,” he insists. But Nebraska landowners could never understand why the company didn’t simply follow the route of the first Keystone project, along the far eastern edge of the state, out of the Sand Hills and away from the aquifer. The new path struck them as so illogical that some believed only secret ulterior motives could explain it. “What we’re really afraid of is that once the tar sands run out, they are going to be piping into the aquifer to get the water so that they can export the water to other areas of the country or overseas,” speculated one Nebraska farmer, Art Tanderup.

Pourbaix was amazed by the mistrust. “I don’t even know what to say to that.”

Now, heavy opposition to anything coming anywhere near the Ogalalla was super-predictable, as anyone who has ever read The Amazing Spider-Man knows:

You just don’t mess with anything iconic enough to make it into a comic book.

That’s serious advice, by the way. It was utterly ridiculous for TransCanada to be taken by surprise at the Nebraskan opposition. They could have avoided the whole damn thing by starting with the route they eventually chose. (The green line below, instead of the yellow.) That would have also gotten the route approved at the federal level before the opposition had a chance to mobilize.

But they were just too arrogant, failing to realize that their southern neighbor was in fact an entirely different country. No American would ever do that!

First pass at what happened in the Mexican legislature

Well, the energy certainly looks closer to the PAN proposal than the first pass from President Peña. Peña’s proposal left all the details to the enabling law; this reform pretty much spells out that the industry is being thrown wide open. Pemex is clearly reduced to just an operator among many. Moreover, there was no sovereign wealth fund in the Peña proposal; now there is one.

The reform keeps a ban on concessions might be meaningful were it not for the fact that the transitory articles refer to “licenses.” Licenses are the what the petroleum industry generally call concessions nowadays. There is no difference and I pity the lawyer who tries to find one.

On the other hand, the political reform left out the one serious thing that the PAN wanted: there is no run-off for presidential elections. Whoever gets the plurality wins.

So what happened? Well, on November 2nd, we wrote, slightly paraphrased, “With PRD support off the table, there are two possibilities. The first is that the PRI holds firm against political reform, but swings right on energy. The second is that the PRI relents on political reform, figuring that it still will have a good shot at the presidency.”

We thought the first to be the less likely outcome ... but that seems to have been what has happened.

Somewhat more effective suffrage, some re-election?

The title of this post is lifted directly from Mexfiles, which has a post on the reform that you should all go read. It goes into some depth about the possible effect of allowing limited re-election and the federalization of election regulation.

It is also an awesome title. When Porfirio Díaz first assumed the presidency, in 1876, his slogan was “Sufragio efectivo, no reelección.” (“Effective suffrage, no re-election.”) Díaz duly stepped down in 1880. He then ran again and won in 1884. And 1888. And 1892. And 1896, 1900, 1904, and 1910.

The joke was that Díaz had simply misplaced a comma the first time around. Instead of ¡Sufragio efectivo, no reelección!, he had meant to write, Sufragio efectivo no, ¡reelección!

(A useful chronology of the Porfiriato can be found here.)

Anyway, at Mexfiles they are pointing out that the new reform is pretty limited. State elections (which are relatively clean now) will become slightly cleaner. (One of the bigger changes is that INE will be now be able to overturn elections in which the parties exceed their spending limits.) Meanwhile, deputies and senators will become very slightly freer from party control. (Very slightly.) Good mayors will be able to win re-election, but not enough to let them create political machines. In all, a sort of halfway house.

I agree with Federico. The reform seems important only because the PAN made it the price of energy reform. What I do not understand is why the PAN cares. After all, it is a little weird to say, “Give us something unimportant [political reform] in exchange for something that we really really care about [energy reform]!”

The whole thing strikes me as political kabuki, a way for the PAN to pretend that it isn’t just automatically approving whatever President Peña sets out.

Political reform in Mexico

The energy reform is moving apace. As you know, the PAN linked energy reform to political reform ... and so, political reform is also moving apace. It moved yesterday out of a Senate committee to the full floor, where it passed today by an overwhelming margin of 106 to 15.

So what was in this motherhood reform? You can find the text here, but it runs 244 pages. (You can also look for it here.) The constitutional changes themselves take up 35 pages. That’s a lot. Below, as a public service, we here at TPTM summarize the amendments for you. The constitutional reform of 2013:

Reforms Article 26 to create a “National Social Development Policy Evaluation Council,” which is probably as pointless as it sounds;

Reforms Article 29 to remove the ability of the Secretary of State or Attorney General to veto a presidential declaration of a state of emergency;

Reforms Article 35 to federalize election supervision by changing the name of the Federal Electoral Institue to the “National Electoral Institute,” which will now in be charge of state elections as well as federal. We are not doing this amendment justice, however — the changes are rather large and deserve a post of their own;

Reforms Article 54 to raise the threshold for a party to receive proportional-representation seats in Congress from 2% to 3%;

Reforms Article 59 to let senators serve two terms and deputies four, with no party-switching allowed;

Reforms Article 69 to require the President to submit a National Public Security Strategy to the Senate in his or her first year in office. (A reform to Article 76 says that if the Senate does nothing, then it should be considered approved);

Reforms Article 73 to require that electoral fraud be punishable by prison. More profoundly, should there be a “coalition government” (see reforms to Article 89 below) then Congress will gain the ability to approve all cabinet ministers save the heads of the Department of Defense (e.g., the Army) and the Department of the Navy;

Reforms Article 74 to make the finance minister require approval by a vote of the Chamber of Deputies;

Reforms Article 83 to shorten the lame-duck transition from five months to three, moving the date the president takes office from December 1 to October 1;

Reforms Article 89 to explicitly allow for coalition governments. It also states that cabinet nominees will assume office when they are nominated; should Congress fail to ratify their position they will then step down. The exact text of the new section is worth translating:

Section XVII: At whatever moment the President may opt for a coalition government with one or several of the political parties represented in the Congress of the Union. The coalition government shall be regulated by its respective convention and program, which shall be approved by a majority of the members present in each chamber of the Congress of the Union. The convention shall establish the causes under which the coalition government shall be dissolved.

Reforms Article 102 to make the Attorney General into an independent post appointed for a nine year term from a list of candidates approved by a two-thirds vote of the Senate … although, contradictorily, it also allows the President to remove him or her at will subject only to getting one-third of Congress to agree;

Reforms Article 115 to allow county mayors to serve two terms, among other reforms designed to insure cleaner local elections.

We are unconvinced that the ease on re-election will have a transformative effect on Mexican politics, especially since California-style legislative term limits will remain in place. In fact, other than the federalization of all elections (something the United States should imitate) it is not clear that any of these changes are particularly major, save possibly the idea of the coalition government. (Which still seems a little odd.)

But perhaps we are wrong and this is bigger than it looks! Thoughts?

A brief recap of the politics of energy (read: hydrocarbon) reform in Mexico

Mexico’s three parties split three ways on constitutional reform.

1. The PRI wants a modest reform that will let Pemex sign joint ventures to develop offshore fields and possibly expand gas and tight oil production on land.
2. The PRD wants no constitutional reform, but wants to cut taxes on Pemex and turn it into a fully autonomous profit-driven corporation. (Or so they say.)
3. The PAN wants to throw open the Mexican hydrocarbon sector, making it look more like Brazil or Colombia. It also wants to reform the way the federal government profits from the sector, imposing a scheme that looks almost exactly like the Alaska Permanent Fund, only with the profits going to the government rather than to individuals.

Interestingly, the PAN introduced its reform before the President, moving on July 31, 2013. President Peña sent his proposal to the Senate on August 12. (The PRD published its relatively vague statement a week after the President, on August 19.) 

Public opinion is at best unclear.  In September, polls showed 52% of the population in favor of the President’s proposal, but only 15% “strongly” favored the reforms. Moreover, 61% opposed allowing Pemex to sign profit-sharing contracts with private companies. 

So how is the battle shaking out? First, the PRI and PAN wound up at loggerheads over a new tax bill. The PAN walked out over last-minute provisions raising the top income tax bracket from 30% to 35%, a hike in the border state VAT to 16% from 11%, and a 5% tax on junk food. (The maquiladora industry also screamed that they would now have to apply for a VAT rebate rather than simply not paying it.) The final bill had to be passed with PRD support.

Now the PAN insists that it will only support energy reform if the PRI agrees to a series of political reforms. (You can find the detailed constitutional proposal at this link. Among much else, it includes the re-election of senators (once) and deputies (3x) and a run-off presidential election should nobody garner 40%+ of the vote. President Peña got 39% last year.)

With PRD support off the table, there are two possibilities. The first is that the PRI holds firm against political reform, but swings right on energy. We wind up with more radical reform akin to the one in the previous paragraph. The second is that the PRI relents on political reform, figuring that it still will (a) have a good shot at the presidency; and (b) be able to maintain control over its congressional delegation even with term-limited re-election. 

My prediction is the second. The PAN reform is still a large bone for public opinion to swallow. It could easily trigger mass demonstrations, or worse. Moreover, the benefits would be limited, at least in petroleum. Foreign companies will still likely want to form joint-ventures with Pemex in the deepwater, and onshore development is likely to move slowly even under a new PAN regime.

Moreover, from the point of view of your average Mexican, it does not matter if the PAN is correct! Let’s assume that its reforms trigger a massive tight oil boom in northern Mexico, a veritable explosion of hydrocarbons. After all, the northern range is an extension of the Eagle Ford shale. Well, estimated breakevens in the Eagle Ford are $75-$85 per barrel. Many of the big companies have failed to make it work in South Texas. The implication is that even if production explodes, there will not be huge windfalls to tax away. Now, gas production could be a different story. Mexico needs natural gas. But the faster and easier way to decrease gas prices in Mexico is to import more from the United States.

That means that the PAN reform will be, in the short-term, all political cost and no benefit. It is hard to see the PRI signing on to that, especially since it is not clear that the PRI shares the long-term vision.

The most probable outcome is something like the PRI reform, tied to political reform. The less likely outcome is that the PRI tacks right to give us a radical Panista reform. It is also possible that nothing will happen, and we will get something like the PRD reform.

Call me in a few months, tell me how I did.

Not-so-transitory articles in the PAN reform

In theory, the transitory articles in Mexican constitutional amendments are self-executing temporary orders designed to insure that the amendment is actually implemented. In other words, they are transitory: once executed, they are obsolete

To my lay eye, some of the transitory articles in the proposed Panista energy reform do not look particularly transitory. The notable offenders are articles 4, 5, 6, 11, and 16. It would logically appear that either they are not transitory, or they are close to meaningless, the Mexican equivalent of a signing statement.

Other transitory articles, it would seem, are transitory in that they refer to a single Congressional implementing action ... but it would also seem that some of them should not actually be transitory. For example, Article 9 gives Pemex a preference as an operator over other companies. Except, well, if its transitory then future Congresses could change the resulting law, no?

Finally, Article 7 requires both the current president and the next one to execute a ten-year program designed to take the federal government’s dependency on oil revenues from today’s ~59% of current revenues to half of the investment earnings of the Oil Fund. I guess that is transitory, but over 10 years? Moreover, after those ten years the 50%-of-Fund-earnings appears to be a permanent cap. So why is that not in the main text?

Transitory articles are not mentioned in the body of the Constitution, so no help there. Which must mean one of three things. (1) Transitory articles are not really transitory; (2) Transitory articles are transitory, but contain a lot of meaningless verbiage; or (3) I am really not understanding something.

The answer is (3), of course. Are there any lawyers here who can explain?

Is American democracy doomed?

Juan Linz has gotten a lot of well-deserved attention in the blogosphere recently. Linz wrote that presidential regimes tend to break down because of irreconciliable conflicts between the executive and the legislature.

Many observers, not least Matt Yglesias, have interpreted Linz as stating that the problem is that presidential system allow for gridlock between the executive and the legislature, especially when the parties are ideologically coherent and commited. Kind of like, uh, the modern United States. So are we doomed now that our parties have become European-style organizations?

Well, maybe. The cross-country data is mildly supportive of the presidentialism = bad hypotesis, but is by no means a slam-dunk. Moreover, while presidential regimes are more likely to break down there is really rather little evidence that the reason was gridlock between the executive and the legislature.

The closest parallel to the current American situation is Chile in the early 1970s — but it is not very close. In the 1969 election, the People’s Union (Unidad Popular) got 60 out of 150 seats in the lower house. The Christian Democrats got 57 and the National Party received 33.  The next year, Salvador Allende (the People’s Union candidate) won a plurality of the presidential vote, throwing the election to Congress, where he won with Christian Democratic support. (The Nixon Administration tried to prevent his election but failed.) Allende started a program of widespread nationalizations using existing legal authority under a 1932 law that allowed for the temporary requisition of basic goods when in the public interest. (The law also allowed the executive to put companies into temporary receivership should they be closed by a strike.) In October 1972, the Supreme Court ordered the President to obey lower-court orders overturning some of the nationalizations; Allende refused.

In March 1973, the opposition won the Congressional elections. The Christian Democrats aligned with the National Party to form the Democratic Confederation, which took 55.6% of the popular vote and 87 out of 150 seats. (The People’s Union got the rest.) Congress first attempted to amend the constitution, which failed. It then tried to impeach Allende, but could not get the requisite ⅔ majority. In May, the Supreme Court again reprimanded the President. At this point, Congress went on record asking for a coup. The coup happened on September 11, and its leaders proceeded to disband Congress and jail or “disappear” many of the legislators who had called on the military.

In short, the Chilean crisis was caused by a President who overstepped his authority and disobeyed the Supreme Court and resolved by a military that believed itself above the law. Suffice it to say that this does not characterize America’s current situation.

What about Argentina? Well, Argentina has had a lot of coups since the first one in 1930. In 1930, President Hipólito Yrigoyen’s party had comfortable majorities in both houses. The 1943 coup was against a dictatorship. The 1955 coup overthrew the elected Juan Perón — but Perón’s party controlled Congress by overwhelming margins. As in 1930, gridlock was not the issue. In 1962, the miltary overthrew President Arturo Frondizi: in that case, the prompt was Frondizi’s loss of several governorships to the Peronists in the ’62 elections. Again, gridlock was not the issue. The 1966 coup kinda sorta maybe if you squint could be gridlock-related — but really had more to do with President Arturo Illia’s confrontation with American oil companies. And 1976? That one was against President Isabel Perón’s supposed inability to defeat Communist guerrillas. Her coalition controlled Congress; once again, gridlock was not the issue.

What about Brazil? Well, the Revolution of 1930 took down an oligarchical government with an extremely limited electorate. Not really comparable. The 1964 coup knocked out a left-wing government with American support. It is true that Congress did not support President João Goulart. It is also true, however, that for his first three years Goulart presided over a parliamentary system in which power resided with Prime Minister Tancredo Neves. In 1963, a referendum restored President Goulart’s executive power: the result was paralysis. In that sense, the ’64 democratic breakdown is consistent with the hypothesis that presidentialism causes gridlock causes democratic failure. The problem is that the parliamentary system tried beforehand was doing no better at resolving the country’s political conflicts.

Colombia? Well, the 1953 coup happened after President Laureano Gómez seized dictatorial power. Gómez, in turn, won the 1950 election because the opposition boycotted it. Again, gridlock not the problem.

Let’s turn then to Mexico. Uh … no, let’s not. The 1910 revolution got started against a dictatorship. Porfirio Díaz government was many things, but gridlocked was not one of them. (In fact, Congressional votes were all unanimous after 1893.)

I could go on around the other countries of the Western Hemisphere, but the pattern is similar. Divided government is not the cause of most democratic breakdowns in Latin America. Chile 1973 is the closest, but that is one event, with little resemblance to the government-by-crisis currently affecting the United States.

So breathe easy America! We will get through this. How, you ask? Well, if the GOP keeps this up, it will lose a lot of elections, even with our gerrymandered House of Representatives ... and there is a lot of ruin in the United States. The worst-case scenario on the debt ceiling is pretty bad, and I would certainly a 5-10% fall in GDP and the corresponding human suffering a failure of the United States. But in the unlikely event that the Republicans take us there, they will not be in a position to take us there again.

Senatus delenda est

The news from Europe today concerns the birth of the new British royal heir. I actually don’t think the news is that big: the only place my wife and I have heard it discussed is on television. That’s it. None of the nurses in her hospital have mentioned it. None of the cops I meet in the morning could care less. Ditto the gym, the coffeehouse, the sports bar. Zero zip nada except for Chris Matthews.

More important political news from Italy has been obscured. It seems as though the current Italian government wants to neuter the Senate.

The official position of this blog is that Senates are a bad thing. Of the ones reviewed here, the U.S. and the Philippines have the worst; Argentina’s and Brazil’s are pretty bad; Canada’s is redeemed only by its relative lack of authority. Only Mexico and Colombia have halfway-decent upper houses, and even those are still halfway-indecent.

On paper, the Italian senate is not terrible. Each region gets a number of seats proportional to its population. The coalition with the most votes (even if not a majority) in the region then gets 55% of the seats from that region. Bizarrely, the national voting age is 18, but for the Senate it is 25.

But in practice, it’s a problem. In the lower house the coalition with a plurality of votes automatically gets at least 55% of the seats. The government therefore has an automatic majority. (In most parliamentary systems the government usually gets a majority, although not always. Minority governments are generally considered a problem and usually short-lived.) In the Senate, however, the government is not guaranteed a majority. Unless a coalition can be cobbled together, you run the risk of having the government collapse. Moreover, even when a government is formed, bicameralism slows down decision-making.

So now the current Italian government is trying to neuter the upper house! I approve. How can they do that, might one ask? Well, simply, if the Senators believe that replacing the Senate with a weaker body is in the interest of their party, then they will vote for the reform.

Nonetheless, success is unlikely ... but it sure beats the way the Canadian government wants to strengthen its Senate.

“Politics is costly & Africa had to pay that price”

I just read a very good essay by Andrew Mwenda in a Ugandan newspaper. (I am not in Uganda.) Here is the conclusion:

Could post independence governments in Africa have performed better? Perhaps, but at a price; they should have aimed at preserving their limited capacity; using it only sparingly. Instead, most governments in Africa moved fast to elaborate public functions. Botswana avoided this mistake perhaps because it had had an almost absentee colonial state. This could have reduced the demands for rapid africanisation. But acting like Botswana would have been a purely technical response to what was actually a burning political problem.

The nationalist struggle for independence emerged to challenge legally sanctioned exclusion of Africans from state power outside of traditional institutions in colonial Africa. That was its fuel. Upon independence, the first demand therefore was rapid africanisation. Although technically disastrous, it was politically popular. The second demand was derived from the first. Africans wanted to take public services to the wider population. Few governments would have survived by resisting this demand.

Political pressure for africanisation undermined the meritocratic systems of external recruitment and internal promotion that allowed the civil service to uphold its high standards. Rapid elaboration of functions without existing capacity made a bad situation worse. What was politically right was technically disastrous. And in our ethnically heterogeneous polities, promoting social inclusion – even on the face of things – was more politically desirable than sustaining technical competence. The problem is that it eroded competence and allowed cronyism and corruption to flourish. Politics is costly and Africa had to pay that price.

Many African elites focus on technical failures in Africa and ignore the political compromises that brought that failure. In other words, the price of political compromise was technical failure. It is possible that if such compromises had not been struck, many states in Africa would have collapsed under the weight of civil war. It is remarkable that African leaders who inherited fictions of states left behind by colonial rule were successful at creating a common national consciousness. This has sustained the sovereignty and territorial integrity of these nations. Today, few states in Africa have fallen apart like Somalia. In others, the state may not be omnipresent yet, but the concept of nationhood has gained a lot of ground.

Click the link and read the whole thing!

I find this a fascinating hypothesis. How to test it? Ted Miguel provides partial evidence from the Kenya-Tanzania border. The border sliced through the same diversity of ethnic groups on both sides, yet villages on the Tanzanian side find it much easier to muster collective action and raise resources to provide public goods than otherwise identical Kenyan counterparts. Ted’s work, however, just indicates that nation-building strategies can work. It doesn’t quite get at Andrew Mwenda’s hypothesis.

I wish I saw an obvious way to operationalize the hypothesis. Calling Suresh Naidu! 

Colombia is not joining NATO, but it is an American ally

OK, I got some emails about Colombian membership in NATO. The rumors are true: President Santos did float a trial balloon about joining the organization. NATO, unsurprisingly, said no. NATO would have said no regardless, but it was useful that the North Atlantic Treaty states that new parties to the organization have to be in Europe. Article 10:

The Parties may, by unanimous agreement, invite any other European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area to accede to this Treaty. Any State so invited may become a Party to the Treaty by depositing its instrument of accession with the Government of the United States of America.

The country will sign a cooperation agreement with NATO, but it is still not clear what that means. NATO says, however, that all cooperation agreements are the same, and you can find out what the organization says about said cooperation here.

NATO member or not, Colombia and the U.S. are close allies. We have a free trade agreement. Small numbers of U.S. troops operate in-country. The Colombian supreme court overturned an agreement giving the U.S. access to Colombian bases (see page 39 of this CRS report) but the U.S. still builds facilities there. (The text of the agreement can be found here.)

And the U.S. is surprisingly popular. Here is Latinobarómetro’s 2009 results on the question, “Does the U.S. treat your country with respect?”

SIDE OBSERVATION #1: It is interesting that Venezuelans place themselves in a category with Uruguay and Brazil, and not with their Bolivarian comrades in Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina. My hypothesis is that it reflects Venezuelan polarization: all Venezuelans know that relations between the U.S. and Venezuela are bad, but many more Venezuelans take the American side than do their compatriots in the other big Bolivarian countries.

Here are the results to a general question on the state of bilateral relations:

Colombians do not see their relationship with the U.S. to be as good as do members of America’s near-abroad (like the D.R. and Panama) but they do see it as very good.

SIDE OBSERVATION #2: The Venezuelan results are consistent with my hypothesis: everyone knows that relations with the U.S. are terrible, but many of them blame their own government. 

SIDE OBSERVATION #3: A large subset of Mexicans are uniquely suspiscious of the United States, and uniquely prickly about national sovereignty. In fact, the U.S. treats Mexico with at least as much respect as Colombia (likely more) and relations are at least as good as with Colombia (likely better). But for understandable historical reasons, Mexicans don’t see it that way.

Finally, the Colombian results appear to hold over time. It is not just a phenomenon of the Obama-Santos relationship.

In short, even though Colombia will not be joining NATO, it has a uniquely close relationship with the United States. Moreover, that special relationship is supported by Colombian public opinion, and thus likely to endure.

None of this is to say that the U.S.-Colombian relationship is necessarily good for Colombia. The jury is out on that one, although if there is demand I will present some evidence that it just might be bad.

How Congress works ... in Colombia-with-an-“o”

In comments, Tzintzuntzan asks about the procedural rules in the Colombian congress. What are the rules by which the legislature makes the rules? Who controls them?

This is something often overlooked when Americans examine foreign countries. It’s an odd oversight, since procedural rules define American politics more than most places. In the Senate, the need to get 60% to pass anything is a procedural rule. In the House, the Speaker’s near dictatorial control over what bills get to the floor is a procedural rule. And don’t get me started on the baroque rules governing the conference committees that reconcile bills passed by both houses. In short, American politics is entirely incomprehensible if you don’t understand the procedural rules.

The same applies (albeit generally to a lesser extent) to other countries. If you don’t understand the rules by which the legislature makes the rules, then you can’t understand their politics.

Fortunately, Royce Carroll (Rice) and Mónica Pachón (Uniandes) have studied the issue for Colombia. Who controls the legislative agenda? Where are the vetoes?

The U.S. president, as Barack Obama knows all too well, cannot introduce legislation directly. Now, it is usually easy for a President to get a sympathetic legislator to introduce a bill, but he or she cannot force Congress to vote on it. Speaker Boehner or a coalition of forty Senators can kill anything before it even comes up for a vote.

Not so in Colombia! Here, the President can directly introduce legislation. Article 200 of the constitution (English here, Spanish here, and note that in context “gobierno” is used in the British sense and ought to be translated in American English as “administration”) lays out the authority:

1. Help draft the laws, present bills through ministers, exercise the right of objecting to them, and approve them in accordance with the Constitution.
2. Convoke the Congress to special sessions.
3. Present the national development and public investment plan, in accordance with the provisions in Article 150.
4. Send the budget bill of revenues and expenditures to the Chamber of Representatives.

This article has been interpreted very broadly.

In addition, the President can force votes on his or her bills within 30 days. In fact, they can force a vote within 15 days by invoking a joint session of Congress. Better yet, they can skip committees and insure that the House and Senate debate the same initial version of the bill.

But there is a snag. Bills can be amended on the floor. So the President needs to pay close attention to the legislative process in both chambers. If the House and Senate amend bills differently, then a conference committee will determine its final shape ... and the President of the Republic has no direct authority over the committee.

So who does? The answer: each chamber’s three-person Board of Directors. They are elected to one-year terms, by secret ballot. Each Board consists of one president and two vice-presidents, with (by tradition) the president coming from the majority coalition and the veeps from the largest minority parties. These guys serve pick the conference committee, and these are the guys that the President needs on board to get his or her bills through the Congress. In fact, they pick all committees, so getting any bills through Congress requires their assent.

The board presidents are, to get back to Tzin’s question, the equivalent of the U.S. Speaker. The one-year limit, however, insures that the Colombian congress produces no Willie Browns. Me, I think that is a bad thing, but mileage may vary.

What is the upshot? First, presidents in Colombia have a good-but-not-perfect legislative track record. (See page 17.) President Pastrana got 85% of his major bills passed. President Uribe got 79% passed in his first term, and 57% in his second. Presidential bills generally, however, take a lot longer than 30 days to pass: the average is actually 224.

Congress, however, maintains a lot of influence over the process. Carroll and Pachón calculated the proportion of characters that changed between the first version of a bill and the last. For presidential initiatives, 54% of the bill (among passed laws) changed throughout the process. For legislative initiatives, however, the proportion was only 26%. (See page 20.)

The unanswered question, however, is why presidential bills change more than Congressional ones. There are three hypotheses.

Hypothesis 1: The conference committees run the show. They change presidential bills more than ones introduced by their fellow congresspeople.

Hypothesis 1 is probably wrong, or at least incomplete. If it were correct, the changes to presidential bills should mostly happen in the conference committee. Conference committees, however, change only 14% of presidential bills. Most changes occur on the floor.

Hypothesis 2: The only kinds of congressional bills that can pass are uncontroversial motherhood issues.

Hypothesis 2 is also probably wrong. It is true that congressional bills usually fail: none passed under Pastrana and only 36% in Uribe’s first term. But congresspeople introduced such significant (and successful) pieces of legislation as the Violence Against Women Act, the Congressional Ethics Act, and a law allowing the confiscation of property from convicted criminals.

Hypothesis 3: The Board of Directors exercise control early on over congressional bills, but though means other than the conference committee. (Of course, the threat of an unfriendly conference committee might lead the executive to roll over on amendments earlier in the process.)

This one seems to fit the facts. The Board of Directors (in Spanish, the “mesa directiva”) are very powerful. Their power is limited, however, by the fact that they serve only one-year terms.

The upshot is that the President of Colombia can work even with the kinds of fragmented Congresses produced by Colombian electoral law as long as he can get a friendly Board of Directors. He can even work with the Senate. Barack Obama should be so lucky.

Tzin, does this answer your question?

But this is not to say that all is well with Colombian politics. More on that if there is interest.

Senates: Colombia

Finally, I will have a good thing to say about a senate!

This blog is on record trashing the senates of America, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, and the Philippines. It has been slightly kinder to the one of Mexico, but only slightly. So, finally, here is a senate that I can support.

Under the Constitution of 1991, Colombia has two houses. The House of Representatives is elected by district. Each department gets two representatives, plus an additional one for every 250,000 people. The representatives, however, are not elected from geographic districts. Rather, they are elected by proportional representation at the level of the department. For example, Bogotá divvies up its 18 representatives according to the percentage of the vote taken by each party in Bogotá. La Guajira, then, does the same thing with its two representatives. (The geographic division of the 164 representatives can be found here.)

The 100 members of the Senate (actually 102, since two Senators represent indigenous communities) are also elected by proportional representation, but according to their percentage of the national vote. Voters vote separately for the two chambers.

Now there may be problems. First, proportional representation might not be the best way to organize a legislature under a presidential system — but given the train-wreck that is the American legislature, I would hesitate to make big claims about that. Moreover, Colombia is a country where it is vital that small political minorities receive direct representation.

Second, the actual system of proportional representation used is one of the worst (see page 6 here) advantaging small parties. Basically, they divide the number of votes cast by the number of seats. That becomes the magic number. Every party that gets above that number gets a seat. If it gets more than twice the magic number it gets two. More than three times the magic number, then it gets three. Any fractions over the magic number are thrown away. Then the smaller parties get any remaining seats in order of their vote tallies. Bigger parties get slightly fewer seats than they should and some tiny parties can sneak in. This is a problem for the smaller House districts, but does not really apply to the Senate, since the magic number there is a relatively small 1% of the total vote.

Finally, the benefit of a two-house legislature is unclear. There is a case that checks-and-balances are good, but multiple veto points can also empower minorities.

None of these three objections strike me as compelling.

Colombian politics has a lot of problems, of course. (Is there interest in the recent politics of Bogotá?) And in a perfect world I would not pick the Colombian system for the United States. (Although I would take it over our own crazier system in a heartbeat!) But similar to the way Mexico has made its Senate more functional by using proportional representation to dilute its undemocratic features, Colombia has made its Senate more functional by using proportional representation to make it more democratic.

But I will say that the problems of Colombian politics owe little to the constitutional design of the Senate. (These political scientists agree: their reforms mostly involve changes to electoral law, not constitutional design.) Moreover, in some ways the Senate is better designed than the House. So, finally, an upper house in the Americas that I can support.

At least sort of. The idea that legislators can vote by secret ballot strikes me as nuts. But that problem applies to both Colombian chambers, not just the Senate.

I am a very new observer of Colombian politics. Thoughts?

Should Colombia chop three zeros off the peso?

UPDATE (June 13): The Santos administration just announced that it intends to redenominate the currency by the end of 2014.

President Juan Manuel Santos has long wanted to chop three zeros off the Colombian peso, which trades around 1,800 to the dollar. Except for Paraguay, the next weakest in Latin America are the colón and the Chilean peso, which bounce around 500. (Wikipedia has a list of the smallest-value currency units here.) In October 2011, the proposal failed in the Senate by a vote of 41-15. In September 2012, the President reopened the idea, but by February 2013 it was clear that it was not going to happen in this legislative session. The idea remains current, however, and I will not be surprised if it comes back after the peace talks with the FARC are sorted out.

Redenominating the currency is not crazy: France got rid of two zeros in 1960; Israel revalued by a factor of 1,000 in 1986 as did Russia in 1998; Peru hacked off six zeros when the sol replaced the inti in 1991; the next year Argentina cut four zeros off when the peso replaced the austral; Mexico sliced off three in 1993; Turkey hacked off six in 2005; Mozambique redenominated by three orders of magnitude in 2006; Ghana introduced a new cedi at 10,000-to-1 in 2007; and Venezuela chopped off three in 2008 with the introduction of the bolívar fuerte.

The direct cost of introducing a redenominated currency would not be insignificant. In 2010, the Colombian government estimated it around $123 million. (In a sign of the problem with high-denomination currencies, that number turned into $123 thousand on an English-language website!) Printing new bills is cheap: 84% of the cost would come from minting new coins. There would also be an additional $32 million spent in advertising and explaining the change, for a total cost of $155 million.

(Side note: in Ghana, coins were basically out of circulation by the time the government proposed redenominating the cedi. Since coins had to be reintroduced anyway, the monetary cost of redenominating was tiny.)

So why bother? The issue is understudied, but the economics literature (such as it is) focuses on credibility. Few currencies (I am tempted to say none) are denominated in hundreths or thousandths of a euro for long-standing historical reasons. Rather, it comes about either because of a burst of triple-digit inflation (say, Mexico in the 1980s), outright hyperinflation (say, Argentina) or a long period of relatively moderate double-digit inflation (like Colombia; see the below chart.)

So the big economic reason to redenominate, then, is to reiterate that the inflationary period is over, kaputsky, finis. Over here, the Banco Central de Venezuela states four reasons that boil down to making mental math easier and one which says “Leave behind the consequences the history of inflations of the past had on the currency.”

Layna Mosley at UNC-Chapel Hill tried to figure out why countries redenominate. She hypothesized that credibility might be a reason, of course, but she also thought that conservative governments would be also be more likely to redenominate for reasons of national pride. Her evidence was supportive, but not compelling.

Colombia, however, mostly fits her model. (You can read the Colombian authorities’ reasons for wanting to change.) In addition to standard discussions about credibility and easier math, the central bankers mentioned the feel-good pride effect from having a serious currency valued at around half a dollar (or euro or real) instead of some teeny tiny amount. “There is possibly a positive psychological impact since it reduces the gap between local and foreign currency denominations.”

That fits the Mosley model. The final reason, however, does not:

“A countrywide redenomination exercise would also mean all citizens had to exchange their currency, and this could potentially shed light on the country's vast shadow economy. It is thought that drug cartels which operate in Colombia trade mainly with greenbacks. However, officials do not have any definitive figures that prove the extent to which pesos are used in drug trade, and a wide-scale currency exchange could help in this respect.”

And that, ultimately, is why I think Colombia should redenominate.

Why I am in Colombia: Spreading the word on the resource curse, or lack thereof

I am in Colombia for many reasons. One is to start a big research project. Another is because I like the country. But the main one was to attend a conference on mining put on by the Universidad de los Andes.

El Tiempo reported on the conference. Here is a translation of part of their report:

“In his presentation, Noel Maurer, a professor at Harvard Business School, said ‘there is no curse’ from the resources created by mining discoveries. For him, there is no evidence from any country where either democracy or development has severely deteriorated after an increase in income generated by mining activity.”

That is worded a little more strongly than I would like (you can find some evidence of a resource curse in Nigeria and Zambia, and it is unlikely that the 1997 crisis would have unseated Suharto at a time of high mineral prices) but it does about sum up my opinion. To be fair to El Tiempo, they added my caveat in this tweet.

Lina Holguin of Oxfam-Québec tweeted in response to my caveat, “Congo, Chad and Niger...????” I would answer by saying that while all three countries are poor and unstable, there is no evidence that they would be less poor or less unstable without natural resources ... with an additional caveat that natural resources may have increased violence in particular regions of Congo. Possibly.

El Tiempo also tweeted a few other quotes from yours truly. First: “The decrease in Venezuelan democracy started before the oil boom.” Second, a somewhat misquoted, “No resource boom has affected countries rich in resources.” (I am mildly unhappy with that one: my argument was only about democratic stability.) Third: “Colombia ought to avoid wasting the current mining boom.”

While my discussion was about democracy, that last quote is correct: lots of countries have blown resource booms, leaving them no better off than they entered. Colombia should avoid that. Of course, that is something easier said than done!

Finally, let me end by presenting the (weak) evidence for a resource curse in Zambia.The red line measures the country’s Polity score, a commonly-accepted measure of democracy. The blue line measures the government’s real direct income from the copper industry; the green line measures the percentage of government revenues from copper.

Zambia’s polity score dropped precipitously between 1968 and 1972, while copper revenues boomed. The country then democratized in 1991, after a period of prolonged low copper prices. The argument would be that copper revenues made it easier for Kaunda to establish a one-party state, while the period of low prices was essential to see the fall of that state.

The rub, of course, is that lots of countries in Africa followed the same trend around the same time. (See the below chart.) But you cannot rule out a curse for Zambia.

The Bolivarian Revolution starts to consume itself

The Boston bombings  have understandably sucked the oxygen out of foreign news coverage. (The mother of one of the victims works at my university. A friend and colleague of mine finished the race shortly before the blasts, but was thankfully already headed home on the T when they happened.) To compensate, in my own small way, I will post a short update about the violent post-election confusion in Venezuela.

Violence broke out after the elections. I cannot say who was responsible, although government supporters seem to be responsible for much. President Maduro has withdrawn his offer to recount the votes; the Supreme Court has now ruled that out. Justice Luisa Morales stated, “In Venezuela the system is absolutely automatic, in such a way that manual recounts don’t exist.”

That is bizarre, since one of the great things about Venezuelan elections is that absolutely the system is set up to allow manual recounts.

Even more bizarrely, the government issued and then suspended arrest warrants for opposition leaders, including Henrique Capriles. In the face of government threats, Capriles wisely called off demonstrations. 

I do not think that Venezuela is headed towards civil unrest. I do think that the Maduro government is in the process of destroying its own legitimacy. This will not end explosively, thank the Lord, but it will not end well.

How Venezuelan voting operates

 

I said yesterday that Venezuela had an excellent voting system. I did not explain how or why. So here is Caracas Chronicles with a great explanation! From them:

1. You vote at an electronic machine;
2. The machine prints a voucher, which you drop in a ballot box;
3. The machines prints a tally of the votes at the end of the day;
4. The machine sends the tallies to Caracas;
5. 54% of tables are tallied on the spot, with hand-counts of the vouchers in front of witnesses.

You end with three tallies: the electronic record, the machine print-outs, and the vouchers. Hard to cheat, and easy to recount. (There are rumors of vouchers found dumped in the trash. We will see. I am skeptical.)

Voting is one thing that the Bolivarian Republic does very well, much better than its predecessors.

Florida should be so lucky.

Maduro wins in Venezuela by a razor-thin and doubtful margin ... but Capriles should accept it

Holy cow! I just fired up ye olde web browser, to discover that Nicolás Maduro was still the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela ... by a margin of 1.59%. He eked out a bare majority of 50.66% of the vote.

That’s not a good result. It may even be the second-worst possible result. (A narrow win by the opposition, under Henrique Capriles, would have been the worst possible result, albeit an extremely unlikely one.) Capriles as already fired a salvo: “We alert the country and the world of the intention to try and change the will expressed by the people.” (The tweet no longer seems to be up.)

The bad side is that the result will be challenged. Venezuela actually has a rather good voting system. The electronic machines record a paper ballot, which is saved, so manual recounts are possible. I get worried, however, when the president of the electoral commission declares a close result to be “irreversible.”

This second-worst result can be turned into the best possible result, however. All Capriles has to do is accept it and admit defeat.

Simply put, the Venezuelan economy is full of ticking time bombs. Why be in office as they start to go off? Let the Socialist Party take the responsibility for the mess they have caused.

Why Cyprus won’t leave the eurozone

If I were the president of Cyprus, knowing the little that I know right now, I would take the country out of the Eurozone. But that is not a no-brainer. There would be a lot of losers. Cyprus should leave the euro, but it won’t, because the losers outweigh the winners in the short run.

Who would be the losers from leaving the euro?

1. Savers with less than €100,000. Right now, their savings are untouched. True, they can’t move those savings off the island, but the chances are good that they will eventually. And the banks have reopened, even if cash withdrawals are limited.
2. Creditors. They would either be repaid in devalued Cypriot pounds or face the possibility of huge write-offs under a new super-lenient bankruptcy law.
3. The employed. “Say what?” you ask? Well, consider. My grandfather kept his job during the Great Depression. As a result, he made enough money to move from Crown Heights to the then suburban-paradise of Jamaica, Queens, plus a second house in Miami Beach. The reason was that deflation drove up the value of wages and assets for those who managed to hold on to them. I doubt that Cyprus is in for as punishing a deflation, but deflation it will be. Moreover, the Mexican and Argentine experience shows that one of the ways in which devaluation works its recovery magic is by falls in real wages. Argentine wages fell by almost a fifth in the two years after the devaluation. Cyprus imported 47% of its GDP in 2010, compared to only 12% in Argentina in 2000, the year before it left the American monetary union. It’s even higher than in Mexico, which imported 22% in 1994, before its big (and devastating) devaluation. Given the scale of imports, the fall in Cypriot real wages from devaluation is likely to be rather worse than in Argentina or Mexico.
4. Debtors to foreigners … possibly. There would be a legal nightmare if Cyprus reintroduced the pound. Locally-owed debts could be poundified, but foreign debts could not. Any attempt to do so would lead to a rash of lawsuits. I would not worry that reintroducing the pound would lead to Brussels throwing Cyprus out of the E.U. … but I would worry that forced poundification of foreign debts just might.

OK, so who wins?

1. The unemployed. Of course, the unemployed will have to grow to a rather large number for them to provide a big enough interest group to matter. There’s a reason Argentina didn’t devalue until 2001, despite three years of depression.
2. The soon-to-be-unemployed. OK … but the woman whose wages collapse and can no longer afford to send her daughter to the U.K. for university is not going to vote based on what would have happened. In a world like that, President Obama would have won re-election with LBJ-like margins. We do not live in that world.
3. Bankers. Yes, bankers! Both their debts and the liabilities will be poundified, at least if the Cypriots are a little bit smarter about it than the Argentines. (And even in Argentina, the courts plus politics eventually helped the banks out.) They will have a bigger problem with their non-deposit liabilities, but they are going to have that problem as the Cypriot economy collapses regardless. More importantly, the new Cypriot central bank will be able to print pounds in order to help the banks out.
4. The tourism industry. Cyprus has a population that’s barely twice that of Barbados; there’s no question that tourism could sustain a high-wage developed economy. The problem is that they would be betting on tourism in an environment in which the rest of Europe is either in or sliding into recession. The tourism boom could take rather longer to get going than the post-1994 manufacturing boom in Mexico or the post-2001 agricultural boom in Argentina.
5. Debtors to foreigners … possibly. If the Cypriot government is willing to protect them from creditors (all creditors, foreign and domestic, in order to remain in the E.U.) or bail them out via cheap pound loans, then they could do surprisingly well out of a situation that one would otherwise expect should be disastrous;
6. Other debtors: inflation is good for debtors.

How will this political logic look by the 2018 election? Well, I’m pretty sure that it will look like staying in the euro was a bad decision. In that sense, I would advise President Anastasiades to leave the euro now and bet on re-election on the wave of a giant economic boom by the time the next presidential election rolls around.

The problem is that it is not at all clear that such a move will look great by the time of the next legislative election in 2016. There are a lot of short-term losers, and they are politically powerful.

In fact, given the opposition, a new currency may be impossible. The president of Cyprus is powerful, but he cannot unilaterally introduce a new currency. There would have to be wide support for such a move. The problem is that most of the soon-to-be-unemployed won’t give it, the bankers are unlikely to act in their self-interest (this is oddly true of American bankers, I should add), and those who owe debts to foreigners can only be appeased by radical changes in Cypriot bankruptcy law. (It is currently very strict; e.g., creditor-friendly.)

While leaving the euro looks like a clear decision at first glance — two-thirds of Cypriots support it! — the politics rapidly gets blurry by the second and third look. Argentina left the American monetary union after a punishing depression had reduced the economy to barter; Mexico’s president could unilaterally devalue (and pretty much had no other option by that point). Leaving the euro would almost certainly lead to a richer and stabler Cyprus by 2018 … but the above analysis, superficial as it is, makes me think that you can’t get there from here.

Cyprus will have a long and grinding depression, but it will not (unlike Argentina) be reduced to barter because the ECB will provide just enough liquidity to insure that does not happen. Things will get awful, but probably never quite awful enough to get the government to take the logical step. It’s a tragedy for the Cypriot people, but an entirely understandable one.

Is power really ending? A preview of Moisés Naím’s new book

Moisés Naím has an interesting new book coming out: The End of Power. Its argument that power (conventionally declined) is decaying is incontrovertible ... but I worry from this preview that the author is conflating too many different things to create a useful framework.  

1. The American problem is super-simple to understand. Combine parliamentary parties with the Constitution (written and unwritten: the filibuster and all that) and you have a recipe for paralysis; 
2. Ditto the European problem. The E.U. is riven with veto points and lacks a real demos, but it has a currency. So they cannot even figure out to create a common deposit insurance scheme, let alone a real transfer union. The diagnosis is not rocket science nor  is the problem unprecedented; 
3. Piracy and organized crime are frightening ... but sideshows and being dealt with. Moreover, neither affects serious states inside their borders. 

There is an argument to be made that the world is facing global problems without a global government. This “governance” thing is failing to compensate; the one international institution that resembles an actual federal government (the E.U.) is still much too weak. But that argument leaves out problem (1). To shoehorn current American political paralysis into his argument, Naím will need a theory to tie the rise of ideological disciplined parties to some greater global force.

Naím appears to be trying to create a theory about the decline of all kinds of centralized power ... but it is not clear that centralized power is declining. Take the examples in the linked-to essay. None of them are clear-cut. Corporate CEOs do churn more than ever before ... but CEOs and the owners of capital get an ever-higher share of income. The BP oil spill did hit the BP share price more than the Exxon Valdez spill hit Exxon ... but the Gulf spill was a far far far far bigger disaster. France did pull out of Afghanistan after a few green-on-blue attacks ... but was not an important part of the U.S. coalition and Paris went on to occupy northern Mali a few years later.

Let me be clear: I think that Naím is an important thinker who is on to something important. I do not think the world is the same as it was in, say, 1980. But from what I see in the precis, I worry that this book will not explain (or even properly define) the difference.

I have posted about the tendency among popular academics to lurch between the extremes of “We Have Seen It All Before” to “Everything is Different Now!” That post mentioned Stratfor as an example of how the former mindset can lead to some head-scratching conclusions. I am hopeful that the new book from Naím will avoid the latter, but the essay gives some reason to worry.

A review of a science fiction novel

A friend of mine, James Nicoll, asked me and a few other mutual amigos to review a self-published science fiction novel: Through Struggle, The Stars, by John Lumpkin. Somewhat reluctantly, I downloaded and read it. To my surprise, I enjoyed the read while remaining unconvinced by the scenario. I will also put up my friends reviews (all written separately). Here (with one change) is mine:

Through Struggle, The Stars is much better than a self-published novel has any right to be. It’s a tale of a war in the year 2140 between China and Japan, told through the eyes of a new officer in the United States Space Force. The USSF — which has inexplicably adopted naval ranks and conventions despite the name — exists to defend both the terrestrial United States and its interstellar colonies. The setting is hard science fiction, in the sense that the only gimme is a system of wormholes to allow interstellar travel. No aliens; space vessels rotate for gravity; and while they use fusion engines that we have no idea how to build the accelerations involved are tiny. The politics aren’t self-evidently silly and the populations of the colony worlds are sensibly low. In fact, it reads like the kind of novel that I tried to write as a teenager, only well-crafted.

From the tone of the above paragraph, I’m sure that you can guess that my overall review is going to be negative. Since the book has a lot of positive qualities, let me start with them. First and foremost, I kept reading! I am not the sort of person who finishes every book he starts. In fact, I finish only a small minority of them. Most of my reading is work-related nonfiction and thus mostly skimmed. As for novels, I’m a high-friction reader: the moment I have to work to maintain my attention, my reading speed drops quickly — and it takes very little to get me to quit. This novel I did not quit. That is an extremely good thing. 

Second, I very much liked how the majority of the American characters had Spanish last names. Finally, somebody who thinks about demographics! I also liked that they threw in Spanish catch-phrases, but just as that: catch phrases. That is exactly how Spanish survives after several generations. We learn (from a Senate vote) that the United States has at least 52 states by 2140 and the author opens the possibility that Cuba might be one of them. Normally, that would get my “silly future cliché” alert up, but the allusion is simply that one enlisted USSF person has Havana for a home town. That would be possible today. While I do not believe that Cuba will ever become part of the United States it is supremely easy to believe that the country will continue to have a “special relationship” with the mainland, up to and including free migration. So the throwaway line didn’t desuspend my disbelief — after all, add Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia and you’ve got 52 right there.

The characters were believable, if somewhat clichéd. Actually, “clichéd” isn’t the right word. They were believable enough for me to care about them (and therefore keep reading) but they weren’t distinct enough for me to really remember any details. The one exception was a Chinese gangster-turned-intelligence-agent, and he stuck with me because I didn’t really ever believe in him. He wasn’t a cliché by any means; he just seemed too much like an agent of the plot, a character created by “The Narrative” rather than a real person who naturally found himself involved with the other people in the book. (The phrase in quotes is a reference to Scalzi’s Redshirts.)

The politics were well-handled … but lacking. First, the portrayal of China as a quasi-democracy felt wrong. Such regimes first appeared in Latin America in the late-nineteenth century; they quickly collapsed (via coups or civil wars) or turned into full-on dictatorships. That pattern continued through the 20th century with a third wrinkle: several of the quasi-democracies turned quickly into real democracies. Mexico’s second dictatorship-in-drag collapsed in the 1990s; even in Turkey today, the “deep state” seems to be on its last legs. It strained my belief to think that China would be ruled by a century-old corrupt oligarchy 130 years from now. (A newly-minted corrupt oligarchy would be a different story.)

Second, the politics of the war were given disappointingly short shrift. It is indisputable that major inter-state war has gone into serious decline since 1945. It strikes me as very plausible that it could see a comeback. The novel provides a necessary condition: powerful directed-energy weapons make it at least plausible that politicians would believe that they could control the ladder of escalation. (The prevalence of robotic and precision weapons had a similar effect.) Logically, therefore, the war began as a limited conflict fought at sea and in space; one can imagine future audiences cheering on such a contest.

The problem is that there was something very pro forma about the backdrop. There is an interesting question about whether industrialized interstate war (limited or not) is possible in a modern democratic environment. Can modern democratic politicians capitalize on violence? Would modern audiences countenance unleashing death in their names for anything less than national survival? These questions are unaddressed. When the author reveals the reason the American president maneuvered the U.S. into the war, it comes as an anticlimax. (It depends on the FTL McGuffin.) There were some references to U.S. domestic opposition, but mostly in the context of “ethnic Chinese” congressmen objecting to a war with the madre patria. (Which is, I have to say, a silly idea — in a world where China has been rich for a century, there will be no discernable Chinese-American community have been little net immigration from China for at least as long. The descendents of past and current immigrants will have long since assimilated; second-generation outmarriage among Chinese-Americans currently tops 50%.) There is a subplot involving a Taiwanese independence movement that strained credibility. In short, the politics never became unbelievable — but they were underexplored.

Which brings me to the killer problem: the book read like it took place in 2012, 2030 on the outside. It was simply unbelievable as a depiction of life in 2140. The ground combat scenes, for example, read like they happened last week. (The main characters were a little too composed during the fighting, but that’s a different issue.) Sure, there were exoskeletons and lasers from space, but that felt like window-dressing. Nothing about microdrones, intelligent robotic “pack animals,” self-guided ammunition ... the tactics of ground combat were basically unchanged.

The same problem afflicted the rest of the book. There were passing mentions of self-driving vehicles, advanced drones, machine translation, advanced 3-D printing, computer interfaces implanted in people’s eyeballs and “the best genes that money could buy,” but none of that had any appreciable effect on the course of the action or the social background in which the characters operated. The author failed completely at giving the impression that the book took place in the future. Now, it is possible that the author is correct that by 2140 automation will advance, sensor technology improve, cyborgization continue, 3-D printing mature and gene modification become common among the rich ... yet with daily life remaining about the same as in 2012. (Along with military organizations, ground combat and democratic politics.) That is possible! And hell, as a small-c conservative, I would very much like it to be true. But it’s a tall order, and a writer who wants to keep my disbelief suspended needs to make the case. The author of this book does not even try.

As a coda, I had three other quibbles. First, while the space combat scenes seemed well thought through, I did have to wonder what all those people on board the ships were actually doing. Even if our 22nd-century space navies decide to keep human commanders in the loop rather than entrusting it all to the AI’s, one would think that the ships would operate with tiny stripped-down crews and lots of maintenance robots. If that’s wrong, I want to know why.

Second, the dynamics of space colonization didn’t make much sense, at least not on the surface. There wasn’t much commerce, so the motivation seemed to be non-economic. The few colonies we saw were not rich places, so there was some indication that the author realized the problem, but it wasn’t explicit. Nothing caused me to recoil, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something didn’t make sense about the scenario.

Lastly, there were a few dumb throwaways. A reference to helium-3 mining on the Moon. Ugh. A reference to asteroid mining. Slightly more plausible for a few rare elements, but double-ugh as something needed to power Earth industry. And then there was a major lacuna for a book about geopolitics: a bit about coastal protections for major cities was the only reference to global warming.

In short, the book succeeded as a yarn. But it failed as science fiction. Props for the Spanish last names, thinking through the dynamics of orbital combat, and avoiding (most) clichés. But minus for essentially writing “2012 in Space!” rather than something about the year 2140.

I would read other works by the author; he shows a lot of promise. I’m not sure that I would read other works set in the same universe, though. None of my objections require him to rewrite his background — just explore it in greater depth. The end result, however, won’t look much like the “2012 in Space” that we saw. Maybe Charlie Stross would let him bounce ideas around?

Comments welcome on any and all of the topics raised above.

Legalizing marijuana in Uruguay

So Colorado and Washington have legalized marijuana! This is a big step, although it is going to be a problem that the federal government still bans the substance.

Now, it looks like Uruguay might be the first country on Earth to fully legalize marijuana. (Or “marihuana,” as they spell it.) The Netherlands tolerates it, but it is not fully legal.

It is pretty neat that a serious country may legalize marijuana, but to give away the punchline, I doubt very much that it will be a harbinger of much until the American or Canadian federal government moves. There is a lot of opposition to legalization in Latin America, and Uruguay is not considered a bellweather. (It is one in practice, but that is more because Uruguay gets to the future first and less because other nations deliberately emulate the Eastern Republic.)

The bill is pretty vague. Here is the complete text:

“The State will assume control and regulation over the importation, production, acquisition in any form, storage, commercialization and distribution of marihuana and its derivatives, under such terms and conditions as fixed by regulation.

“Likewise, the State will undertake such material activities as are necessary before, during and after to carry out the activities referred to in the previous paragraph, under such terms and conditions as fixed by regulation.

“The activities referred to in the previous paragraphs shall be realized exclusively under a policy of damage reduction that shall, therefore, alert the population to the consequences and adverse effects of marihuana consumption, as well as the effects of minimizing the risks and damages to the population of potential consumers under such conditions as fixed by regulation.”

It is worth noting here that the Uruguayan president is quite a bit more powerful than the American president. (At least inside the country. Outside Uruguay, I do not believe that Mr. Mujica has the ability to order flying robots to kill anyone.) As long as his cabinet concurs, the Uruguayan president can send bills directly to Parliament. (Officially, the “General Assembly,” but everyone calls it Parliament.) In fact, under Article 168 the president can designate bills as urgent. “Urgent” bills must be approved or disapproved with 85 days or they automatically become law. The catch is that the president can only submit one urgent bill at a time.

The marihuana bill is not urgent.

So it is taking its own sweet time through Parliament. Of the six security measures proposed by the President (the marihuana deal is considered a security measure) the legislature has approved only one, which reduced sentences for low-level drug dealing while increasing the penalties for corruption. Right now, the marihuana bill is in a dicey spot. It can pass, but only with support from the President’s Broad Front. So far, only one opposition legislator has come out in support.  President Mujica seems reluctant to pass such a significant bill on a party-line vote.

In order to get support, the administration has announced what the regulations might look like after the bill is passed. The drug will cost ₱700 per gram, around US$36. That is higher than the U.S. price of $14 per gram, but roughly the price in Uruguay. (Since marijuana is still illegal, it is hard to come up with a standardized price, even for tolerated medical marijuana.) If the law passes, Uruguayan consumers will receive a photo ID armed with a photo and bar code (that is high tech?) and be limited to 40 grams a month.

To sum, the bill looks likely to pass, but it is still generating controversy.

But I would also bet that the Mexican government is going to consider legalization but do nothing until the U.S. federal government moves. There is a great deal of conservative opposition in Mexico, deeper and wider than in Uruguay, and with a weaker president and a divided Congress everything is tougher.

In fact, contrary to popular belief, a great book by Isaac Campos shows that opposition to marijuana actually originated inside Mexico; it was not imposed by international norms. The reverse actually: had Mexicans been less anti-marijuana, then the world might not have gone prohibitionist.*

Around the Revolution again

Hugo Chávez just won re-election by a convincing margin in Venezuela. If I may, my friend Francisco Rodríguez at Bank of America called it correctly. To be honest, although Capriles did have a few good poll results, most of them showed a Chávez win. Anyway, the Bolivarian Revolution will go on until 2019 , even if the President passes away in office in the meantime. His successor probably won’t be Vice-president Elías Jaua. If something happens to Chávez between now and January 10, 2017, a new election will be held within 30 days. If he passes away after that date, then the vice-president will take over, but the Veep serves at the pleasure of the President and there is no guarantee that the person in the office will be the person in the office then.

In Ecuador, meanwhile, the big news concerns Assange and Occidental. With the former, not a whole lot is likely to happen. The Ecuadorians are settling in for the long haul: it is an easy way for Correa to take an anti-imperialist posture and distract attention from press measures at home. Correa is ahead in the polls for the 2013 election, but there is a while yet.

What I love is that Rafael Correa is going to advise Tunisia about dealing with debt! That is awesome.

Bolivia is having a rougher time. Two different groups are in conflict over the mining industry: unionized employees and cooperative independent miners. Until June, the government could play a conciliatory role, with Glencore as the foreign villian. But by nationalizing the mines, Evo has lost his cat’s paw. Now he is smack in the middle of a fight between the union and the small independent miners, which is a bad place to be. Moreover, his nationalization fights are starting to go bad. He just told a Canadian silver mining firm to go hang, no compensation. Legal recourse is not the problem, since the investment happened after Bolivia left ICSID (although there are other options, see next paragraph). Rather, the problem is that the nationalization, like earlier ones, has put the government smack in the middle of a conflict between different local interests. This is trouble.

President Morales has made a habit of nationalizing something every May Day, usually with compensation, but Rurelec has taken Bolivia to arbitration over a 2010 electricity nationalization. Since ICSID is no longer available, the arbitration will be held under looser U.N. rules. The nationalization beat the hell out of Rurelec: it lost 80% of its revenues and its share price crashed from 16p to 9p (U.K.). So it wants its money. It is less clear if it can collect, although the new nationalizations are making its life a little easier. The company sounds confident.

Finally, all-quiet on the Nicaraguan front, including a giant sigh of relief that President Chávez won re-election, what with this project getting underway. We think.

Ethiopia, North Korea, and Some Half-Formed Thoughts on Dictatorship

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il died late last year. He was promptly succeeded by his twentysomething son. Some observers questioned whether the son would be able to take over and impose effective personal rule, but nearly a year has passed and he seems to be doing just fine.

Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi died last month. He hasn’t been succeeded by anyone yet. (Formally, officially, the Deputy Prime Minister has stepped up. But nobody seems to be taking him too seriously. He’s a mild-mannered guy, not a member of the revolutionary generation, and the wrong ethnicity to boot.) Zenawi was a “slash the tallest flowers” kind of guy; years of life on the run as a guerrilla in the bush seem to have rendered him permanently paranoid. Anyone who seemed too popular or too competent got demoted. At best demoted. So there’s no obvious successor.

I think the odds of Ethiopia staying a dictatorship are pretty good. It’s a country that has never known democratic rule or any sort of pluralism. Since the Emperor Haile Selassie consolidated his rule in the late 1920s, Ethiopia has had exactly three rulers: Selassie himself, Stalinist dictator Haile Meriam Mengistu, and the recently deceased Mr. Zenawi. That’s just three guys in almost 90 years, all of them absolute rulers with little or no tolerance for dissent. The country has almost no liberal traditions. Civil society does exist — there are NGOs and labor unions and even a few lawyers who are willing to sue the government — but it’s young and small and weak. It won’t be too surprising if a new strongman emerges. But it may take a while, and Ethiopia may go through a period of oligarchic rule and jockeying for power before things sort out.

Regimes with clear lines of succession are generally stronger regimes. Part of the reason is that they’re slightly harder targets — you not only have to take out the top guy, you have to get rid of his designated successors as well. But I think the bigger reason is that everyone knows what’s coming next after the dictator. Even if the successor is a dubious character, he’s likely to seem better than chaos and uncertainty.

Traditional monarchs have known this for millenia. But the lesson applies to dictatorships as well. We currently have at least five extant examples of non-royal dictatorships that have been successfully transferred to a son or brother of the dictator: Azerbaijan, Congo, Cuba, Syria, and North Korea (twice). Gabon and Togo are authoritarian regimes run by sons of former dictators; if we include them, the club expands to seven.

Examples of transfer to a non-relative are much much rarer. There have been a couple in the past. (Ataturk hand-picked his successor; Mexico in 1934-94 had an extremely powerful president who chose his successor from the party leadership, but they did not meet the definition of dictator. After all, they had to leave after six years in office.) But not a single extant dictatorship fits this pattern! (Burma’s dictator chose a successor who is still in power, but the successor seems to prefer being primus inter pares to being a true lone ruler.)

Now, it’s a long established principle that old age is a dangerous time for a dictator. All three of the dictators picked off by the Arab Spring were in their golden years. (Porfirio Díaz in Mexico and Juan Velasco in Peru also went down in their dotage.) More generally, an old dictator with no clear successor is pretty clearly putting himself at risk. That said, some dictators do run the course and die, more or less peacefully, in office.

So what happens when a dictator manages to pull this off — grows old and dies without first being overthrown or losing an election or whatever? Well, we can sketch out a tentative typology.

1. A son or other close relative steps up. (Several extant examples, see above.)
2. A hand-picked successor takes over. (Rare; no extant examples.)
3. There is a party or other system independent of the dictator that chooses a new dictator. (Rare outside of the Communist world; Mexico in 1934-94 comes closest. No extant examples, though we might see one soon in Cuba.)
4. After a period of uncertainty, brief or prolonged, a new dictator takes over. (A couple of extant examples — Turkmenistan, South Sudan.)
5. There’s a shift to authoritarian but non-dictatorial rule, either by a single ruler, an oligarchy or junta, or a party system. (China, Vietnam, Ivory Coast.)  This seems to be the single most common outcome in the last decade or two.
6. There’s a relatively rapid shift to relatively liberal or democratic rule. (Portugal, Spain. In the former, it took six years and revolution to get democracy.) This happens, but it’s less common than we might like to think. A shift in the direction of liberalism is much more likely when the dictator has been overthrown, or has voluntarily stepped down (Indonesia, Tanzania, Singapore), or agreed to elections (Chile, Zambia, Senegal). A system that lets the dictator die in office seems less likely to produce democracy at first go.

Numbers 2 through 6 include the possibility of foreign intervention; the United States, France and the Soviet Union have all intervened in this manner at one time or another. We may call these 3a (party picks a new dictator, foreign approval makes the difference: the Eastern European model, 1945-1990), 4a (new dictator takes power subject to foreign approval) and so forth. There aren’t really any extant examples of these at the moment — the U.S. seems to have lost interest in installing dictators in Central America and the Caribbean — but I would not be surprised if Russia’s “near abroad” in Central Asia were to throw up a 4a or 5a in the next little while.

6a is damnably rare, actually nonexistant: Panama would be one of the rather few cases since WW2 in which foreign intervention replaced a dictatorship with a democracy. Iraq sort of maybe kinda if you squint really hard. The jury is out (to be charitable) in Libya. And all of those interventions happened when the dictator in question was very much still alive and in power.

Anyway. There are enough elderly dictators out there that we should expect to see some more examples in the next few years. I expect that (5) “a shift to authoritarian but non-dictatorial rule,” will continue be the most common outcome. Which means that some countries that are currently dictatorships will drop off the list! If the number of dictatorships is to remain constant, then new ones will have to emerge. How likely this is ... well, this post is long enough. In a bit.

Greenpeace and parody

I have a checkered history with Greenpeace activists, as does my wife. I have surprised signature-collectors by calling them out on their crazy shut-down-the-Navy-sonars position. My wife has done the same, taking them to task for their opinions on nuclear power. And, of course, they have done some ridiculous acts of literal tree-hugging. But still, at the end of the day, I figured they served a useful purpose. In an age of human-caused global warming, somebody needs to keep the Overton Window from shifting too far against environmental protection, right?

Well, yesterday I get an email about Shell’s Arctic Ready campaign. So I looked at the site. Pretty obviously a parody. I mean, dude, it starts with “For hundreds of years, explorers have battled the Arctic. Today, we’re finally winning.” That is funny! And then there is the viral video, which is not only silly, but poorly acted. I am told people were fooled anyway, but Greenpeace came clean.

Abi Sutherland is upset with this. “Greenpeace lied to us. This wasn’t a nod-and-a-wink parody; this was a dedicated effort to deceive. They played the public for patsies and herded them like sheep. That kind of contempt for the people whose support (financial and otherwise) they need is inexcusable … Now, I know that our common discourse is already thoroughly befouled. But that does not mean it’s OK to add yet another dose of rainbow-shining toxic sludge to the mix, not even in the cause of righteousness. Indeed, especially not in the cause of righteousness.”

I see where he’s coming from, but I don’t agree, despite the fact that I hang out with oilmen. A parody is a parody, and this one was less-than-subtle. It was totally “nod-and-a-wink”! And Greenpeace didn’t let it go on for long. And there are lots of reasons to be skeptical about Arctic drilling.

So, no, I am not a fan of Greenpeace. But I also don’t think this parody did anything wrong. Am I being too generous?

Was the Mexican election stolen?

 

Was fraud decisive in the Mexican presidential election? Well, in the sense of fraudulent vote-counting, no. But what about vote-buying? The PRI stands accused of bribing people to vote for them. Moreover, cellphones have provided a new way of circumventing the secret ballot: to get the bribe, the voter needs to zap a picture of his or her ballot. Pretty nifty stuff! More prosaically, the PRI-Green coalition hired children to watch the voting and report back.

Still, at the end of the day, Peña won by a margin of 3.2 million votes. My friend Alberto Simpser calculates that there it would have been expensive for the PRI to have bought enough votes to swing it. Here’s his calculation (modified slightly by yours truly to account for an apparent arithmetic mistake):

First, the PRI needs to swing a minimum of 1.6 million votes from the PRD to win. Second, reports show bribes between 100 and 1,800 pesos per voter. (Note the final “r”!) Youtube indicates that 100 pesos was small enough to backfire. Alberto goes with ₱700, which is consistent with data from the 2000 election (after adjusting for inflation) of a cost of ~₱500. Finally, bribing a voter is not the same as getting his or her vote. Data from a 2004 survey of Argentines implies a vote-buying efficacy of around 16%. So ... the minimum cost of buying the election is: ₱700 × 1.6 million ÷ 16% = ₱7 billion, or US$560 million.

That is a significant chunk of change. Of course, if you assume that the PRI is better at targeting its vote-buying than Argentine parties (which is not unreasonable) the cost goes down.

At 33% efficiency, the minimum cost of buying the election drops to $272 million. Even at an impossible 100%, the coalition would still need $90 million. That is a significant chunk of change: legal spending by the PRI-Green coalition came to only $111 million. Alberto concludes that although the PRI could have raised such sums, they should be detectable. For what it’s worth, the PRD claims to have evidence that the PRI-Green coalition spent $320 million.

To recap: Alberto is not arguing that the amount needed to buy the election is too large to carry out! He is arguing that the amount is too large to hide.

When evaluating the morality of the situation, as opposed to the legality, readers should keep in mind what exactly the PRI stands accused of. It matters whether voters were offered store coupons or offered rides to the polls, both being illegal under Mexican law. Consider the list of illegal behavior on election day reported by the Alianza Cívica, with the percentages reporting the activity:

1. Someone came to your door to insure that you voted (5.6%);
2. You were offered breakfast (2.3%);
3. You were called by phone (2.1%);
4. You received a gift (1.7%);
5. Someone tried to take your voter ID (1.0%);
6. Someone offered to take your voter ID to the polls (0.3%);
7. Someone gave you a pamphlet (0.3%);
8. Someone offered you a ride to the polls (0.8%).

Well, I worked heavily in North Carolina in 2008 and in Florida in 2004. (I also worked on New York local elections in 1988 and 1989.) The GOP in New York and the Democrats in Florida and N.C. all engaged in nos. (1), (2), (3), (7), and (8) quite legally. They also did a little bit of (4), not so legally. (Google “walking-around money.”) 

I find it hard to be outraged about (1), (2), (3), (7), and (8). After all, not all that is legal is moral, and not all that is illegal is immoral. That said, an argument can be made that political parties need to be held to a higher standard: they should avoid all illegal behavior (regardless of morality) and a pretty good chunk of legal behavior as well. My point is only that 1988 this is not, but I can be convinced that I should be more outraged than I am.

The internets are freedom-neutral

Not unexpectedly, the protests over the recent Mexican election (which will go nowhere) have led to bloviations about Twitter and Facebook and the blogosphere yadda yadda. My skepticism about the political effect of the Internet is well-known. Here I pointed out that the Egyptian government readily shut it down during the rebellion. Here I mentioned that revolutionary activity spread further and just as fast in the mid-nineteenth century. And here I presented evidence that most revolutionary mobilization in Egypt took place via ... printed leaflets.

So I was gratified when Mex Files (which you should all read regularly) published photographic evidence that angry young Mexicans agree with me.

“If I had known that you would be a cowardly Mexican, then I would’ve stuck to taking care of my cows. I didn’t have the Internet or Facebook, and I made a revolution. You, you’re too lazy to march for your rights. But hey, ‘Viva México,’ right?”

Right. I actually don’t think the recent Mexican election was fraudulent, and I still say right. The internet has made political mobilization easier — but only for those who were going to mobilize without it.

Esther Gordillo wins Congress! Mexico, though, loses.

 Who is Esther Gordillo and how did she win Congress, you ask? Give me a moment for that issue. First, we have some quasi-official Congressional results. The preliminary estimates appear to have been remarkably inaccurate. (Diego Valle, can you explain that?)

In the Senate, the PRI-Green alliance has picked up 48 senators directly and 13 seats via P.R., for a total of 61, four short of a majority. In the House, the PRI-Green alliance has taken 157 districts plus 83 party-list seats. That is eleven seats shy of a majority. (It is also a full twenty districts less than the preliminary post-election count.)

The New Alliance Party (aka “Panal”) won another ten P.R. seats. If the PRI can convince the Panal to support them, that would provide 250 votes.

Now 250 votes aren’t quite enough for a majority. The Mexican constitution contains no tie-breaking provisions. Article 142 of the House internal rules states only that in the event of a tie, the House will immediately vote again.

If still tied, they vote again the next day, at which point that’s it. (Unless the matter is really pressing, in which case they will hope for a miracle, or something. Really! Go read the rules at the above link.) So the PRI will need 251 votes to pass legislation through the lower house. With the Panal plus one independent or PAN defector, they will have it.

Which brings us to Elba Esther Gordillo and the Panal. Gordillo heads the national teachers union (SNTE). Now, I am aware that Republicans like to prattle on about the power of the teachers unions in the United States. That is because Republicans do not know what a real union looks like. Gordillo is immensely powerful, and immensely corrupt. Frex, on an official salary of $26,910 a year she somehow bought a house in San Diego for $1.7 million, in the same neighborhood as Mitt Romney.

The SNTE was part of the PRI machine, but split in 2006 to support the PAN. As part of that split, the union created its own political party, the Panal. Lest there be some confusion, Patrick Corcoran reminds us that the top two positions in the Panal bureaucracy went respectively to Gordillo’s daughter and Gordillo’s personal secretary. Gordillo could have just thrown her votes to the PAN directly, but creating a party gave her more flexibility ... and access to federal election subsidies. Panal did not run a presidential candidate in ‘06, but it did picked up nine seats in the House and elected one senator.

This year, Panal ran its own candidate for president, the hapless and vaguely hipster-looking Gabriel Quadri. The reason was to leave Gordillo’s options open for post-election negotiations. The SNTE has 1.2 million members and managed to pull in about that many votes for Quadri, plus 1.7 million votes for the Panal’s congressional slate, enough for ten deputies and a senator.  

Now, my prediction is that given its internal splits, the PAN will not resort to a Republican-style strategy of unified opposition. That will reduce Gordillo’s leverage. That said, she will be the PRI’s easiest route to a working majority in the lower house, giving her something close to a veto. In other words, it is probably the best possible result from La Maestra’s point of view.

But it is a bad result for Mexico. Not the worst, but bad. For those who still wonder why (the $1.7 million house wasn’t enough?) read this article from the Economist.

Ms. Gordillo is not the sort of person you want in a position of power, and this election gives her more power.

Election update: PRI loses Senate, and recounts afoot!

OK, we now have better results ... and I’m now reading them correctly. (The previous post used the wrong numbers.)

In the Senate, the PRI-Green coalition won 18 states, 36 seats. They came in second in 10 more, for 46 seats in total. In the P.R. vote, though, the PRI will only pick up 10 seats, and its Green allies another two. That’s 58 seats, seven shy of the 65 needed for a majority. The

House still might be PRI. 174 districts for the PRI-Green coalition, plus 80 P.R. seats, for a bare majority of 254.

Large-scale recounts are underway. To be honest, I do not understand why they don’t just change the law and make a full recount automatic.

Postelection roundup: Polls blow it, PRI likely takes Congress, and AMLO calls fraud

 I hope those of you with interest in the race were turning to Diego Valle. He took on the challenge with aplomb, and his blog became the go-to data-driven place for election news.

The polls substantially overstated Peña’s lead in the run-up to the election. My initial thought was that the undecideds broke for AMLO, but Diego’s evidence is that the polls had a systematic bias. Considering the prevalent use of face-to-face polling, and that the polls were more accurate in 2006, that’s surprising, but the information should lead to better polling in the future. (And good job offers for Mr. Valle, I hope.)

The results are still not in, but it looks like the PRI will take Congress. So far the PRI (or the hard-to-explain PRI-Green coalition) has won 187 out of the 300 first-past-the-post districts. They also appear to have gotten 58% of the congressional vote (tossing the Greens running alone, who did not make the 2% threshold) which (I think! It gets complicated) will give them more-or-less 116 of the PR seats. That is rather more than 250, and thus they should have a majority in the House.

The Senate is less clear. The PRI won 18 states outright, which gives them 36 out of 128 senators. They appear to have come in second in 13 more states, upping their total to 49. Then the two received about 56% of the vote, which will give them (once again, more-or-less, it’s complicated) another 17 seats for a total of 66 ... a 2-vote majority. Recounts and the complications of the PR process could lose them that edge.

Finally, it looks like AMLO is calling fraud. It is indubitably true that the election was far from perfect: see some evidence on Mex Files, and note that the early reporting system clearly broke down for a while. But that, of course, is far from saying that the election was fraudulent. This stuff from Anonymous is entertaining, but not credible, and the anecdotal evidence is, well, anecdotal; only PRI-favoring errors have been reported.

After 2006, I get worried about these sorts of claims. A legal challenge is one thing, once again going to the streets or occupying Congress is quite another. Richard Grabman predicts more such events; I can only hope that he is wrong. Considering that the margins in most districts are quite substantial (and the overall presidential margin ain’t nada) I suspect that he is.

But I do not know. I worry, at least a little. But let’s stay optimistic!

Victory! For Spain ... and (we hope) for Mexico

 We know the result in the European Cup! Great game, and a most unexpected blowout. Poor Balotelli.

We won’t know the results of the Mexican election for a few hours yet. Absent a truly earth-shattering surprise, though, the details are for the Congressional vote: did the PRI win a majority or not?

In the meantime, here is some food for thought. Four things. First, Mexican face-to-face polling may be the future, as Americans give up land lines. (And, as importantly, become less eager to answer the calls that do come in.) Second, the Economist argues for political reform, but I encourage you to doubt whether the reforms being mooted will make any noticeable difference to Mexican governance. (If there is interest, I will explain my doubts.) Third, consider that the biggest damn difference that any Mexican government can make regarding any damn issue facing the country is to raise more public revenue. The PRI has floated the idea of higher taxes, and there are reforms afoot that might (might! maybe!) reverse the decline in Mexican oil output.

Finally, though, remember at the end of the day that politics exists for two reasons. First, to give us a way to decide on public issues that don’t involve violence. Second, to make the society a better place for its weakest members. And with that, I give you this picture of a little girl in Iztapalapa, D.F., in front of her home ... a home where the family puts out tarpaulins to capture rainwater, where the streets regularly flood, where wages are tiny, where crime is high, and where this brilliantly smart little girl will attend schools that are barely able to teach her any more than her heroic parents already have. None of that is fair, not by my lights.

It might be cheesy, but f--k that. It’s people like this family that make you remember why all this matters.

Uncertainty and certainty, European soccer v. Mexican politics

 Uncertainty involves the game that starts today at 2:45pm EST. My wife pointed out to me that my mother is probably spinning in her grave right now, considering her lack of attachment to the madre patria. (In a European competition, she would be have been more likely to root for the Netherlands than the land of our ancestors.) Me, on the other hand, I revel in the victories won by our distant cousins!

Of course, everyone in America who doesn’t think I’m Puerto Rican thinks I’m Italian-American. (Which, to be brutally frank, I am, if we abstract away from such technicalities as my ancestry.) And how could I not like the pair of Balotelli and Buffon? But I think the furia roja is equipped to keep Pirlo in a box ... and we have Llorente (from Navarra, where my grandfather was born!) and Soldado. Plus, Casillas is an awesome goalie, and Iniesta an awesome striker. (Yes, I know he plays midfield.)

It’ll be a great game no matter what, unless the two sides resort to a defensive fallback like Spain’s last game or that miserable Italy-England soccer Stalingrad. I want the furia roja to win, but it matters not.

Today’s election in Mexico, unlike the soccer match, involves almost no uncertainty at all about the result. Enrique Peña Nieto is going to win. The polls are unanimous on that point. On the other hand, there is a great deal of uncertainty about whether it matters. From looking at campaign ads, it all seems pretty inane.

But it is not inane. How much is at stake hinges on three known unknowns:

1. What does Peña Nieto want?
2. What power will he have to accomplish (1) above?
3. What will be the consequences of the subset of (1) and (2)?

Gabriel Aguilera summed up well the dilemma of question (1): does Peña Nieto want to be a great Mexican president, or does he want to be a great Priísta? That is, does he want to leave his country in better shape regardless of the consequences to his party, or does he want to leave his party more powerful regardless of the consequences to his country?

Of course, it isn’t really a dilemma but a continuum ... and sometimes, as it took the Obama administration way too damn long to learn, good policy is good politics. But that aside, the above really is the first question.

Here is a good essay on just how bad it could be if Peña wants to be a great Priísta. Jeffrey Weldon thinks that is his aim. The Economist does not. The writer of this graffiti disagrees with the Economist.

 And then there is question (2). The Mexican president, unlike his or her Argentine counterpart, really is a weak figure. Now, that is not true when seen from the North: they have two advantages over their U.S. counterparts and one advantage over their Democratic U.S. counterparts. First, only one two executive positions requires congressional approval: the attorney-general and the treasury secretary. Second, the Senate of Mexico has no filibuster and no holds and none of the other insanity that has accumulated around the Senate of America. In addition, the entire Mexican senate is elected at the same time as the President, which makes it more likely for the President to have a majority, as does the presence of the electoral list senators. Finally, Mexican parties are generally more disciplined than the Democratic Party, although not as disciplined as the Republicans.

(For a description of the Mexican Senate, see here. For those bothered by my use of “America” to mean the United States, go away.)

That said, the Mexican president is nonetheless weak as American presidents go. (For those bothered by the above use of “America” to mean the entire Western Hemisphere, go away. Consistency, hobgoblins, all that.) He or she has no true decree power, and cannot introduce bills into the legislature nor command the legislative agenda. On the margin the Mexican presidency is slightly more powerful than the president of the U.S. of A., but rather less so than most other presidents in this hemisphere. Therefore ...

... It will matter a lot whether the PRI has a congressional majority.

The wrinkle is that the PRI has lost a lot of its national discipline: the Priístas I spoke to over the past week have told me that the party has evolved into a series of state-level fiefdoms, where the governor effectively chooses the congressional candidates, and machines are perpetuated by having the governor switch offices with senators and deputies and then switch back. That means that the congressional PRI will want President Peña to be a great Priísta, and not necessarily a great President. In such a world it might be better for President Peña to lack a PRI majority.

As long as the PAN and PRD decide that they will not be served by a GOP-like strategy of automatic opposition (and I suspect that they will not be so served), a Peña who wants to serve his country could build cross-party majorities. Remember, Mexico has no filibuster; its Senate (unlike ours) functions as an ordinary legislature. In short, it will be good if the PRI does well in Congress, but not quite well enough to secure a majority in both houses.

Finally, there is question (3). The problem with it is that there is no way to tell until we have the answer to questions (1) and (2). In the field of security policy, I am with Patrick Corcoran (see part one and part two): there is unlikely to be much change. But in economic policy, there could be; ditto in political reform.

I will discuss more later about what I think the answers are to the above questions. Right now, I just want to say that every Mexican needs to answer (1), (2), and (3) for themselves, and then go out and vote. After which, root for the madre patria!

Guest post: My problem with AMLO

 This is Patrick Corcoran, from Ganchoblog.

In general, I don’t find the arguments that Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO) is a grave economic risk to Mexico to be very convincing. His program isn’t particularly extreme. Rogelio Ramírez de la O (his proposed finance minster) is sharp, experienced, and within the economic mainstream. And most importantly, between its business community, central bank autonomy, and NAFTA, there’s something of a policy straightjacket in Mexico. I don’t think anyone should expect a Kirchner a la mexicana should AMLO pull off the upset, and if I were a fund manager or a currency speculator, his election alone wouldn’t do all that much to change my opinion of Mexico’s prospects.

The problem is this: AMLO’s democratic commitment has wavered time and again. This is something that he has demonstrated repeatedly over the past six years. The reaction to the 2006 loss was a big part of that, but it’s not the only example. The takeovers of Congress were shameful. The shenanigans in Ixtapalapa treated the democratic process in an area of almost 2 million residents as though it existed only to serve him. And there’s no reason to think that this would change. When asked if he would accept the results of the election in July, a question where the only acceptable answer is an unqualified “Yes,” he waffled. His moderation during the campaign has been laudable, but when faced with a narrow defeat of an agenda item he holds precious, I don’t believe that he’ll just take his lumps and move on. Unfortunately, taking your lumps and moving on is a basic element of democracy.

The counterargument to this is that AMLO has been justified in his more extreme actions — that is, the election was a fraud, and the oil reform proposals being tossed around were a vital threat to Mexico’s well-being. Clearly AMLO seems to believe that; he couches his reaction in 2006 as a defense of democracy, notwithstanding his sending the institutions to the diablo. Given the fraud in the 1994 Tabasco race and President Fox’s 2005 push to deprive him of his legal immunity when he was mayor of Mexico City, I can understand him assuming any opposition to him is illegitimate. But while this bias is understandable on a personal level, that doesn’t make it any less worrying or damaging. Over the past six years, there isn’t much to support his belief that he was acting in democracy’s defense: the case for outright fraud in 2006 is extremely weak and has been contradicted by numerous people on the left, and his opinions regarding Pemex are just that — opinions — and have no more inherent value than those who would privatize the company tomorrow (which is certainly not what I’m advocating). The “desperate times, et cetera” explanation for AMLO’s unorthodox actions over the past six years just doesn’t hold up, and if your bar for the barbarians being lined up at the gates is set so low, well, then, what crushing political loss doesn’t justify an assault on the system?

That’s not to imply that his opponents would necessarily make better leaders. There’s also a pretty good argument to be made that the (potential) insidious erosion of democracy from within under Peña Nieto would far more harmful than AMLO’s frontal assault, which has typically been conducted in plain view of the public. If Peña Nieto turns out to be as bad as many assume he will — that is, if he is an old-school PRI dinosaur in a pricey suit — the damage could well be much worse than what is at risk in an AMLO presidency. Even if that doesn’t happen, by all indications Peña Nieto is the lightest of lightweights, and the campaign doesn’t seem to have put much weight on his bones. And the defects of Vázquez Mota are so obvious and damning that they hardly bear mentioning. From my point of view, there is no right candidate, and this is the worst slate of candidates of any Mexican election that I am more than passingly familiar with (basically, from 1988 onward).

But now that AMLO has emerged as the optimistic, anti-Peña Nieto candidate, it’s important to be clear about what his drawbacks are. Support for AMLO carries risks that go well beyond ideology. Electing AMLO would mean entrusting the system to someone who doesn’t wholly believe in it.

Maybe the game isn’t on after all, plus health policy!

Well. There may not yet be an equivalent of Fivethirtyeight for the Mexican election, but the poll of polls doesn’t look good for AMLO. You gotta stare really hard to see any sign of movement. Enrique Peña Nieto (EPN) is still cruising towards victory with a plurality of the vote. (Mexico, I have to add, does not have a French-style runoff system nor an Australian-style transferable vote. This is a bad thing.) 

It seems odd — but not surprising! — that the biggest issues in the election are the least discussed. Oh, they both get mentioned in short ads (see below) but not much in concrete terms. I am referring, of course, to crime and health policy. The latter should be a big issue. While Mexico has made great strides in public health over the past 18 years, it is still far from universal coverage. So what do the two main candidates propose? (My apologies, Josefina.)

Well, both AMLO and EPN think it ridiculous that Mexico has a multiplicity of public health systems: one for formal sector workers, one for government employees (both run like the U.K. National Health Service) and a bare-bones People’s Insurance program for the poor. So it will be no surprise that both are calling for universal coverage. AMLO, however, wants change to be incremental. He wants to allow patients to receive services in the installations of any of the public health programs, a de facto conversion of the federal government’s role to something more like a single-payer system. The problem, of course, is a combination of complexity and vested interests. Peña Nieto is more direct: he wants a new Universal Social Security System, which he claims would cut overhead expenses from 9.5% to 3% and de jure move Mexico to Canadian-style Medicare. He also wants to provide more free medicines via a voucher system, with no word on how to pay for it.

So who would you trust? EPN has a better, more-concrete plan. AMLO is more serious about these things, and incremental change is generally easier. At the end of the day, AMLO is more honest about the inevitability of the need to throw more money at the problem ... but at the end of the day, a President AMLO is also more likely to be hamstrung by Congress.

Edge: AMLO. Not that it matters.

Game on, México!

 Wow. Oh wow. Big news in the Mexican presidential race.

Courtesy of Ganchoblog, it seems that the Mexican presidential blowout that we all expected for Enrique Peña Nieto may not actually happen. The Reforma newspaper runs reputable polls, and they show a sudden collapse in PRI presidential support from 42% to 38%, with AMLO rising from 27% to 34%. Now, I remember drinking pulque (horrible stuff, by the way) with some friends in Melchor Ocampo (awful town, I should add, although worth visiting) and being told that the polls meant nothing, AMLO could pull it out. I scoffed. Distant relatives in Huixquilucan (a very much not-awful town, at least if you like bad science fiction movies from the 1970s, but really not worth visiting unless you know somebody who lives there) said the same. But they were PRD partisans, and so I scoffed some more.

But they were all correct! If this poll holds, then the electoral game is on. We will have a real race on our hands, and not a PRI blowout. Both Melchor Ocampo and Huixquilucan are in Mexico State and under the Peña governorship. I think that gave my friends tacit knowledge about the fragility of his support that nerdy old gringo me could not appreciate. I think Mr. Hootsen, who also lives in Mexico State, would concur.

Were I voting in the election, a poll like this would pose a dilemma. I despise AMLO for his actions after the 2006 election. But I suspect, for reasons I find distressingly hard to verbalize, that he would be less damaging to Mexico than a President Peña. Which means that strategically speaking, if AMLO had a chance, I would want to cast a strategic vote for him. Except ... his behavior and statements in 2006. The questions raised by the commentators here are becoming much more valid. Assuming that the poll holds and we really do have a race, for whom should a concerned Mexican citizen vote?

I would like to end with a call for someone to start a blog like Fivethirtyeight, aimed at the Mexican elections. So far, the Reforma poll is an outlier. We have no way of judging its accuracy or predicting the result. Mexico could use a Fivethirtyeight. I nominate Diego Valle to start it.

Positive campaigning is not all that it’s cracked up to be

 The 2006 presidential campaign in Mexico was especially nasty, with television ads claiming that AMLO was the second coming of Hugo Chávez and would destroy the country if elected. Mexico, however, lacks an equivalent of the First and Fourteenth amendments and, more importantly, the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of both. (Article 6 of the Mexican constitution guarantees freedom of speech, “unless it offends good morals, infringes the rights of others, incites to crime, or disturbs the public order.” Article 7 unconditionally guarantees the right to write and publish, but that is more specific than speech in general.)

The result of the election, then, was a 2007 law that prohibited negative campaigning. (Mr. López Obrador’s subsequent behavior, and whether that retroactively justified otherwise scurrilous ads, is not relevant to this discussion.) The result is an oddly anodyne bunch of ads. TV ads emphasize personality, as do the print ads from the three major parties. The PRI candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, is also running on the Green Party ticket, however, and is using that platform to run a bunch of rather interesting issue statements:

My favorite is “Life sentences for kidnappers,” but I didn’t get a picture. Above you have a subway ad proclaiming “Pensions for all adult over age 65” and “Your place guaranteed in high school.” The latter is pretty much already true, and the former will be interesting without new tax revenue.

Below you have “No to fees in the public schools,” with a picture of an angry white man scolding a woman who only wants the best for her child:

And a related billboard proclaiming “No more fees in public schools: Truly free education.”

The end result is oddly populist to an American, but honestly no worse than the populist positive ads run by Republicans all the time. So what’s the problem? Two things.

First, the internet is unregulated. This is, I think, less of an issue than it sounds. In general, the internet is not a push medium, except for paid adverts, which are (or will be) regulated. Whispering campaigns are of course terrible, but I would need evidence to be persuaded that they are worse in the age of the internet: e.g., that they convince anyone who wasn’t already basically on-board.

Second, negative ads can convey real information. Patrick Corcoran argues this here. It makes sense that the truly scurrilous stuff will not convince a sophisticated electorate regardless of how it is disseminated, while real bad information may find it harder to be known. That said, I am not sure how this shakes out.

What I am sure of, however, is that the Green Party has no reason to exist other than as a subsidy-collecting machine, and is very far from Green. But that is a different issue.

The 2012 election in Mexico, early musings

 On Saturday there was a massive student march against the candidacy of Enrique Peña Nieto, the PRI candidate for the presidency of Mexico.

I have been asked more times than I can remember (by friends, family, and complete strangers, including taxi drivers and bartenders who are well-aware that I am a gringo) who I would vote for in the Mexican election. As with the United States, the answer is easy. I cannot vote for Andrés Manuel López Obrador for the simple reason of his reaction after the 2006 election.

So you cannot vote for the PRD in this election. If Ebrard were the candidate, things would be different, but he is not. AMLO, no f---ing way.

Then there is Mr. Peña Nieto. Uh. Erm. Uh-huh. Next post will discuss his campaign, which is actually somewhat amusing. I will even discuss the various positions on health policy. The problem is that I do not believe that he is not corrupt. Moreover, he is a member of a party that has not abandoned corruption. This is one of the few cases where my academic research and my heart push in the same direction: institutions matter more than policies, and regardless of policies, Enrique Peña Nieto and his party will not be good for the institutions.

Which leaves us with Josefina Vázquez Mota. Were I voting in the Mexican election, she would have my vote. With little enthusiasm, sadly. But she would have it. Am I wrong? I have PRD relatives, but they are not talking to me about the election. (Baseball yes, U.S. politics yes, Mexico no.) So help me out! Am I wrong? Who should an informed Mexican vote for? 

Mexico has changed!

 When I lived in Mexico, during the late 1990s, I often found myself arguing with people over the rate of cultural change in that country. It was blinding, even in those days before the internets and all that. And the pace has not slowed.

Evidence of change is not that the woman in the white dress handed out the order in which the presidential candidates were to speak. Evidence of change is that it was extremely controversial and prompted an apology by the organizers.

That said, wags could not help but declare her the winner of the debate. And having watched it, I can understand why. Plus, Enrique Peña Nieto is so far ahead that it does not really matter. As long as he does not throw up on himself, or confess to killing his ex-wife, then he is going to win. (For more on the ex-wife rumors, see here, or for a hella show go to minute 5:30 to see a state legislator cause a giant fuss after making the accusation on the floor of the Mexico state congress.)

Oligarcas argentinas

 Now Bloomberg Businessweek reports that Repsol is obligated to buy back the Eskenazi shares in the event that it loses control of YPF. I have not gotten direct confirmation of this, but the lawyers interviewed by Bloomberg do not believe that it will be enforceable in the event of expropriation.

It also seems that the Eskenazis borrowed a lot more for their YPF shares than the initial reports indicated. They owe $560 million on a loan put together by Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas and Itaú – worse yet, according to the Financial Times, the balance is due next month. They also owe $700 million to a syndicate of Itaú, Credit Suisse, Citibank, Standard Bank and BNP Paribas.

It is not clear how Enrique Eskenazi gained control of the Petersen Group. The story, perhaps apocryphal, is that he met the owner in a psychiatrist’s office, which would be a very Argentine way of receiving an opportunity. He told an interviewer that he somehow got from that meeting to become “an adviser, then a director and finally ending up with the company.” In Santa Cruz province, he met Governor Néstor Kirchner, who helped Eskenazi take control of the Banco de Santa Cruz and steered construction contracts his way. “Then came what must have seemed a wily business deal to move into YPF without having to stump up the cash.”

We still do not know why they have fallen out with Cristina, but according to Lucio di Matto, she became angry at Sebastián Eskenazi’s “salary and purchase of a $5m helicopter at a time when YPF was paying hefty dividends instead of ploughing profits back into boosting production.”

It can’t really be that petty, can it?

Observatorio argentino 15: CFK throws the Eskenazis under the bus

 In our last installment, there were some questions about how badly the YPF expropriation would hit the Eskenazi family, old allies of the President’s late husband. Federico suggested that there had been a falling out. I responded that it really depended upon the details of the loan contract.

When in doubt, go to the source! The SEC is a marvellous organization (write your Congressman and tell ‘em that it needs more money!) and the 20-F is a marvellous form. From Item 7 in the appendix:

Pursuant to the share purchase agreement entered into by Petersen Energía and Repsol YPF in 2008, Petersen Energía purchased 58,603,606 ADSs, representing 14.9% of our outstanding capital stock, from Repsol YPF for a total purchase price of U.S.$2,235 million, or U.S.$38.13758 per ADS. Petersen Energía’s purchase of our securities was financed by the drawdown of U.S.$1,026 million under a senior secured term loan facility provided by certain financial institutions, borrowing of U.S.$1,015 million under a seller credit agreement entered into with Repsol YPF and equity provided by Petersen Energía’s shareholders. The seller credit agreement matures on February 21, 2018. Principal payments are required to be made at certain periodic intervals commencing in 2013 until the maturity date. The loan under the seller credit agreement bears interest at 8.12% per year until May 15, 2013, and thereafter at 7.0% per year, and contains other customary terms and provisions.

Securities purchased by Petersen Energía are pledged as collateral under the senior secured term loan facility and the seller credit agreement. The seller credit agreement is subordinated to the senior secured term loan facility.

The same applies to the loans made in 2011 to finance further purchases. OK, the Eskenazis are on the hook if they cannot pay. What about the buyback clauses? Page 126:

Lock-Ups and Transfer Restrictions

Petersen Energía has agreed not to sell any shares of our capital stock for a period of five years, subject to certain exceptions, including the condition that Repsol YPF continues to hold at least 35% of our outstanding capital stock. In addition, if our dividend payments are insufficient for Petersen Energía to meet its obligations under the senior secured term loan facility, or if Petersen Energía repays the senior secured term loan facility in full, Petersen Energía may sell shares of our capital stock ...

Repsol YPF has agreed to hold at least 50.01% of our capital stock for a period of at least five years, unless Petersen Energía repays the senior secured term loan facility in full.

In other words, there is no buyback clause: the contract just lets the Eskenazis dump their stock if dividends fall low enough to make the loan no-longer self-financing.

The Eskenazis would have been much better off if the Argentine government had expropriated them along with Repsol. Federico is right! Something is rotten in the state of Argentina, it seems. I wonder what they did to get President Fernández so angry at them?

Observatorio argentino 14: clientelismo político

 It seems that Argentina will be nationalizing only Repsol’s stake in YPF. The Eskenazi family won’t be directly affected. This was not what I expected.

Some facts: the Petersen Group, owned by the Eskenazis, owes Repsol $1.9 billion which it borrowed to purchase its stake in YPF. It owes an additional $680 million to various banks. Early reports stated that the debt contracts had conditional buyback clauses that made me think the Argentine government would want to take them off the Eskanazi’s hands. Now it seems that the loans were collateralized by YPF shares. At $38 per share, the purchase price reported by the Financial Times, that comes to 50 million shares, or 12.7% of YPF.

Under the terms of the Eskenazi deal, YPF is supposed to pay dividends equal to 90% of net income. The government wants to stop those payments, of course: the point of the exercise is to increase reinvestment. In that case, the expectation is that YPF will default ... and according to Reuters, Repsol will get the shares.

I am surprised because it means that the Eskenazi family will still have to deal with the banks while holding shares that will only have an option value. I thought the government would have wanted to bail out the Eskenazis via expropriation. Right now, they stand to lose. They own 24.55% right now, or 96.6 million shares. A default on the Repsol loans will probably knock that down to 46.6 million shares. They spent (at $38 per share) $1,769 million to acquire them. They borrowed $680 million and put up $1,089 billion of their own money. Those shares are currently worth $907 million at $19.50 per share. $907 million − $680 million < $1,089 million = a dilemma for the Fernández administration.

It seems to me, based on the limited information so far, that the government has decided that its easier to let the Eskenazis unwind half their stake via default and make the rest up to them in some other way ... that will be cheaper than paying them for their stake.

The other possibilities are (a) the Eskenazis paid less than $38 per share for their non-Repsol-financed stake, but since the price of YPF never went below $34.49 in 2011, that seems unlikely; or (b) they borrowed more than $680 million to somebody against whom they can easily default. But absent those things, the Fernández administration will either need to make them whole ... or risk alienating a very wealthy family that has been a strong supporter.

Perhaps Cristina has decided to cash in those chips. That seems unwise, but sometimes in politics it makes sense to screw over your old friends. Somebody more plugged into Argentine politics should weigh in here. Anyone?

UPDATE: If ... and this is a big if ... courts find in favor of the Eskenazis, then there is a way that this could sort itself out in their favor. The Repsol loans included a buyback clause, as noted above. If YPF cuts its dividend, then the Eskenazis could, in theory, activate that clause. Repsol, obviously, won’t follow through. If a court then declares the contract null but lets the Eskenazis keep the shares, then the family would hold 96.6 million shares worth $1,883 million dollars. Even after subtracting the value of their bank debts, they would avoid losses on the deal.

That, however, is a big if. It depends on the country whose law governs the contract. If it’s Argentina, then I can imagine the above scenario. If it’s the United States or somewhere in Europe, then President Fernández will still have a dilemma.

Bahrain against America? Not yet, but it is getting personal

 My friend and occasional co-blogger, Suresh Naidu, is a professor at Columbia. He is also an activist for human rights, as is his wife, Radhika Sainath, along with her colleague Huwaida Arraf. Radhika and Huwaida travelled to Bahrain in order to place American observers inside the demonstrations scheduled for the February 14th anniversary of the Pearl Roundabout demonstrations. The Bahraini government detained both of them and then had them forcibly deported. In a gratuitous move, the government kept their hands tied behind their backs for the entire flight to London.

On the exact same date that the Bahraini government detained Radhika and Huwaida, I was told that the Bahraini government was disinviting me from giving a talk next month due to this piece on an HBS blog.

Demonstrations in the Shia townships and villages are regularly met with violence from the government, as have spontaneous protests. (The embassy publishes demonstration notices, which are useful for those who like the smell of tear gas.) There are continual rumors of violence aimed at foreigners, but the horrifying incident in which a Briton lost two fingers to a “sword” attack turned out to be a mugging gone wrong. The fellow had fallen asleep in his car when a group of kids tried to rob him. When he resisted, they slashed his hands. It is not clear that the blade was a sword, or that they cut off his fingers as opposed to slashing them badly. Given my background, my standards are probably low, but the story could have happened in the United States.

What is going on in Bahrain? Justin Gengler has a useful roundup. The basic split, as discussed here earlier, is between the Sunni monarchy and poorer Shia citizens. There were demonstrations in February, and the government resorted to repression, with help from Saudi troops. The Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry reported in June of last year that the government had tortured detainees, but it did not name any names. On September 24th, the government held new elections to replace the Shia parliamentarians who resigned in the wake of the crackdown. Violence surrounded the elections. Turnout, unsurprisingly, was low.

According to Gengler, five important trends have emerged over the year since the crackdown:

1. The Sunnis are unhappy. Some of it is anger at corruption, which is probably good. But some of it is that they think the government has been too soft of Shia, which is probably not;
2. The Bahraini government has thrown a lot of money at the population to head of dissatisfaction (much of which has come from the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) ... and it has not helped. People are still angry;
3. Sectarianism is dangerous. That makes sense, but I am unclear as to why this is something that we didn’t know in February 2011;
4. The GCC is split. All the GCC governments united around support for the Bahraini monarchy, putatively out of fear of Iranian influence, but since then it has become clear that some are more worried than others. The Qatari government hosted Muqtada Al-Sadr, which did not the Bahraini happy. The Omani government went further and “denied Tehran’s interference in Bahrain’s internal affairs.”  These splits could widen;
5. This is gonna take a hella long time to sort out.

Here is an interview with Radhika and Huwaida. I am much more sympathetic to the American consular officials who helped them while in detention. They might not have gotten back their equipment, but the American embassy in Manama is not a viceregal office. (We have an empire, and Bahrain is part of it, but it is a particularly incoherent and weak empire.) More broadly, I am sympathetic to the American dilemma. We need the Fifth Fleet to keep the sea lines open and constrain Iran. Perhaps Qatar would offer a more peaceable home (and I should note that Dubai already allows our vessels to use its facilities) but in practical terms that would change nothing in Bahrain. Much as I would like to get worked up about the way we coddle the Bahraini government, I just can’t, not until somebody convinces me that we could accomplish something by yanking our support.

So, please, convince me! Why is the Obama administration wrong?

Department of Obvious: Syria is not Libya

 This has become a fairly handy idiot test.

Short version: intervening in Syria would be much, much harder and more expensive than intervening in Libya. This was true back in March, and it’s still true today.
 
(1) The uprising in Syria has never remotely approached the success of the uprising in Libya. Syria has seen a bunch of large, sustained protests and demonstrations. That’s great! But Libya saw the effective secession of almost half the country. By the middle of March, the rebels controlled the country’s second largest city. About a fifth of the country’s area and maybe a third of its population had passed completely out of government control. Major government military units had gone over to the rebel’s side. Nothing like that has happened in Syria.

(2) Syria has an actual, functioning air force. This is in sharp contrast to Libya, which did not. Syria actually has late-ish model planes, pilots who know how to fly them, and some semblance of a professional administrative and logistical infrastructure to support them. No, the Syrians couldn’t stand up to a sustained war with NATO — but they exist, and would have to be dealt with.

(3) Syria has an actual, functioning air defense system. Again a sharp contrast to Libya. As with the air force, it could be dealt with — but it would take time, and would likely cost casualties.

(4) Syria’s in a much, much more delicate and complicated location. Just look at a map. Taking Gaddafi out was relatively easy — Egypt and Tunisia just had their revolutions, and nobody cares much about Chad. But Syria? Israel, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon. What a nightmare. Do I need to spell out why this makes everything much harder and more fraught?

(5) Assad is much less diplomatically isolated than Gaddafi. By 2010, the Brother Leader had managed to alienate or annoy pretty much everyone. Even the Arab League openly despised him. His nominal “friends” in the Mediterranean — most notably Berlusconi’s government in Italy — turned out to be fair-weather indeed. Russia restricted itself to tut-tuts from a distance. Only in Sub-Saharan Africa did he have any real allies left, and the plain sad fact is that Niger and Senegal just don’t count for much when you’ve got the United States, United Kingdom, and French Republic all lined up against you. With bombs.

Assad, on the other hand, is a respected member of the international club. He’s a dictator, but he’s not a flake. He’s a reasonable neighbor. (Well, unless you’re Lebanese. More accurately, a Lebanese of a certain political flavor.) The Arab League is never going to pass a resolution approving force against him. And the Russians are likely to veto anything in the Security Council — they’re much closer to him than they ever were to Gaddafi. They’ve had a small naval base at the Syrian port of Tartus since the 1970s, and they’ve sold weapons to the Syrians since forever.

In fact, the Russians were just closing a deal to sell Syria a bunch of Yakhont antiship missiles when the uprising started. The Yakhont is basically a bigger, dumber Exocet; a supersonic cruise missile designed to kill large ships from far away. Israel vigorously protested the deal, for fear Syria would pass a couple along to Hezbollah. (Hezbollah blew a massive hole in an Israeli corvette a few years back using a crappy little Chinese C-802, and my co-blogger will eventually post something about his research on the brewing conflict over Israel’s new offshore gas fields,  so it’s a quite reasonable fear.) Remember how in Libya, we had capital ships hanging around just offshore from Tripoli, and the Charles de Gaulle parked conveniently just a bit further out? That wouldn’t happen in Syria; even the faint possibility of shore launched cruise missiles would make any sane admiral pull his ships well back over the horizon.
 
Oh, and he’s got the Iranians on side, at least for the moment. I think the Iranians would switch sides in a flash, if they thought it was in their interest — but until they reach that point, they’re backing him firmly. (They just replaced their ambassador to Damascus with a hardliner with ties to the Revolutionary Guards.)

(6) Assad is much less physically isolated than Gaddafi. Libya looks like a solid block of territory, but in fact it’s like Canada — a long, thin populated strip and a vast empty hinterland. 90% of the population lives within 100 km of the coast. The civil war cut that strip in two, east and west. Gaddafi had an open path to the south, but as supply lines they were meaningless; an 800 km drive across desert, and then you’re in Niger. (A country whose major resources are under French control.) With NATO controlling the seas, virtually everything in Gaddafi’s territory had to come in or out through Tunisia, most of it on a single coastal road. The moment the rebels cut that road was the moment when everything changed for good.

There’s nothing like this in Syria, which has well-developed land links to all its neighbors except Israel. And most of Syria’s coast is actually Lebanon. Nobody’s going to blockade Lebanon. As with the air defenses, this is a solvable issue — but it makes everything much, much more difficult and expensive.

So, to summarize:

• Military intervention in Syria would be incredibly expensive and difficult, would have to overcome serious diplomatic obstacles, and would likely involve significant losses and casualties. This has always been true, and will probably continue to be true for some time to come. Therefore, it is very unlikely to happen.
• Because military intervention is unlikely, any uprising against Assad will have to succeed or fail without it, as did the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. I judge this unlikely, but that’s an issue for another post.
• If someone says “our intervention in Libya prevented us from intervening in Syria,” then you may immediately begin heavily discounting, or completely ignoring, anything else they have to say on the topic. (This goes double if they suggest that the reason is “Syria has no oil.”) If someone suggests that we should intervene in Syria, same-same.

I wish the Syrian people good luck in getting rid of the loathsome Assad regime. But the plain fact is, they’ll have to do it without direct military help from us.

Dictators

 In a recent thread over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin averred that with fall of Qaddafi, the world is running out of dictators. I sharply disagreed. I’d like to distill the ensuing discussion into a post, because it led to an interesting question: who are the world’s remaining dictators?

Let’s start by defining our terms. I define a dictator as (1) a solitary leader, who (2) wields tremendous personal power, and (3) rules in a generally illiberal manner, and (4) will not leave office or surrender power unless compelled by force majeure, and (5) is not a traditional monarch.

(1) “solitary leader” eliminates juntas and oligarchies. There are several borderline cases where a country is ruled by a group, but one member of the group is clearly primus inter pares. It also eliminates regimes that are repressive, but run by a party or oligarchy rather than one guy.

(2) “tremendous personal power” is obviously pretty slippery. But as the judge said, we know it when we see it. A dictator may have to deal with other power centers, and may face various and sharp constraints on his rule. But if the leader can do pretty much as he pleases, provided that he wants something badly enough, he qualifies. (Note that this one disqualifies rulers who are “merely” authoritarian.)

(3) “illiberal”: a leader who can and does ignore human rights, freedom of the press, inconvenient constitutional provisions, and so forth. Note that this does not disallow elections, as long as the dictator always wins them. A free-ish press is also possible, as long as it can be curbed or suppressed if it presents a serious problem.

(4) “will not leave”: this is close to the heart of the definition. A dictator is a guy you can’t get rid of, ever. Dictators may  — very rarely  — step down voluntarily, but they don’t lose elections and they can’t easily be compelled to leave otherwise. If you’re going to rule indefinitely absent a coup, revolution, civil war, or at least massive and sustained protests accompanied by major social and economic disruption, good chance you’re dictator.

(5) “not a traditional monarch”: this one is more for convenience than anything else. There are several traditional monarchs, all in the Arab world, who are very much like dictators. For now, I’m choosing to view them as their own category.

Obviously this is a fairly ad hoc definition that is going to scoop up a wide range of characters. The resulting group is likely to be, as the biologists say, paraphyletic. And it’s going to be a bit blurry around the edges, too. Nonetheless I think it’s an interesting exercise: if we apply these standards, who do we end up with? Well, I get the following list:

Angola: Dos Santos has been the President nonstop since 1979.  There are significant limits on his power, but IMO he qualifies.

Azerbaijan

Belarus

Cambodia: Hun Sen, a bland and retiring little man, has ruled unchallenged since the middle 1980s.

Cameroon: Paul Biya since 1982. The country has kept the trappings of a democratic republic, including opposition parties, but Biya is in charge and he’s not going anywhere.

Chad

Congo (Republic)

Congo (Democratic Republic):  President Kabila, son of the late President Kabila, is likely to stay in power for the foreseeable future. He’s in a tie with Aliyev of Azerbaijan for youngest dictator -- they’re both just 40.

Cuba: Raúl, not Fidel. (It’s surprising how many people think it’s still Fidel.)

Djibouti

Equatorial Guinea: this is a nasty one. Doesn’t get much attention, of course.

Eritrea: Afewerki is another nasty one. A shame, since his rule started with really high hopes.

Ethiopia

Kazakhstan

North Korea

Rwanda

South Sudan: I’m jumping the gun here, because the country of South Sudan is just a few months old. But President Mayardit has already made it pretty clear that he’s not going anywhere.

Sudan

Syria: At least for the nonce. (I think Assad has a decent chance of sticking around.)

Tajikistan

Turkmenistan

Uganda: to nobody’s surprise, President Museveni won a fourth term a few months ago.

Uzbekistan

Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe, still hanging in there at age 87, has been the world’s oldest dictator for a while now.

There are some borderline cases:

Algeria: I’d put Algeria right on the border. M. Bouteflika is president for life, has built an immense personal and family fortune, is the subject of a personality cult, and rules illiberally. On the other hand, his power is relatively limited; in particular, he must deal with rival power centers, most notably the military and the security services.

Burma: Burma was run by a military junta until the middle 2000s. Then Than Shwe drove his last serious rival out of power. He then ruled — but from behind the scenes; he was a dour, withdrawn character who mostly shunned the limelight. Then Than Shwe stepped down last year, appointing a hand-picked successor. It’s a bit soon to say whether the new guy qualifies.

The Central African Republic: Francois Bozize took power in a coup a while back, but I’m not sure he qualifies; he came close to losing the last election, and might have accepted defeat if he had.

Fiji: the current leader came to power in a military coup and shows no sign of stepping down. However, to me he looks “authoritarian” rather than “dictator” — Fiji still has a somewhat-functioning constitutional framework that seems to place some real limits on his power.

Gabon: the current President Bongo is the son of the late President Bongo. Bongo pere was the real deal  — he ruled without serious opposition for decades. It’s not clear to me whether Bongo fils is in the same league.

Togo: It looks like Gnassingbe fils, after a tricky couple of years, is on track to fill his father’s shoes. Not sure if he’s there yet, though.

And some that don’t come close:

Afghanistan: even putting aside the fact that half the country is at war with him, Karzai just doesn’t seem to have that much power.

Iran: theocracy, very authoritarian, but also weirdly constitutional — the powers of both the President and the Supreme Leader are vast but constrained. Iran is sui generis, its own strange thing.

Nicaragua: Ortega has certainly played around the edges of standard democratic practice, but if he lost an election, then he would lose power.

Russia: Actually, I don’t think Russia is very close to the border at all. Authoritarian, yes, but not any kind of dictatorship. I’m only including it here because people are going to ask.

Venezuela: Oh, come on. Obnoxious narcissist with authoritarian tendencies, not a dictator. As with Russia, included only because someone’s going to bring it up.

That makes 24, plus six borderline cases.

So: is this list meaningful? useful or interesting in any way? or is this just a parlor game?

There are some patterns. There’s not a single dictatorship left in the New World other than Cuba. The complete disappearance of the classic Latin American strongman is an interesting historical development that my co-blogger is annoyed to learn doesn’t seem to have attracted much attention in the rest of the world. 14 of the 24 are in Africa, and six more (the four ‘Stans, Azerbaijan and Belarus) are from the former Soviet Union. In fact, if we include Cambodia, Cuba, and North Korea, then every single dictatorship except for Syria is either African or a relic of Communism.

I’ve excluded the Arab absolute monarchies. But if we included them, then you could argue with a straight face that every remaining dictatorship falls into one of just three groups: African, Arab, or Communist/ex-Communist.

Is there any meaning in that pattern?

Miscellaneous Saturday links

 Comin’ atcha from the Westside ... Medical Center in the very-creepily-named Plantation, Florida:

Department of Denominators: Really, the graph needs one, like, say, real tax revenue. I expect better.

Department of Thanks: “I want to express my sincere gratitude for your thoughtful discussion of the issues,” wrote Colonel Qaddafi in a letter to Congress. “We are confident that history will see the wisdom of your country in debating these issues. We are counting on the United States Congress to its continued investigation of military activities of NATO and its allies to confirm what we believe is a clear violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973.”

Department of Trouble: Doug Muir made the good point that there must be reasons for the Anglo-French defense posture, since both countries spend significant amounts on their militaries. I would like to see this discussed seriously, for the simple reason that I do not discount the possibility that there is no plan, and NATO defense budgets are set simply out of a combination of momentum and interest group politics. Moreover, what’s the counterfactual? What would an alternate European defense posture look like?

Department of Panaceas: We’ll see if ending gerrymandering has an effect on California’s political woes. I doubt that it will, but I would also like to be wrong.

Department of Crime: There is less of it, and nobody really knows why.

Department of Bahrain: Things are very bad.

Robert Moses and solar power in California

 Americans of a certain age and predilection often like to say things just to be provocative. I am about to say something provocative, and I want to reassure you that it is not because I am trying to be provocative. It is because I am, at the end of the day, very old-fashioned.

So here it is: I love Robert Moses. I think neighborhoods like the one above, the ones he got built, are awesome. I know, I grew up in ‘em. It was a muscly ambitious society what threw up these buildings 5 years before I was born. It is a sad thing for the environment that we no longer build stuff like this.

Robert Moses, he got stuff built.

Which brings us to California and the future of the planet. The great state of California recently approved no less than nine solar-thermal power plants. They would produce collectively 4.2 gigawatts of power, or 4% of the state’s total generating capacity. Keep that up for twenty years, in a place that gets as much sun as regularly as the Mohave desert, and you could shove aside a big chunk of natural gas. I am a fan of natural gas when the alternative is coal or freezing in the dark; in the Golden State, the alternative is sunpower. The Schwarzenegger Administration set the stage with its energy laws, and the Bush Administration helped the goal along when it opened federal lands to development on 2006. (When the opposition does good things, I give credit, and the energy policy of the second Bush Administration was nothing less than a big improvement on the status quo.)

But ... now come the lawsuits. Protection of protected species. “Impacts to Native American culture.” The Sierra Club and the Cuña de Aztlán Sacred Sites Protection Circle Advisory Committee united with the Tea Party people to keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. The Sierra Club worries about Calico project and the desert tortoise. La Cuña de Aztlán fears for the impact of the Imperial Valley project on the Quechan tribe’s origin story. The Tea Party all the projects because they hate subsidies. There are reasonable worries over the Genesis Project’s diversion of Colorado River water ... or they would be reasonable if the way we currently use the river made any damn sense.

I cannot sum up my hostile reaction to the anti-solar opposition inside the American political spectrum. Where is our Robert Moses? Anyway, attempts to talk me down would be very welcome. Tell me why I shouldn’t be angry at these people.

How to imply a lie without lying: Bahrain edition

 It is a skill. A Stratfor analyst managed to pull it off. Nothing in the below is false, but it does disagree completely with the internal assessments of the United States chief diplomatic arm:

After Egypt, Bahrain has become the most significant place where street agitation is taking place in the Middle East. ... The country being a proxy battleground for Saudi Arabia and Iran makes it even more significant.

Pro-democracy street agitation is not a stranger to Bahrain ... what is happening is not entirely new. What makes this significant — this latest round of unrest — is that it comes in the context of the overall regional unrest that started in Tunisia and moved to Egypt ...

It’s not just the sectarian dynamic that makes the protests significant in Bahrain. There is also a wider geopolitical contest between Saudi Arabia and Iran that has been going on for several decades and, more recently, since the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.

Since then, Saudi Arabia has been very worried about Iranian attempts to project power across the Persian Gulf into the Arabian Peninsula. And with Bahrain having a heavy Shiite population, this is a cause for concern in Saudi Arabia, as Saudi Arabia is neighbors with Bahrain and has its own 20 percent Shiite population.

From the point of view of the United States, Bahrain is also significant because it is home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet. The 5th Fleet is one of the key levers that serve as a counter to Iran, or any movement on the part of Iran. It is not clear at this point to what degree Iran is involved in the uprising. There are linkages, but to what degree Iran is playing those linkages is not clear at this point. Nonetheless, it is one of those flashpoints between Shiite Iran and the largely Sunni Arab world, and Bahrain is going to be very interesting in terms of how both sides battle it out in the form of a proxy contest.

Should Bahrain succumb to unrest and the monarchy has to concede to the demands of the protesters at some point in the future, this becomes a huge concern for the security of countries like Saudi Arabia, particularly where there is a 20 percent Shiite population that has been keeping quiet for the most part, but could be emboldened, based on what they have seen in Egypt and now what they are looking at in Bahrain.

Riiight. The above analysis implies that Iran is behind the protests. It also implies that the transformation of Bahrain into a constitutional monarchy would be a de facto expansion of Iranian power. The fact that there is no evidence that Iran is behind the protests does not come into play. Nor does the fact that Bahrain receives a lot of hydrocarbon rents, and a democratic Bahrain would have as much desire to share those rents with Iran as Alberta wants to share its rents with the rest of Canada. (In 2011, the Kingdom of Bahrain expects to earn $5.1 billion from hydrocarbon production, taxes, and royalties.)

There is little doubt that if the United States washed its hands of the Gulf tomorrow, Iran would invade Bahrain the next day. As recently as 2007, Iran floated trial balloons about reactivating its historical claim to the island. And ... well ... $5.1 billion is a lot of money, maybe not for the United States, but for Iran, which has a (nominal) GDP around $335 billion and a government budget around $66 billion.

And it is true that the Saudi government has its own reasons to fear a demo-cratic Shia-dominated Bahrain. The last paragraph of the analysis is spot on.

But jumping from Iranian desires and Saudi fears to some sort of blather about a great game, with intimations that Bahraini democracy would be bad for the United States, is just silly. Moreover, it runs against the perceptions of the United States government. A democratic Bahrain under a constitutional monarchy would be just as much of a threat to the Iranian regime as it would be to Saudi Arabia. (“Look! A Shia democracy! Without an American invasion, and without the occasional car bomb!”)

Given the reality of the situation, I really don’t think there is anything more for the United States to do or say than it already is doing and saying. In short, viewing the situation through the lens of Cold War 1½ would, I think, be a mistake. Analyses like Stratfor’s are misleading without being incorrect, and in a potentially dangerous way.

Thoughts?

Political parties in Bahrain

 Bahrain is a near-absolute monarchy founded by, in the words of one of our co-bloggers, “pirates that admired Maria Theresa’s bust on thalers.” In 1971, the British withdrew their protection, and the monarchy chose not to join the UAE. In 1973, it got a constitution creating an elected parliament. In 1975, that constitution was suspended. In 2002, as part of a reconciliation that included a 2001 amnesty for political exiles, a new constitution revived the 40-member elected lower house of parliament. Its powers are limited, however: the upper house is appointed, and the Prime Minister serves at the pleasure of King Hamad, not the Parliament. Prime Minister Khalifa bin Sulman Al Khalifa is the nephew of King Hamad, and has been in office since 1971.

Elections are run by district with a runoff between the top two candidates if nobody wins an outright majority. Political parties remain, strictly speaking, illegal, but the Political Societies Act of 2005 allows for the formation of registered “political societies” which function for all intents and purposes as political parties. The distribution of seats after the 2006 elections was as follows: Wifaq (17 seats), Asala (8), Minbar Al Islami (7), and Mustaqbal (4). New elections were held on October 2010. The results were Wifaq (18 seats), Asala (3), Minbar Al Islami (2), and 17 all-Sunni independents.

Courtesy of Wikileaks, we know what the U.S. embassy thinks of the political organizations currently active in Bahraini politics. Since Bahrain is both a country that I like and made the front page of the New York Times today, what follows is a condesation of “The Field Guide to Bahraini Political Parties.”

Wifaq: the leading Shia party. The leadership consists mostly of people exiled during the unrest of the 1990s, who returned after a 2001 amnesty. The party’s nominal leader is Ali Salman, a mid-level cleric, but the real leader is the country’s most popular Shia cleric, Isa Qassim. Wifaq demands a Westminster-style constitutional monarchy. The party also attempts to combat anti-Shia discrimination, both through legislation and street demonstrations.

Asala: the State Department calls Al-Asala the “Salafist” party. The party itself, however, “says its goals are to increase the standard of living for Bahrainis; strengthen political, social and economic stability; and enhance financial and administrative oversight of the government and industry.” It is, however, adamantly opposed to women’s rights, which are rather advanced in the Kingdom. The State Department had this to say about the party’s leader: “Ghanim Albuanain strikes emboffs [sic] as rational and open-minded, though many of his followers are not.” Most Bahrainis, reports the Department, believe that the monarchy supports the party against Wifaq.

Minbar: the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. “Minbar seeks a personal status law that conforms to Sharia and is acceptable to both sects” and “does not allow its female members to stand for election.” As with Asala, it is widely rumored that the monarchy and the Islamic banking sector provide finance. In 2006, it was caught in a vote-buying scandal, although no one was prosecured. (The whistle-blower was a British fellow named Salah Al Bandar, who had been serving as an advisor to the Bahraini government. He was sent home forthwith.)

Mustaqbal: the State Department had only this to say: “The bloc bills itself as the only secular grouping in parliament, though all four members are Sunni. It votes reliably for the government and its leader, Adel Al Asoomi, is close to the Prime Minister.”

There are a few other parties without seats. Wa’ad is a socialist party formed by returning exiles in 2002. It is a strong proponent of women’s rights as is generally moderate, with support from both Sunni and Shia, although its leader, Ebrahim Sharif, courted a bit of an international scandal in July 2008 when he said nice things about Hezbollah. The Al Minbar Progressive Democratic Society (APDS) is the former Communist Party. It won 3 seats in Parliament in 2002, but lost them to Wifaq in 2006. A bigger blow came in 2008, when it lost control of the General Federation of Trade Unions to Wifaq. Al Meethaq won 5 seats in 2002, but lost them to Wifaq and Minbar in 2006.

The Adala National Justice Movement is loud, but not to be taken seriously. “The society initially focused its criticism on the U.K. and Iran, but now devotes all its energy to exposing the horrors of U.S. imperialism. Abdulla Hashim has a real talent for attracting local and international media coverage for his stunts, such as an April 26, 2008, demonstration near the U.S. Navy base here that featured the beheading of a mannequin dressed to represent a U.S. Marine. Despite their media profile, however, Adala has never produced more than 80 people at one of its demonstrations.” Hashim was beaten by a Minbar candidate in the 2006 election.

Finally, there is Haq. Hasan Mushaima, a founder of Wifaq, left to found Haq in November 2005. From the start, Haq has defied the requirements for registration of political societies. Haq opposes the 2002 constitution on the grounds that it rescinded liberties granted by the 1973 constitution. Moreover, the King drafted it unilaterally and (unlike the 1973 constitution) it provides for an appointed upper house of parliament. Haq’s top public goal is a new constitution for Bahrain drafted by elected delegates.

The rest I’ll leave in State’s own words. “Since Haq competes with Wifaq for the same Shi a supporters, Haq gains support whenever Wifaq is perceived as unsuccessful in parliament. When Wifaq is successful, Haq loses popularity. Post [sic] and the public perceive Haq as inspiring many of the small gangs of Shia youth who throw stones and Molotov cocktails at police almost every weekend. Haq has submitted petitions to the U.N., the USG, and the GOB calling for the Prime Minister’s resignation and condemning the GOB’s human rights record. Abduljalil Al Singace, Haq’s public affairs and media specialist, has contacts with U.S.-based and international NGOs and media outlets. GOB officials often assert that the Iranian regime controls Haq supporters, however has yet to provide post with convincing evidence.”

Do you want to know more? One day, Luke will tell you!