Category: Political Science
It seems Scotland and Northern Ireland must agree on invoking Article 50
Theresa May has indicated that Brexit could be delayed as she said she will not trigger the formal process for leaving the EU until there is an agreed “UK approach” backed by Scotland.
The Prime Minister on Friday travelled to Scotland to meet Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister, and discuss plans for Britain’s Brexit negotiation.
In a sign that the new Prime Minister is committed to keeping the Union intact, she said she will not trigger Article 50 – the formal process for withdrawing from the EU – until all the devolved nations in the country agree.
That is from The Daily Telegraph. Here is my previous post on whether Article 50 ever will be invoked.
Failed coups in democracies do not seem to depress economic growth
Here is my first column for Bloomberg View (more on that transition soon), on the research of Erik Myersson:
In autocracies, successful coups often improve economic performance, perhaps by replacing an incompetent or malevolent leader. In democratic countries, however, a successful coup is associated with lower per capita growth rates by an average of 1 to 1.3 percentage points per year over the following decade. On average, these coups reverse beneficial economic reforms, especially for the financial sector.
When a coup does overthrow a democratically elected government, it tends to bring a military leader and significant changes in policy, and not usually for the better. There are long-run correlations of such successful coups against democracies with lower investment, lower schooling and higher infant mortality.
…for failed coups in democracies the more general historical results are quite different. In fact, they are difficult to distinguish from no economic growth effects at all. Given the various imprecisions of statistics, this does not prove that failed coups will have no growth effects, but it can be said that the numbers give us no clear reason to be worried, at least not over the 10-year time horizon chosen by Meyersson. This may be one reason why asset markets do not seem to be panicking over the failed Turkish coup attempt.
To be sure, there are some possible or even likely short run effects of the recent turmoil, such as declines in tourism or foreign investment. Still, the data as a whole are showing that the long-run fundamentals of democracies with failed coups tend to reassert themselves within the 10-year time horizon, and those short-run disruptions end up mattering less than we might think.
Do read the whole thing. You will note that shares of the Turkish closed end mutual fund are still up about thirteen percent for the year (FT link), though down 2.5 percent at Friday’s close.
Now if Turkey had left the European Union, that would be a different matter altogether…
Coups are less frequent these days, but more likely to succeed
In other words, last night was an outlier. Here is Jonathan M. Powell and Clayton L. Thyne in the Journal of Peace Research:
We also see some interesting trends in the frequency of coup attempts over time. As shown in Figure 2, there is a fairly clear decline in the total frequency of coup attempts over time. The high point for coup attempts came in the mid-1960s, followed by two more bubbles in the mid-1970s and the early 1990s. The number of successful coups has likewise decreased over time. We saw 12 successful coups in both 1963 and 1966. The mid- to late-1970s also saw a brief burst of successful coups (ranging from 3 to 9 for each year). An interesting trend emerges when we look at the percentage of coup attempts that resulted in successful regime changes, which we plot on the right side of the Y-axis. The mean success rate is 48% during the entire time span. This rate saw early peaks around 1970 and 1980, and then a decline until the turn of the century. However, we see another spike in the success rate starting in 2003. Twelve of the 18 (67%) coup attempts since then have been successful, and only one of the most recent four coup attempts has failed. While coups have certainly waned over time, the recent success of coup plotters suggests that coups remain a key element of governmental instability.
I cannot readily pull out Figure 2 from the pdf, but it is on p.7 of the document. Note that their data run up through 2010, and thus do not cover the Arab Spring.
Are military coups based on popular opinion? Poor growth performance?
Here is Naunihal Singh, writing at Monkey Cage a few years ago:
More fundamentally problematic, however, is the assumption that popular opinion has an impact on coups. Although this claim is common in political science, there is no evidence to support it. Over the course of writing my book, “Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups,” I spent 300 hours talking with participants in 10 coup attempts in Ghana and statistically analyzed the determinants of every coup attempt and outcome in the world from 1950 to 2000. Based on this evidence, I argue that there is no reason to believe that military factions hesitate to attempt coups when popular opinion is against them, or that coup attempts are more likely to fail when the populace is opposed.
Over the course of this research, I observed that conspirators devoted very little consideration during coup plotting to the question of how the population would react. Coup makers are largely convinced that their cause is just (even when the coup comes from a partisan or personal interest), and that they will have widespread popular support for their actions, with perhaps limited opposition coming from entrenched special interests.
…there is no relationship between economic growth rates and the likelihood of a coup. Similarly, there is no relationship between regime type and coup attempts. Even though democracies are presumed to have higher levels of legitimacy than other kinds of political regimes, they were no more or less likely to experience coup attempts. Lastly, coup attempts were actually more likely to occur during presidential election years, which suggests that conspirators were acting to thwart the popular will rather than being constrained by it.
…The bottom line is that the dynamics of a coup attempt are almost entirely internal to the military.
Read the whole thing. Nam Kyu Kim dissents from some of those propositions. Note that since early 2015, Turkish growth rates have been in the four to six percent range, hardly miserable.
Turkish economist Timur Kuran is doing plenty of coup tweeting
From Istanbul, follow him here. Here is my 2010 post “Why Timur Kuran is one of our most important thinkers.” Timur’s work has held up very well since then, to say the least.
Addendum: Here are remarks from Turkish economist Dani Rodrik.
The rise of coup-proofing in Turkey?
Go to this link, and click on “Coup-proofing in Turkey.” (Or try here.) It is a recent 2006 account of what the Turkish government has tried to do to make the country coup-proof, by Gokhan Bacik and Sammas Salur. They tried many institutional changes toward that end. Here is one paragraph:
In terms of coup-proofing, the first issue is the military aspect. Gül is now the commander of the armed forces. First of all, any high level military appointment requires his consent. All major military appointments and promotions also require his official endorsement. Yet, the traditional alliance between the president and the army against the government was dissolved. In the past, the corridor between the army and the president worked so far as an instrument of influence over the political elites. The formula “army plus the president”, to remind six of the former presidents were generals, put the government into a restricted zone. Thus, by the fall of presidency, the officers lost a very important historical corridor that kept them legally in the political game. Now, putting aside a third costly option they should either obey the president or stop. Ironically, as a result of this situation, weekly meetings are scheduled between the prime minister and chief of staff as no routine tête-à-tête meeting ever took place before. The lack of such a regular meeting in the past was basically the army’s autonomous position. Gül’s presidency, a man out of the traditional Kemalist quota, weaken the traditional role of army vis a vis political elites.
It doesn’t seem it worked! The paper nonetheless makes for interesting reading. It talks about increasing power for the courts, changes to the intelligence services, increasing reliance on the police, and other attempted coup-proofing strategies in Turkey. Note that in the past Turkish military coups have been relatively bloodless and swift; we’ll see if that is still the case. If things do turn violent, which seems at least possible given what I am right now seeing on my TV screen, that suggests in some cases “coup-proofing” may be overrated.
How social science got the “psychoticism” factor wrong
Remember the paper that said “conservatives” were on average more likely to exhibit “psychoticism,” but then it turned out there was a statistical mistake and this should have been attributed to “liberals,” at least within the confines of the paper’s model? How did it all happen, and why did it take so long to correct? Jesse Singal has the scoop, here is one excerpt:
Hatemi is convinced that Ludeke is out to get him. In our phone conversation, he repeatedly impressed on me just how minor the error is, how few times the papers in question had been cited, and how much of an overreaction it was for anyone to care all that much. “This error is freaking tangential and minor and there’s nothing novel in the error, whether [the sign on the correlation] was plus or minus,” he told me. “There’s no story. And I wish there was — if there’s any story, it’s, Should people be allowed to honestly correct their errors, or should you lampoon them and badmouth them for everything they didn’t do because they had a real error they admit to?”
Yes it’s that kind of story. There is much more at the link, including tales of academics acting “like dicks.” Here is the conclusion of the piece:
…the social-science landscape isn’t yet as embracing as it could be — and should be — of the replicators, challengers, and other would-be nudges like Ludeke who tend to make science better and more rigorous, who make it harder for people to coast by on big names and sloppy research.
For the pointer I thank Daniel Klein.
*Middle Kingdom & Empire of the Rising Sun*
This excellent book by June Teufel Dreyer has the subtitle Sino-Japanese Relations, Past and Present. Here is one short bit:
Moreover, the Chinese distinction between themselves as civilized and all others as barbarians was, they [the Japanese nativists] argued, absurd, given the reality that barbarians had several times conquered China and the barbarian leader was the anointed as the son of heaven. Who, then, should be considered barbarian? To nativists, the logical conclusion was the Japan had become the true Middle Kingdom. While one might reverse China’s past accomplishments, China had declined into an entity that was no longer worthy of emulation.
The book is substantive and readable throughout, essential for our time as well.
European Union fact of the day
A Timbro study by Alexander Fritz Englund showed that E.U. membership for the 28 countries resulted in a statistically significant increase in economic freedom in all of the sub-categories in The Economic Freedom of the World index. The biggest improvement comes in the year of membership, but it increases afterwards as well.
That is from Reason, here is the Swedish-language study.
The economic policies of Theresa May
Also in The Sun on Sunday, May argued that outside of the EU, “we’ll be able to do lots of common-sense things, like cut back on red tape and let local councils buy British.” She went further in her speech launching her leadership campaign saying, “A proper industrial strategy wouldn’t automatically stop the sale of British firms to foreign ones, but it should be capable of stepping in to defend a sector that is as important as pharmaceuticals is to Britain.”
Here is more. I would say that puts her one for three. I’ve also heard talk of May embracing a “worker codetermination” model for the UK, similar to that used in Germany. It works less well for services, and besides Gorton and Schmid estimated it cost German firms about 26% of shareholder value (pdf)).
So that puts her at one for four, and it seems she was the best of the plausible candidates. The perceptive Janan Ganesh put it this way:
But if Tory history pits the spirit of freedom against the claims of social order, the one periodically dominating the other before giving way, she might herald the latter’s resurgence.
As he clutched his second Wimbledon trophy on Sunday, Andy Murray saluted David Cameron, the outgoing prime minister, as the doer of an “impossible job”. Ms May has only won the right to choose whose hearts to break. Free-marketeers, gird yourselves.
I am not surprised that Brexit is working out badly, but I am surprised how quickly it is becoming obvious that Brexit will not mean more individual liberty for the Brits. Here is Richard Tuck making the left-wing case for Brexit.
The Coasean upshot on the Hague ruling on the South China Sea
Analysts said the Philippines’ temptation to cut a side deal with China could undercut US efforts to put pressure on Beijing to back off its more maximalist claim to 85 per cent of the South China Sea — the nine-dash line” — by using the tribunal’s decision to mobilise international public opinion.
According to Richard Heydarian, a political analyst at De La Salle University in Manila, the new president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, “will surely look at ways to leverage the arbitration . . . to extract concessions from China”.
…Zhu Feng, director of the China Center for Collaborative Studies of the South China Sea at Nanjing the University, said Beijing’s efforts to cut deals with neighbours on maritime claims is a longstanding policy which even has a name: roughly translated it is called “shelve disputes in favour of joint development”.
He pointed to a number of diplomatic successes — a compromise with Vietnam on maritime claims in Beibu Bay in 2000 and a joint marine seismic work agreement signed with Vietnam and the Philippines in 2005.
…A number of areas of co-operation have been floated in the Chinese media: joint development of oil and gas resources, shared access to the fishing waters and collaboration in research for restoration of coral reefs in the region.
That is from Charles Clover at the FT.
The culture that is Kansas
“Some have begun to call public schools ‘government schools,’ a calculated pejorative scorning both education and anything related to government,” he [Davis Merritt] wrote.
That elicited a response from Bob Weeks, the host of “WichitaLiberty.TV,” a show about Kansas politics and public affairs.
“It is surprising to me that liberals and progressives object to the term ‘government schools,’” he said on the show. “They like government, don’t they? These people want more taxation and government spending, don’t they? Well, when we think about our public schools, we find they have all the characteristics of government programs.”
That is from Julie Bosman at the NYT.
That was then, this is now, Great Britain edition
The [1707] Act of Union was a legislative measure agreed in Scotland by a tiny patrician elite against some internal parliamentary opposition and much external popular hostility.
That is from T.M. Devine’s new and useful Independence or Union: Scotland’s Past and Scotland’s Present.
From the comments, on reintegrated servicemen
…I work occasionally at the VA as a psychiatrist in both inpatient and outpatient settings. My impression is that the men going into the recent wars are far less psychologically healthy then the men who went to WWI, WWII, or Korea. The prior longitudinal studies of the wars of the first half of the 20th century, such as they are, do indeed suggest that most men exit war with similar psychological profiles as to when they entered. Could the recently documented ‘sense of loss’ so many returning veterans express reflect something similar to inner city youths and gangs, namely, that the camaraderie of combat and order of military life provided the paternal presence they lacked growing up? Military life and combat provided what communities and families had provided similar men when they returned from WWI and WWII. Take away the military life and combat, and they are left where they were prior to joining.
That is from a recent post on reading.
The culture and polity that is Danish
Which Danish restaurant gained a third Michelin star in February 2016?
How many municipalities are there in Denmark?
In what constellation did the 16th-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe discover a new star?
Questions such as those are part of a new Danish citizenship test so difficult that more than two-thirds of applicants who took it for the first time in June failed, the Integration Ministry confirmed this week.
Here is the NYT article, this one stumped me too:
Danish Radio recently asked the actor Morten Grunwald a question on the test: When was the premiere of the first movie about the Olsen Gang, a fictional criminal syndicate? Mr. Grunwald, a star of the film, replied, “That, I can’t even answer myself.” His memory was jogged when he was given the choices: 1968, 1970 or 1971. (It was 1968.)
I hope you have all seen the episodes of the TV show Borgen, one of my favorites.