Selectorate Theory's take on Democratic Leaders vs Dictators at War

In discussing the effect of coalition size on the behavior of leaders in war, Bueno de Mesquta (BDM) and Smith contrast the advice of Sun Tzu with that of Casper Weinberger. BDM and Smith summarize Sun Tzu's advice for kings contemplating war as follows:

1. Quick action is more important than outnumbering an adversary
2. Mobilize only enough resources for a quick campaign that will not require resupply from home
3. Provide private goods to soldiers to motivate them to fight.
4. If the initial resources are not enough to win, give up the fight rather than drain the treasury

In contrast, BDM and Smith summarize Casper Weinberger's advice for Presidents contemplating war as follows:

1. Commit forces to combat only if doing so is vital to the national interest
2. If forces are committed, commit enough to win. If you aren't willing to commit the forces needed to win, than don't commit any at all.
3. Have clearly defined political and military objectives, a clear cut plan for achieving them and the resources needed for doing so.
4. Constantly reassess the relationship between objectives and forces committed and adjust them as needed.
5. Before committing troops to combat, ensure that the action is supported by the people and Congress.
6. Use force only as a last resort.

Though Sun and Weinberger offering completely different advice, BDM and Smith argue that each is offering very good advice to their intended recipient. Sun Tzu was giving advice to ancient kings who were leaders of small coalition regimes and Weinberger was giving advice to US Presidents who are leaders of large coalition regimes. Therefore, though the rules of warfare may be the same for both types of leaders, the rule of political survival are very different for leaders of small vs large coalition regimes.

In a small coalition regime, the leader (call him a dictator) survives in office with the support of a small coalition of supporters. Because they are small in number, the dictator can best ensure their loyalty by providing them with private benefits. As a result, the leader's survival depends not on his job performance as a national leader, but on his ability to keep the flow of private benefits to supporters going. As long as the private benefits flow to the leader's essential supporters, the leader is free to do whatever he wants with regard to policy, including the prosecution of a war. However, the leader will have only the resources he has left over after paying off his supporters to devote to the war effort. 

With this in mind, it should be clear that Sun Tzu's advice is tailor made for a dictator and we should expect dictators to behave in more of less this way. That is, we should expect them to act opportunistically and make bold, if economical, moves. While this may provide them with small scale successes, we should also expect them to fail with some frequency, either from miscalculation or lack of follow-on efforts.  In general, we should expect to see them fight wars on a shoe string budget and to avoid making large scale commitments of resources to the fight.

The leader of a large coalition regime (call her a democrat) is in an entirely different situation. She depends on the support of too many people (millions in the case of a democracy) to be able to pay them off with private benefits. Therefore, she stays in power by providing public benefits in the form of good (from the supporters point of view) public policy. As a result her political survival depends on her performance as a national leader in the eyes of these supporters. Where the dictator is largely free to do as he pleases with regard to prosecuting a war, the democrat has her head in a political noose as she will be called to account for all her decisions. She must make sure that the issue or cause at stake is one that her essential supporters care about and gauge how much these supporters will be willing to sacrifice to prevail. She must calculate whether the resources the supporters will deem appropriate to expend will in fact be enough to win the conflict. Then, if she engages in the war, she must not only win it, but do so in a seemingly competent manner. Anything less will open the door to a challenger for her job.

Indeed, Weinberger's  6 points pretty well cover the pre-war calculations a democrat must make if she wants to keep her job. Therefore, if we assume that democratic leaders are aware of the necessities of political survival, we should expect that they actually will  tend to act the way Weinberger argues they should. That is to say that they will tend to view war as a last resort, seek political consultations and support before engaging in action, and generally be more deliberate in initiating war. However, once they decide to fight, they are going to fight to win and devote significant resources to the process.

While the Ukraine crisis hasn't erupted into a full scale interstate war, Putin's actions and those of Western leaders seem too conform with the predictions of Selectorate Theory. Putin made a bold move to snatch Crimea at a very low cost but hasn't really followed up with much effort. He put large numbers of troops on the border but hasn't seen fit to use them in support of the separatists. Now, in the wake of the downing of Malaysian airliner, the Christian Science Monitor reports that he seems to have pulled a U-turn by telling his Security Council that there is no immediate threat from the west and suggesting that he might use his leverage to influence the separatists towards a peace process.

In contrast to Putin's staccato moves, leaders of more democratic nations may seem ponderous. But Selectorate Theory tells us that this is the nature of the beast. Democratic leaders must not get out ahead of their large coalition of supporters and pursue goals that the coalition does not deeply desire, and they must take care not to make mistakes (like giving high performance surface to air missiles to rebels) lest their supporters turn on them. However, if their supporting coalition demands action, then action they must have, though, again, that action must be successful (or at least perceived as being so). Western democracies may move plodding pace, but they find it hard to stop or change direction once committed to moving.

For this reason, Putin would be well advised to rein things in. The destruction of MH17 has struck a cord with the supporters of western democratic leaders and has probably increased domestic demands that those leaders do something. While it looks like we are a long way from European publics accepting the cost of boycotting Russian gas and oil (much less going to war),  the murder of close to 300 people is a step in that direction and will force western leaders to look harder for someway to demonstrate their competence to their supporters. Putin might do well to consider how he can allow them to do so at the least cost to himself and his coalition.

Factoid: US Auto Manufacturing

Mark Perry has a chart laden post about the US auto industry on his Carpe Diem blog that is worth checking out.

The chart I find most interesting is one that shows the Federal Reserves index of motor vehicles and parts productionin the US from 1972-2014 (below). Note that current production is about double what it was prior to 1993.

So what? Well, this just another factoid in my push-back against the notion that US manufacturing has vanished. That meme would have been true in the 1980s but hasn't been true since then. Note that, even at the height (or depth) of the Great Recession, the US produced about as many vehicle and parts as it did in the 1970s.

Of course, as is usually the case with manufacturing, higher output doe not mean higher employment. The chart below come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and show employment in the US vehicles and parts industry.

 Employment in US Motor Vehicle and Parts Manufacturing Industry 1990-2014

Source: BLS

Sadly, BLS only has data from 1990 onward, but we can see enough in this chart, especially if we compare it to Perry's chart at top. Though production remained stable from 2000-2008 (top chart), the BLS graph shows that employment by roughly 300,000 in the same period. Of course, employment nose dived in the recession but has not comeback to pre-recession levels despite the fact that output is higher than it was before the recession.

From the society's point of view, this drop in employment is not a good thing (especially for Detroit). However, in terms of the auto industry, it is a sign of improved efficiency since manufacturers are making more vehicles and parts with about 500,000 less workers in 2014 compared to 2000. While hardly a rebirth, it is a significant improvement.

Of course, one needs to take care not to confuse the US auto industry with the Big Three (GM, Chrysler and Ford). As noted in Perry's post, 7 out of 10 of the best selling US auto mobiles are made by Toyota and Honda. Indeed, Cars.com, who published the 2014 American Made index  notes that there were only 13 cars that qualified as American made and 3 of them were being discontinued and so were not eligible for their top 10 list. That left every "American made" car on the top ten list (one wonders if there will be enough next year to have a top 10 list). As further evidence of the globalization of the US auto industry, Perry also notes that BMW is actually the largest exporter of vehicles from the US and that those exports have increased significantly since the end of the recession (see chart below).

From Mark Perry's Carpe Diem blog

Matt Ridley on the Greening of the Planet

Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist) points out that the planet is actually getting more green (in literal terms of vegetation coverage). It is important to point out that Ridley is not a climate change denier but takes an inquisitive empirical view of things. While he points out some inconvenient truths for the environmental movement, he argues that these are the result of the success of many environmental policies and should be a source of encouragement for environmentalists.

However, he questions many of the common wisdoms about the effect of economic growth on the environment and the benefit of renewable energy, especially bio-fuels.

Make sure you get to the part where he talks about Haiti and the Dominican Republic and his discussion of bio fuels at the end (it is only 18 minutes and goes by fairly quickly).

Factoid: Russian Favorability Ratings Have Fallen in the Past Year

Pew Research's Global Attitudes Project released a report entitled Russia’s Global Image Negative amid Crisis in Ukraine. The general finding is that, in 20 of the 44 countries surveyed by Pew in this past April and May, people have a significantly more unfavorable view of Russia in 2014 than they did in 2013. The increase in unfavorable attitudes towards Russia is most profound in Europe and the US, as you can see in the graph below.

However, looking at regions obscures what is going on in individual countries. Therefore, it is important to look at country level data as shown in the next chart from Pew:

Note that the only countries in which a majority of respondents had a favorable view of Russia were China (66%, up 16 points from 2013), Bangladesh (60%), Greece (61%, down 2 points),  Vietnam (75%), and Russia itself (92%, up 8 points).

While these figures are undoubtedly affected by the Ukrainian crisis, we should remember that, among other things, Russia also hosted the winter Olympics in Socchi and has taken a pro-Assad stance in Syria in the 2013-2014 period. The latter may explain the improvement in Russia's favorability rating in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

If one looks closely at the nations in which a smaller percentage of respondents had an unfavorable view of Russia (i.e., those with negative numbers in the shaded column on the right), one can see that several of those countries have a smaller percentage of respondents choosing to take either a favorable or unfavorable view at all. For instance, 7% less respondents in India had an unfavorable view of Russia in 2014 than in 2013, but only 55% of respondents expressed a favorable or unfavorable view in 2014, as opposed to 68% in 2013 (a 13% drop). In Pakistan, 51% of respondents expressed a favorable or unfavorable view of Russia other in 2013, but only 40% did in 2014 (an 11% drop). This is also true, to a lesser extent, in South Africa. This suggests a growing uncertainty about Russia in these countries

Indeed, the only countries that had an unambiguous increase in favorability towards Russia (beside Israel and the Palestinian territories) were China, the Philippines, and Russia itself.

In contrast,  global attitudes towards the US remain very favorable. In 34 of the 44 countries surveyed, a majority of respondents had a favorable view of the US (with Germany and China coming in at the bottom of the favorable pack with a 51% and 50% favorability respectively). As has been the case for years, the countries with less than 50% of respondents having a favorable view were mainly from the Middle East (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Palestinian Territory, Tunisia, Turkey) with Russia, Greece and Argentina in the mix (the latter two's population possibly driven by disdain for US dominated financial markets and IGO's).

If one looks at the nations with the most favorable views of the US (i.e., those with 75% or more of the respondents reporting a favorable view of the US), the list includes some interesting nations. The Philippines had the most respondents with a favorable view (92%, 10% more than the US itself), and Vietnam and Bangladesh came in at 76% (about the same percentage the view Russia favorably).  It is also interesting to note that France makes this list at 75% of respondents having a favorable view of the US (which has been about the case since 2009 but  is a big improvement over the 37-43% ratings in France from 2003-2008).

Categorizing the Islamic State

Stathis N. Kalyvas has a post on the Monkey Cage, The logic of violence in the Islamic State’s war, in which he exams how the Islamic State (formerly the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS) uses violence. The question he asks is whether we should view the Islamic State as a sectarian or revolutionary group.

Though he cautions that the data is incomplete and somewhat contradictory, he argues that the Islamic State appears to be more a revolutionary group that happens to be Islamic than a predominantly Islamist group, as follows:

First, violence is not a transparent process and we should be careful about drawing easy conclusions from what transpires from the fog of the civil war battlefield. Second, there is nothing particularly Islamic or jihadi about the organization’s violence. The practices described above have been used by a variety of insurgent (and also incumbent) actors in civil wars across time and space. Therefore, easy cultural interpretations should be challenged. Third, if the Islamic State ought to be characterized, it would be as a revolutionary (or radical) insurgent actor. These groups project a goal of radical political and social change; they are composed of a highly motivated core, recruit using ideological messages (although not all their recruits or collaborators are ideologically motivated – far from it) and tend to invest heavily in the indoctrination of their followers. They tend to prevail over their less effectively organized insurgent rivals (see the examples of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front or the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka), but their Achilles heel lies in their radical proclivities which often turn local populations against them if the opportunity arises, as happened in Iraq with al-Qaeda in Iraq. Revolutionary groups can appropriate a variety of other causes (nationalism, ethnic or sectarian identities), but their revolutionary identity is central and helps make sense of much of their activity. In that respect, we have much to learn from revisiting the action and strategy of the last generation of insurgent revolutionary actors, those of the Cold War.

The big point I would like to make here is that, when interpreting ongoing events, one is forced to use theory by the lack of available data.  An essential part of using theory to analyze current events and make predictions about future events is deciding in what theoretical category the events belong. Are you looking at apples or oranges?

Elizabeth R. Nugent touches on the same subject in a MC post, What do we mean by ‘Islamist’?. She argues:

Islamism’s definition as an ideology that locates political legitimacy in the application of the sharia (often translated as Islamic law) and in Islamic tradition pegs it to complicated and unfixed concepts that are diversely interpreted in different manners by different practitioners. Various definitions of sharia draw from any combination of the prescriptions outlined in the Koran and the Sunnah related to larger societal issues of politics, economics, justice and social organization. The complexities arising from the translation of a multiplicity of practiced and interpreted Islams is manifested in the diverse range of actors that might fall under the rubric of an Islamist movement, party, or group. Islamists can range from those that advocate for quietism, effecting gradual political change through internal individual reform, to political parties advocating for societal reform through social welfare and electoral contestation, to revolutionary militants that seek to overthrow illegitimate states and implement revolutionary change. Islamists range from those who root justifications of their political behavior in personal and literalist interpretation of the textual tradition, to those who rely on interpretations derived from independent reasoning and decision-making with a firm basis in established schools of Islamic legal theory.

She concludes:

In many ways, this finding and the larger point are obvious and intuitive, but it’s something that continues to get lost in contemporary debates. It means both actors and critics who essentialize Islam, and fault or credit the entire faith tradition for one politicized version contained within its discursive tradition, are incorrect. It’s why militant actors as well as religious parties cannot claim that they speak for all of Islam or Muslims as a collective community, and it’s why outsiders cannot condemn Islam as a monolithic entity. These differences in interpretation and practice are the fascinating and frustrating challenges in understanding religion in politics, and understanding the inherent multiplicity and pluralism contained with religious faith traditions is important for consumers of news about Islamism and its current political actors.

Matt Ridley on the Future Economy and Environment

Matt Ridley on why the future isn't as bad as a lot of people think.

Contemporary Protectionism: South Korean Tubular Steel

This past Saturday, Mark Perry commented on US tariffs on South Korean tubular steel. As he often does, he argues (a la Frederic Bastiat) that concerns about cheap steel imports reflect the interests of US steel producers at the expense of US steel consumers, the latter of which are actually more important to the society.

As Perry puts it:

If the viewpoint of the consumer, i.e. mankind, were seriously considered in the case of imported steel from Korea, there would be no question about the outcome – no government protection for the U.S. steel industry. And to get the lowest possible steel price for American consumers, we should welcome the Koreans to engage in as much “dumping” as they are willing to…. the lower the price they offer us, the better…. even if it’s below their cost of production… And if that’s really the case and they’re selling steel and steel pipe at a loss, we should gladly accept their generous gift of foreign aid to America, and stop complaining….

Of course, there is more than just consumers versus producers at stake. There is also the overall efficiency of the economy, which Perry argues is negatively impacted:

Economic trade theory and mountains of empirical evidence on protectionist trade policy confirm conclusively that there is almost always a net loss of economic efficiency from protectionist trade policies. Reason? Protectionist trade policies generate costs to domestic consumers in the form of higher prices and reduced trading activity that outweigh the benefits to protected domestic industries, often by a factor of 2-to-1. In other words, protectionist trade policies always makes the country imposing them worse off on net, not better off, when considering all of the costs and benefits.

Media Bias?

Perry also notes  that the WSJ's coverage of the issue displays "... the usual media bias of presenting protectionist trade policy completely from the viewpoint of the protected domestic industry." He then edits the WSJ article to reflect an emphasis on consumers

Typical of such reporting is this LA Times article by Don Lee which does seem to emphasize the effect on producers over that on consumers (despite mentioning a surge in demand for tubular steel due to fracking) and accepts the charge of "unfair" prices at face value. However, if you get deeper into the article, Lee does point out that US prices are out of line with the global market:

What's more, a deeper look at the industry also tells the story of a U.S. steel market that is out of sync with the rest of the world, where steel prices have been declining as Chinese real estate construction has softened.

Despite an international oversupply, U.S. Steel and other domestic operators charge substantially more than global competitors for tubular goods. That's possible, analysts said, because the industry has gone through severe restructurings over the last few decades and is now more concentrated with greater ability to dictate prices.

The article also notes that US steel manufacturers have contributed to the oversupply by ramping up production of tubular steel in anticipation of increased demand from the drilling industry. It isn't until close to the end of the article that the effect on US consumers (i.e., the energy industry) is brought  up and the tariffs are described in a quote as a two-edged sword.

Now, is this bias? Afterall, the article does get around to the main counterpoints and placing the emphasis on consumers is simply replacing one bias for another. I'll just leave at noting that is you read the article backwards, you might have a very different impression of the situation than if you read it as written.

Boudreaux Weighs In

Don Boudreaux has some even more scathing comments on a letter to the WSJ in which he puts the principle behind US tariffs in terms of individuals in households:

The ostensible principle behind Uncle Sam’s action is that we Americans are made poorer when non-Americans act especially vigorously to increase our access to foreign-made products.  But this principle is economically insane.  People grow prosperous, not by rejecting, but by embracing enhanced access to goods and services, regardless of the sources of this enhanced access.

If the principle that motivates Uncle Sam to tax Americans who buy inexpensive imports were valid, then, for example, my household would be made poorer whenever I buy - rather than make myself - my own furniture and clothing.  After all, Ethan Allen and Nordstrom charge prices so low that they not only “hurt,” they destroy, my capacity to make for myself the goods that they offer for sale.  Should I perhaps, in my quest to grow more prosperous, hire my neighbor to threaten to shoot me whenever I seek out merchants willing to sell to me especially low-priced sofas and shirts?