Consider the availability of as basic and essential a public good as clean drinking water. In a world in which easily prevented, waterborne diseases like cholera, dysentery, and diarrhea kill millions of the young and old—non-workers—clean water would be a tremendous lifesaver. The problem is that these are lives that autocrats seem not to value.
Sure enough, drinking water is cleaner and more widely available in democratic countries than in small-coalition regimes, independent of the separate and significant impact of per capita income. Honduras, for instance, is a pretty poor country. Its per capita income is only $4,100. Yet, 90 percent of the people in Honduras have access to clean drinking water. Per capita income in Equatorial Guinea is more than $37,000, nine times higher than in Honduras.8 And yet only 44 percent of its people enjoy clean potable water. This is true even though both places have the same burden of a tropical climate; both were Spanish colonies; and both are predominantly Christian societies. The big difference: Honduras is considerably more democratic, with a larger group of essentials, than Equatorial Guinea. Is this comparison out of the ordinary? Not at all! To be sure, higher income countries on average do enjoy even higher quality drinking water than poorer countries. Looking within approximately equal per capita income slices of the world, however, those regimes that depend on a big coalition on average make quality drinking water readily accessible to almost their entire population, and those who depend on a smaller coalition lag behind by 20 percent or more. The availability and technology of clean water doesn’t favor democratic societies; democratic regimes favor ensuring that drinking water is clean.
Building Infrastructure
As we’ve demonstrated, even a nasty dictator provides the people with basic education and essential health care so that they can work at making the autocrat rich. There is one more public goods program that is necessary to translate labor into his or her wealth. Everything the workers make has to get out to the market so that the leader can sell the product of the workers’ labor for money. That means there is a need for roads to transport what’s been made to markets where people have money.
Nevertheless, there is still a balance when it comes to infrastructure. Since roads run in two directions, one must be careful not to build too many roads or, especially, roads to the wrong places. Roads are very costly to build and it is easy to hide their true costs. This makes them a good source of graft, which in turn makes constructing them attractive. But having a country too well connected can lead to new regional power centers—political, economic, or otherwise—that undermine the autocrat. And if things ever heat up sufficiently to encourage rebellion, the very roads that autocrats build can come back to haunt them. Shoddy infrastructure is often an intentionally designed feature of many countries, not a misfortune suffered unwillingly.
Zaire’s (today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo) Mobutu Sese Seko once told Rwanda’s president Juvénal Habyiarama, “I’ve been in power in Zaire for thirty years, and I never built one road.” Why? As he explained to Habyiarama, “Now they are driving down your roads to get you.”9 Indeed, when Mobuto came to power in 1965, Zaire had about 90,000 miles of roads. Thirty-two years later, when he was finally deposed, only about 6,000 miles remained, just enough to sell goods and not enough to make it easy to get to Mobutu. So, roads to market: yes. Roads to get you out of the country: yes. Other roads: no.
Consider how straight or curvy the roads are from the center of capital cities to the city’s largest airport. Of course, just how straight the road is depends on a number of factors. There’s topography, how sprawling the capital city is, the technology when the road was built, and how wealthy the society is. And then there is the size of the winning coalition.
Wealth is not randomly distributed. Places that depend on broad-based support to keep the government in power tend to be wealthy too. That might lead us to think that airport highways are especially straight in wealthy—read, large-coalition—societies, since it is rich governments that can most easily compensate people for tearing down their houses to make efficient roads from the city to the airport. And yet, that isn’t the case.
Topography, unlike wealth, isn’t dictated by politics. A landscape spattered with wide waterways and high mountains is likely to make the road from the capital city to its airport pretty curvy regardless of the type of government that runs the society. To just plow straight ahead in such circumstances means building tunnels and long bridges. Those are expensive. Tearing through villages is expensive too if the townspeople need to be properly compensated when the government invokes its right of eminent domain to knock down houses. And the people who need to be compensated in such circumstances may well happen to be both influential and essential. If the townsfolk whose houses are in the way of an airport road are not influential or essential, then it is cheaper to go straight ahead than to skirt village after village.
If the choice of route were just about economics one might think that straight roads from city to airport are especially prevalent in rich countries. But if politics trumps economics, then straight roads will more often be the province of petty dictatorships rather than representative—and rich—democracies. That the difference between driving distance and the distance as the crow flies is related to politics, and especially to how many essentials a leader needs, is rather interesting and perhaps surprising, but related they are.
We calculated the ratio of driving distance to the distance as the crow flies from the major airport serving each national capital for 158 countries.10 A low ratio means a fairly straight road; higher ratios, more curves. Only two of the thirty lowest ratios—places where the driving distance is almost equal to the distance as the crow flies—fall in democracies, taking the average coalition requirements for governance into account over the past thirty years (1981–2010). Portugal and Canada have the straightest roads to their respective capital-city airports among societies whose leaders rely on lots of essentials to hold power. Portugal has the world’s thirteenth lowest ratio and Canada is twenty-eighth. Which countries have the ten lowest ratios? Answer: Guinea, Cuba, Dominica, Colombia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Ecuador, Ethiopia, and Equatorial Guinea. This certainly is not a who’s who of democracy. Only Ecuador and Colombia’s governments, among this motley crew, are making real progress toward dependence on a large coalition. The average coalition size for these ten by our estimation method is 42 out of a possible score of 100.11 The world’s average is 62; that is, 50 percent higher!12
The lesson is that when an autocrat needs a road to the airport (a good route of escape) he can just confiscate people’s property, making the road as straight and as quickly traveled as possible. As President Obama observed in his State of the Union address on January 25, 2011, when discussing the similar issue of building railroads, “If the central government wants a railroad, they get a railroad—no matter how many homes are bulldozed.” He was contrasting what autocrats can do with what he, as a democratic leader, cannot.
Democrats find using eminent domain politically costly and so are more likely to go around a village or house than to knock it down. In the event that a democrat ignores property rights, it’s likely that all the freedoms she must provide will culminate in people taking to the courts and the streets to redress any perceived wrong. A smart democrat, of course, tries to avoid such troubles, using eminent domain only when it benefits many people, especially members of the democrat’s constituency (the influentials). It is incredible to see how easily leaders can take people’s property in the People’s Republic of China and how hard it is to do the same in Hong Kong. When essentials are few, pretty much anything goes.
Roads are not the only infrastructure construction that seems to emphasize their private benefits in autocracies and their public benefits in democracies. Autocrats and democrats need electric grids. A recent study, for instance, shows that when governments expand reliance on a large coalition they shift electricity pricing and availability away from policies that favor industry and
toward policies that help consumers; that is, the masses instead of the wealthiest in society.13 And then there are the Mobutu Sese Sekos of the world, who have worked out how to use electric power to advance their political survival.
Mobutu famously replaced local electricity-generating capacity near Zaire’s copper mines with a hydroelectric station that was more than 1,000 miles away. This empowered him to cut off electricity at the touch of a button, guaranteeing that he, and not some local entrepreneur, controlled the flow of copper wealth. It’s worth noting that the power lines bypassed all the people along the way. That’s the right sort of infrastructure project taken up by someone who wants to use public policy to secure his hold on power.
Massive construction projects, like the Aswan Dam in Egypt and China’s Three Gorges Dam, are very much like Mobutu’s power grid. These sorts of projects are great for autocrats. Although they dislocate vast numbers of people, they also generate vast corruption opportunities, making them gems of private rewards as well as providers of basic public infrastructure. It is noteworthy that they also cost vastly more to build than comparable dams in the United States or other democratic countries, where such projects serve primarily to advance public—not private—welfare.
All leaders need to provide some public goods in order that the people can work to pay taxes. This is just as true in other organizational settings. Corporate bosses cannot expect their employees to produce in isolation. Communications, training, and team-building skills promote productivity, although they also facilitate the coordination of protest against the boss. For this reason, not all corporate phones connect to everywhere.
Even the heads of crime families provide public goods that help mobsters earn, of which perhaps the most important is reputation. Mobsters would find it much harder to demand protection money if people did not believe they were backed by muscle. Mafias also provide muscle and deterrence to protect their members. Killing a mafioso is not to be undertaken lightly. Mobs also provide lawyers. Each of these services is a valuable reward. But more importantly, they keep the mafia earning. As with autocrats, mob bosses provide those public goods that help mobsters produce the wealth that their bosses need to stay on top.
Public Goods for the Public Good
In small-coalition polities, public goods often serve the narrow interests of the leadership and only indirectly the interests of citizens. The situation is almost entirely different for those who rely on a big coalition. For such leaders the desire to stay in office dictates that they must satisfy the large coalition’s desire for access to good education at all levels; to quality health care at all levels; and, most importantly, to the means to make the wishes of the coalition easily known by the government at all levels. It is surely no coincidence that all but one (Singapore) of the twenty-five countries in the contemporary world with the highest per capita incomes are liberal democracies; that is, societies that enjoy rule of law, with transparent and accountable government, a free press, and freedom of assembly. These are places that foster rather than suppress or obstruct political competition. They foster such competition not out of civicmindedness but rather out of the necessity of assembling a large coalition of supporters.
Some of the richest people in the world live in tiny countries with tiny populations, like Iceland and Luxembourg. Others live in countries with vast populations—the United States or Japan—while still others live in expansive territories with relatively modest populations, like Canada or Australia. Some of the wealthiest people live in religiously homogeneous societies like Denmark or Italy, but others reside in religiously heterogeneous nations such as the United Kingdom or the United States. Many of the richest countries are in Europe, but others are in Asia, North America, or Oceania. Some were imperial powers like Britain and France; others were themselves colonies like Canada or New Zealand.
What, then, is it that these countries have in common? It is not their geographic locale, their culture, religion, history, or size. What they all have in common is that they are democracies and therefore dependent on a large coalition, albeit of different shapes and sizes. And being dependent on many essentials, all of these regimes share in common the provision of the cheap and yet hugely valuable public good called freedom.
Although such crucial freedoms as free speech, free assembly, and a free press are cheap to provide, autocrats avoid them like the plague. Democratic leaders, no doubt, wish they could avoid these freedoms since it is these public goods that make it easy for opponents to organize to overthrow them. But those who depend on a large coalition can’t escape them because they cannot amass a winning coalition without guaranteeing large numbers of people the right to say, read, and write what they want, and come together to discuss and debate at will. And then democrats must listen and deliver what it is their constituents want or someone else will come to power and do so.
But when incumbents rely on a small coalition of cronies, then coalition members are readily satisfied by being made rich through corruption and cronyism. They do not risk these riches by demanding that incumbents siphon money away from them and into effective public policies. Under these conditions, leaders can readily limit the provision of public goods in general and freedom in particular if they so choose. Hence, democracies escape Hobbes’s state of nature and autocracies generally don’t. Indeed, we can see just how dramatic the difference is in escaping the state of nature by looking at what happens when nature exercises its freedom to wreak havoc. We have in mind the consequences of natural disasters like earthquakes, cyclones, tsunamis, and drought. These certainly are not political events, but their consequences are the product of how rulers best allocate revenue and how people’s freedom to organize shape allocation decisions.
Earthquakes and Governance
An earthquake of magnitude 7 on the Richter scale is ten times larger than one of magnitude 6, just as an 8 is ten times larger than a 7 and 100 times bigger than a 6. The city of Bam in Iran suffered a terrible earthquake on December 26, 2003. Its magnitude was between 6.5 and 6.6. Of the city’s approximately 97,000 residents, 26,271 were killed. Chile, with a similar per capita income to Iran, experienced a magnitude 7.9 earthquake on June 14, 2005. That is twenty-five times bigger than the Bam earthquake and it struck in a more populous area. The Chilean quake hit the city of Iquique with a population of about 238,000. Remarkably, it killed only eleven people. Was this good luck or good policy at work?
Chile and Iran both regularly experience substantial seismic activity. As such, we should expect that their governments are attentive to the risks of earthquake and the devastation that can befall their people. But everything we have argued urges us to be cautious about such an optimistic view of governance.
Just to look at the past fifty years of history, Iran has consistently been a small-coalition regime. The shah’s government may well have depended on a somewhat smaller group of essentials than Iran’s current theocracy, but the two regimes are in practice not so different. By our way of thinking, therefore, Iran is not a place expected to foster the kinds of political freedoms that make it easy for people to express what they want and for the government to make a serious effort to fulfill those wants.
Chile’s last half century was a bit more complex. The country was a fairly democratic polity from 1960 until 1973, and was then plunged into a small-coalition regime that lasted until the end of the 1980s. By 1989 it was well on its way back to dependence on a relatively large coalition to sustain the government. This means that we should expect a substantially more public-goods oriented approach to seismic activity in Chile than in Iran at least during the 1960s and since 1990.
Chile experienced an extraordinary 9.5 earthquake in 1960. It killed 1,655 Chileans (as well as sixty-one in far-away Hawaii following the tsunami that resulted) and left about 2 million people homeless. Chile’s fairly democratic government (at the time) immediately set about developing a new, rigorous seismic code for all new construction to protect its citizens from such destruction
in the future. Left largely unaltered during the long years of military dictatorship, the code was revisited in 1993 when the once-again democratic Chile made upgrades to reflect improvements in technology. It seems that Chile’s seismic code was not only rigorous but also well enforced, resulting in greatly enhanced public safety against the ominous threat of natural earthquake disaster.
Unlike Chile, Iran enjoyed no such period of democratic rule during the last half century. As a result, there was no impetus for the government to strengthen its policies for protecting the public from disaster. As reported by the Iranian studies group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) following the Bam earthquake, “Considering the high seismicity of Iran, a comprehensive hazard reduction program was launched in 1991, but the effectiveness of the measures have [sic] been limited by lack of adequate funding and institutional coordination.... The principal causes of vulnerability in the region include . . . inefficient public policies, and lagging and misguided investments in infrastructure. [Emphasis added]”14 Translation: the small-coalition Iranian regimes of the shah and the ayatollahs have siphoned off funds for their private benefit instead of directing them toward improved public security against the predictable threat of seismic disasters. They provide no means for the people to make clear their desires, and they take few actions to secure their citizens against the predictable danger of death and destruction from seismic shocks.
The Dictator's Handbook Page 16