The Dictator's Handbook

by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

  On average, the Northern states developed more rapidly than the Southern states. It is tempting to ascribe this to the traditional historical narratives and attribute the general difference to climate or slavery. However, a careful examination of the subtle differences between the states suggests that variations in their political institutions were the main culprit behind how differently they developed. Jeffrey Jensen, a former student of ours and now a faculty member at NYU, Abu Dhabi, did a very careful study of the differences in the size of the interchangeables, influentials, and essential groups across the original states.3 He understood that many thought the differences in development depended on slavery and climate and so he corrected for these possibilities. Jeff took the size of the slave population carefully into account just as he also took carefully into account how many frost-free days there were per year in each of the original thirteen states. He investigated the distinctions in electoral rules within the early American states that created different levels of dependency on a large or small coalition drawn from a large or small set of interchangeables. His discoveries may not only rewrite how we understand America’s early development, but they can also help us understand how to make our own modern democracy do better.

  Who could vote differed greatly from place to place in the early United States. Obviously, slavery played an important—but not decisive—role. For purposes of allocating seats in the House of Representatives (and many state legislatures as well), slaves counted as three fifths of a person, but, of course, they had no right to vote. They were not alone. Women were not given the franchise until the twentieth century, and in the postcolonial period there were sizable genderbalance differences between the states. Some states also imposed substantial property or educational qualifications for voting, while others did not. Electoral districts were typically based upon county lines. Many of these inadequately reflected the population distribution, so in some legislative districts it took vastly more votes to win a seat than in others. The modern principle of one-person, one-vote was not yet the acknowledged law of the land.

  The upshot of these differences was that state political leaders were accountable to greatly different numbers of voters—that is interchangeables and essentials. Through painstaking research, Jeff Jensen estimated the proportion of the states’ populations that constituted the minimal winning coalition across states and across the years. It turns out that the size of the group of essentials varied enormously from a low of 8.8 percent of adult white males (and 0.9 percent of the total population) in South Carolina to a high of 23.9 percent of adult white males (and 4.9 percent of the total population) in Pennsylvania.

  As the rules to rule by lead us to expect, states in which leaders required support from a larger proportion of the population developed faster. Such states build more extensive canal, rail, and road networks. They also achieved higher educational attainment and were more attractive places for other Americans to migrate into. People left small-coalition states and flocked to big-coalition states where public services were better and all manner of public goods were more extensively provided. Foreign immigrants also flocked to the larger coalition states, even after correcting for proximity to large ports. Per capita incomes were much higher and varied almost directly with coalition size even after correcting for preindependence differences. States with bigger coalitions simply did better.

  The lesson here is clear. While all the states had the same nominal rules, redistricting and enfranchisement criteria matter in creating differences in the competitiveness of political systems and the development of the states. If properly attended to, districting and enfranchisement decisions could make the United States an even better place than it currently is.

  Let’s start with the decennial redistricting of Congress. The Supreme Court insists on the principle of one-person, one-vote and that is an excellent guideline. But it is a principle so easily distorted as to make congressional elections almost a farce except under extreme conditions. This is true for the simple reason that it is politicians in state legislatures who get to draw up congressional district boundaries. Shockingly enough, they design the boundaries to make it easier for their party to win.

  Gerrymandering is especially pernicious because it translates into two conflicting consequences. The average American is greatly dissatisfied with the job that Congress does and the average American is happy with his or her member of Congress. The latter is true because districts are constructed by politicians to give their preferred party a majority and so, by definition, the majority in any district is likely to be content. But this is a great perversion of governance. A small coalition of state legislators pick their voters instead of millions of voters picking their representatives. When politicians pick who votes for them it comes as no surprise that politicians are easily reelected and barely held accountable.

  Fixing gerrymandering is something that can be done only once a decade in the United States. It can be done more frequently in many parliamentary democracies that equally suffer from this perversion of representative politics. Whether the opportunity is ongoing or infrequent, fixing gerrymandering is easy, but to be feasible the voters must take up the cause and fight for it.

  Many scholars of American politics have worked out lots of better ways to allocate congressional districts than the way it is done now. All the methods come down to variations on a common theme: district boundaries should not be manipulated to squeeze some voters in here and others out there. Boundaries should reflect some basic principles of geometry and the natural constraints of the terrain, like major rivers or mountains. As a simple principle, gerrymandering could be greatly diminished by turning redistricting over to some computer programmers and mathematical political scientists, who could design rules that are not district specific but that instead apply common principles of fair representation across all districts.

  A voter initiative in California has taken a step in this direction. It calls for the appointment of a nonpartisan commission to handle redistricting. We will see how well that does at being nonpartisan. A computer program drawn up in ignorance of any specific district’s distribution of political preferences would be much more likely to achieve fairness and impartiality while fulfilling the spirit as well as the letter of the Supreme Court’s insistence on one-person, one-vote.

  Along with wiping out coalition-reducing gerrymanders, the time may well have come to amend the US Constitution to get rid of the electoral college. Here we have an institution whose founders’ original intent is pretty clear. They wanted to ensure that the slave states would join the United States and that meant erecting constitutional provisions that would protect slavery.4 The electoral college was one of those institutions. Here is a great example where original intent most assuredly should not guide modern-day politics. Slavery has been outlawed for about 150 years and yet the electoral college persists, and the primary reason, even if rarely spoken out loud, for its survival is that it allows politicians to construct a coalition of essential supporters that is substantially smaller than would be the case under direct election.

  Today the electoral college is justified by its defenders on the principle that it protects the interests of the small states since they are overrepresented in terms of electoral college votes. Indeed, that is exactly what it does. But what happens to the idea of one-person, one-vote? Apparently a vote in Wyoming or Montana should, by this argument, count more toward choosing the president (and vice president) than a vote in California or New York. That’s a convenient argument—if you’re from Wyoming or Montana. The rules of the electoral college make it possible in a two-candidate race for one candidate to win a majority of the popular vote and the other candidate to be elected president of the United States. Indeed, judiciously placed votes in a multicandidate race, such as in the cases of John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln, can allow someone to become president with a surprisingly small amount of support in the general electorate. Win the right combination of states—rather than
the most voters—and you can be president. This is just another mechanism to keep the winning coalition smaller than it could be and, thereby, to empower politicians more and the people less. Just this mechanism helped distort American politics right up to—and contributed to precipitating—the Civil War and it helps today to favor candidates popular in the right places rather than across all the country.

  Immigration policy is a hot topic of debate in the United States and across much of democratic Europe. The reason for the debate is pretty much the same whether it is taking place in Phoenix or Paris, Shropshire or San Francisco. Immigration policies come in three flavors. In one, immigrants have an easy time becoming citizens in their new homeland. In another, immigrants are welcomed as guest workers but cannot gain citizenship. And in the third, immigrants just aren’t welcomed. It turns out that which immigration flavor is chosen has big effects on the size of the groups that dictate whether a government, in governing for itself, also governs for the people.

  Immigrants without citizenship opportunities increase the size of a country’s disenfranchised group. As such, they are, barring open rebellion (which is rare among poor immigrants), an impotent source of demand for public goods. They are not in the interchangeable selectorate and they cannot become influentials or essentials. Guest worker immigration policies put immigrants in exactly this boat. The monarchies of the Middle East love this sort of immigration because it doesn’t interfere with the control of the few over the many, and if any immigrant misbehaves he can just be deported.

  We see a similar pattern of constraints that keep immigrants from having a shot at being in a winning coalition in some democracies as well. Gaining citizenship rights is extremely difficult in Japan, for instance. Although over the centuries there have been many waves of immigration to Japan (from, for instance, North Korea), the limits on access to citizenship ensures that immigrants do not compel an expansion of the winning coalition.

  In places like Great Britain, immigrants from commonwealth countries like India or Pakistan can easily enter the country and gain citizenship. This means that they are quickly made part of the selectorate. Because the size of the winning coalition in democracies is tied, at least indirectly, to how many people can vote, this also means that immigration expands the coalition. Naturally many politicians will be unhappy about this as it diminishes their control over discretionary money. Current citizens may also be unhappy especially if they back the party in power. Expanding the coalition reduces the value of their private rewards. But, for farsighted members of a current winning coalition in a democracy and for the many citizens who voted for the losing party, increased immigration means increased pressure on the government to produce more public goods. That’s good for just about everyone and especially for those not in the coalition of essentials.

  Expanding immigrant access and rights, then, can boost the required size of the winning coalition and, in the process, improve the quality of public policy. But with so many interests aligned against immigration because of its short-term costs, it is hard to change immigration rules. Or is it?

  A simple fix that lifts everyone’s longer term welfare is to grandfather in immigrants. Amnesty for illegal immigrants—a dirty word in American political circles—is a mechanism to choose selectively those who demonstrate over a fixed period their ability to help produce revenue by working, paying taxes, and raising children who contribute to the national economy, national political life, and national social fabric. Give us your poor and let’s see if they can make a better life. Give us your tired and let’s see if they can be energized by participating in making a more public-goods oriented government work better. Give us your huddled masses longing to be free and let’s see if their children don’t grow up to be the foundation of a stronger, more peaceful, and more prosperous society than they first came to. For generation after generation, the waves of immigrants to the United States have made our winning coalitions bigger and better. They have turned from poor, tired, huddled masses into modern America’s success story. This was no happenstance of time or place. This is the straightforward consequence of easy citizenship and, with it, an expanded winning coalition that makes for better governance.

  Removing Misery

  Beneficial change in the third world is among the most difficult challenges to overcome. Rampant poverty, frequent exposure to the resource curse, and long-entrenched autocratic regimes all stand in the way. But change can and does happen, as the stories of South Africa, Tunisia, Taiwan, and Mexico demonstrate. When change does happen, it can come from two sources: internal political upheaval or external threat, and between these two, external threat is far less likely to succeed in making many better off at the expense of the few. American presidents and European prime ministers have long advocated a democratic world and they might even claim some qualified success. The world is much more democratic today than it was fifty years ago, but it is not likely that our cries for freedom in the world—rarely backed up by effective efforts—turned many dictators into freedom lovers. As recent events in the Middle East demonstrate, effective change comes mostly from local circumstances. After nearly a decade, the US government has spent over $1.1 trillion dollars on combat and nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan.5 The resulting governments are still largely isolated from the need to improve the welfare of the people. The citizens of several Middle Eastern nations achieved more in the matter of weeks with virtually no expense. And if these changes are solidified by winning the backing of essentials and influentials, then they stand a much better chance of producing meaningful democratization.

  In the winter of 2011, waves of protests swept across North Africa and the Middle East. Educated, unemployed people in places like Tunisia and Egypt set the wheels in motion. With 25 percent to 30 percent of people under twenty-five unemployed in these countries, the downside for rebels was small. The upside was great and success was quickly achieved with relatively little violence. At the same time that these countries were engulfed in regime-changing mass upheaval, uprisings in Libya and Bahrain also occurred but with very different consequences. Unemployment among the young educated classes was no better in these and other oil-rich lands of the Middle East. But unemployment is not that big a deal for their leaders because, after all, they get their money from oil, not labor. In terms of comparative deprivation it may seem odd to some that the Tunisians were the first to rebel, since, at least in relative terms, they were well looked after by their government. They had a relatively free press and the ability to assemble. Revolution, however, neither comes to those most deprived of freedom nor to those who are already free. It is most likely in the great in between.

  Oppression is a tourist turnoff, so Tunisia’s former president, Ben Ali, whose economy relied significantly on tourism, was compelled to allow more freedom than he probably would have liked. All those tourists were unwitting agents for change. They placed Tunisia at risk of revolt to overthrow the government, because to get their dollars the government had to grant more freedoms to the people. These freedoms translated into education and access to information and the means to communicate through the Internet. That, in turn, meant the possibility of organizing and coordinating fellow dissenters, creating free assembly online that could and was translated into mass assembly in the streets. Egypt, another economy with a large tourist sector, was perhaps in the same boat. Hosni Mubarak ran an oppressive, often violent regime against his fellow Egyptians, but he never ruled with the iron fist of a world-class oppressor like natural gas–rich Than Shwe or the vicious Cambodian murderer Pol Pot. Mubarak couldn’t afford to. With US aid waning, Mubarak needed tourist revenue more and more and so he showed a modicum of restraint. No such restraint was seen in Libya, where oil dollars provided Qaddafi with ample funds to buy mercenary soldiers who did not hesitate to slaughter rebels seeking to overthrow the colonel’s regime.

  In looking for places that may be good targets for democratization, it is probably a good idea to look to places that
rely on tourists for a big chunk of their economy, like Kenya, Fiji, and an independent Palestine, which hopes to be a big tourist destination. Reliance on tourism is, of course, only one reason that an autocrat might allow just enough freedom that opponents might see how to organize and revolt. Any profound economic strain will do just fine in turning thought to liberalization provided the strain is so deep that there isn’t enough money around to buy political loyalty.

  If some mass organizers see how to mount an uprising, the problem still remains of when to strike. The right moment almost always depends on their country having a new leader, a sick leader, or a bankrupt leader. Tunisia’s Ben Ali, for instance, was rumored to be seriously ill, possibly suffering from prostate cancer, and Egypt’s Mubarak, in his eighties, may also have been ailing. Those who want to protest when the time is right and those overseas who want to see democracy blossom can work on laying the groundwork ahead of time. This may be much easier to achieve than we sometimes believe.

  Cell phone technology and access to the Internet can transform the lives of people, even poor people, in developing nations. Even simple information, like market prices for crops, can make an enormous difference in the income of a farmer, and of course, the more they can earn the harder they will work. Such mobile technologies are also giving poor people access to services, such as banking and insurance, which many of us in developed nations take for granted. Mobile phone accounts will be increasingly used to transfer money so that with a simple text message a farmer can pay for fertilizer or receive payment for his crops.6 The political empowerment of the people by such technology goes way beyond economic benefits. The adoption of such technologies will make it impossible for leaders to turn off an important means through which the citizens can coordinate, without also turning off the commerce and economic activities that the leadership needs to provide the tax resources with which to sustain themselves in power. When economic circumstances dictate that a despot’s flow of cash depends on allowing the people to converse, the dictator is truly between a rock and a hard place. Turn off the technology for long and there will not be enough money to buy coalition loyalty. Leave the technology on and the people can coordinate to overthrow their autocrat. Given such circumstances, a smart dictator will look ahead and work out that he is better off liberalizing now than risk being exiled, jailed, or killed later. It is not happenstance that a SIM (subscriber identity module) card for mobile phones costs over $1,000 in Burma. It is also not a coincidence that J. J. Rawlings liberalized when Ghana faced economic collapse.