How can justice be causal?

Is social justice an empirical characteristic of a set of social arrangements? And can social justice be a causal factor in processes of social change or social stability?

Before justice could be considered an empirical feature of a set of social arrangements, we would need to have a more specific understanding of what we mean by the term. And we would need to be able to "operationalize" this complex concept in order to be able to apply it to different social arrangements. But neither of these tasks is insurmountable; certainly not more so than defining and applying the ideas of fascism, liberal democracy, or welfare state to specific societies.

So let's begin with a simple, applicable definition of justice. Let's focus on just three dimensions of a society's functioning: distribution of access to society's wealth; the degree of abuse of power and its contrary, reliable legal protections of the person; and the extent of individual freedoms. Injustice involves --

• exploitation and inequality
• unwarranted coercion by the state or private organizations
• the abuse of people's freedoms.

A society is more just when it involves less of any of these features. And each of these dimensions seems measurable.

But immediately a problem arises. Each of these features requires a key normative judgement. Exploitation is the unfair division of the fruits of productive activity among the participants. The qualifier "unwarranted" requires that we supply a normative theory of the state. And "abuse" of freedom isn't simply restriction on freedom; it is the unjustified or unequal restriction on freedom. So in order to measure any of these characteristics in a particular social context it isn't enough to know who gets what or who does what to whom; we need a background set of normative ideas that allow us to judge which kinds of treatment and inequality count as exploitation, coercion, or the abuse of freedom.

This is where Amartya Sen's ideas about capabilities, realizations, and freedoms are practical and useful. We might substitute "capabilities realization deficit" for exploitation. Here we might argue that a society that leaves a significant portion of its population in material conditions where they cannot fulfill most of their basic human capabilities is for that reason unjust. We might measure the gap in human development between the top quintile and the bottom quintile as an estimate of the degree of exploitation that is prevalent in a given society. We may not know in detail how the system of distribution works, but the severity of the gap gives reason to believe that a portion of the society is being treated unfairly.  The Human Development Index provides a basis for beginning to assess different countries along these lines (link).

Second, we might measure coercion and legality by the estimating the degree to which a society has effectively implemented a working system of law that is applied equally. The World Bank has made some efforts in this direction through its Worldwide Governance Indicators (link; working paper here).  This gives us an empirical measure of the degree of lawlessness and unchecked state power that exists in various societies.

We might measure freedoms by aggregating observable features of democratic participation in various societies.  The Economist has constructed a Democracy Index that was first implemented in 2006 (link). This gives us an empirical way of assessing the rough degree of involvement citizens can have in public decision-making; or in other words, it is a measure of the degree to which it is possible for citizens to exercise their freedoms in a public space.

So we might imagine a "justice index" for a society that aggregates measures like these into an overall assessment of the degree of justice the society currently demonstrates.  It would then be interesting to see how societies differ in this measure, and how other important social characteristics may be correlated with this measure.  I haven't done this experiment, but here's what we might expect: higher injustice ratings correspond to greater likelihood of social conflict, lower productivity, and lower community and civic engagement.

What mechanisms might be hypothesized that would originate in these core aspects of a society's justice profile and its various outcomes?  Here we can identify a couple of factors that would support a causal interpretation.  For example, absolute or relative deprivation can cause people to rebel as they struggle to create social changes that protect their interests.  Further, as Barrington Moore demonstrated in Injustice, the conviction that basic social arrangements are unfair can also move people to activism and resistance -- as we seem to be seeing in the Occupy Wall Street movement.  These factors derive from the distributive arrangements of a society: injustice can provoke resistance.  Similar statements can be made about state violence and lawlessness. We have seen in Libya, Syria, and Morocco that state violence against protesters can actually have the effect of strengthening and broadening resistance.

So these aspects of injustice can have effects on mobilization and resistance by a population. Are there other effects that injustice can have?  As noted earlier (link), Pickett and Wilkinson argue in The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger that inequalities of income have surprisingly strong associations with a variety of social ills.  This could be developed into an argument that social justice and injustice lead to behaviors that either promote or undermine social welfare.

Finally, it seems plausible to imagine that the intangibles that accompany a harmonious society -- a population of people who generally feel that they are fairly treated by their basic institutions and their fellow citizens -- will lead to a variety of other social goods, including cooperation, civic engagement, and economic productivity.  Conversely, it is plausible to suppose that a dis-harmonious society would give rise to the negatives of these qualities: less cooperation, less civic involvement, and less economic productivity.

So two things seem true.  First, it does seem possible to "measure" injustice (supported, of course, by a normative theory of why various kinds of inequality are illegitimate).  And second, it does seem plausible that the features of a society that constitute its injustice may also have causal consequences for social unrest, social wellbeing, and social cooperation.  And these are certainly significant social consequences.

(Perhaps there is an analogous set of questions at the individual level: Is "virtue" a specific empirical characteristic of a person's character? And can virtue be a causal factor in the individual's life outcomes and level of happiness?)

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Posted in: CAT_moraltheory,inequality,justice

A jobless future?

Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio wrote a pretty gloomy book in 1994 with the striking title, The Jobless Future. Here is a Harvard Educational Review discussion of the book (link). What is most discomforting in reading the book today is the degree to which the factors they identify seem to be today's headlines. What does jobless mean here? In a word, it means that the US and other OECD countries will never recover the number and quality of jobs they need in order to regain the middle class affluence they had in the 1950s and 1960s. The future will involve work -- but not enough jobs to ensure a low unemployment rate. Here is their assessment in 1994:

For there is no doubt that we have yet to feel the long-term effects on American living standards that will result from the elimination of well-paid professional, technical, and production jobs. At the same time, nearly everyone admits that many of these jobs are gone forever. (xi)

The central structural factors they identified in 1994 are still key parts of our economic environment today: technology innovation replacing labor, rising productivity producing persistently flat labor demand, shifts in the structure of the economy towards finance and service sectors, and internationalization of production.

Technological progress and capital accumulation seem to disrupt the social fabric in the United States. A weakened position in the international economy demands that American industry increase its productivity and cut its unit labor cost. As Carl G. Thor, president of the American Productivity Center in Houston, says, "The trick is to get more output without a surge in employment." Technological change and competition in the world market guarantee that increasing numbers of workers will be displaced and that these workers will tend to be rehired in jobs that do not pay comparable wages and salaries. Women and minorities will suffer the most as the result of these changes; the increased participation in an occupational sector by women and minorities is often an indicator of falling wages in that occupation. (3)

The second explanation, more sobering, emphasized the role of huge federal and consumer debt accumulated beween the late 1970s and the early 1990s that has drained public and private investment, inhibiting recovery and growth. (5)

This, in brief, is the context within which a severely reduced job "market" began to take shape, not only for U.S. workers, but potentially for all workers. In this book we argue that the progressive destruction of high-quality, well-paid, permanent jobs is produced by three closely related developments. (8)

The implication they draw is stark: new jobs will never be created at a rate to satisfy rising demand for jobs.

Our first argument—that the Western dream of upward mobility has died and it is time to give it a respectful funeral—may have at long last seeped into the bones of most Americans, even the most optimistic economist. The dream has died because the scientific-technological revolution of our time, which is not confined to new electronic processes but also affects organizational changes in the structure of corporations, has fundamentally altered the forms of work, skill, and occupation. The whole notion of tradition and identity of persons with their work has been radically changed. (15)

They've also got a vision of what the future could look like: satisfying lives with a decent standard of living, based on a combination of paid work and guaranteed social income.

The aim of this work is to suggest political and social solutions that take us in a direction in which it is clear that jobs are no longer the solution, that we must find another way to ensure a just standard of living for all. (xii)

Accordingly, if unwork is fated to be no longer the exception to the rule of nearly full employment, we need an entirely new approach to the social wage and, more generally, "welfare" policy. If there is work to be done, everyone should do some of it; additional remuneration would depend on the kind of work an individual performs. (353)

They are as interested in the "satisfying" part of the question as the "standard of living" part. They want to know what sources of meaning, worth, and value are possible for a whole civilization in which work and career are no longer the primary focus? It is an existential question as much as it is an economic one -- which takes us back to an earlier post on income and wellbeing.

But here is someone else who has a vision of a jobless future: William Gibson. His pictures of the Sprawl (an urban agglomeration extending from Atlanta to Boston) and the Bridge (the improvised "off the grid" community living on the earthquake-damaged Oakland Bridge) offer a grim picture of life for people scraping by in a cyberpunk world. There is talent, technology innovation, wealth, economic competition in Gibson's world -- but there's nothing that looks like a middle class life for ordinary people. (Here are a couple of the novels: Neuromancer, All Tomorrow's Parties.)

It seems inescapable that the rising inequalities of income and wealth we have experienced for thirty years are strongly linked to the jobless state of 15% to 20% of us (counting discouraged workers and underemployed workers) and the fairly stagnant living standards of another 50%. By tolerating this acceleration of inequality, our society is also silently sanctioning the end of social solidarity and the compact that we've had according to which everyone benefits from economic activity. Our graph seems to be pointing more in the direction of Gibson than Aronowitz. But maybe this is the fundamental goal of right wing rhetoric after all: to decisively break the bonds of social solidarity and mutual obligation altogether and to allow privilege to have its way unconstrained by social obligations. Surely we owe each other more than this.

So far the strategies on the table about employment are either about job creation (Democrats) or providing even more tax relief for business and the wealthy (Republican). None of these voices consider the more radical implication: we may need to consider a dramatically new way of thinking about income, work, social distribution, and lifestyle in the future. And that's what Aronowitz and DiFazio proposed almost 20 years ago.

(Philippe Van Parijs' recent contribution to Boston Review on a universal basic income is a really interesting start on some serious alternative thinking (link).)

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Posted in: CAT_policy,inequality

The moral basis for an extensive state

A recent post focused on the conception of society involved in seventeenth and eighteenth English political thinking, the theory of possessive individualism.  The post suggested that this conception has a lot of resonance with the ideas and rhetoric of the Tea Party today.  I've also posted a number of discussions of the social ideals of John Rawls (link, link), expressing a liberal democratic view of the good society.  These posts remind me how important it is to have some fairly specific ideas about how we would want society to be organized in the future, so we can also have some ideas about current reforms that might take us in that direction.  And today we don't seem to have a lot of clarity about this kind of vision, especially on the progressive side of the political spectrum.

The ideal that seems to lie behind the conservative Tea Party political philosophy is simple but alarming:

1. Citizens should have maximum possible liberties of activity and use of property.


2. Citizens have no positive obligations to other citizens, beyond those associated with respecting liberties and property rights.


3. The state exists only to secure the liberties and security of citizens; this means the state needs to have funds to provide for national defense, enforcement of property rights, and maintenance of public order.


4. The state has no legitimate basis for creating more extensive regulations on the exercise of liberty and property (FDA, EPA, regulation of banks, …).  Such regulations represent an unjustified interference with the exercise of private property rights.


5. The state has no legitimate basis for using tax moneys to provide a social safety net (unemployment payments, welfare payments, food and housing subsidies, …).  Such transfer programs represent an unjustified system of redistribution of wealth and income that violates the property rights of anyone who is taxed more extensively than a fair share of the costs of providing for national defense and maintenance of public order.

This political philosophy is familiar from Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974).  At the time Nozick's vision was considered extreme from a philosophical point of view; it took to a logical limit the very limited assumptions about individual rights that were a part of the Lockean tradition of political philosophy, and arrived at what was then a very startling set of conclusions about the limits on legitimate state action.  Nozick referred to this conception as the "minimal state".  Nozick's philosophy expressed a form of libertarian conservativism, with no inclination towards the "social values" of more recent conservatism.

If this political philosophy were to be enacted through legislation, it would imply a number of things: abolition of mandatory social security, abolition of regulatory agencies like EPA and FDA, abolition of unemployment benefits and poverty-based welfare programs, and dramatic reduction of taxes on the affluent.  This is a vision of the minimal state with a vengeance; and it seems rather familiar from much of the rhetoric offered by Tea Party activists and Republican presidential candidates alike.

We could spend time thinking about the deficiencies of this political philosophy from a number of points of view.  Here my interest is different; I'd like to consider what components might go into a political philosophy that expresses a moral justification for the more extensive state that a great many Americans would want to have. First, what are the institutional arrangements that might be considered?

A strong alternative to the minimal state is the Nordic model -- essentially the political and economic system associated with Scandinavian democracies in the 1960s through the 1980s.  Here is an interesting monograph on the economic and social characteristics of the Nordic model: The Nordic Model: Embracing globalization and sharing risks (Torben M. Andersen, Bengt Holmström, Seppo Honkapohja, Sixten Korkman, Hans Tson Söderström, Juhana Vartiainen; published by the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy); link.  The authors describe the key economic and social commitments of the Nordic model in these terms:

• a comprehensive welfare state with an emphasis on transfers to households and publicly provided social services financed by taxes, which are high notably for wage income and consumption;


• a lot of public and/or private spending on investment in human capital, including child care and education as well as research and development (R&D);


• and a set of labour market institutions that include strong labour unions and employer associations, significant elements of wage coordination, relatively generous unemployment benefits and a prominent role for active labour market policies. (13)

A key goal of the study is to assess the economic performance of the Nordic model over the past fifty years.  The study's summary conclusion is very favorable: contrary to anti-tax, anti-government ideology, the Nordic economies have performed very well.

The Nordic countries have, according to many indicators, succeeded relatively well in fulfilling their social ambitions. Recently, this has been combined with a satisfactory economic performance in terms of employment and productivity levels as well as growth of GDP per capita. Also, the macroeconomic balance is good and public finances are strong. There is indeed a Nordic success story in the sense of a favourable combination of economic efficiency and social equality. 

True, the Nordics went through a period of low productivity growth in the 1970s (like most other OECD countries) as well as a major financial and macroeconomic crisis with very high unemployment rates and large fiscal imbalances in the early 1990s (somewhat earlier and less dramatically in the case of Denmark). But even so, the Nordics have more or less managed to keep up with the US in terms of PPP-adjusted GDP over the last 25–30 years, which is more than can be said of most other EU15 countries. The longterm performance is mainly recorded as a high rate of total factor productivity growth. This indicates that technical progress, notably in the area of information and communication technology (IT), has played in important role in growth. More importantly, it also shows that the Nordics – contrary to popular belief – demonstrate a high degree of economic flexibility and capacity of structural change. The macroeconomic crises have helped the process by inducing growth-enhancing changes in structural policies (and, for a while, through the improvements of competitiveness caused by large depreciations in the early 1990s). (15)

These are social and economic arrangements that establish an active state, a state with broad responsibilities to the welfare of its citizens, and a state that calls upon a significant fraction of the wealth of society to do its work.  What are the moral principles that might underly such a conception of a good society?  Here are a few axioms that seem to be worth considering within such a political philosophy.

1. Society is a system of interdependency and mutual benefit for all citizens. Everyone benefits from being part of a just society.


2. The moral situation of individuals in society includes several important components:


1. Individuals within society have rights, liberties, and needs for personal security.


2. Individuals have obligations to each other to help prevent hardship and to facilitate full human development. These obligations derive from at least two sources: (a) the benefits we all enjoy as a result of social cooperation in a functioning society; and (b) the moral recognition we have of the equal human worth and dignity of fellow citizens.


3. Individuals within society have universal needs to facilitate their full human development and functioning, including education, health care, housing, and adequate nutrition.


3. Certain core functions for the state follow from these moral ideas:


1. The state is obligated to create a system of law that protects the rights, liberties, and security needs of all citizens.


2. The state is obligated to serve as one of the important vehicles through which our positive obligations to other citizens are honored. 


1. The state needs to ensure that all citizens have access to education, healthcare, and the essentials of life.


2. The state needs to provide a safety net for citizens whose earnings within the market economy leave them unable to provide for a decent standard of living.


3. The state is obligated to protect the public from the harmful effects of private activities, including regulations concerning health and safety, conditions of labor, and environmental harms.


4. A handful of moral constraints surround the policies and laws the state may adopt:


1. The state is authorized to collect taxes to efficiently perform its functions of protecting rights, securing welfare, and regulating harmful activities.


2. The state is obligated to be procedurally just and economically efficient in its administration of public programs.


3. The policies and laws of the state need to be adopted through a democratic process in which all citizens have equal voice.

This formulation highlights a cluster of values that can potentially gain wide support within a democracy: the equal worth of all individuals, the importance of liberty, the importance of a range of social obligations all citizens have to each other, and the idea that the state needs to be articulated in such a way as to embody these moral ideas.

If the theory of the minimal state owes much of its content to John Locke, the more extensive state described here owes much of its moral rationale to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Rousseau brought the moral perspective of the "individual within community" into the foundations of political philosophy.  Josh Cohen's Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals provides an excellent discussion of Rousseau's political theory; link.

(Gosta Esping-Andersen has studied the politics and policies of social democracies through a lifetime of writing. Especially important are The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism and Politics Against Markets: The Social Democratic Road to Power.)

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Posted in: CAT_policy,inequality,justice

More on The Spirit Level

There are quite a few interesting comments on my earlier post on The Spirit Level on Economist's View. I can't respond in detail to all of them, but here are a few additional thoughts.

A few commentators seem to think I'm unsympathetic to the book, which isn't accurate. So let me be more direct in my assessment of The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. I find the empirical data presented to be highly suggestive and interesting. Pickett and Wilkinson demonstrate simple trend relationships between the income inequality score of a set of countries and states and a series of social problems. I myself do not have reason to doubt their statistical methods, though other critics have done so, including Lane Kenworthy in a balanced and reasonable critique in 2010. What troubles me about the central argument of the book is what I find to be a flatly unconvincing hypothesis, that the psychological states created in a country’s population by status conflict and income inequality suffice to explain the variation in health outcomes for individuals in these societies. There are many determinants of a person’s satisfaction with his/her life besides income inequality; and there are many social factors that influence health outcomes for individuals besides their perception of income inequalities and the level of stress that those inequalities create in them.

In my view, a good causal explanation requires an analysis of the mechanisms that bring about the relation between cause and effect. I find only one mechanism underlying their accounts of this relationship – essentially a psychological mechanism linking the individual’s perception of income inequalities to health and behavioral outcomes. They flesh this out with a description of the physiology of stress induced by rising income inequalities leading to rising mental illness; perceived status differences leading to decline in trust; stress based on perceived inequalities leading to increased “comfort eating” and obesity; status competition leads to increased violence; etc. This is what I mean by monocausal; there is just one causal process at the heart of their analysis.

The variety of causal mechanisms that seem pertinent to me in consideration of their data include several different kinds. First, as I mentioned in my post, there are serious and systemic sources of separation between individuals within societies that have nothing to do with income inequalities and that might be expected to have the same kinds of psychological and physiological effects on individuals: racism, ethnic hatred, sexism, economic conflicts that do not have to do with inequalities, and so on. For example, in the United States there are credible efforts to explain racial disparities in health outcomes on the basis of the effects on individuals living in circumstances of endemic racial discrimination and prejudice. (See, for example, Arline T. Geronimus, ScD, Margaret Hicken, MPH, Danya Keene, MAT, and John Bound, PhD, "“Weathering” and Age Patterns of Allostatic Load Scores Among Blacks and Whites in the United States"; link.) These effects are unrelated to income inequalities and derive instead from another aspect of social separation. So race rather than income appears to explain this set of health disparities. So perhaps this implies that if we had a way of measuring a “composite index of non-economic social separation” we might have a similar set of graphs, with societies with a lot of racism and ethnic hatred at the upper right quadrant of the graph. I don’t suppose that this index would be highly correlated with the quintile-quintile ratio that the authors use as their proxy for economic inequality.

Second, there are structural influences on a population’s health outcomes that do not derive from the degree of income inequalities that exist in a society but are nonetheless highly influential on health status of the population. For example, the quality and accessibility of rural healthcare has a large influence on the health status of rural people; the accessibility of health insurance to inner city residents has a large influence; the targeting of food marketing in favor of “comfort foods” has a large potential influence on the whole population; and differential treatments and discrimination within health systems for different populations of patients have large potential effects. None of these factors derive from the ratio of quintile incomes – the degree of income inequality – in the society; they are independent causes of differential health outcomes across sub-populations.

I’m not an expert on statistical reasoning; but of course every reader knows that evidence of correlation between two variables A and B is not conclusive evidence of a causal relation existing between those variables. There may be a common factor that causes variation in both A and B, or the correlation may be flatly spurious. It is necessary to frame a credible and testable hypothesis about how the putative causal condition leads to the putative effect. On the other hand, finding that a proposed mechanism is not in fact valid does not establish that there is not a causal connection between the variables; it only mandates that we then search further for a mechanism that does in fact obtain. Only if we are ultimately convinced that there is no possible mechanism would we come to the conclusion that the correlation is spurious. So my position in the posting under discussion is simply that the authors have not established a mechanism linking income inequalities to bad health outcomes that satisfies me.

One can be opposed to extreme and rising income inequalities in one’s society – as many of the readers of The Spirit Level are – without being convinced of the particular causal connections that the authors assert. And this matters quite a bit; if we want to reform society, we need to have well grounded theories of the causal processes that lead to the outcomes we want to reduce or avoid.

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Posted in: CAT_structure,inequality,mechanism

Income inequalities and social ills

According to Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson in The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, income inequalities in a society are a source of a variety of social problems in that society, almost without regard to the absolute level of income in the society.

Their basic measure of inequality across countries and states in the United States is the ratio of income from the top quintile to the bottom quintile. (They also sometimes make use of the Gini coefficient.) The quintile income ratio varies across OECD countries from a low of about 4 (Japan) to a high of just under 10 (Singapore). The United States has the second highest ratio, at about 8.5 (figure 2.1).

In order to empirically evaluate the impact of a society's income inequalities on social well-being, they construct an Index of Health and Social Problems for each country and US state. The index incorporates --

• Level of trust
• Mental illness
• Life expectancy and infant mortality
• Obesity
• Children's educational performance
• Teenage births
• Homicides
• Imprisonment rates
• Social mobility

These ten factors are all weighted equally. Here is their most basic graph plotting the index against income inequality among OECD countries (figure 2.2):

A similar but looser relationship obtains between these variables for US states; figure 2.4. And they find similar relationships between the UNICEF index of child wellbeing and income inequality; figure 2.7. So their most basic claim is well substantiated: there is a strong negative relationship between social inequalities and social well-being. Most importantly, they maintain that this relationship is causal.

This is indeed a striking hypothesis. Their argument is not that material deprivation causes social harms and high inequality societies have more material deprivation; it is rather that the degree of inequality is itself an important cause of social harms. Further, they maintain that these relationships persist in affluent societies. And they are explicit in accepting that this implies a causal relationship between a structural feature of society and individual outcomes (chap 3).

Some of the most interesting content in the book comes in the form of specific empirical analysis of some of the kinds of social malaise that are rising in society, and some of the mechanisms through which inequalities contribute to this rise. Chapter 3 takes on stress and anxiety. Figure 3.1 documents a generally rising level of anxiety among men and women college students from the 1950s to the 1990s. The authors relate this rise to an increase in social anxieties: feelings of inadequacy, friendlessness, and separation from community (kl 745). And these features of social relationship, they believe, derive from rising hierarchy and inequality.

Another important mechanism of social harm is the erosion of trust that modern societies have experienced. This too the authors attribute to rising hierarchy and inequality and the pronounced separation this creates among members of society. Figure 4.1 illustrates this relationship.

Similar analysis and findings are presented for mental illness (chapter 5), health and life expectancy (chapter 6), obesity (chapter 7), educational performance (chapter 8), teen births (chapter 9), violence (chapter 10), rates of incarceration (chapter 11), and social mobility (chapter 12).

The data presented here are very striking: a standard set of scatter plots demonstrating a positive relationship between inequality and a variety of social harms. In each case the authors attempt to provide an account of a mechanism that plausibly leads from inequality to the higher incidence of the social harm.

It strikes me, though, that all the mechanisms amount to the same sociological idea: that extreme inequality leads to a set of psychological conditions that in turn produce the harm in question. They emphasize status differences on the one hand (inequality) and friendship on the other (equality) as powerful determinants of social well-being and harm (kl loc 2927).

Much of this argument seems to come down to some familiar hypotheses in sociology: that anomie is a social feature that produces social and individual harms (Durkheim) and that the strands of community are favorable to human wellbeing (Tonnies, Putnam). Inequalities are toxic, according to this line of argument, because they undermine the strands of social relationships and community among individuals; they produce a situation of rising anomie and separation among individuals in society. Societies with lower inequalities allow higher levels of trust and community to persist and this gives rise to fewer social problems.

It is an appealing argument, but in the end I find it monocausal and therefore less convincing than the authors would wish. I'm finding it to be "Durkheim on epidemiological steroids". Even if we accept the point that reciprocity and mutual respect are key components of a society's health, there are other factors that undermine these besides economic inequality -- racism, ethnic hatred, sexism, and other kinds of "othering" besides income inequality. I appreciate the book. But I'd like a more multicausal analysis of the findings.

It is also interesting to ask whether the authors think there is a tipping point when it comes to inequalities. Is there a level of income inequality where inequalities are a non-factor when it comes to the social ills that they highlight? Is the level of inequality current in Sweden just fine as a foundation for social cohesion and reciprocity? Or is the situation more analogous to exposure to second-hand smoke: every level creates a risk? In other words, is it only high inequality societies that create these harms, or does every society north of Babeuf do so to some extent?

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Posted in: CAT_structure,inequality

Quiet politics

image: Conspiracy, Edward Biberman (cover illustration, Quiet Politics)

Pepper Culpepper's Quiet Politics and Business Power: Corporate Control in Europe and Japan sheds some very interesting light on one key question in contemporary western democracies: how do corporations and business organizations so often succeed in creating a legislative and regulatory environment that largely serves their interests?  And, for that matter, why do they sometimes fail spectacularly in doing so, even while spending oceans of money in the effort to influence public policy?

The book is a careful comparative study of the development of corporate governance laws and institutions in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Japan.  It offers special focus on the institutions governing hostile corporate takeovers (very different across the four examples), but also takes on other issues of current interest, including executive pay.  But though the cases and issues considered in the book are fairly esoteric and specialized, Culpepper's analysis is intended to provide a broadly useful tool for understanding how corporate influence is exercised in a democracy.

Culpepper wants to know what political and situational factors explain the divergent course that corporate governance has taken in these four contemporary democracies, from more permissive to more restrictive.  Do elected officials determine the broad outlines of the governance regime?  Are differences across states the result of differences in the platforms of large political parties in these states?  Or are the outcomes driven by something else?  Culpepper thinks that it is usually something else:

In this book, I argue that the outcomes observed in these four countries result not from variations in government partisanship or from different interest coalitions, but from differences in the political preferences of managerial organizations.  In all four countries, the rules favored by the managers of large firms are those that triumphed, often against substantial political opposition. (3)

Or in other words, the outcomes are those favored by the business elites rather than elected officials or mass-based political parties.  And differences in outcomes are explained by differences in the business environment in the four countries.  This is the "business power" part of the question, and Culpepper's fundamental empirical finding is that businesses elites generally have proven successful in creating the institutional and regulatory regimes in their polities that they prefer.  But how do they succeed?

Here Culpepper's central finding is encapsulated in the other half of his title: these corporate governance issues usually fall in the domain of what he refers to as "quiet politics."  Noisy politics arise around the issues that generate significant and sustained interest by large numbers of voters; these issues have "high salience" to the electorate, and parties and elected officials find it in their interest to adjust their positions around voter preferences on these salient issues.  Quiet politics arise in the context of issues with "low salience" -- issues to which the mass of voters are largely indifferent.  "The political salience of an issue refers to its importance to the average voter, relative to other political issues" (4).  In the context of "low salience" issues that matter to the interests of high-level business managers and elites, it is possible for these elites to deploy an arsenal of influential tools that succeed very well in bringing about the legislative and regulatory outcomes that the managerial elites prefer.  Most fundamental is an information asymmetry between managers and policy makers:

The managerial weapons of choice in quiet politics are a strong lobbying capacity and the deference of legislators and reporters toward managerial expertise.  The political competitors of managers, be they liberalizing politicians or crusading institutional investors, lack access to equivalent political armaments, so long as voters evince little sustained interest in and knowledge about an issue. (4)

Culpepper unpacks the political advantage residing with business elites and managers in terms of acknowledged expertise about the intricacies of corporate organization, an ability to frame the issues for policy makers and journalists, and ready access to rule-writing committees and task forces.  These factors give elite business managers positional advantage, from which they can exert a great deal of influence on how an issue is formulated when it comes into the forum of public policy formation.  Culpepper refers to British Cadbury Committee, tasked to develop "best practices" in corporate governance (9), as an important example of an occasion where high-level managers had a very powerful ability to write the rules that would govern their behavior.  Vice President Cheney's energy committee during the Bush administration is another great example (link).  Informal working groups, containing a significant representation of managerial elites, have an ability to set the agenda for a regulatory regime that allows them to privilege positions they prefer and to protect their organizations from worst-case outcomes.

As in the case of direct lobbying, the power of managers in this context is the power to set the terms of the debate in an environment that is established with an explicit eye to protecting their interests. (9)

Here is one of many detailed examples that Culpepper studies in the book: the Peters Committee in the Netherlands in 1997, tasked to "establish a voluntary code of best practice in corporate governance" (100).  He notes that the Peters Committee was very similar in structure to the Cadbury Committee.  It was chaired by a former CEO, and had representation from the VEUO (Dutch Association of Securities-Issuing Companies), pension funds, and the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.  Unions were not represented.  And, Culpepper reports, the forty recommendations of the Committee were essentially ignored by the Dutch corporate actors.

Scholars of corporate finance point to the Peters Committee as a textbook example of the failures of self-regulation of business without any legal enforcement.  Yet from the viewpoint of the managerial interests that dominated the committee, its results were consistent with their highest political priority: to defend protection mechanisms [against hostile takeovers]. (101)

In other words: from the point of view of Dutch corporate elites, the committee was not a failure, but rather a demonstration of their ability to shape the agenda and secure a near-term environment that enabled their freedom of action.

So essentially Culpepper's empirical-institutional argument is that top business managers (CEOs and their teams) have a very powerful set of tools on the basis of which they are able to influence legislation and regulation.  This tool set leads to an impressive win percentage when it comes to legislation and regulation affecting the business environment.

But he also finds that these tools are really only decisive in the context of "low salience" issues -- issues that have not engaged the voting public with any intensity.  When a hitherto boring and technical issue of corporate governance suddenly jumps into high salience -- for example, the conflicts of interest faced by accounting firms involved in the Enron debacle -- these weapons of quiet influence essentially lose their ability to shape the outcomes.

The more the public cares about an issue, the less managerial organizations will be able to exercise disproportionate influence over the rules governing that issue. (177)

Parties, political entrepreneurs, legislative committees, and elected officials become interested in the issue; it becomes worthwhile for business journalists to learn the technical details; and the public demands solutions that may be contrary to the preferences of the business elite.  And Culpepper works through one of these examples in detail as well: the public and public policy debates that have flared up concerning executive pay (chapter 6).

In addition to its substantive political-institutional findings, the book is interesting for its methodology.  Culpepper explicitly favors the "causal mechanism" approach to social research and investigation.  He treats cases comparatively; and he attempts to "process-trace" the paths through which outcomes came about.  He depends extensively on interviews with pivotal actors in some of the cases studied.  He does a very good job of aligning his analysis against its main competitors -- median voter theories and coalition politics analysis.  Finally, the book is explicitly comparativist; he want to understand in some detail the situations and factors that lead to different outcomes with respect to corporate governance, and the rules governing hostile takeovers, in the four countries he studies.  So the book does an admirable job of sketching out some of the microfoundations of corporate influence in existing democracies.  As such, it is a very useful contribution -- it helps to connect the dots (link).

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Posted in: capitalism,CAT_institutions,inequality,power

Inequalities and the ascendant right

The playing field seems to keep tilting further against ordinary people in this country -- poor people, hourly workers, low-paid service workers, middle-class people with family incomes in the $60-80K range, uninsured people, ....  75% of American households have household incomes below $80,000; the national median was $44,389 in 2005.  Meanwhile the top one percent of Americans receive 17% of total after-tax income.  And the rationale offered by the right to justify these increasing inequalities keeps shifting over time: free enterprise ideology, trickle-down economics, divisive racial politics, and irrelevant social issues, for example.

Here is the trajectory of US income by quintile since 1965 (link); essentially no change in the bottom three quintiles over that 40-year period. Plainly the benefits of growth and productivity change in the national economy have benefited the top 40% of the population, and disproportionately have flowed to the top 5%.

Just consider what has happened to income to the "middle" class versus the top 1% in the US economy. The 40-60% segment of earners have declined from 16.5% to 14.1% of after-tax income, while the top 1% has more than doubled its share, to 17.1%.

And here's a very graphic demonstration of the rapid increase in the percent of income flowing to the top percent of US income earners since the Reagan revolution (thanks to benmuse):

Meanwhile, the power of extreme wealth in the country seems more or less unlimited and unchallenged.  Corporations can spend as much as they want to further candidates -- as "persons" with freedom of speech rights following Citizens' United v. Federal Election Commission (link). Billionaires like the Koch brothers fund the anti-labor agendas of conservative governors. Right-wing media empires dominate the airwaves. Well-financed conservative politicians use the language of "budget crisis" as a pretext for harshly reducing programs that benefit ordinary people (like Pell grants). Lobbyists for corporations and major economic interests can influence agencies and regulations in the interest of their clients, more or less invisibly.  And billionaire lightweights like Donald Trump continue to make ridiculous statements about President Obama's birth status.

The political voice of the right, and the economic elite they serve, has never been louder.  And it is becoming more reckless in its attacks on the rest of society.  Immigrants come in for repressive legislation in Arizona and other states.  Racist voices that would never have been tolerated a generation ago are edging towards mainstream acceptability on the right. Self-righteous attempts to reverse health care reform are being trumpeted -- threatening one of the few gains that poor and uninsured people have made in decades.  And the now-systematic attack on public sector unions is visibly aimed at silencing one of the very few powerful voices that stand in the political sphere on behalf of ordinary working people.

The big mystery is -- why do the majority of Americans accept this shifting equation without protest? And how can progressive political organizations and movements do a better job of communicating the basic social realities of our economy and our democracy to a mass audience?  Social justice isn't a "special interest" -- it is a commitment to the fundamental interests and dignity of the majority of Americans.

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Posted in: CAT_policy,democracy,inequality,power

Why peasant activism?

I have long been interested in peasant struggles as an historical phenomenon -- for example, the causes and outcomes of the peasant rebellions in China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Understanding Peasant China: Case Studies in the Philosophy of Social Science).  But it is also true that peasant movements are still visible in contemporary politics in a number of countries.  For example, mobilization by peasants and landless workers in West Bengal against the state's proposed development of a Tata factory led to the project's relocation to Gujarat (link).  In some instances and issues, peasants and other disadvantaged people come together as a mass organization to press their interests and concerns; in other apparently similar instances they do not.  How are we to understand this variation?

People are generally careful about their active political investments, especially when their choices can lead to serious personal consequences.  Are there good reasons for poor people to form and support organizations that seek strategies for expressing their needs and interests? Should they consider supporting demonstrations, strikes, and protests? What is the likelihood that social mobilization of the poor majorities in India, Egypt, or Brazil might lead to improvement in their daily lives?

A first point is fairly obvious. As a low-income society undertakes policies and strategies for growth, there are choices to be made. These choices have differential effects on different social groups.  And poor people and peasants are often at a severe disadvantage in competing over the terms of these choices within the formal institutions of government.  China's decision to create the Three Gorges Yangtze River dam system created many winners; but it also created many millions of low-income losers whose homes and livelihoods were destroyed in the process (link).  Largescale social and economic change is a time when the stakes are exceptionally high, and having a voice is crucial.

A second point has more to do with the "normal" workings of power in a developing state.  Poor people's interests are almost always overlooked or undervalued by official power-holders in developing societies -- a point made thirty years ago by Michael Lipton in Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development (1977). And this is often true even within parties that are ostensibly devoted to the poor, like the Congress Party in India. Corruption by leaders and powerful organizations is endemic, and landlords, business owners, and the military almost always wield disproportionate influence in the corridors of power.  So if nothing is done to disturb this "tilt" in the political system, then the outcomes will be unfavorable to poor people.

Third, it is plain that the organized efforts of under-class people can be powerful. Women's organizations advocating for environmental protection or property rights for women can push state and national authorities towards policies they would not otherwise have chosen. (Bina Agarwal has documented these processes in India; for example, here.)  Organizations of landless agricultural workers can pressure the state into adopting reforms and programs that provide some relief for their poverty. Mass mobilization is almost the only way to assert the material interests of the people.

Debal Singha Roy considers these issues in detail with regard to rural India in Peasant Movements in Post-Colonial India: Dynamics of Mobilization and Identity. Here is how Roy puts the point:

Social movements have always been an inseparable part of social progression, and through organized protests and resistance against domination and injustice they pave the way for new thoughts and actions that rejuvenate the process of change and transformation in society.  They bring forth for public scrutiny the hard and hidden realities of social dynamics. (8)

So, according to Roy, popular movements -- e.g. peasants' movements -- can lead to measurable change in favor of the dispossessed. They do so by making injustice visible to the broader society; pressing effectively for social changes that improve the condition of one's group; giving voice to segments of society who are almost always invisible to the middle classes; and asserting one's own agency as a fundamental aspect of being human.  These are all reasons for thinking that social activism and social movements are important.

What about the rest of us? Is activism important in a modern market democracy? Frances Fox Piven argues that these points do indeed apply in modern market democracies as well. In her recent book, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, she lays out this case through a new analysis of American policy history.

This book argues that ordinary people exercise power in American politics mainly at those extraordinary moments when they rise up in anger and hope, defy the rules that ordinarily govern their daily lives, and, by doing so, disrupt the workings of the institutions in which they are enmeshed. (kl 23)

Piven's basic view is that the structural inequalities of property and power in market democracies mean that electoral processes are usually tilted against the interests and concerns of poor and middling people. Electoral competitions are generally won by enough candidates reflecting the interests and world views of the powerful, that the perspectives of the poor and disadvantaged in American society rarely prevail in the statehouse or the Congress.  The exceptions occur, she believes, when poor and disadvantaged people find ways of expressing their interests through avenues that threaten to disrupt "business as usual" -- boycotts, strikes, demonstrations, and other activities outside of formal politics. Rights of speech and association underlie many of these strategies, and they express a different aspect of democracy. And these in turn depend upon a combination of mobilization and a moment in time when such collective actions have the potential of creating significant disruption -- when French farmers block roads to protest milk prices, for example.

So it seems that democracy almost requires a dynamic tension between formal representative politics and informal, nonviolent popular politics. What goes on in the state house needs what goes on in the streets of Madison if outcomes fair to ordinary working people are likely to occur.

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Posted in: CAT_collective action,class consciousness,democracy,inequality,power

Social justice and democratic stability

One thing I find interesting about the sustained demonstrations and protests in Madison, Wisconsin is the fact that people on the streets do not seem to be chiefly motivated by personal material interests. Rather, the passion and the sustainability of the protests against Governor Walker's plans seem to derive from an outrage felt by many people in Wisconsin and throughout the country, that the Governor's effort is really an attempt to reduce people's rights -- in this case, the right to come together as a group of workers to bargain together. This is a well established right in the private sector, protected by the National Labor Relations Act, and the rationale is substantially the same in the public sector.

So when the Governor attempts to eliminate the right to collective bargaining for public employees, he offends the sense of justice of many citizens in Wisconsin and elsewhere -- whether or not they are directly affected, whether or not they themselves are members of unions. Restricting established social rights is a very serious thing -- well beyond the specific calculation of interests that people might make. It's morally offensive in the way that state efforts to roll back voting rights would be offensive.  And this moral offensiveness can be a powerful motivator of collective resistance.

So this seems to provide an intriguing clue about political mobilization more generally. To what extent is moral outrage, a perception of injustice, an important motivator of individual political engagement and activism?

When we look at the MENA rebellions, even from a great distance, it seems that concerns about social and political justice have as much prominence as more material motivations -- demands for food subsidies, demands for state-sponsored jobs programs, etc. Egyptians, Tunisians, and Libyans interviewed on the BBC talk more frequently about the outrage of dictatorship and arbitrary state power than they do about material demands. And really, it's hard to see an economic interest in forcing a certain kind of food subsidy program being strong enough to create enough of a political motivation to lead a person to stand up against fighter jets and attack helicopters.

This is an insight that James Scott expressed a generation ago in The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, and E. P. Thompson a generation before that in Customs in Common, in the theory of the moral economy. In its essence, the theory holds that the fact of sustained violation of a person's moral expectations of the society around him or her is a decisive factor in collective mobilization in many historical circumstances.  Later theorists of political activism have downplayed the idea of moral outrage, preferring more material motivations based on self-interest.  But the current round of activism and protest around the globe seems to point back in the direction of these more normative motivations -- combined, of course, with material interests.  So it is worth reexamining the idea that a society that badly offends the sense of justice of segments of its population is likely to stimulate resistance.

This basic and compelling idea has an important implication for sustainable social and political stability in a political regime. If citizens react collectively to sustained injustice, then a regime that wants to rule sustainably needs to respect the demands of justice.  It is important for a social order to arrive at a rough-and-ready shared understanding about the rights and obligations that citizens have, and it is important for the state to conduct itself in ways that honor those expectations.

This sounds like a social contract theory, and it certainly has something in common with that normative theory. But its relevance here is more sociological. It is the basis of a prediction about what social and political circumstances will elicit sustained protest and resistance, and which kinds of arrangements are likely to be accepted indefinitely by the population. And it leads to a policy recommendation for any regime that wants to create a stable, ongoing polity: work hard to make sure that social arrangements and institutions treat citizens fairly, and don't gratuitously violate their deeply held convictions about their rights and about the general features of justice.

So what moral expectations do American citizens have about how society ought to work? Several things seem fairly clear. Americans care about equality of opportunity. We are deeply rankled by the idea that the good opportunities in society are somehow captured by an elite of any sort. Second is the idea of equal treatment of all citizens by the institutions of the state. Teenagers and persons of color rankle at being singled out for special attention by the police. Women rightly seethe at the persistence of institutions in the workplace that continue to treat them differently. Arab Americans rightly resent special scrutiny at airports.  We don't accept status inequality easily -- especially in our own cases.  And third, we are very sensitive about the inviolability of our rights -- our right to vote, right to go where we want, right to speak our minds and associate with whomever we want to.

What Americans don't yet seem to have is a specific moral sensitivity to extreme inequalities of income and wealth. The fact of the accelerating concentration of income at the top doesn't seem to produce the moral outrage in the US that perhaps it would in France or Germany. And maybe this comes from another element of our moral economy -- the idea that inequalities are all right as long as they are fairly earned. But more information about bonuses on Wall Street and the banking industry may begin to erode that tolerance.  

It is intriguing to have widely separated examples of social mobilization going on right now.  Surely there are sociologists and political scientists working right now to interview leaders and followers in Egypt, Madison, or Benghazi trying to sort out the motivations and social networks through which these movements arose and solidified.  As a theoretically informed prediction, it seems likely that moral motivations like resentment of arbitrary power, violations of strongly held rights, and persistent status inequalities will be found to have played a role.

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Posted in: CAT_collective action,inequality,moral economy,motivation

Democracy and contentious politics

Democracy and contention are back on the front page, thanks to the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).  As always, Chuck Tilly provided some important insights into today's events based on his depth analysis of several hundred years of contentious politics.  The relevant work on the intersection between democratization and contention is Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650-2000 (2004).  As the history of contentious politics demonstrates, nothing in the nature of social contention leads necessarily to a demand for greater democracy; in fact, nineteenth century observers tended to believe that "revolutionary contention" and democracy were antithetical to each other. So democratization and contention are interweaving subjects rather than different aspects of the same process.

As always, Tilly is interested in using historical comparisons to shed light on the processes of contention and democratization, and the history that they focus on in this volume is that of modern France and Britain.

To explain similarities and differences in French and British experience since 1650 constitutes a reasonable start toward more general explanations of variation within Europe as a whole. Since European polities and their immediate transplants originated most of the contemporary institutions we recognize as democratic, furthermore, any explanation that gets right the last few centuries of European involvement in contention and democracy offers some promise of helping to identify likely origins of democracy elsewhere. (7)

So comparison is one key methodological pillar.  The other is the framework of mechanisms and processes that he and his colleagues developed in Dynamics of Contention and in other subsequent works.  "[This book's] claim to attention resets instead on the identification of mechanisms and processes that promote, inhibit, or reverse democratization" (ix).  This places Tilly's approach in direct opposition to several other theories of largescale social change -- theories that look for common structural factors that explain large outcomes such as democracy or revolution, and theories that look primarily to the intentions of the actors.

My inquiry guesses, furthermore, that the social world’s order does not reside in general laws, repeated large-scale sequences, or regular relationships among variables.We should not search for a single set of circumstances or a repeated series of events that everywhere produces democracy. Nor should we look for actors having democratic intentions, seeking to discover how and when they get chances to realize those intentions. We should look instead for robust, recurrent causal mechanisms that combine differently, with different aggregate outcomes, in different settings. (9)

If we are to attempt to understand the factors that are conducive to (or inhibitive of) greater democracy, we need to have a fairly specific idea of what we are thinking of under the concept of democracy.  Tilly provides this definition of democratization:

Democratization means increases in the breadth and equality of relations between governmental agents and members of the government’s subject population, in binding consultation of a government’s subject population with respect to governmental personnel, resources, and policy, and in protection of that population (especially minorities within it) from arbitrary action by governmental agents. (13-14)

Remarkable in this definition is the fact that Tilly does not chiefly highlight institutions such as representative voting or separation of powers, but rather several more general features of a polity: equality between government and the subject population, binding consultation of the subject population, and protection of the subject population from arbitrary action.  Each of these dimensions has a strong theoretical relationship to the concept of democracy; the equal worth of citizens favors the first point, the idea that citizens should contribute to the formation of government's policies finds expression in "binding consultation"; and the idea of the rule of law is expressed in the idea of protection from arbitrary action.  Greater democratization means increasing one or more of these three dimensions in the given society.  Tilly refers to this as a "political process" approach to the conceptual problem.  And he folds this definition into a substantive historical hypothesis:

Only where positive changes in trust network integration, inequality insulation, and the relevant internal transformations of public politics all intersect does effective, durable democracy emerge. Most changes in public politics, on the contrary, produce undemocratic outcomes. (17)

So what are the high-level factors that work on the state's side to influence the state's ability to crush popular contention?  And what external factors might bring about abrupt changes in these factors?  Tilly refers to a state's command of "coercion, capital, and commitment" as a measure of its ability to enforce its will -- including the ability to repress popular movements demanding social and political change.  Coercion has to do with the apparatus of the military and police, and the administrative infrastructure through which these are controlled.  Capital has to do with the amount of wealth the state is able to summon to its purposes.  And commitment has to do with the networks of committed partners the state can call upon throughout the population within its scope of control -- what he refers to as the "trust networks" of the state.  When the state's ability to marshall these forms of power is great, contentious movements are unlikely to succeed.  But specific, concrete social factors can work to undermine each of these aspects of the state's power.  Those factors can be internal -- a food crisis that greatly undermines the loyalty of the state's agents, for example -- or external -- the stresses of international efforts by the state.  In particular, he singles out revolution, conquest, confrontation, and colonization as large stresses for the state that can significantly change its ability to enforce its will (40).  And all of this leads Tilly to a fairly strong hypothesis:

Regional variation in the accumulation and concentration of coercion, capital, and commitment strongly affected the sorts of governmental institutions that formed in different parts of Europe through the centuries, but the presence of certain sorts of regimes in a region shaped what kinds of regimes formed later. (45)

These factors give some insight into how a regime can be more or less capable of resisting contentious challenges; but what factors influence the likelihood of such challenges themselves? Tilly's analysis takes an important step towards greater specificity through his construction of three tables of concrete mechanisms in these areas of political process: "mechanisms segregating categorical inequality from public politics," "mechanisms integrating trust networks into public politics", and "mechanisms increasing breadth, equality, enforcement and security of mutual obligations between citizens and government agents" (18-20). Examples from each group of mechanisms are highly relevant to the processes currently underway in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya:

• Adoption of devices that insulate public politics from categorical inequalities; for example, secret ballots, payment of officeholders, and free, equal access of candidates to media forward formation of cross-category coalitions (18) 
• Disintegration of existing segregated trust networks; for example, decay of patrons’ ability to provide their clients with goods and protection promotes withdrawal of clients from patron-client ties (19) 
• Central co-optation or elimination of previously autonomous political intermediaries; for example, regional strongmen join governing coalitions, thus becoming committed to governmental programs (20)

These tables amount to a detailed micro-analysis of mechanisms and processes that can occur more or less independently, and that have impact on the democratic issues of categorical inequalities, consultation, and protection.  Here is a causal model in which Tilly attempts to capture the meso-level causality that he finds in the comparison of British and French contentious politics over three centuries:

Tilly encapsulates his key findings in these thirteen hypotheses:

1. Differing combinations of coercion, capital, and commitment in various regions promote the formation of significantly different kinds of regimes, and different directions of regime change, within those regions.
2. Trajectories of regimes within a two-dimensional space defined by (a) degree of governmental capacity and (b) extent of protected consultation significantly affect both their prospects for democracy and the character of their democracy if it arrives.
3. In the long run, increases in governmental capacity and protected consultation reinforce each other, as state expansion generates resistance, bargaining, and provisional settlements, on one side, while on the other side protected consultation encourages demands for expansion of state intervention, which in turn promote increases in capacity.
4. At the extremes, where capacity develops farther and faster than consultation, the path to democracy (if any) passes through authoritarianism; if protected consultation develops farther and faster than capacity and the regime survives, the path then passes through a risky zone of capacity building.
5. Although the organizational forms – elections, terms of office, areal representation, deliberative assemblies, and so on – adopted by democratizing regimes often emulate or adapt institutions that have strong precedents in villages, cities, regional jurisdictions, or adjacent national regimes, they almost never evolve directly from those institutions.
6. Creation of citizenship – rights and obligations linking whole categories of a regime’s subject population to governmental agents – is a necessary but not sufficient condition of democratization.
7. In high-capacity regimes, nondemocratic citizenship sometimes forms, and with extensive integration of citizens into regimes even reduces or inhibits democracy.
8. Nevertheless, the prior presence of citizenship, other things equal, generally facilitates democratization.
9. Both creation of citizenship and democratization depend on changes in three arenas – categorical inequality, trust networks, and public politics – as well as on interactions among those changes.
10. Regularities in democratization consist not of standard general sequences or sufficient conditions but of recurrent causal mechanisms that in varying combinations and sequences produce changes in categorical inequality, networks of trust, and public politics.
11. Under specifiable circumstances, revolution, conquest, confrontation, and colonization accelerate and concentrate some of those crucial causal mechanisms.
12. Almost all of the crucial democracy-promoting causal mechanisms involve popular contention – politically constituted actors’ making of public, collective claims on other actors, including agents of government – as correlates, causes, and effects.
13. In the course of democratization, repertoires of political contention (arrays of widely available claim-making performances) shift from predominantly parochial, particular, and bifurcated interactions based largely on embedded identities to predominantly cosmopolitan, modular, and autonomous interactions based largely on detached identities. (7-8)

Here is what France's political history looks like, according to Tilly's analysis of its path through the space of "governmental capacity" and "protected consultation":

Some readers might be disappointed at the complexity of the analysis Tilly offers here.  But that is inherent in his foundational assumptions: that there are many relevant mechanisms and processes, that these mechanisms interact in multiple complex ways, and that there are many pathways to democracy and dictatorship.  So even the most systematic tracing of possible scenarios will result in a highly complex "phase diagram" of a polity as it moves through its political processes over time.

*          *           *

In light of the recent post about Steve Pincus's reinterpretation of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, it is interesting to pull out a few of Tilly's observations about the same period.

• The Glorious Revolution that brought William and Mary to power wrought enduring effects, but at a price. Considering the British Isles as a whole, the settlement of 1690 produced a higher capacity government than had ever existed before. It did so, for the time being, at the expense of protected consultation. (144)
• The new regime likewise brought the rise of party politics and Dutch inspired fortification of public finances (Braun 1975: 290–94, ’t Hart 1991; Kishlansky 1996: 290; Scott 2000: chapter 21). Creation of a Bank of England (1694) coupled with parliamentary control over governmental indebtedness to produce a relatively secure national debt, heavy involvement of London financiers in the funding of that debt, and widespread investment of the wealthy in government securities (Armitage 1994; Muldrew 1998: 328–29). (145)
• As military forces exploded during the 18th century, moreover, Parliament’s authorization of taxation and expenditure added weight to parliamentary decisions, beginning a decisive shift of power from the royal administration to Parliament (Brewer 1989; Stone 1994; Tilly 1997). (147)

These points converge closely with Pincus's points about the modernizing state, and the role of financial elites in the changes of the period.  But it is also interesting that Tilly treats the earlier part of the English seventeenth century as being more crucial for the process of British democratization.  The "Glorious Revolution" plays a secondary role in his analysis.

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Posted in: CAT_history,CAT_policy,collective action,democracy,inequality,social movements

Education a leveler?

The role of education in social inequalities is difficult to assess, because it seems to have contradictory tendencies.  On the one hand, improving access to education at all levels -- from elementary school to graduate school -- levels the playing field because it enhances the ability of everyone affected to realize their human talents and to pursue their goals with a greater foundation of cognitive and mental skills.  Closing the literacy gap, the numeracy gap, or the technology gap across all of society gives the previously disadvantaged population a better chance to compete for success in seeking employment or creating other economic and social benefits for themselves and their families.  Traditional sources of social inequality -- positions of privilege in social hierarchies, privileged access to political benefits, disproportionate ownership of land and other forms of productive property -- are to some extent blunted by a greater degree of equality of access to good schooling and the knowledge and skills it provides.  So we might say that improving the quality and reach of a society's educational system should be expected to reduce existing inequalities.

On the other hand, access to education amplifies everyone's talents -- elite and disadvantaged alike.  And more importantly, education proceeds through specific, concrete social institutions -- schools and universities -- and the quality and effectiveness of these educational institutions varies enormously across the face of a complex society.  It is possible -- perhaps likely -- that these variations in quality will correspond to populations and neighborhoods in ways that align with patterns of prior advantage and disadvantage.  So it is likely that we will have high-quality, effective schools providing education to advantaged groups; and low-quality drop-out factories providing education to the disadvantaged institutions.  In this case, the education system might actually have the effect of deepening and entrenching the social inequalities that exist across groups.

I've put this point in hypothetical terms.  But we know that across much of the United States, this isn't simply a hypothetically possibility.  It is largely a fact on the American cityscape that schools vary in quality by race, poverty, and social status at the K-12 level.  Affluent people are often served by good public schools, and they have the financial ability to choose good private schools if they are unsatisfied.  Poor people are usually served by schools with severe disadvantages -- under-resourced, dilapidated, endemic management crisis, disaffected teachers and principals.  So it is hard to make the case that American public education is a powerful force for decreasing social inequalities.

So what about American universities?  Here the picture is more favorable.  High school graduates who have gained the intellectual abilities required for succeeding at the university level -- admittedly, often a minority of all graduates -- have a range of choices that can genuinely erase most of the disadvantages of birth.  A first-generation freshman from a low-income family can nonetheless gain a great engineering education or a great education in art history at an affordable public university; and this undergraduate success in turn positions him or her for future successes in graduate school or employment.  So American universities do in fact deliver much of the promise of the theory of democratic education: broad access without regard to status or income, and substantial enhancement of life prospects as a result.

That said, American universities continue to reproduce a more specific form of elite advantage.  Here is a January 2011 Newsweek review of America's elites and their university degrees.  The snapshot it provides is a familiar one; elite positions in our society are disproportionately held by graduates of elite universities.  Think of the number of US presidents and members of Congress with Ivy League degrees.  Plainly our political elite was disproportionately produced by an elite set of universities (link).  But similar results seem to obtain in the business world as well.  The same Newsweek story reports that elite universities also produced the largest bloc of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, with Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania leading the list, and Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio State providing a significant number of CEOs as well.  Put the point this way: entry into an elite university greatly increases an individual's likelihood of becoming a member of the political and business elites in America.  It is true, of course, that talented young people attend these universities, and it is predictable that they will be successful.  But there seems to be more at work here than simply "elite schools educate the most talented young people of their generation."

Rather, it seems likely that the pathways that lead to career success are themselves facilitated by the social resources created for the graduate by his or her university: networks of alumni, the prestige of the degree, and the classmates and their families whom they come to know.  The density of elite social networks seems to be a key part of the story; avenues into elite careers are facilitated by these contacts and social advantages.  Contacts in government, politics, journalism, business, and Wall Street are richly available to the rising elite university graduate.  An elite university provides a great reserve of social capital for the graduate. and this is unrelated to the actual level of achievement and talent that the graduate possesses.

Here are two empirical studies that complement these suspicions -- one in France in the 1960s and the other in the United States in the 1990s.  Both studies are interested in essentially the same question: to what extent do universities (French or American) provide equitable opportunities across social groups?  To what extent are the universities in these countries effective agents for bringing about greater social equality?

First, France.  One of Pierre Bourdieu's earliest works is a study (with Jean-Claude Passeron) of the social inequalities that are reproduced by the French educational system (Les Héritiers : Les étudiants et la culture, 1964).  Essentially Bourdieu and Passeron provide empirical data from 1961-62 that demonstrate that the population of French university students was highly unrepresentative of the social categories of the larger population.  The likelihood of attending university was many times higher for some economic classes than others.  Here is a graphic that captures the heart of Bourdieu and Passeron's findings:

In spite of the pre-Pixar graphics, I think Edward Tufte would approve; the graph displays very economically the fundamental relationship that the authors want to highlight in the data. The left panel of the graph represents the sizes of the populations associated with various social groups as well as the number of students whose background stems from the group.  The right panel aggregates these data by computing the percentage of students from each who enroll in a university. For children from the humble social categories, including workers and farmers, the likelihood of attending university was very small, ranging from .7% to 3.6%.  Higher social categories had substantially greater rates of attendance, ranging from 16.4% for the children of the owners of businesses to 29.6% and 58.5% for the children of lesser and higher civil servants and professionals.  From top to bottom, then, the disparity of odds for different social groups is staggering.  The children of professionals and high civil servants were 85 times more likely to attend university than hired farm workers, and they were 42 times more likely to attend than the children of blue collar workers.  They also look carefully at academic success and choice of professions by the social class of the students' parents -- a perspective which continues through the present.  Naturally, these findings are specific to a point in time -- 1961-62.  No doubt these disparities have narrowed in the fifty years since Bourdieu and Passeron did this research.  But they asked the right questions, and they established a perspective on French education that has continued to guide research in France.   

And second, the United States.  William Bowen, Martin Kurzweil, and Eugene Tobin provide a careful, empirically detailed and historically nuanced treatment of these issues in Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education (2005).  One chapter of Equity and Excellence is particularly relevant to the question here.  In "The Elite Schools: Engines of Opportunity or Bastions of Privilege?" the authors consider a large data set of admissions and outcomes at 19 selective colleges and universities (94).  It is a fascinating analysis.  

Their conclusion is a nuanced one:

By providing an increasingly straight path to entry and graduation for academically talented students from all socioeconomic strata, these prestigious institutions are fulfilling their historical promise to serve as "engines of opportunity." On the other hand, the disproportionately large number of graduates of these schools who come from the top rungs of American society indicate that they also remain "bastions of privilege."  Vigorous recruiting notwithstanding, the applicant pools of these schools contain only a small number of well-prepared students from families of modest circumstances.  This is the "controlling reality." (135)

They also find that students from disadvantaged socioeconomic origins are severely underrepresented in the elite institutions included in their study (parallel to the Bourdieu-Passeron findings):

Students whose families are in the bottom quartile of the national income distribution represent roughly 10 to 11 percent of all students at these schools, and first-generation college students represent a little over 6 percent of these student populations.... Both groups are heavily underrepresented at the institutions in our study.  ...  When we combine the two measures of SES, and estimate the fraction of the enrollment at these schools that is made up of students who are both first-generation college-goers and from low-income families, we get a figure of about 3 percent.  Nationally, the share of the same-age population who fell into this category was around 19 percent in 1992, making this doubly disadvantaged group even more underrepresented than students with just one of the two characteristics. (98)

This looks at the issue from the point of view of "probability of attendance" -- the focus of the Bourdieu-Passeron analysis.  What about the outcomes of students from different socioeconomic groups who have successfully graduated from the elite institutions that Bowen et al survey?  Does SES status influence career success?  Bowen and his colleagues find that it does.  First, a very crude measure: "The average income in 1994 or 1995 of a former student from the bottom income quartile was over $67,000; former students from the middle two quartiles had average incomes of between $73,000 and $75,000; and those from the top quartile had average earnings of nearly $86,000" (123).  And an even more telling statistic when it comes to the sociology of American elites: "Just under 2% of former students from the bottom income quartile had a very high income 15 years out of college, while almost 6 percent of former students from families in the highest income quartile were themselves already in the top income category" (123).  So socioeconomic background makes a difference all the way through; high SES graduates are three times as likely to have very high income than their equally qualified classmates from low SES circumstances.  This certainly suggests that elite universities fail in the democratic ideal of leveling the playing field for persons of talent.

So it isn't really possible to answer the simple question with a simple answer: do modern educational systems in democracies level inequalities or increase inequalities?  It would seem that they do some of both; they provide access to disadvantaged people who can then leverage success for themselves and their families, and they also create mechanisms of recruitment into elite organizations that are anything but egalitarian.

 

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Posted in: CAT_institutions,education,inequality