Democratic Recession in Africa: Is the US Responsible?

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There has been some online discussion recently of the idea that the world is going through a “democratic recession”. In the article that started this debate, “Facing up to the Democratic Recession”, the US scholar Larry Diamond nods towards the difficulties of classifying the world’s regimes as democratic or authoritarian, but then goes on to state firmly that “most scholars of democracy have agreed that it makes sense to classify regimes categorically”. He then argues that a global “third wave” of democratization started in the mid-1970s and finally fizzled out in 2006 or 2007. During this period of over three decades the number of states in the world whose political systems could be classified as liberal and electoral democracies increased from under one-third to just under two-thirds of the total. Since then, the number of democratic states has remained more or less the same, with some signs of an “authoritarian resurgence”. The main countries identified as typifying a return to authoritarianism are Russia and Turkey.

Subsequently a piece by Thomas L. Friedman appeared in the New York Times, taking Diamond’s positions more or less on faith, and the debate has been picked up in Sierra Leone with contributions by Joseph Lansana Kormoh and John Baimba Sesay. I am not qualified to comment on the state of democracy in Sierra Leone, although it is clear that these issues resonate strongly there, given the country’s recent turbulent history. What I want to do in this post is, rather, to point to some methodological flaws in what I will call the nomothetic approach to the application of governance indicators – the very indicators on which Diamond’s assertion of a democratic recession and an authoritarian resurgence in fact rest. What a nomothetic approach does is to look for general laws that are applicable in all circumstances and in every situation. But the social sciences are not the same as physics: in most cases there are so many variables in play in different countries that meaningful generalization is impossible without a profound understanding of multiple local conditions.

In my view Diamond’s article displays all the characteristic weaknesses of a political science discipline that is desperate (like economics) to show that it is really “scientific”, and too often tries to do this by reducing immensely complex political realities to sets of statistics, and then drawing sweeping generalizations from them. An extreme example of this tendency is the Polity IV project, run by the Center for Systemic Peace, which condenses the multifaceted politics of 167 countries during the period 1946 to the present to simplified two-dimensional “trend graphs”. The test, of course, is how well these methodologies perform at predicting future outcomes: political science (again, like economics) does not have a distinguished record by this measure.

Diamond bases his analysis on tabulations produced by the conservative US think-tank Freedom House, with a few minor quibbles here and there. In its 2015 report, sub-titled “Discarding Democracy: Return to the Iron Fist”, Freedom House claims that authoritarian regimes became “more aggressive” and that there was a “disturbing decline in global freedom” in 2014. Diamond ramps this up a notch by calling the trend a “recession” and by the end of his article is sounding the alarm in no uncertain terms:

“Democracy has been in a global recession for most of the last decade, and there is a growing danger that the recession could deepen and tip over into something much worse. Many more democracies could fail …”

Now, it may well be that both Freedom House and Larry Diamond are correct, and that the ability of the citizenry to assert political and other rights in the face of state oppression really is threatened in many places. But is it really possible to prove this – or even useful to try – with such blunt instruments as universalised governance indicators?

The critique of such measures is not new (the earliest negative evaluations date back nearly half a century to the 1970s), but they have not had much impact on political science methodology. Critics have pointed out over and over again that universal measures are not objective, their application often lacks transparency, their validity and reliability remain unproven and the results that they produce are not replicable. Governments sometimes attempt to improve their ranking rather than changing policy itself: in one case, a South American government successfully moved several places up Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index by launching a campaign against the index itself as an imperialist plot, rather than by tackling endemic corruption.

Because the scores and rankings are so crude, it is usually hard to distinguish the real from the imaginary, and such lack of clarity may lead to poor decision making if governments take them seriously. Countries in the global south are held to account by the developed world as if their governments exercise complete control over the post-colonial circumstances in which they find themselves, with no allowance made for the degree to which the liberal project is relevant or realistically achievable.

Freedom House itself is far from being an ideologically neutral arbiter of the quality of governance around the world. It is financially supported from United States government funds, and prominent US neo-conservatives sit on its governing board. Although the organization has defended itself vigorously, its links to the CIA, various anti-communist groups, and US propaganda broadcasting operations still cast a shadow over its judgements....

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CONTINUES:
https://africancentre.wordpress.com/2015/09/03/democratic-recession-the-us-us-responsible/