Cyrus Samii

As far as I can tell from the news coverage the protesters in Egypt have not anointed any individual or group to speak on their behalf. Whenever an opposition figure makes statements on behalf of the protesters, a regular reaction, at least in the Twittersphere, has been to deny that the figure should be understood as speaking on the protesters’ behalf. Given the decentralized nature of the protests, it’s hard to know how such an anointment process might even take place.

This presents an interesting set of dilemmas. On the one hand, it would seem to suit the incumbent regime just fine. If leadership is needed for well-coordinated strategic acts, then the atomistic nature of the protests limits the degree to which it can threaten the incumbent regime. If leadership provides focal individuals that can inspire steadfastness and sacrifice, then the atomistic nature of the protests means that its longevity depends on the sustained enthusiasm that each participant or small group of participants can muster themselves. If leaders are necessary to offer clear rebuttals to claims made by the incumbents, then the atomistic nature of the protests makes it easier for the incumbents to cast it in their preferred light and peel away support. For these reasons, we might expect the incumbent regime to do whatever it can from preventing the protesters from establishing a leadership. There is a certain “divide and conquer” element to this.

But things may cut the other way too. The rejection of claims to leadership that I read on Twitter seem to reflect a fear of letting anyone take up the mantle too early. Let me try to characterize what I interpret as a strategic rationale for this. The presumption seems to be that the establishment of a leadership will mark the end of establishing a bargaining position vis-a-vis incumbent forces and the beginning of bargaining, which inevitably means no more ground can be gained. So long as the atomistic movement is gaining ground, the logic might go, there is no need to settle on leaders yet. Given all the resources still at the incumbent regime’s disposal (including, it seems, the backing of the US), it would seem that if protesters agreed to have leaders begin bargaining for them now, they would end up with the short end of the stick. After all, when authority is delegated to a leader, that leader will look after the interests of those he or she represents to some extent, but will look after his or her own interests to the fullest extent. Knowing this, the incumbent regime may offer side deals that make the leader quite happy but sell the protesters short. To the extent that this captures what is going on, we have a classic “agency dilemma” (link).

As a protester, is time on your side in terms of the resources that incumbent leaders will have to co-opt whomever you put forward as a leader to bargain on your behalf? Or will the advantages that the incumbents gain by the lack of leadership on your side start causing you to actually to lose ground for your bargaining position? And how do you know, as a protester, that other protesters are looking at things the same way that you are? Pretty tough dilemma. It will be interesting to see if and how it is solved.

Catching up on some blog reading, I came across a post by post-communist Eurasia expert Lucan Way over at the Monkey Cage blog (link). He makes the following points,

Above all, Egypt does not benefit from a pro-democratic external environment in the form of the European Union that greatly facilitated democratization in countries such as Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia. Thus, with the possible exception of Mongolia, the fall of Communism has led to full democratization only in central and south-eastern Europe where the EU has offered the possibility of membership…Furthermore, in stark contrast to the color revolutions in the early 2000s, protests in Egypt (and even more strikingly in Tunisia) lack clear leadership. In Ukraine in 2004, opposition strategized for months how best to use demonstrations to oust President Kuchma. In both Tunisia and Egypt, protests were almost completely spontaneous and took almost everyone by surprise. While the heavy reliance in Egypt on spontaneous organization by citizens newly involved in politics is inspiring, the apparent dearth of organized opposition makes it more likely that Mubarak will be able to wait out the protests.

I will take for granted that Way knows what he’s talking about in suggesting that the pro-democratic external environment and leadership were important factors in establishing democratic trajectories in Eastern Europe. The differences that Way highlights suggest what the US and Europeans could do to productively engage the transitions in Egypt and Tunisia. That is, American and European policy could aim to fill at least the first gap—that of “a pro-democratic external environment” that could motivate democratic deepening. The second leadership gap might be one that internal forces should be left to handle on their own. Of course, this kind of policy formulation presumes a genuine interest in seeing such democratic deepening.

Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl and Julia Choucair have a post at HuffPo on the current contagion of protest movements in the Arab world (link). As I noted in a previous post (link), from the perspective of current social science theory it isn’t at all obvious why events in Tunisia should inspire events in other countries in the region. I proposed that the contagion may be based on the events in Tunisia creating a “normative reset” moment, with Tunisian protesters having “established a new embodiment of dignity” to which others in similar circumstances are emotionally driven to live up. In addition to rational “focal point” effects and updating about the vulnerability of authoritarian regimes, Schulhofer-Wohl and Chocair propose a similar hypothesis to explain this contagion:

Tunisians’ sacrifices have created a new moral climate in the region. If Tunisians were willing to die for the future of their country, then citizens of other countries have to ask a new question about facing down their regimes. Rather than calculating the risks and rewards to participating in uprisings, the question now is: If Tunisians were willing to make this sacrifice, why shouldn’t I also be willing? Continuing sacrifices, now on the streets of Egypt, underscore it.

I find this to be a compelling hypothesis, worthy of more rigorous investigation. I find that it is consistent, for example, with the fact that the Iranian protests did not inspire protests elsewhere: the emotional connection to other peoples in the region would not have been as strong.

The authors examine ways to measure how “segregated” is a school district. One could imagine complete segregation as being the case where each school in a district hosts a different ethnic group, and nonsegregation as the case where all schools in a district have the same ethnic distribution.

The authors propose a set of 6 axiomatic desiderata for measures of segregation, desiderata that appeal to intuitions about how a measure should be affected or not by certain changes in underlying conditions. For example, one axiomatic desideratum is called “symmetry”, which amounts to an ordering produced by a segregation measure being invariant to the renaming of the ethnic groups in question.

On these grounds, they find that a measure producing an ordering equivalent to that of the so-called Atkinson index (link) is necessary and sufficient to satisfy 5 out of the 6 desiderata, with the symmetry property being the one that is not satisfied. This strikes me as a major problem with Atkinson-type indices, as they require ad hoc decisions to combine or exclude ethnic categories in cases where districts differ in the combinations of groups that they contain.

The authors then discuss the appealing properties of orderings that are equivalent to that which is produced by the Mutual Information index. This index is an entropy (link) based measure that quantifies the reduction in uncertainty about a student’s race that comes from learning about what school she comes from; in a symmetric manner, it also equals “the reduction in uncertainty about a student’s school that comes from learning her race.” Measures that always produce an ordering equivalent to that which is produced by mutual information are necessary and sufficient for all 6 desiderata except the so-called “composition invariance” property. Composition invariance is a controversial property. It implies that the ordering imposed by the measure does not change when the size of an ethnic group in a given district is increased in a uniform manner in all schools in that district (e.g., if the number of whites increases by 10% in all schools in a district). Composition invariance runs counter to conceptualizations of segregation that emphasize “contact” between people of different ethnicities (the authors cite work by Coleman, Hoffer, and Kilgore). For this reason, I find mutual information-based measures to be especially appealing.

Clearly these measures can be applied to measuring any kind of segregation. A useful discussion.

Full citation:

David M. Frankel and Oscar Volij (2011) “Measuring school segregation,” Journal of Economic Theory, 146:1-38. (gated link)

After the Eastern European democratic uprisings that brought down the Eastern Bloc, social scientists set upon explaining how such sudden mass political movements could arise. Timur Kuran (1989) modeled “unanticipated uprisings” in a manner that echoed Granovetter (1978). In Granovetter’s model, we assume that people vary in their tolerance of risk. Some people are fearless, and will take to the streets at any instigation irrespective of the potential costs. If they do so, and the police do not respond with repression, then those who are slightly less risk tolerant may update their beliefs about just how risky it is to take to the streets, learning that the risks are actually not so high, and thus join the action on the streets. So long as the police continue to hold off on repression, a “cascade” may be triggered of people updating their beliefs and taking to the streets, with ever more risk averse people deciding that it is okay for them to jump on the bandwagon. Granovetter clarified how the essential feature here is the distribution of risk tolerance and the feedback loop that occurs when people take action and consequences are withheld. Kuran contributed to this line of thinking by showing how an individual may underestimate the number of people who share his or her disdain for the incumbent regime because people are not willing to share their true feelings (perhaps because of fear of being ratted out). This may lead people to over estimate the risk of taking to the streets. Once such a person receives adequate reassurance that his or her beliefs are shared, a Granovetter-like cascade can be triggered. The belief updating that takes place to propel this mechanism was formalized by Lohmann (1994).

So far so good for a single “unanticipated” revolution, as with Tunisia. But what of the spill-over effects? With the Eastern European revolutions, there was a strand that tied the regimes together: the Soviet Union. Ever since the Hungarian revolution of 1956, it may have been reasonable for citizens of Soviet bloc countries to think that ultimately, incumbents had a guarantor in Moscow. But Moscow’s non-response in Poland in 1989 may have led citizens of other European bloc countries to update their beliefs about Moscow’s willingness and ability to serve as guarantor, inspiring the eventual cascade.

But to what extent does this logic apply to the current uprisings? One thing that seemed obvious to those of us to who watched the developments in Tunisia a few weeks ago was that these demonstrations would likely spread to other countries in the region—perhaps not with the same outcome, but spread nonetheless. Why did we share this intuition? It does not seem to me that a Soviet-style strand ties these countries together. That role, I suppose, would have to be played in this case by the US and European powers. But did Egyptians really think events in Tunisia to be informative of a likely US response to protests in their country? If so, it is not quite of same flavor of beliefs about a Soviet guarantor. Maybe some other relevant beliefs were updated. For example, perhaps the protesters in Tunisia established a new embodiment of dignity, causing certain in Egypt to reassess their own actions and decide that they had to live up to this model. Or maybe it was a more emotional mechanism. It begs to be theorized, and this may even have us revise our accounts of what happened 20 years ago.

References

Granovetter, Mark. 1978. “Threshold models of collective behavior.” The American Journal of Sociology. 83:1420-1443. (ungated link)

Kuran, Timur. 1989. “Sparks and prarie fires: A theory of unanticipated political revolution.” Public Choice. 61:41-74. (gated link)

Lohmann, Susanne. 1994. “The dynamics of informational cascades: The Monday demonstrations in Leipzig, East Germany, 1989-1991.” World Politics. 47:42-101. (ungated link)