Can the Taliban govern?

I refrain from commenting too much on Afghanistan because lots of other people who are more knowledgeable than I am write about it frequently.  However, I have been reading a fair bit about whether or not the Taliban can govern and I think I add value to this question, so I will put in my two cents.  Whether the Taliban can govern is the wrong way to ask a good question.  The better question is whether the Taliban can get compliance from people who do not support them.  As anyone who has watched The Godfather will know, the answer is yes.

The logic is simple.  When the Taliban shows up in your village they basically offer two choices.  Cooperate and we will allow you to live or don’t cooperate and we won’t.  Whether or not people will cooperate is based on the credibility of the threat.  The Taliban has shown over and over that the threat is credible.  Thus, people have an incentive to cooperate even if they do not particularly like the Taliban’s style of justice.

When International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) soldiers show up in a village, they ask for cooperation and promise security from the Taliban in return.  Sounds like a good deal if you don’t like the Taliban.  The question is whether people who do not like the Taliban will cooperate with ISAF soldiers.  The answer to the question depends on whether the promise to provide security from the Taliban is credible.  In the past it has not been.  Instead, ISAF soldiers have tended to clear the Taliban out of a village and leave.  Once they leave however, the Taliban return and make good on their promise to retaliate on those who cooperated with ISAF troops.  Thus, it is rational for Afghans not to cooperate with ISAF and cooperate with the Taliban even if they like ISAF more than the Taliban.

The essence behind the counter-insurgency strategy ISAF is designing is clear, hold, and build.  But we can state it more clearly: a credible threat to provide security from the Taliban.  If they can provide it, they can gain cooperation from the Afghans as long as they like ISAF forces more than the Taliban.  ISAF doesn’t need to be popular to gain cooperation if its promise to provide security is credible, just more popular than the Taliban.

Violence follows Gabon’s flawed election

Violence erupted following the announcement that Ali Bongo, son of the late former President Omar Bongo, won last Sunday’s election in Gabon.  Omar Bongo ruled Gabon for 41 years, from 1967 until his death last June, and was the world’s longest serving president.

Most people watching the election expected that violence would occur because few believed it would be free and fair.  The main opposition candidates, Pierre Mamboundou and Mba Obame have both claimed the election was fraudulent as well.  There is widespread evidence they are correct.  First, while only 50% of Gabon’s population is over voting age, the total number of registered voters accounts for 60% of the population.  One government official even admitted that they had registered dead people.  Second, African Union election observers reported major irregularities at polling stations, including unsealed ballot boxes, security forces improperly entering polling stations, ballots that did not list all candidates, and poll workers refusing to allow registered voters to cast their ballots.

Ali Bongo has “won” the election.  Now the hard part starts.  Gabon, like the US, uses plurality rules for its presidential elections.  This means that the person who receives the most votes wins, regardless of whether that candidate obtains a majority.  According to the official results, Bongo received 42% of the vote and turnout was very low, between 30% and 40%.  This means that in the best case scenario – a free and fair election did occur – close to 60% of voters cast their ballot against Bongo.  Since evidence suggests the election was rigged in Bongo’s favor, in all likelihood the actual percent of Gabonese who support him is far, far lower.

Why do people protest?

Why do people protest?  This is an issue that I have been pondering from a practical and a theoretical level for some time.  I go to South Africa once or twice a year and each time I go the level of protest seems higher than my previous visit.  Recent protests have made parts of the country almost ungovernable.  From observing these patterns, I began to wonder why people protest about a certain issue.

If you ask people in South Africa who are familiar with the protests or active in them, they will tell you that people are protesting because they are angry about the government’s lack of performance on various economic issues, such as services like water and electricity, jobs, and housing.  However, this can’t be correct.  In the first place, the Government of South Africa has been reasonably responsive to these demands.  While the poor do not live well in South Africa, the government does provide free basic electricity and water, it has built millions of new homes, and has reasonable social welfare policies for a country at its level of development.  In addition, public opinion data demonstrates that South Africans are reasonably content with their existing government.  Moreover, levels of satisfaction are similar to those of a much poorer but equally as democratic country – Ghana – where protests are extremely rare.

More broadly, the argument that people protest because they reflect the public mood about important issues doesn’t hold.  Consider three current protests:

1. US: Against health care reform
2. UK: Climate change
3. South Africa: Better services, jobs, and housing

There is a curious pattern to these protests that suggests it is about far more than about anger over broad public concerns.  In the UK and the US, protests are not focused on issues that most people cite as a major issue.  Moreover, as far as I know there have been no widespread protests around jobs and the economy in either country.  Rather, people are mobilizing around more marginal concerns from the point of view of society in general.  In South Africa, public opinion data do not suggest widespread dissatisfaction around the topics of the protests: half the population say the government is managing the economy well or fairly well, 42% say it is doing a good job raising standards of the poor, and 50% trust the ruling African National Congress (ANC).  While no government would be proud of these ratings, they don’t seem to be as low as the massive amounts of protest would suggest.

Having dispensed with the argument that protests occur around citizens’ most salient concerns, what is a more reasonable way to figuring our why people protest around an issue?  Most important, we need to recognize that the level of protest we observe is a very small fraction of the potential amount.  After all, in every society there is always going to some group of people who are going to be angry about some issue.  Thus, most of the time, we observe only a very small amount of protest relative to the potential set of areas where protest could occur.  In trying to understand why we see protest in the areas we do, this strikes me as the most fundamental point.

I suggest that the reason we only see a small amount of protest relative to the amount that could exist is because protest is subject to a massive collective action problem.  The costs for an individual to mobilize a population are typically far greater than the benefits he or she can expect from any policy changes that derive from protesting.  For example, if your main concern is about the employment situation in your country, while you may benefit from policy changes that create more jobs, it is in your individual interest to work hard at your existing job to keep it or look for a job if you do not have one, not protest.  As a result, most protests won’t occur because most people will not find it in their self-interest to organize one.  Mobilizing people requires time, ability, and incentive.  Thus, only those who have the time, skills, and incentive to organize (e.g., people who care a lot about the issue or stand to gain/lose substantially from any policy changes) will do so.  Thus, we come to the first implication about protest: it will reflect the priorities of those who organize them.  These may or may not be the most exigent concerns of the society.  The problem does not end there, however.  Even after you have mobilized the population, you still need to create a window of opportunity to protest.  There seem to be two ways this can occur.  One, an event occurs that creates a window of opportunity (such as the Obama Administration getting serious about health care reform).  Two, you care so passionately about the issue that you make your own window (as this article on climate change protest in the UK seems to suggest).

From the above, we can hypothesize that protest around an issue will occur when those who have the incentive and ability to do so find or create the opportunity.  I think this does a nice job of explaining why we see the protests that we do.  In the US, a small number of large insurance firms stand to lose a lot of money if the government provides health care.  The insurance firms have solved their collective action problem because each one has a strong incentive to organize even if others do not because of the amount of money it could lose.  When the Obama Administration showed it was serious, the window of opportunity materialized.  Hence we observe protest against health care reform.  In the UK, the people protesting appear to enjoy it.  They have solved their collective action problem and created their window of opportunity because they derive benefits from the act of protesting.  In South Africa we see significant amounts of protest at the local level due to the fight against apartheid.  Like today, during apartheid there were massive protests at the local level on economic issues like housing and jobs, and those who participated wrote a lot about it.  South African organizers at the local level today can easily solve their collective action problem and create their window of opportunity because they have widespread access to strategies that worked well in the past in their country on the issues around which they are mobilizing.

Japan’s Historic Election

On August 30, Japanese voters decisively chose the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) over the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).  The DPJ took 308 of the 480 seats in Japan’s House of Representatives, the more powerful of the two chambers of its legislature. This was a truly historic election as the LDP has been in power since 1955 (except for about 9 months in 1993 and 1994).  In 2009, after more than fifty years in power, voters overwhelmingly rejected the LDP.

Or did they?  The election is a good example of the effects of electoral rules on election outcomes.  Japan uses a mixed member system to elect the House of Representatives: they elect 300 members from single member districts using First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) and the other 180 from multi-member districts using Proportional Representation (PR).  PR allocates seats according to the share of votes the party wins while FPTP awards the seat to the candidate who gets the most votes.  Thus, the difference between the number of seats a party wins in the PR and the FPTP components gives a good idea of how FPTP distorts the margin of victory.  In the election, the DPJ won just under 50% of the PR seats and about 75% of the FPTP seats.

The FPTP system thus makes the DPJ appear far more popular than the popular vote suggests.  While the DPJ won 42% of the popular vote, due to the distorting effect of FPTP, it controls 64% of the seats in the House of Representatives.  At the same time, the LDP lost close to 60% of the seats they controlled (approximately 70% of their single member seats and 30% of their PR seats), while their popular vote share declined by just over 20%.  Consequently, due to the electoral rules, looking at the number of seats each party controls alone exaggerates substantially popular support for the DPJ and rejection of the LDP.

Renard Sexton at FiveThirtyEight.com and Matt Shugart have more analysis.