Yes, that’s Robert Mugabe having a supersoaker fight with Qadaffi, singing karaoke with Mao, making sand angels with Saddam, swinging with P.W. Botha, and ghost riding the whip with Idi Amin.

Do we really have “less” dictators “than we used to”? Or is the nature of oppression just shifting from the traditional strongman dictator to something less opaque (and less colorful)?

Via Joshua Keating of Foreign Policy’s Passport.

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Social Media, Governance, and Political Reform

Over the past few years, many technophiles, activists, and political observers have been lauding the potential of social media platforms such as Facebook, SMS, Twitter, and YouTube to improve governance and foment political change. To date, we possess largely anecdotal data on the impact of new media and technologies on political reform. For example, many argue that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have played critical roles in organizing the recent protests in Egypt, Iran, Moldova, and Tunisia. Moreover, anecdotal evidence suggests that cell phone technologies can play an instrumental role in revealing electoral fraud by improving election monitoring and reporting techniques. Yet, in spite of the anecdotal evidence that supports these developments and their use in specific instances, there is a dearth of empirical analysis on the subject. We lack studies that trace the causal impact of these technologies on political reform and improved governance. As a result, a number of open questions remain. Some areas that mandate more serious inquiry are the following:

• Evidence of Political Change. While we know that social media can play an important role in publicizing political activities such as protests, do we have evidence that such actions have led to substantive political change? Is it possible to develop a set of indicators to more effectively gauge the impact of new technologies and media on questions of political change?
• Technology and Governance. That social media can help coordinate large and discrete activities, such as protests and election observation, is clear. Is there any evidence that these technologies can help to improve day-to-day governance and improve political accountability? Moreover, as a transparency instrument, mobile governance relies on outflows of information from citizens to each other, and to governments and NGOs. Therefore it is important to consider how citizens can be persuaded to adopt such technology. What incentives do citizens have to participate in mobile governance, and how can new technologies be employed to complement advocacy efforts already underway?
• Questioning Access and the Digital Divide. Many social media technologies, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, require access to functional Internet connections, however most people in developing countries lack access to such technologies. Rather, the most common technology in developing countries is a basic cell phone. Since the countries with the worst governance tend to be the poorest ones as well, how relevant are these advanced technologies to the people living in the countries with the worst forms of governance?
• Dictators versus Demonstrators. How quickly are regimes opposed to the spread of these technologies learning how to block them and/or employ them to suppress political dissent more effectively? For governance projects, technical questions relating to how data will be managed, and by whom, are worth considering. U.S. policy in this area also seems to work in contradictory ways: while the U.S. State Department has emerged as strong advocate for Internet freedom, the U.S. Department of Defense is building more effective programs to monitor the use of the Internet.
• Substitute versus Complement. Is social media a complement to direct political action or a substitute for it? Does it pose problems to the nature of direct political action today, and if so, how? Are people who use social media for political purposes more likely to take direct action, such as participating in a protest, or are virtual protests becoming substitutes for actual ones?

This issue of Democracy and Society will take a broad and analytical perspective to the impact of social media on political reform and improved governance. We seek to gain leverage not on anecdotal or circumstantial evidence of these impacts, but to demonstrate causal effect. We are also interested in exploring how we can employ such technologies away from large scale and discrete events, such as protests and elections, to more everyday issues of governance. Finally, we are interested in studies that illuminate how we can employ more modest technologies, such as SMS, to improve governance and catalyze political change.

Please email submissions to democracyandsociety [at] gmail [dot ] com. For additional information, please visit www.democracyandsociety.com or contact Deborah Brown or Ayesha Chugh at democracyandsociety [at] gmail [dot ] com.

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In its shortened form the argument lacked clarity and it seems unclear that this “critical mass” exists in China. It is also unclear how this argument fits with the ideas included in the extended portions of the post that suggest the internet can reinforce the power of authoritarian regimes. Though it is clear the internet is not a silver bullet in the struggle for freedom, it is also not a key factor in the government’s ability to “adapt and accommodate” indefinitely.

Professor Zhu argues discussions of Chinese politics focus almost exclusively on political leaders and ignores trends within Chinese society; she argues regular Chinese are “more and more the masters of their own destiny.” She notes that most discussions of information flows in China emphasize government control and censorship. She, however, characterizes information sources in China in the following manner:

“What emerges in China is a commercialized and vastly expanding information society. We’ve heard about censorship and crackdowns; but as you know much better than I do, people who want to DO find means to bypass the Great Firewall. Vigorous public discussion and networking on the Internet and via social media have become central features of contemporary Chinese society. So, for the fans ofThe X-Files, I don’t know about the “truth,” but the information is out there, even in China. And people do process information on their own terms, incorporating a variety of resources…”

Zhu provides several examples of instances where rapid online mobilization generated shifts in or constraints on policy – the Google row, the Green Dam incident and the reinstatement of Avatar. The example of the online response to the Google incident is particularly interesting. Initially the sympathies of both citizens and netizens seemed to lie with Beijing. She gives the example of a conversation with a colleague from a university in China:

“She told me that the majority of her students consider it opportunistic for Google to threaten to leave China just when a new round of Internet crackdowns is raising eyebrows among Chinese netizens. Her students think that Google is exploiting anti-crackdown sentiment and that its threat is mainly a gesture to please the U.S. government.”

In the discussion of shifting public sentiment over the Google incident the piece seems to contradict its initial assertions. Zhu cites the “continuing lack of easy access to unfiltered information” for the initial lack of response to Google’s action by Chinese citizens. She goes further to say the following:

So it’s not surprising that the politically targeted computer hacking, downplayed in mainstream Chinese news reporting on Google, escaped widespread notice. To most people in China, the Google story is only about differences over the state’s censorship policy.

The fact that most Chinese use “the internet and social media primarily for entertainment, social networking and other mundane purposes” makes it highly unlikely that those individuals working to “assure that a constant stream of unauthorized information flows through the networks of public discourse” impact the online experience of ordinary citizens. Especially when Zhu says that “[Chinese] normally do not have any great reason to doubt the news reports of their own media or to go looking… for something more about the Google story than the mainstream media tell them”.

The final chapter to the Google story is yet to be written and it remains unclear what impact the internet discourse will have on the outcome. Zhu provides examples of nationalists rallying against the rhetoric of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton and equating freedom of information with imperialism. At the same time others see the struggle as a battle between liberty and tyranny. From her piece alone it is unclear which side carries the discourse – though she suggests opinion is turning in Google’s favor – or even the scale of the online debate. Despite this ambiguity, Zhu asserts that:

“In the case of Google, based on what I’ve gathered, the tide of public opinion expressed on the Internet and in social media appears to be turning now in Google’s favor. It at least looks as if a critical mass of public interest and opinion is building that will influence the ongoing negotiations between Google and the Chinese state.”

Additionally economic elites – crucial to Zhu’s notion of “critical masses” – apparently also sympathize with Google. The coalescence of popular and business sentiments will thus make it hard for Beijing to deal with Google severely.

Taking this example – and shorter examples about Avatar and Green Dam – Zhu moves on to her theory about the relationship between the internet and political change. The argument is riddled with jargon, but can be distilled to this: the internet can reinforce authoritarian governments by creating outlets for dissatisfaction, a mechanism for governments to discern the preferences of critical social groupings, and disaggregating demands into smaller groups based around malleable identities not tied to “primordial” characteristics. So while popular sentiment, if aligned with key economic players, can bring Avatar back to theatres and possibly keep Google in China this progress is double-edged. These new groupings can be readily mobilized, but Zhu argues that Chinese society more broadly has become “divided along socio-economic lines into smaller interest groups” and local issues “constitute the bulk of China’s recent [protest] activities such as the taxi driver strikes and localized and short-term protests about job losses and property confiscations.

Rather than linking this localization to policy successes in Beijing, Zhu argues it is in fact caused by the rise of “lifestyle politics”. Lifestyle politics simply refers to identities built around value preferences that are flexible owing to the availability of choices on the internet. Zhu argues that both Western governments and Beijing are incapable of servicing these new constituencies and that this spawns “public cynicism about government and traditional political action directed toward government action”. Instead people take it upon themselves to manage their lives.

I have three immediate hesitations about lifestyle politics and its explanatory value. First, the construct is vague and it is not clear why primordial, socio-economic or any other sort of identity cannot coexist with this new type. Second, there are numerous potential socio-economic issues that transcend the local level. Environmental degradation, youth unemployment, and even the property seizures that Zhu cites as a local concern are common across regions and provide the potential for broader political action. Finally, if government – local or central – is seen as impeding the realization of individual preferences, regardless of their relativism, there will be conflict between citizens and the government. Comparing the frustrations of average Chinese to the disgust some Americans felt about statements by the owner of Whole Foods against healthcare, as Zhu attempts to do, does not seem to make sense. The politics of grocery store choice among a small sub-segment of American consumers is hardly comparable to a Chinese family trying to receive recompense from a land seizure or American families trying to hang on to a mortgage. These issues cut across regional preferences and can mobilize people from competing ideological camps.

Zhu attempts to address this by explaining how lifestyle politics affect political participation. She argues that it also involves the “expression of individual rights and a consciousness abut the social responsibilities associated with a given lifestyle” and is about “associating with a group or class of people in order to claim rights and recognition against the insecurities of contemporary globalized society.” This sounds fairly unsurprising, “mediatized society” or not, and further suggests that lifestyle politics is like any other politics.

Zhu points out that there exists a great deal of public support for the Chinese regime and its form of government (how does this mesh with the cynicism built up earlier by these new identities?). Zhu argues that despite China’s autocratic form, there exists a “quasi-public sphere that compels the state to actively cultivate and incorporate public opinion into amore overtly deliberative policy making process.” This allows the government to react to public demands and undertake the accommodation necessary to avoid revolution.

This suggests that the primary challenge to authoritarian governments is a lack of information. While access to information is important and lower-level cadres have incentives to distort it, poor and unpopular policies persist for political reasons. When times are good the Chinese can afford to be more accommodating, but the regime’s flexibility will be severely challenged when crisis hits. If stability is the primary concern and resources become scarce, policy will overtly target constituencies crucial to the maintenance of communist party power. The majority of Chinese society is not yet one of those constituencies. It is easy to predict adaptability and persistence when things are good, and some argue that they are just going to get better, but no country’s development has been without crisis. And while some analysts believe in the ability of the Chinese government to ward off such calamities, history is not on their side.

Freedom House…in its latest annual assessment that liberty and human rights had retreated globally for the fourth consecutive year. It said this marked the longest period of decline in freedom since the organisation began its reports nearly 40 years ago.

The author (I have no idea who because The Economist does not carry bylines), goes on to discuss the various causes of the latest democratic recession:

…the worrying thing is that the cause of liberal democracy is not merely suffering political reverses, it is also in intellectual retreat…

there are some obvious reasons why Western governments’ zeal to promote democracy, and the willingness of other countries to listen, have ebbed. In many quarters (including Western ones), the assault on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and its bloody aftermath, seemed to confirm people’s suspicion that promoting democracy as an American foreign-policy aim was ill-conceived or plain cynical.

In Afghanistan, the other country where an American-led coalition has been waging war in democracy’s name, the corruption and deviousness of the local political elite, and the flaws of last year’s election, have been an embarrassment. In the Middle East, America’s enthusiasm for promoting democracy took a dip after the Palestinian elections of 2006, which brought Hamas to office…

But perhaps the biggest reason why democracy’s magnetic power has waned is the rise of China – and the belief of its would-be imitators that they too can create a dynamic economy without easing their grip on political power.

The article then makes one of the most concise, clear, and convincing arguments the importance of supporting democracy I have read in a long time. It methodically addresses all of the criticisms leveled against democracy and shows why they are wrong.

So how does the case in defence of democracy stand up these days?…Democracy may not yield perfect policies, but it ought to guard against all manner of ills, ranging from outright tyranny (towards which a “mild” authoritarian can always slide) to larceny at the public expense.

… all but two of the 30 least corrupt countries in the world are democracies… Autocracies tend to occupy much higher rankings on the corruption scale…

What about the argument that economic development, at least in its early stages, is best pursued under a benign despot?…For every economically successful East Asian (former) autocracy like Taiwan or South Korea, there is an Egypt or a Cameroon (or indeed a North Korea or a Myanmar) which is both harsh and sluggish…

Believers in democracy as an engine of progress often make the point that a climate of freedom is most needed in a knowledge-based economy..It is surely no accident that every economy in the top 25 of the Global Innovation Index is a democracy, except semi-democratic Singapore and Hong Kong.

China, which comes 27th in this table, is often cited as a vast exception to this rule…The determination of China’s authorities to impose their own terms on the information revolution was highlighted this week when Google, the search engine, said it might pull out of China after a cyber-attack that targeted human-rights activists…

Admirers of China’s iron hand may conclude that it can manage well without the likes of Google…But in the medium term, the mentality that insists on hobbling search engines will surely act as a break on creative endeavour…

What about the argument that autocracy creates a modicum of stability without which growth is impossible?…On the State Fragility Index…democracies tend to do much better than autocracies…

At the very least, a culture of compromise – coupled with greater accountability and limits on state power – means that democracies are better able to avoid catastrophic mistakes, or criminal cruelty. Bloody nightmares that cost tens of millions of lives, like China’s Great Leap Forward or the Soviet Union’s forced collectivisation programme, were made possible by the concentration of power in a small group of people who faced no restraint.

Liberal democratic governments can make all manner of blunders, but they are less likely to commit mass murder autocracies may be faster and bolder. They are also more accident-prone.

For all its frustrations, open and accountable government tends in the long run to produce better policies…Above all, elections make the transfer of power legitimate and smooth. Tyrannies may look stable under one strongman; but they can slide into instability, even bloody chaos, if a transition goes awry. Free elections also mean that policy mistakes, even bad ones, are more quickly corrected…

I often describe democracy assistance as a harm reduction strategy. This is a crucially important point that the development first crowd does not seem to understand.

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In a year of intensified repression against human rights defenders and democratic activists by many of the world’s most powerful authoritarian regimes, Freedom House found a continued erosion of freedom worldwide, with setbacks in Latin America, Africa, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East. For the fourth consecutive year, declines have trumped gains. This represents the longest continuous period of deterioration in the nearly 40-year history of Freedom in the World, Freedom House’s annual assessment of the state of political rights and civil liberties in every country in the world.

Democratic setbacks occurred  for a number of different reasons, such as authoritarian upgrading, coups, and threats from non-state actors, such as criminal organizations and terrorist groups. However, even if the setbacks to democracy have no common theme, they do show one lesson. The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial on the report sums it up nicely:

The recent reversals coincide, however, with America’s own waning interest in democracy promotion. This didn’t start with the Obama ascendancy. Chastened by the 2006 midterm election debacle and sinking public support for his Mideast policies, President Bush took rhetorical and practical emphasis off his own flagship foreign-policy agenda.

The current Administration has changed the focus entirely. In its dealings with Russia and China, strategic issues trump any talk of democracy or human rights, which earlier this year in Beijing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton notably called a distraction to bilateral relations. Ditto in Iran.

If in the days of Jack Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, we worked to fashion the world into a better place guided by the belief that the urge to live in freedom is universal, today we act as if we are resigned to taking the world as it is. We used to nudge countries toward liberal democracy. Now we assume the price of nudging is too high.

Meanwhile, the enemies of democracy have set out to undo the gains of the post-Berlin Wall era, and many are succeeding.

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A consensus seems to be growing among Western policymakers and intellectuals that Russia is not ready for liberalism and that there are even certain advantages to dealing with the illiberal political order built by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. This may be why Western policy toward Russia has only served to shore up the Russian powers that are pursuing anti-Western interests…

So what would a more principled Russia policy entail? Western leaders must keep liberal and democratic principles in mind while dealing with the Russian elite. They must be wary of the latest fairy tales about “modernization,” avoid naively spreading the Kremlin’s ideas…

Democracy is Russia is a very dim prospect. In a Gallup public opinion poll in February 2009, only 18% of respondents thought that democracy was good for Russia, while close to 70% preferred some sort of dictatorship. This not surprising as Russia’s only experience with democracy was in the 1990s, during a time of deep economic crisis and embarrassing leadership of Boris Yeltsin, while growth exploded and the country regained status as a major power under Putin‘s return to dictatorship. Nevertheless, the regime does not tolerate internal dissent and its discouraging to see democratic leaders fail to highlight this point.

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Sharing Strategies on Repression and Reform

A Graduate Student and Practitioner Symposium

Presented By

The Center for Democracy and Civil Society at Georgetown University

In Cooperation With

Freedom House & the Forum for the Study of Democracy

December 10th, 2009

10:00 AM – 1:00 PM

Council on Foreign Relations

1777 F Street, NW, Washington, DC 20006

From Rangoon to Tehran, demonstrators continually adopt new strategies and technologies in their struggles against oppressive regimes. However, demonstrators are not the only ones adapting. In an effort to preempt demonstrators, authoritarians manage access to technologies, cooperate in regional organizations, and learn from each other. Contending dictators and demonstrators are aware of this competitive learning, but we know little about which side is more adaptable and under what conditions.

Demonstrators: 10:00a.m. – 11:20 a.m.

Commentator: Thomas O. Melia, Deputy Executive Director, Freedom House

Gabrielle Bardall, International Foundation for Electoral Systems

Kilic Kanat, Department of Political Science, Syracuse University

Laura Mottaz, Center for International Media Assistance, National Endowment for Democracy

J. Hunter Price, Department of Political Science, Trinity University

Dictators: 11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Commentator: Daniel Brumberg, Associate Professor of Political Science at Georgetown University and Acting Director of the Muslim World Initiative at the US Institute for Peace.

Lauren Albright, Department of Political Science, Temple University

Sheena Chestnut, Department of Political Science, Harvard University

Jeanne Elone, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University

Brandon Yonder, National Endowment for Democracy

Refreshments will be served

RSVP by December 8 to cdacsconference@gmail.com

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China itself has a similar history of sending its officials abroad to learn techniques of governance they believed suitable for China’s future. Since the 1980s the CCP has demonstrated interest in the People’s Action Party (PAP) in Singapore. David Shambaugh’s book, China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation, reveals that the CCP values the PAP model for “guided democracy” in which the PAP sustains itself through successful policies and co-optation of the opposition”.

Each of these cases is evidence of oft assumed authoritarian cooperation, but what the implications of this learning between authoritarians are for democracy advocates and practitioners is unclear. The ability of democracy assistance or democracy/reform advocates to exert any kind of pressure on authoritarian regimes is minimal. However, a regime’s selection and analysis of case studies is perhaps indicative of direction. In China, corruption could potentially undermine the ability of the CCP to claim itself an efficient manager and capable steward of economic expansion. Singapore is the logical choice for the CCP to study given its economic success and the PAP’s ability to retain control of the state during and after economic modernization. Shambaugh believes the interest of the CCP in semi-authoritarian regimes is one example of the CCP undergoing renovation in order to retain power. If similar direction can be assumed from United Russia’s choice of China as a model then the implications are less positive. That direction might best be summed up by Sergei Mitrokhin, leader of the liberal pro-Western Yabloko party, who is quoted in the NY Times article as saying “the China meeting demonstrated that United Russia wants to establish a single-party dictatorship in Russia, for all time”.

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