Chris Blattman

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Graph of the day: 211 years of political change

From Jay Ulfelder:

The GIF below… animates a series of 211 heat maps summarizing annual data on national political regimes around the world from 1800 to 2010.

The space in the heat maps represents two of the “concept” variables from the Polity IV data set—executive recruitment and political competition—that roughly correspond to the dimensions of contestation and participation Robert Dahl uses to define modern regime types.

In the animated maps, the lower left is least democratic, and the upper right is most democratic. The darker the grey, the higher the number of cases in that cell.

I love this gif. Watch it in full. Jay thinks it suggests an evolutionary system. I’m not so sure. All change is not evolution.

I am a fan of Douglass North, and for this purpose I like his short article on Institutions and Credible Commitment. He doesn’t see history in evolutionary terms, progressing towards something better.

The organizations that come into existence will reflect the pay-off structure. More than that, the direction of their investment in skills and knowledge equally reflects the underlying incentive structure. If the highest rate of return in an economy is perceived to come from piracy we can expect the organizations will invest in skills that will make them better pirates. Similarly if high returns are perceived to come from productive activities we will expect organizations to invest in the skills and knowledge that will increase productivity.
In the more than 2500 years from Solon to Stalin the incentive structure provided by the institutional framework and the mental models of the actors have guided the choices that have resulted in the enormously diverse patterns of economic change. Most of human economic history is not a story of economic growth but one of stagnation or, at best, very modest economic growth.

So, another way to interpret the patterns 1800-2010 is that political systems change because incentives and constraints change: the changing world technological frontier, the riches available from capitalistic economic and social organization, the diffusion of democratic and individualistic norms, increased costs of authoritarianism as the skills and technologies of voice and revolution improve.

You might think of this as a multiple equilibria story: the authoritarian system is an equilibrium in one geopolitical and technological world, and democratic systems are an equilibrium in a different one.

I think the interesting question is whether we are simply witnessing a two-hundred year transition from one equilibrium to the other, or if the authoritarian equilibrium is still sustainable with the current incentive structure. North Korea and others suggest the answer might be “yes”, but five decades is not a reasonable span of time on which to judge. I think the authoritarian equilibrium is probably an unstable one. But I think getting to the stable democratic one is a long and messy process.

25 Responses

  1. Totally agree with Jay’s comment. All those “ascent of man” images (with their myriad take-offs) actually miss the point about biological evolution, which simply is concerned about survival. Hence why many other great apes did not transform into technological innovators like us. They didn’t need to (perhaps until now).

  2. Thanks a lot for sharing the post, Chris.

    Let me make absolutely clear, though: “evolution” does *not* connote “progress”—at least not as it’s used in biology and other sciences nowadays, and not as I meant it, either. I wrote a couple of other posts recently taking long views on political and economic development, and I was more explicit in them about this point. The story of punctuated equilibria you tell here is exactly what I’m trying to get at. In fact, given the breadth and depth of global change occurring right now, I’m not even sure there will be an equilibrium centered on representative democracy as we know it. It’s quite possible that democracy is the flexible form that will survive better during the phase shift but not the one that will predominate in the world that shift eventually (and temporarily) produces.

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