Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Failed States

Posted by Professor Cameron Thies



Why do some rulers use the coercive power of the state to repress their own people? Why do some states experience coups, civil wars and other episodes of violence? Why do some states struggle to provide adequate education, health care, or jobs for their people? Why are some states home to terrorist groups, roving bandits and even pirates?

All of these questions point to the problem of state failure in today’s world.  According to Robert Rotberg (2003: 2) “Nation-states exist to provide a decentralized method of delivering political (public) goods to persons living within designated parameters (borders).”[1]  The mix of public goods that each society expects its state to produce has varied over time, but at a basic minimum we expect that states provide security to their citizens.  This includes protection from external threats (e.g., war, loss of territory, terrorism), domestic threats (e.g., rebel groups, civil war, coups), crime (e.g., police, judicial system), and dispute resolution between citizens (e.g., rule of law, contracts, judicial system, property rights).  Once individuals feel secure, they are then able to engage in economic, cultural and political activities that lead to increases in individual and societal well-being.  The public good of security thus lays the foundation for the provision of higher order goods, such as transportation and communication infrastructure, a functioning economy, a rich associational life, a responsive political system, education, health care, and a healthy natural environment.

Rather than consider state failure to be a problem just for Africa or other developing regions, a focus on public goods provision forces us to confront the fact that all states fail to a certain degree at certain times.  We can think about state failure as a continuum with relatively strong states on one end and relatively weak states on the other.  Strong states perform well in effectively delivering most types of public goods; they tend to have high GDP per capita, good infrastructure, quality of life, and tend to be democratic.  Weak states have an overall tendency to be less effective at producing public goods, with lower GDP per capita, poor infrastructure, poor quality of life, and they tend to have autocratic governments.

At the extreme, a weak state is a failed state when it is “no longer able or willing to perform the fundamental jobs of a nation-state in the modern world” (Rotberg, 2003: 6).  Even worse is the collapsed state, in which there is a complete vacuum of authority.  Somalia is the most well-known example of a collapsed state, which occurred in the aftermath of the fall of President Siad Barre’s regime in 1991.  Americans are familiar with Somalia largely from the horrific images of U.S. soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993 when U.S. forces engaged self-proclaimed president Mohamed Farrah Aidid and his militia.  This incident was later dramatized in the movie Black Hawk Down.  In the aftermath of the collapse of the central government, Somalia devolved into a territorial patchwork of “warlords” providing security for themselves and those loyal to them across the former state.  Over time, an official Somali government reemerged to control the capital, but other parts of the former Somali state continued to operate independently, such as Somaliland in the north.  Piracy sprang up off the coast of Puntland and terrorized the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea, requiring a multinational force to begin naval patrols to protect commercial shipping.  Somalia is thus an extreme example of a failed state, but one that shows what happens when states are no longer capable of providing the basic good of security.

A number of organizations have begun to identify indicators and warning signs of state failure.  Most adopt a similar position to the one outlined in this blog post: states exist on a continuum of strength and failure.  For example, the Fund for Peace produces their annual Failed States Index.  You can check out their latest 2012 ranking of all states here: http://www.fundforpeace.org/global/?q=fsi.  You will note that Somalia anchors the failed end of the spectrum, but it is joined by others that the index identifies as those we should be alerted to, such as Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, South Sudan, Chad, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Haiti, Yemen and others.  On the sustainable, strong end of the spectrum are the Nordic states, Canada, and Australia.  It may surprise you that the United States is not in that top group of strong states, but is in the next tier with South Korea and the Czech Republic.  Check out the component parts of the index to see why!

The Country Indicators for Foreign Policy at Carleton University in Canada also has a state fragility index.  You can check out their method for ranking failed and failing states here: http://www4.carleton.ca/cifp/app/ffs_ranking.php.  It produces a similar, though not identical ranking of states on a continuum from fragility to strength.  Both approaches to measuring state failure rely on identifying failures in the provision of public goods.  Security is the most basic good, but there are many others that these approaches identify as critical to the success and health of states.  Ideally, these approaches could be refined to one day produce early warning systems, so that events like the Arab Spring would not be a surprise to policy makers.  Unfortunately, our ability to predict the specific time and form of such state failures is not very advanced at this point in time.

If you are interested in learning more about state failure, I regularly teach a course “State Failure in the Developing World” (030:173).  We explore a variety of theoretical frameworks for understanding the causes and consequences of state failures, as well as approaches to rebuilding states that have failed.  We conduct in-depth analyses of a number of states at different points on the continuum of failure, from a variety of regions in the developing world.  This course will be offered again in the Fall Semester of 2013.


[1] Rotberg, Robert I., ed. (2003) State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror.  Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution. 

Friday, November 16, 2012

When is High Voter Turnout Bad?

Posted by Professor William Reisinger

"I want to thank every American who participated in this election.  Whether you voted for the very first time or waited in line for a very long time.  . . .  Whether you pounded the pavement or picked up the phone.  Whether you held an Obama sign or a Romney sign, you made your voice heard and you made a difference."
Barack Obama, November 6, 2012
President Obama’s comments reflect a widely held article of faith: we realize the ideals of democracy only when a substantial portion of us votes. A high voter turnout is about the only way for a 21st-century country to approximate the participatory ideals of Athenian democracy or the New England town hall. Most of us accept that those who neglect this civic duty have done a disservice to their country, at least in a minor way. Correspondingly, it is vital that the act of voting should be relatively easy and equally available to all eligible citizens. For many experts, low turnout poses serious risks for the body politic. The distinguished political scientist and expert on democracy Arend Lijphart used his address as president of the American Political Science Association to argue that “unequal participation spells unequal influence” and that voting, like other forms of political participation, is not randomly distributed but more common among some types of citizens than others. Low voter turnout leaves some social groups poorly represented. 

Thus, voter turnout is often treated as an unalloyed asset.  Indeed, some scholars have even used it to measure the level of democracy in different countries: a country where 90% or more of the eligible citizens vote is, by this measure, more democratic than one in which 60% vote.  (Which of these is the United States?  Find the answer at George Mason University’s United States Election Project.)  One practical objection to this, however, is that turnout levels vary quite a bit even among the world’s full-fledged democracies.  You can see this at the excellent site on voter turnout around the world maintained by the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.  Ask yourself this: is Australia (with 93% turnout in its last parliamentary election) more democratic than the U.K. (65%)?  If so, it is probably for reasons other than turnout per se.  
 
We can at least agree, however, that more people voting is never a bad thing, right?  Well . . . not so fast. 
 
Perhaps, in reading the paragraphs above, you were thinking of a potential voter sitting in isolation, weighing her good intentions against the need to get to work on time or put the kids to bed or watch the basketball game or whatever.  Yes, that scenario is one part of the dynamic.  Yet it misses out on the more important social dimension of voting.  Citizens vote because they are mobilized to vote.  Other people and organizations entice, cajole, flatter, badger, threaten and reward them.  (President Obama’s remarks quoted above and similar statements from other politicians can be seen as part of how Americans are mobilized to vote, in the category of flattery.)  Turning potential voters into those who have voted is not easy; it must overcome the many other activities that compete for our time as well as the improbability that one’s vote will play a decisive role in the outcome.  Citizens receive mobilizing messages from friends (especially Facebook friends?), relatives, co-workers and others.  Non-partisan organizations such as the League of Women Voters promote voting.  Political parties and groups supporting a party spend tremendous time and money to encourage and assist their supporters in voting.  Their efforts have spawned a large, increasingly sophisticated industry. 

In considering whether higher turnout is better than lower turnout, what matters is how voters are mobilized.  Some techniques reinforce democracy, while others erode it.  Democratic modes of voter mobilization include spreading information and opinions relevant to voters’ choices (albeit frequently “negative”).  Even the partisan efforts promote the social acceptability of voting among all.  Authoritarian mobilization, however, involves buying or coercing votes from the economically or socially vulnerable while rarely enhancing voters’ knowledge or choices.  In many parts of the world, high turnout is guaranteed because those who run factories and farms let the workers and farmers know that voting is required and will be monitored.  (The workplace may provide a bus to take everyone to the polling station, for example.)  In the world’s most highly repressive places, turnout rates can reach 99-100%.  Moreover, these voters are often also directed how to vote or given pre-filled-in ballots to deposit (returning the blank one they receive to the organizer so it can be filled in and given to someone else).  If you’re interested, Daniel Calingaert reviews some of the many ways that elections can be rigged; it is impressive, in a sad way. 
 
My examination of elections in Russia illustrates how higher voter turnout can signal less democracy.  I have compared turnout levels for Russia’s 83 regions (equivalent of U.S. states) in each of Russia’s presidential and parliamentary elections, from 1991-2012.  In the 1990s, Russian elections had their share of fraud, particularly in the 1996 run-off when President Yeltsin defeated his challenger from the Communist Party.  Nonetheless, the fraud was small enough that the election results do tell us something about voter behavior in the different regions.  During this period, a region’s turnout correlated well with two characteristics that one would expect to promote turnout.  One is the number of elderly in the region’s population.  The elderly in many countries vote at a higher rate than the young.  The other is support in the region for the Communist Party.  Why should this boost turnout?  Because in those regions with a strong presence by the Communist Party, the races were closer, and voting carried more potential impact. 

In the 2000s, however, President Vladimir Putin built a political regime centered around strong election victories for himself, or his temporary surrogate, Dmitrii Medvedev, and the political party United Russia.  Political authorities throughout the country focused on pressuring people to vote in the “right” way.  During the six elections held from 2003-2012, turnout changed in multiple ways.  For a small minority of regions, turnout above 90% became the norm.  In the March 2012 presidential election, for example, the average region had turnout at 67%, while Chechnya reported an official turnout level of 99.6%!  Also in the 2000s, regions having more elderly are no longer the high-turnout regions.  Even more remarkably, the correlation with support for the Communist Party went from strongly positive in the 1990s to strongly negative in the 2000s.  In recent years, the Communist Party’s supporters have not imagined they could win the election if only enough of them voted.  Instead, high support for the Communist Party in a given region is only a signal that Putin and United Russia are not as strong there as elsewhere.  What does correlate with high regional turnout levels?  The percent of a region’s residents who are ethnically non-Russian.  That is, the regions called republics, like Chechnya, have been able to mobilize their residents to vote at rates equal to the super-high Soviet levels.  It would seem, then, that Russia’s hopes for democracy rest on residents in regions where turnout has been substantially lower, such as in Moscow, where 58% voted in March 2012. 
 
Not coincidentally, the regions that reported turnout over 90% also voted for Putin or United Russia at suspiciously high levels.  For example, 99.7% of Chechnya’s voters chose Putin this last March.  Given the high turnout, this means that, supposedly, Putin received votes from 99.4% of all the adults living in the region.  (For comparison: the equivalent figure for the District of Columbia voting for President Obama in 2012 was 47%.  Obama received 94% of the votes cast, but turnout was about half of Chechnya’s; 94/2=47.)  Although not among Russia’s more populous regions, Chechnya and other republics have given Putin and his party significant quantities of votes.  In 2012, Putin would not have won the presidency on the first ballot without their extraordinary efforts. 
 
So it matters quite a bit how turnout is generated.  A democracy in which most people vote is stronger for that.  Focusing on countries’ turnout levels alone, however, is misleading.  Even more misleading is to treat turnout itself as a measure of democracy.  Doing so helps the PR efforts of authoritarian regimes, which find it quite easy to produce high turnout.  Supporters of democracy do not want authoritarian leaders to get bragging rights for activities that actually reduce their citizen's freedom.

Professor Reisinger is teaching a class on Democracy: Global Trends and Struggles(30:196) during the Spring 2013 semester


Tuesday, November 13, 2012

IR Career Advisor

Posted by Melissa Fitzgerald, Career Advisor for IR Major




Hello from the Desk of Melissa Fitzgerald at the Pomerantz Career Center!

Hi!  I’d like to introduce myself – I am one of the new career advisors in the Pomerantz Career Center here at the University of Iowa.  A little background about myself: I grew up in the Cedar Rapids area, studied psychology at Ball State University in Indiana, completed my master’s in College Student Personnel at Western Illinois University and have been working in Pennsylvania for the last 6 years as an Assistant Director of Career Services.  Coming back to Iowa with my family 12 years later has been an exciting adventure and we’re so happy to be home!

Coming to work every day knowing that I get the chance to work with students that are exploring their career options excites me.  I remember being in my senior year of undergrad and having the conversation with my advisor “What can I really do with this degree?”  I didn’t have all the answers and neither did she, but together, we were able to focus on my abilities, skills and interests and found a way to capitalize on my strengths until I was able to find my right career path.

Having that “ah-ha” moment with my advisor led me to my career as a career advisor.  It is my goal to help each and every one of my students have that “ah-ha” moment.  Each path for each student is very different.  How we all choose a major, what we enjoy and like about our major, and what we decide to do with our major can and should be different!  I’m here to help you explore all of the options and put you in touch with the resources that will help connect you with your future career path.  Sometimes these moments take years of work, but we’re in it together.

Looking back on my college career, I have 2 major regrets.  1 – I wish I would have taken the opportunity to study abroad (if you’re interested, I encourage you to contact the study abroad office) and 2 – I should have met with my career advisor much sooner than my senior year!  I felt so lost until those conversations started happening.  It would have saved me many sleepless nights had I connected sooner.

So what can our office do for you?  We have a wide variety of programs and services that will benefit you as a student. The list below is simply a highlight.  If you’d like the full list of our services, please visit our webpage at: www.careers.uiowa.edu

Career Advising Appointments
Job and Internship database, HireAHawk
Mock Interviews offered year round
Assistance connecting with volunteer and service learning opportunities that pertain to your career area
Self-Assessments including Focus2, the Strong Interest Inventory, and the MBTI
Resume and Cover Letter review 9-4 Monday-Friday – Walk-Ins (really – no appointment is needed!)
Job and Internship Fairs (We have a fair coming up on Feb. 27th in the IMU Ballroom)
 
For specific step-by-step instructions on scheduling an appointment in our office, please click here.  Remember – take advantage of those walk-in hours Monday-Friday from 9am-4pm!

I look forward to hearing from you and/or seeing you in our office.

Melissa Fitzgerald
Career Advisor
Pomerantz Career Center


Friday, November 9, 2012

Study International Relations in the City of Light!

Posted by Associate Professor Kelly Kadera

Study International Relations in the City of Light!

 Introduction to International Relations (30:060 or POLI 1500) will be offered as part of the Iowa International Summer Institute from May 20 to June 14 in Paris, France.

 Intro to IR counts toward:

·         The International Relations major

·         The Political Science major

·         The International Business Certificate

·         General Education credit in Social Sciences or International and Global Issues.

 Europe is the birthplace of modern world politics, and Paris, in particular, offers some wonderful opportunities. Students will have a chance to explore:

¨       The landing beaches, the American cemetery, the WWII museum, and the old fortified coastal city of St. Malo during a weekend excursion to Normandy and Brittany

¨       Musée de l’Armée, the military museum at Les Invalides (where Napoléon is buried)

¨       Museums such as the Louvre and Quai Branly, where they can examine the representation of concepts such as revolution, statehood, imperialism, nationalism, and war, in artwork and artifacts

 Course requirements reflect and take advantage of the compressed semester. In particular, class discussions and participation are substituted for homework assignments, students write short reactions papers for 3 excursions of their choice instead of a longer research paper, and students are encouraged to write on IR topics connected to France.

 For more information and instructions on how to register for the Iowa International Summer Institute:


For help or questions, email Prof. Kadera at: kelly-kadera@uiowa.edu

Picture of 2012 summer class in front of a German bunker in Normandy at Pointe du Hoc


Thursday, November 8, 2012

Spring Classes for IR Major

Here are a list and links to required classes for the IR major that are being offered this Spring 2013.

30:061 Introduction to International Relations
TTh 3:30-4:20 plus a section

 30:100 Understanding Political Research
TTh 12:30-1:45

30:170 Politics of International Economics
TTh 9:30-10:45

016:003 Western Civilization III
TTh 12:30-1:20 plus a section

OR

016:003:EXW Western Civilization III

OR

016:082 The World Since 1945
TTh 2-3:15

Required Emphasis Area Courses

Conflict and Foreign Policy

30:061 Introduction to American Foreign Policy
MW 11:30-12:20 and a section

International Business and Economic Relations

06e:001 Principles of Microeconomics

06e:002 Principles of Macroeconomics

Regional Politics and Relationships

030:045 Introduction to Comparative Politics
MW 1:30-2:20 and a section


Friday, November 2, 2012

Inequality and Interest

Posted by Assistant Professor Fred Solt



Earlier this week, media attention briefly alighted on four-year-old Abigael Evans, whose tearful frustration with her inability to escape "Bronco Bamma," Mitt Romney, and the whole 2012 election was recorded and posted to YouTube by her oversharenting mother.  On the news and across the interwebs, the overwhelming reaction was complete sympathy: the San Francisco Chronicle's headline, for example, was "`Bronco Bamma' Girl Expresses What We All Feel Deep Down About the Elections," and Time magazine declared, “We Are All Abigael Evans.”  National Public Radio, according to Abigael's mother the immediate catalyst of the meltdown in the supermarket parking lot, posted a public apology to the girl, writing that “the campaign has gone on long enough for us, too.”  Politics in the United States, apparently, just aren’t all that interesting to many Americans—even those who are paid to cover the presidential election seem to just want it to go away.

Wait, this is the blog for the IR major.  Why am I writing about U.S. politics, especially when so many of us find the topic so tiresome?  Because as it turns out, taking an international vantage point—or, more specifically, a cross-national one—can tell us a lot about why politics in a country are the way they are.  After all, the citizens of many other countries find their own politics to be much more engaging than Americans do.

In some research I started publishing a few years ago (see here for the first installment), I found evidence that several factors contribute to the relatively low interest in politics found in the United States.  Drawing on surveys of the citizens of many wealthy democratic countries collected in the World Values Survey, I was able to discern how various differences between people and countries shape levels of political interest.  The most proportional electoral systems make people an average of nearly 10 percentage points more likely to express higher levels of interest in politics than U.S.-style single-member districts—proportional representation allows many parties, advocating a broad range of different views, to make it into the legislature.  Further, citizens of countries with streamlined, single-chamber legislatures are similarly about 10 points more likely to say they are more interested in politics than people in places with bicameral legislatures like the U.S. House and Senate.  (On the other hand, presidentialism apparently works in favor of interesting politics in the United States: it tends to increase interest in politics by about 8 percentage points over parliamentary systems.)

I focus, though, on another explanation for why so many people in the United States find politics boring, even annoying.   It is suggested by a media infatuation that lasted scarcely longer as a topic of coverage than young Ms. Evans is sure to: the high levels of economic inequality in this country.  In the wake of the financial crisis, when rich bankers were quickly bailed out and ordinary Americans were largely left to struggle on their own, journalists reported on the Occupy movement’s argument that the immense economic resources of “the 1%” were drowning out the voices of everyone else.  If politicians speak only to the concerns of the richest, the implication is that it should be no surprise that others are less interested in what they have to say.

The evidence supports this view, as shown below.  This figure depicts the probabilities of expressing different levels of political interest (in each column) for people of different incomes (in each row) over the range of income inequality observed in the world’s advanced democracies (represented by the Gini index, a common measure of inequality), once a laundry list of individual attributes and country-level characteristics are taken into account.  (The dashed lines around the solid ones represent the uncertainty in these estimates.)



As seen in the top row, for the richest individuals, inequality has little effect on political interest: the lines are practically flat for every category of interest.  But the other rows show that the probability of being “not at all interested” and “not very interested” increase as inequality increases (and the probability of being “somewhat interested” or “very interested” decrease as inequality increases)—and that these effects grow larger and larger as we move down the income scale.  For people with incomes in the bottom fifth for their country, living with inequality similar to that found in the United States decreases the probability of expressing higher levels of interest in politics by as much as about 13 percentage points, on average, compared to people in countries with less inequality.  More inequality does seem to lead to politics that are less interesting to many people.  And without comparing the United States to other countries, we’d never know.

Just one more reason to major in International Relations: it helps you to learn not just about politics in other countries, but also to better understand politics in your own!

During next semester, Spring 2013, Professor Solt will be leading a Political Science seminar 030:149 (POLI:3450:002)  (“Problems in Comparative Politics”) on the politics of inequality.