I want to lay out a basic hypothesis which claims that the main variable is political will. Important variables feeding into this are corruption and social capital.
Resources sort of feeding into this model (some more sort-of than others):
The Dictator’s Handbook (this one is for real the source of most of the intuitions)
Moral Mazes, Elephant in the Brain (these aren’t actually things I have read, but feel relevant)
The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives are No Substitute for Good Citizens
Bowling Alone
Basic claim: quality institutions come from “political will”. Political will is basically like coordination-juice. I will claim that political will comes from two places:
Social Capital: the distributed trust that people have in each other.
Explicit Structure: the actual political arrangement.
The question of where social capital comes from is an open one, but a few important factors:
Television seems to have struck a significant blow to social capital, for the simple reason that it caused people to stay home in the evenings rather than go out.
Free market capitalism and high social capital seem quite correlated.
Measures of government corruption seem like a good proxy for low social capital.
As far as explicit structure goes, there are two basic sources of “political will”:
Benevolent dictators. These do exist, but it seems like it’s not something you can count on.
Much more often, the political will to create solid institutions comes from large-coalition dynamics.
Large-Coalition Dynamics
To those who have not read The Dictator’s Handbook, I highly recommend it. You can get the basic model from the CPG Grey video The Rules for Rulers.
The basic idea is that you can put governments on a spectrum from democracy to dictatorship by asking how many people does the leader need to keep happy in order to stay in power. This is the “coalition”. A very small coalition makes a government autocratic, and a very large coalition makes it democratic (regardless of the formal government structure). (Note that even within a democracy, the number of supporters required for a party to maintain power varies greatly depending on the voting method and the structure of the government.)
A ruler always has an incentive to minimize the size of the winning coalition, in order to minimize the number of people who need to be satisfied. This maximizes the amount the ruler can take for their own interests (be they benevolent or otherwise), and also maximizes the longevity of their rule (because it’s easier to keep the coalition satisfied, and therefore, easier to keep it stable). Strong rulers will therefore tend to cut down the size of their coalition in a wide variety of ways.
However, the most important rule for a ruler is to keep their coalition satisfied. So although the ruler may want to cut the coalition down, whether they can get away with this depends largely on whether the coalition wants it, too.
The Dictator’s Handbook argues that there is a turning point between small and large coalitions. Small coalitions generally want to become smaller, so long as they can maintain power: less people to split the pie between. Small coalitions will essentially loot the public welfare for their personal gains, restrict freedoms to prevent revolt, and shut down all parts of the economy except what they personally benefit from (through over-taxation and other means).
Large coalitions, on the other hand, rely more on public-good rewards. They want to grow the economy, create good infrastructure, etc. Large coalitions usually recognize that the best way to do this is to grow the coalition further, which helps ensure that the leader (who still wants a smaller coalition) won’t boot anyone out, and puts more pressure on the leader to increase freedoms, invest in public works, etc.
So that’s why dictatorship isn’t the only stable attractor; democracy is also a stable attractor. (Even though the democratic leaders will keep looking for ways to reduce coalition size.)
This is, on this theory, the source of stable, cooperative institutions: the large-coalition attractor.
On this theory, the main interventions are those which decrease corruption, increase the size of the coalition, and increase social capital.
Can you clarify which “The Dictators Handbook” you mean? I suspect you mean the Mesquita and Smith version, though the Randall Wood one looks more fun.
I want to lay out a basic hypothesis which claims that the main variable is political will. Important variables feeding into this are corruption and social capital.
Resources sort of feeding into this model (some more sort-of than others):
The Dictator’s Handbook (this one is for real the source of most of the intuitions)
Moral Mazes, Elephant in the Brain (these aren’t actually things I have read, but feel relevant)
The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives are No Substitute for Good Citizens
Bowling Alone
Basic claim: quality institutions come from “political will”. Political will is basically like coordination-juice. I will claim that political will comes from two places:
Social Capital: the distributed trust that people have in each other.
Explicit Structure: the actual political arrangement.
The question of where social capital comes from is an open one, but a few important factors:
Television seems to have struck a significant blow to social capital, for the simple reason that it caused people to stay home in the evenings rather than go out.
Free market capitalism and high social capital seem quite correlated.
Measures of government corruption seem like a good proxy for low social capital.
As far as explicit structure goes, there are two basic sources of “political will”:
Benevolent dictators. These do exist, but it seems like it’s not something you can count on.
Much more often, the political will to create solid institutions comes from large-coalition dynamics.
Large-Coalition Dynamics
To those who have not read The Dictator’s Handbook, I highly recommend it. You can get the basic model from the CPG Grey video The Rules for Rulers.
The basic idea is that you can put governments on a spectrum from democracy to dictatorship by asking how many people does the leader need to keep happy in order to stay in power. This is the “coalition”. A very small coalition makes a government autocratic, and a very large coalition makes it democratic (regardless of the formal government structure). (Note that even within a democracy, the number of supporters required for a party to maintain power varies greatly depending on the voting method and the structure of the government.)
A ruler always has an incentive to minimize the size of the winning coalition, in order to minimize the number of people who need to be satisfied. This maximizes the amount the ruler can take for their own interests (be they benevolent or otherwise), and also maximizes the longevity of their rule (because it’s easier to keep the coalition satisfied, and therefore, easier to keep it stable). Strong rulers will therefore tend to cut down the size of their coalition in a wide variety of ways.
However, the most important rule for a ruler is to keep their coalition satisfied. So although the ruler may want to cut the coalition down, whether they can get away with this depends largely on whether the coalition wants it, too.
The Dictator’s Handbook argues that there is a turning point between small and large coalitions. Small coalitions generally want to become smaller, so long as they can maintain power: less people to split the pie between. Small coalitions will essentially loot the public welfare for their personal gains, restrict freedoms to prevent revolt, and shut down all parts of the economy except what they personally benefit from (through over-taxation and other means).
Large coalitions, on the other hand, rely more on public-good rewards. They want to grow the economy, create good infrastructure, etc. Large coalitions usually recognize that the best way to do this is to grow the coalition further, which helps ensure that the leader (who still wants a smaller coalition) won’t boot anyone out, and puts more pressure on the leader to increase freedoms, invest in public works, etc.
So that’s why dictatorship isn’t the only stable attractor; democracy is also a stable attractor. (Even though the democratic leaders will keep looking for ways to reduce coalition size.)
This is, on this theory, the source of stable, cooperative institutions: the large-coalition attractor.
On this theory, the main interventions are those which decrease corruption, increase the size of the coalition, and increase social capital.
Can you clarify which “The Dictators Handbook” you mean? I suspect you mean the Mesquita and Smith version, though the Randall Wood one looks more fun.
Ah indeed! I meant Mesquita & Smith.