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RPP 7

For my project, one dataset I would use is the Polity database. Its citation is as follows:

Gurr, Ted and Monty Marshall. Polity Data Series, Political Instability Taskforce. Updated June 2014.

The Polity dataset is a widely used source of data on the level of democracy in governments around the world. To produce a government’s final score (from 10 for a full democracy to -10 for an autocracy), the dataset uses six “component variables, which are as follows:

  • Regulation of Chief Executive Recruitment: the level of explicit institutionalization in the selection of the head of government. More institutionalized is more democratic.
  • Competitiveness of Executive Recruitment : the level mobility of figures up the executive hierarchy. Hand-picked selections are the least democratic and elections are the most
  • Openness of Executive Recruitment: what part of the population is able to actually attain a position through this process. More opportunity is more democratic.
  • Executive Constraints: how much institutional control there is over the executive. More constraint is more democratic.
  • Regulation of Participation: the level of institutionalization of the political participation (e.g. voting) process. Clearer, more institutionalized participation is more democratic.
  • The Competitiveness of Participation: how much opposition can realistically be pursued in the political process. More room for opposition is more democratic.

The dataset covers all states with populations above 500,000 in every year since 1800. All together, there are 17,061 cases in the set.

The limitations of the dataset can be found primarily in the process of transferring the data into a coherent understanding of democracy. Although the variables used are extensive in nature, they could probably never be extensive enough to capture the entire picture of a state’s level of democracy. And the collection of data also poses a challenge. Many of the variables may depend on records kept of elections, which may be unreliable or nonexistent in many countries.

Article comparison

For this article comparison, I continued with the theme of US military interventions to promote democracy, although I am still not entirely resolved to take my research puzzle in that direction. Specifically, I will compare two articles that examine the actual efficacy of American military intervention in promoting democracy. The articles come to largely opposite conclusions about these effects. This is an important theoretical debate because the question of results — whether American strategies, in this case military, can change other governments — is the motivating factor behind the actual deploying of such policies. One of these articles is a statistical analysis of US military interventions that emphasized the operationalization and measurement of democracy, and the other is a historical narrative of a few cases that emphasized the political preconditions necessary for a successful intervention.

The first article was the statistical analysis by Hermann and Kegley (1998). Analyzing the Polity III democracy and autocracy scores for a large set of countries in which the United States intervened, they found that intervention increased the level of democracy in the targeted country under almost all circumstances, and they then applied different variables to determine which factors impact the outcome most. Their main contribution is the breadth of their analysis and their answer as to whether the interventions succeed in the first place. The most useful item they provide to my own research is a great deal of data about US military democracy promotion.

Art (1991) produced a narrative detailing America’s interventions in German, Japan, Nicaragua, Chile, Grenada, and Panama to identify the impact of the specific conditions in each country had on the efficacy of the intervention. He concludes that the benefits of military intervention almost never justify the harms, and that interventions only reach such a level of net success when ” the nation invaded is small and militarily weak, the intervention is welcomed by the bulk of the populace, the costs in American casualties are relatively low, and the probability of success is high” (p. 43). His main contribution is the identification of those four factors, and that is also his largest contribution to my research.

Most obviously, these two articles, and their schools of thought, disagree on the conclusion. Whereas Hermann and Kegley found that military intervention had a positive effect on democracy, Art found no such benefit, and concluded that the costs are overwhelming. Methodologically, the number of cases examined in each article is of importance. Hermann and Kegley could say that Art’s research is biased because he focused so exclusively on the most expensive (German and Japan) and least successful (Chile and Nicaragua) cases, while Art could say that Hermann and Kegley’s inclusion of more than 60 cases prevents them from really examining important factors in individual states.

Moving forward in my research, these articles moved up one particular puzzle on my hierarchy of interest, that being how the level of organization of democratic movements in individual countries affects the success of US democracy promotion. I very well may end of researching that, whether I choose the military route or not.

 

Art, Robert. “A Defensible Defense: America’s Grand Strategy after the Cold War.” International Security 15, no. 4 (1991): pp. 5-53.

Hermann, Margaret G. and Charles W. Kegley Jr. “The U.S. use of military intervention to promote democracy: Evaluating the record.” International Interactions 24, no. 2 (1998): 91-114.

Post 5

I want to study the 1994 American invasion of Haiti because I want to find out why it seems more successful than other democracy-promoting interventions in order to help my reader understand the broader context of military democracy promotion strategies.

 

The first point to establish is that the Haiti intervention was more successful than other interventions. It is important to note that this case be the case even if Haiti did not completely fulfill the intentions of its designers. When spearheading the effort, President Clinton focused his public justification on “restoring democratic government in Haiti,” as he stated in a national speech he gave regarding the invasion. [1] By that metric, the intervention has had mixed results. Jefferies (2001) finds that although the immediate democratic failings that led to the invasion were corrected, the intervention has also worked to weaken the institutions on which Haitian democracy would rely. [2] The event that precipitated the invasion was a military coup which ousted President Jean Baptiste Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected leader in decades, from power. Three years after that coup, the invasion did bring Aristide back to power. However, Haiti has remained plagued by governmental issues in the intervening years. Haiti has had a number of presidential elections since the invasion, and almost none of them have been recognized as legitimate by all participating political parties. The most recent elections, originally scheduled for December 2015, had to be postponed several times due to massive protests before it took place in November 2016. [3] Clearly, even though the invasion restored a democratically elected leader in Haiti, it did not “restore democratic government,” in part due to the fact that very little democratic government existed there to begin with.

 

But at the same time, other democracy promoting military interventions have been far less successful than the Haiti invasion. The two interventions that were clearly justified along the same democratic lines as Haiti were the second Bush administration’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Whereas Haiti’s most significant governance problem appears to be disputed elections, the governments installed by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan currently lack control over large parts of their own territory. Bridoux and Russell (2012) find that a main cause of Iraq’s domestic unrest is the poorly functioning democratic government set up in the wake of the 2003 invasion. [4] When disputed politics in Iraq causes the essential lack of a state over much of the country’s territory, this clearly signals that the intervention was less successful than Haiti’s.

 

This topic is significant first of all because of the gravity of the content. Military invasions to alter the government of countries carry monumental importance for both sides, particularly the country being remodeled. It is imperative to understand the subject as long as it has a possibility of happening. This particular topic can also help readers add nuance to their understandings of why such interventions work the way they do, and which conditions affect these outcomes. Although in all three cases — Haiti, Iraq, and Afghanistan — the United States invaded a country in order to establish a democratic government, the Haitian intervention had different results. It appears that there is some larger trend at work here. I would hypothesize that the strength of preexisting democratic alternatives can help explain the difference. Whereas Bill Clinton was essentially just returning a leader to power once he had already been elected, the two Bush/Obama interventions attempted to create a new democratic government in each country after eliminating a previously entrenched non-democratic one.

 

Before I draft some questions, I should note that I do not currently foresee choosing this case study, or the general topic of military regime change, to be the topic I finally choose. I am researching more subtle, non-military methods of democracy promotion. But until a puzzle arises in that area, the Haiti example is something I know some background about.

 

For a specific question I could research, “Why does the 1994 American intervention of Haiti seem more successful than other US democracy promoting interventions?” More broadly, I could research “How does the strength of pre-existing political institutions affect the outcome of external democratic regime change?”

 

  1. Clinton, Bill. “Address to the Nation on Haiti.” September 15, 1994. <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=49093>
  2. Jefferies, Judson. “The United States and Haiti: An Exercise in Intervention.” Caribbean Quarterly 47, no. 4 (2001): pp. 71-94.
  3. “Haiti says election could drag on for months, protests grow.” Reuters, April 25, 2016. <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-haiti-election/haiti-says-election-could-drag-on-for-months-protests-grow-idUSKCN0XM0CC>
  4. Bridoux, Jeff and Malcolm Russell. “Liberal Democracy Promotion in Iraq: A Model for the Middle East and North Africa?” Foreign Policy Analysis 9, no. 3 (2012): pp. 327–346.

Philosophical wagers

When reading through the introduction to these philosophical debates, I fell firmly on what I’ll call the “universal” side of all of them. That is, those sides of each debate which held that generalizeable research could be done and facts could be pulled closer to our grasp, even if we never achieve absolute certainty. (I.e. – realism, transcendentalism, etc.) After looking at some research and participating in our discussions, I am still confident in this position.

Coming from that base, I do think objective social research can be done. It can be noted here that I did not directly answer this question the way it is posed in the assignment — ” do you think you can be an objective observer of the social world?” This question looks in the wrong place. It looks at the researcher instead of the research. Humans definitely have biases and deficiencies. The proper reaction to this when preforming and consuming research is to consider it and adjust your evaluation of the research accordingly, not completely abandon the concept of capital-f Facts altogether. Some things are true, period. Some truths are universal, period. The difficulty of finding those universal truths may be beyond articulation, but that does not mean that good research cannot pull us ever closer.

In my estimation, researchers can make knowledge claims about any factual propositions. Whether these knowledge claims are valid depends on the veracity of their contents, and the reach of valid claims advances with our capabilities as researchers. If we can identify 500 variables that make parliamentary elections in Ghana different than those in Belgium, our research will be more valid, more capable of revealing a better picture of universal truths, than if we can only identify 10.

In making an ultimate evaluation of this philosophical debate, it is important to define the terms. This debate is about fundamental differences, not gradient differences. Possible versus impossible is a fundamental difference. Easier versus harder is a gradient difference.

Non-univseralists (constructionists, etc.) propose that social science is fundamentally difference than natural science — that universal facts can be determined in natural science but not in social science. The justification is that researchers (being human) are a part of society, and thus can’t objectively study it. But this ignores that researchers are also part of nature. No one would say that Einstein’s research on the physics of the solar system was not actually True because Einstein lived in the solar system. No one would say that biologists can’t make universal discoveries about cells just because they are themselves made of cells. There is not a fundamental difference. Humans are a part of society just like they are a part of nature. As a matter of fact, human society itself is a part of nature. The difference we observe is a gradient one. It is harder to find facts in social science because there is more stuff going on, as it were. But at a fundamental level, the possibility is still the same.

Portfolio post 2

I met with Prof. Mislan on September 7 for about 30 minutes. After meeting each other personally, we discussed my academic history at AU, my future academic plans, and how they relate to my research project. The first specific item we talked about was Reinhold Niebuhr’s book The Irony of American History, which Prof. Mislan suggested I read over the summer. I shared my opinion that the book is principally an argument against ideology in foreign policymaking. Niebuhr, writing during the Cold War, contended that both the Soviet Union’s communist ideology and America’s liberal ideology could distort their respective foreign policies if emphasized over factual nuances. The largest concern I shared with Prof. Mislan was that my topic, as of yet, has not been focused into a single puzzle or question. Prof. Mislan told me that there will always be a worthy, manageable research question in a rich thematic area. Accordingly, my next few steps in the process should be focused on finding a puzzle that I can get my question out of. Along with the research related readings from class, I think the best way to go about that would be to read academic literature on democratization, including in the Journal of Democracy.

Research Portfolio Post #1: Research Interests

The topic that I will be researching this year is the various methods of US democracy promotion, a topic I’m interested in for two reasons.

First, the expanding or declining trends of democracy worldwide have been a key theme of world history for the past few decades. The fall of the Soviet Union brought about democratization in Europe that helped expand the project of European economic and political integration started after World War II. The Arab Spring and subsequent faltering of democratic movements in the Middle East created new layers of instability in that region. And politics today in countries from Turkey to Russia to the Philippines is largely defined by increasing strength of authoritarian actors. Almost all current international events can be seen in part through a lens of forward or backward moving democratization.

And secondly, democracy promotion is a feature of US foreign policy that is often known a mile wide and an inch deep. Anyone who follows foreign policy knows that it plays a prominent part at least in the rhetoric of American leaders, and it was perhaps the most prominent element of the foreign policies of Presidents Clinton and Bush 43. (Its relative absence with Obama and Trump is equally notable.) However, while the basic concept of democracy promotion is widely known, the various methods remain largely untouched in conversations about the topic. When they are discussed, discussions revolve around large scale military intervention, which is important but excludes a large part of the policy. Smaller military action, commercial tactics, and the use of aid and diplomacy receive practically no mention or evaluation. With this research, I hope to make the conversation about democracy promotion more holistic.

The “puzzle” I used when applying for the program was to determine the effectiveness of the various methods of democracy promotion. I thought that such a question was probably too broad at the time, and I now think that even more so. To further focus my work, I could evaluate individual tactics or compare the democratization in countries targeted by America versus other democratizing countries, etc. I am still largely unsure of a particular direction I want to take the project.