Laws of Politics

Their Operations in Democracies and Dictatorships

Alfred G. Cuzán

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000423549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Drawing on classic and contemporary scholarship and empirical analysis of elections and public expenditures in 80 countries, the author argues for the existence of primary and secondary laws of politics.

Starting with how basic elements of politics—leadership, organization, ideology, resources, and force—coalesce in the formation of states, he proceeds to examine the operations of those laws in democracies and dictatorships. Primary laws constrain the support that incumbents draw from the electorate, limiting their time in office. They operate unimpeded in democracies. Secondary laws describe the general tendency of the state to expand vis-à-vis economy and society. They exert their greatest force in one-party states imbued with a totalitarian ideology. The author establishes the primary laws in a rigorous analysis of 1, 100 parliamentary and presidential elections in 80 countries, plus another 1, 000 U.S. gubernatorial elections. Evidence for the secondary laws is drawn from public expenditure data series, with findings presented in easily grasped tables and graphs. Having established these laws quantitatively, the author uses Cuba as a case study, adding qualitative analysis and a practical application to propose a constitutional framework for a future Cuban democracy.

Written in an engaging, jargon-free style, this enlightening book will be of great interest to students and scholars in political science, especially those specializing in comparative politics, as well as opinion leaders and engaged citizens.

Part I

Preliminaries

1

Introduction

Politology—the science of politics¹

Our discipline goes by the name of political science, although I hold that a more appropriate name for it is “politology.” Many other sciences, anthropology, biology, psychology, zoology, and so on, employ the “ology” suffix, derived from the Greek, to signify a subject of study. In Spanish, the word used is politología, and its practitioner, politólogo. Politologists (aka “political scientists”) aim to study government and politics objectively, with scrupulous attention to reason and evidence. As social scientists, we seek to know, to understand, what is involved in governing—and being governed. Politology, then, is the science that studies human beings engaged in political activities.

The study of politics in the scientific sense requires observation, theorizing, empirical analysis, and explanation. By theorizing, I mean developing concepts that appear to be good matches for observations, and linking those concepts together in some intuitively or logically meaningful way. Empirical analysis involves quantification of observations and testing for relations among them with statistical tools ranging from relatively simple to highly sophisticated ones, depending on the complexity of the system and the difficulties encountered in isolating relations among some of its parts. Explanation means constructing a “story,” so to speak, that connects the related data points within a theoretical framework. Theorizing and observation go together, informing each other. After all, one normally needs a guide to aid in focusing one’s attention on something important about the phenomenon of interest. On the other hand, one’s attention may be drawn in an unexpected direction that turns up something about it of which one was unaware or to which one had not given much thought. This interactive process linking observations to each other and to concepts, concepts to each other and back to observation, in a search for patterns that make sense theoretically, is what the scientific enterprise is all about. The search comes up empty most of the time, frustrating all our efforts. But now and then an “aha!” moment occurs, or something of value turns up, maybe even an occasional “discovery,” which makes it all worthwhile.

Unlike, say, economics, it is unusual to find attempts to lay down principles of politics (Budge et al. 2012). This is easily verified. A quick test is to search in Google or Amazon for titles bearing the phrase “elements of politics” or “principles of politics,” and compare the total with those that include “elements of economics” or “principles of economics.” Perhaps it is feared that such principles do not exist, or at least that they are not universal or, contrarily, that there are so many of them operating under multiple contingencies, many unknown, that the attempt to enumerate them is bound to fail. Or, that the subject is so bound up with ideology or the personal preferences of the politologist as citizen that no objective criteria can be found to satisfy all doubters.

I submit that this aversion to digging into the fundamentals of politics shortchanges the discipline and deprives students and scholars alike of a firm foundation, a set of common understandings, upon which to erect the results of more specialized, narrowly focused research, not to speak of what remedies may be tried whenever government performance falls far short of expectations. My purpose in this book, then, is to make a contribution toward improving upon this situation by calling to mind a few basic principles about government. To that end, I draw on classical, modern, and contemporary scholarship; my own empirical analysis of more than 2,500 elections in 80 democracies from around the world; research into nearly four dozen dictatorships of different types; and the histories of two neighboring cases born of wars of independence or revolution that represent polar opposites in their design and operations—the United States and Cuba. Also, following Tullock (1987, xi), I use a few examples or anecdotes from other countries, not as evidence, but to elucidate a theoretical point.

A caveat, however, is in order. I make no claim that the list of laws of politics here presented is exhaustive, or that it subsumes all aspects of politics or the state. As will become evident, I limit the analysis primarily to the internal dynamics of state formation arising from a war of independence or a revolution, and the subsequent operations of two ideal types, democracy and dictatorship, and their subtypes. By and large, other origins of states, and of their international relations, are omitted. Also, throughout this analysis, in support of some of my arguments or empirical assertions, I make references to previous works in politology. Authors of some renown made similar claims, grounding them in their study of history or their own contemporary observations or actual political experience. I assume that those constitute robust, if not necessarily dispositive support for my own affirmations. Finally, it is the prerogative of an author to determine the use of terms that denote the concepts one has in mind, the only requirement being that they be clearly defined and employed consistently throughout the analysis. I make use of that privilege here.

To begin, then, politics is the pursuit, exercise, and influencing of the coercive powers of the state. A state is a modern entity, a form of organization that originated in Western Europe (Colomer 2007). It now occupies most of the surface of the inhabited world, exercising power more or less effectively. Its directors claim sovereign authority, that is, an exclusive or ultimate right to govern a distinctive, or what they claim is a distinctive people, usually bounded by a concrete territory, a domain, under a particular regime. To govern means to rule, to lay down laws and regulations, impose requirements, issue orders for carrying on every kind of human activity, to make decisions for all others who come under their compass on pain of punishment in the form of fines, imprisonment, even death. Other social bodies also demand obedience to their strictures, and to belong an individual must conform to its rules, norms, or conventions, or be subject to a sanction of some kind, from ostracism to violence, even death, as in the case of prison gangs (Skarbeck 2014). But only the modern state claims a monopoly over what it regards as the legitimate use of violence over a population residing in the territory to which it lays claim. It does so with varying degrees of success, depending on the extent to which its authority is recognized by the population and by other states, on the one hand, and its own coercive capabilities, on the other (Heggen and Cuzán 1981). A regime is a complex set of rules, structures, and policies, which those who control it justify according to a reigning ideology. By ideology, I mean a more or less coherent set of ideas, beliefs, and images—in short, a worldview about people, society, and state that serves the political purpose of a party or regime. It justifies their rule to themselves, to those over whom they claim to have authority, and to other states. It may draw on religious or secular sources.

The rules that those who govern seek to enforce are of three kinds: permissions, prohibitions, and requisitions. Everything is permitted that is not prohibited; that is, where the law is silent. However, permission may be conditional, granted only after certain requirements are met. Prohibitions are self-explanatory. Requisitions include all kinds of obligations, including payments in cash, in kind or in labor, imposed on the subjects or citizens. Specifically, those who govern a contemporary state claim the authority to do the following:

• To tax, conscript, wage war, and engage in diplomacy with other states.
• To extract and administer revenues from the population, to borrow money and to issue it, to declare its own currency legal tender.
• To recognize, license, regulate, require, or prohibit relationships, activities, or conduct, from the most intimate to the most public, in the form of laws, edicts, executive orders, mandates, codes, judicial rulings, etc.
• To adjudicate disputes between individuals or associations, or between them and the state itself.
• To police the subjects and to punish those who do not abide by its laws, decrees, orders, requisitions, etc., with measures that may, depending on the nature of the regime, include such things as fines, denial of a license to practice a trade or profession, deprivation of liberty, uncompensated labor, physical or emotional pain, even death.
• To maintain a permanent bureaucracy to administer the state’s myriad activities, from producing, contracting for, or delivering “public goods” of all sorts, with varying degrees of social benefit, as well as private ones, including transfer payments in the form of pensions, assistance to those deemed deserving or in need of public support, etc.
• And to reward those who, in the judgment of those in charge of the state, have exerted themselves in its service.

These powers excite the ambition of a segment of the most spirited members of any population. They may be motivated by some mixture of patriotism, altruism, a vision of a good society, a passion for honor or fame. Or, alternatively, by a desire to exploit state resources for private gain, nepotism, or even vicious passions, such as desire to dominate for the sheer pleasure of it, revenge, resentment, envy, hatred, sadism.

Parenthetically, a “public good” is a good or service which is technically difficult or uneconomical to price to beneficiaries; that is, once supplied, it is technically or economically difficult to exclude free loaders or shirkers. To provide it, then, requires that the presumed beneficiaries, be it a subset of the population or the entire country, be coerced into paying for it through taxes in the form of money or in-kind services, including conscripted labor. It needs bearing in mind, however, that as with private goods priced to consumers in markets, there is an unavoidable subjectivity about the value of a public good. What some portions of the population regard as desirable, others may consider as worthless or worse, at least in the form, quality, or quantity supplied beyond a certain point. Unless the two camps can be disaggregated, conflict is bound to occur whenever the first group pressures government to provide it. This is one argument for federalism or of substantial geographic decentralization of government (Colomer 2010, chap. 6). A related concept is that of a commons, a natural resource, such as an aquifer, a pasture, a forest, a fisheries, that remains unappropriated. If open to all without restriction, it tends to be exploited beyond the point of natural replenishment or economic sense. The incentive to conserve and invest to improve the resource itself is weak or lacking altogether. If it is technically impossible or uneconomical to establish private property rights over it, regulations of some sort will need to be enacted by the state, private associations, or some combination of the two, in order to manage and ration its rate of use (Ostrom 2015). But bear in mind that the state treasury is itself a sort of common-pool resource (Bish 1987; Brubaker 1997). Incentives to draw from it beyond the point of replenishment by taxes or what the economy can bear in order to satisfy internal demands from departments, agencies, public employee unions, external pressures from interest groups, not to speak of ambitious politicians wanting to make their mark, or a party bent on realizing an ideological vision, will ensue. So now, the very entity, the state, subject to internal and external incentives to overspend, needs to impose a budgetary limit on itself. Again, federalism or some other decentralized scheme that disaggregates public finances into smaller pools, making for a closer match between the benefits expected from expenditures and the costs borne through taxation, user fees, and other means, should ameliorate the problem (Tiebout 1956).

Government, the collection of offices occupied by anywhere from a handful to a few hundred decision makers located in the country’s capital, is the controlling center of the state, its commanding height, its “brain.” However, in some cases the effective center of power may actually reside in the “office” of a ruling party, or that of a person, a “Boss” or “Fuehrer.” Those who capture the government, as well as those who seek to displace and replace them by electoral or violent means, as well as those able to exert strong pressures on it from within or without the state itself, constitute the political class. The rest, however much or little their voices and votes are taken into consideration in the making of public policy, that is, in anything that government decides or does, are the subjects, the ruled. This is not to say that members of the political class are not, themselves, ruled. Individually they are, although depending on their power or influence, or the credits and liabilities they may have accumulated vis-à-vis the rest of the class, they may be treated more or less leniently than ordinary subjects or citizens for similar offenses. Nor is it to say that all subjects are without voice or vote, or that their influence is trivial, or that the two classes are in separate, airtight compartments. It all depends on the nature of the regime. The state is embedded in society. There is a certain amount of permeability between the two, uncontrollably fluid in democracies, but restricted to various extents in dictatorships. Also, in democracies, the ruled are citizens, sharing in the power of government. They do so not so much as individuals, but as members of the electorate that periodically chooses the top tier of the government, and of a multiplicity of interest groups that exert pressure on public officials to do or not do something, depending on the desires and aversions of their associates. In some dictatorships, namely those that aspire to exert complete control over human activity, the subjects are little more than helots, whose lot is to applaud and obey those who rule over them, self-selected members of a family, religious hierarchy, junta, or party. These differences of regime take pride of place in this book.

Those differences notwithstanding, as I demonstrate in Parts III‒V, there are a number of laws of politics, akin to natural laws, to which democracies and dictatorships alike are subject. The reader anxious to get to them should review a summary in the concluding chapter, assembled in Table 18.1, and then proceed directly to review the statistical evidence in Parts III‒V. For those wishing first to understand how a new state or regime may come into being and bifurcates into one or the other of the two main types in the first place, in the remainder of Part I and continuing in Part II, I describe one path of state formation, one commonly observed in the 19th and 20th centuries. It originates in a war of independence from a colonial or occupying power, or in a revolution, in the course of which five elements of politics fuse into one of two distinct regimes, a democracy or a dictatorship. In Parts III‒V I present the components of the political system I have constructed, describe and analyze the data used to test for basic relationships among them, and demonstrate their law-like constancy. Next, in Part VI, I draw on the general findings to shed light on the political history of a particular country. In a little more than a century, Cuba underwent two major wars of independence, two military occupations by the United States, two revolutions, two democratic eras, and three dictatorships, the last one, still standing after six decades, being ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Preliminaries
• Part II The making of democracies and dictatorships
• Part III A data set for the study of politics
• Part IV Primary laws of politics
• Part V Secondary laws of politics
• Part VI Cuba: A case study
• Part VII Recapitulation and conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index