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Arthur A. Goldsmith

Journal of Democracy, Volume 23, Number 2, April 2012, pp. 119-132 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/jod.2012.0023

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ballots, bullets, and the bottom billion

Arthur A. Goldsmith

Arthur A. Goldsmith is associate dean and professor in the College of Management at the University of Massachusetts–Boston. He publishes frequently on international development, international business, and the politics and economics of Africa.

In late 2010, the small West African republic of Côte d’Ivoire held troubled presidential elections that seemed to typify a broad difficulty with democracy in low-income countries. Instead of peacefully recon- ciling political differences, the balloting boiled over into unstructured conflict and renewed strife in a country that was just emerging from a dating back to 2005. The 28 November 2010 runoff brought the problems to a head. It pitted longtime incumbent Laurent Gbagbo from the Christian south against equally longtime opposition leader Alassane Ouattara from the Muslim north. Côte d’Ivoire’s election commission and the United Na- tions declared Ouattara the winner, but Gbagbo claimed fraud, had votes from Ouattara’s base region disqualified, and insisted that he and not Ouattara had won the contest. The stalemate degenerated into a new civ- il war, complete with atrocities committed by both sides. Four months later, Ouattara’s militia prevailed and, with the help of UN and French forces, arrested Gbagbo before extraditing him to face trial before the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Chaotic power struggles such as this raise a difficult issue for the international community, whose policy has been to encourage elections as a way of resolving internal disputes and promoting good governance. One theory, favored by policy makers and based on the concept of do- mestic democratic peace, expects representative institutions to produce accommodation and compromise. A contrary view says that in order for elections to help rather than harm, a society must first be ready for democracy. According to modernization theory, the main factor determining

Journal of Democracy Volume 23, Number 2 April 2012 © 2012 National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press 120 Journal of Democracy any particular regime type’s feasibility or performance is economic development: Countries such as Côte d’Ivoire, standing as they do on the lower rungs of the international economic ladder, will experi- ence democracy as an unstable and conflict-prone form of govern- ment—just the opposite of what happens in economically advanced countries. Much has been written trying to quantify the link between econom- ic development and political regimes. My present point of departure is recent work by and his colleagues. Collier focuses on the “bottom billion,” meaning the portion of humanity that lives in the world’s poorest countries. “Prior to the end of the Cold War,” Collier observes, “most leaders of the bottom billion had come to power through violence. . . . Now most are in power through winning elections.” 1 But elections in these nations are a sham or, worse, destabilizing due to a lack of institutionalized checks and balances. “To date,” Collier asserts, “democracy in the societies of the bottom billion has increased political violence instead of reducing it.” 2 He labels this defective form of gov- ernment “democrazy.” Which countries are in jeopardy? Collier records some sixty coun- tries in the bottom-billion group today. His list overlaps with similar lists of fragile or vulnerable states from the OECD, the World Bank, and others.3 But no such list is fixed over time. Collier’s research suggests that the cutoff point below which democracy turns into democrazy is an annual per capita income of US$2,700—although depending on the year the aggregate number of people in that category may number well more than a billion.4 Below that level of income, Collier says, democratic political systems are more likely than dictatorships to expose citizens to coups, assassinations, and outbreaks of guerrilla warfare. In order to have an extended period over which to analyze the extent of democrazy, let us isolate all countries (with populations exceeding a half-million) where annual Gross Domestic Product per capita (GDPpc) is $2,700 or less (in 2005 prices using Purchasing Power Parity esti- mates) in any given year back to 1960, as reported in the Penn World Table.5 Seventy-one countries held at least one competitive election for the national leader while in this recorded income range for the election year during the period from 1960 to 2006. Let us also leave out elec- tion years when any of these countries may have risen above the $2,700 GDPpc level.6 At first glance, there are reasons to question the democrazy argu- ment. One cause for doubt is the dwindling use of the bullet around the world to transfer power, whether by coup d’état, assassination, or civil war. If the democrazy thesis is correct—if democracy in very poor countries feeds conflict—one would expect to see the opposite tenden- cy. Another reason for skepticism about democrazy is the growing sig- nificance of the ballot globally. Although Collier and others are correct Arthur A. Goldsmith 121 that post–Cold War elections have often had a make-believe quality, it would be a mistake to dismiss the significance of every election in very poor countries, even when incumbents try hard to manipulate the results. Many studies of democratization are hampered by methodology and data problems regarding the measurement of regime types. It is hard to measure a concept as broad as democracy, and it is hard to say pre- cisely where democratic regimes end and other forms of government begin. In order to avoid these difficulties and minimize measurement error, let us ask more simply whether a country has experienced an at- tempt or attempts at changing leaders by extralegal means as opposed to lawful elections. While narrower in scope than a country’s overall level of democracy or autocracy, this “bullets-or-ballots” variable has the advantage of considering explicit events that lend themselves to di- rect measurement, and spares us the need to assess broad hypothetical constructs such as regime type.

Transfers of Power: Regular or Irregular?

Max Weber defines politics as the realm of human endeavor regard- ing the leadership of the state. Any political decision, he writes, always means “that interests in the distribution, maintenance, or transfer of power are decisive.”7 The struggle for national power or leadership may occur through recognized state institutions, or it may take place with- out consideration of the rules (and therefore illegitimately, in Weber’s sense), outside the system of “organized domination” and “continuous administration” that constitutes the state. “The decisive means for politics is violence,” Weber continues, but in states where people accept governments with which they disagree, neither the state nor its citizens need turn to forceful methods to gain or hold political power. The gloves come off more frequently in regimes with uncertain legitimacy, which of course include many of the bottom- billion states. Rival groups are apt to destroy property and inflict bodily harm as means to affect the composition or behavior of government. The state may well respond in kind, although this article does not address the question of state-sponsored oppression directed against members of society.8 In a little-noticed trend, however, overtly violent manifestations of political rivalry and power-seeking are on the wane. Across the whole set of nations where GDPpc is less than $2,700, we see far fewer coups d’état, attempts to assassinate the top ruler, and (though here the falloff has been less dramatic) onsets of civil wars fought over the question of who shall control the national government. These noninstitutionalized methods of taking power are at or near historically low levels, as Figure 1 on page 122 shows. Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne have recently compiled a dataset 12 New civil wars for central control

Assassinations and e) g 10 assassination attempts ra e av Successful and unsuccesful g n coups vi 8 o 122 m Journal of NewDemocracy civil wars for central 12 r a control e 12-y 6 New civil wars for central igure xtralegal5 fforts to eplace ationAssassinationsal and control e)F 1—E ( E R N g ts assassination attempts a 10eadership in ottomn illion ountries rL B ) e -B C , 1960–2007 Assassinations and e e v v g 10e 4 Successful and unsuccesful assassination attempts a a f New civil wars for central 1212 g r o New civilcoups wars for n e r centralcontrol control* vi 8 v e Successful and unsuccesful o a b g m Assassinations and coups ) m in 8u 2 assassinationAssassinations attempts** and e ar v g 1010 e o N assassination attempts a y m er - 6 r Successful and v (5 a unsuccessfulSuccessful and coups*** unsuccesful a s e g t -y 6 0 coups in n 5 v 88 ve ( o e ts 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 f 4 n r m o e a r v e e e 4 -y 66 b f 5 m o ( u 2 r s N be nt e um 2 ev N f 44 o 0 er b 1960 1965 19700 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 um 22 N 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005

Number of Events (5-Month Moving Average) 00 19601960 1965 1970 1975 19801985 1990 1990 19952000 2005 Note: Country coverage excludes nations with fewer than 500,000 citizens and countries with per capita GDP over $2,700 in 2005 PPP dollars. *Civil wars for central control are armed struggles for command of national political insti- tutions. There must be sustained combat causing at least 1,000 deaths within a year. Only the years of civil war onset are shown here. **Assassinations are efforts to murder the national leader, excluding actions occurring during coups. ***Coups are illegal, overt attempts from within the state apparatus to oust the sitting executive, and are considered successful if the perpetrators seize and hold power for more than seven days. Sources: Author’s estimates based on Heston, Summers, and Aten, Penn World Table; Jones and Olken, “Hit or Miss?”; Correlates of War Project, Intra-State War Data, Ver- sion 4.1 (2011), available at http://www.correlatesofwar.org/; Powell and Thyne, “Global Instances of Coups.” that tracks the number of successful and unsuccessful coups over the past fifty years.9 They define coups as illegal and overt attempts by the military or other influential groups within the state organization to un- seat the sitting executive (a coup counts as successful if the perpetrators hold power for at least seven days). Ambitious or discontented bottom- billion elites attempted an average of about five coups annually during the 1960s, according to the dataset, coincident with the rocky transitions of many former colonies to independent statehood. About 40 percent of the coups in that decade were successful. The number of coups per year has dropped in each decade since then, though not steadily. In the years from 2001 to 2010, the bottom-billion countries were witnessing, on average, not even one coup per year— a fifth of the annual coup rate that such countries had suffered in the 1960s. The success rate of coups, however, has gone up by half. This is not necessarily a bad thing. As Collier points out, some coups are “sur- Arthur A. Goldsmith 123 gical strikes” that remove dysfunctional leaders. Still, even bloodless coups are a haphazard and arbitrary way to empower new rulers. It is a sign of how rare coups have become that just two were reported worldwide in 2010. Both came in Africa. The first was a failed putsch in , while the second was the successful deposition of the ruler in . Interestingly, both these events can be seen as efforts by the military to protect rather than subvert constitutional principles, espe- cially the right to vote. The attempted coup in Madagascar was launched on the day a referendum was held for a new constitution proposed by the country’s President Andry Rajoelina—a former mayor who himself had been installed by the military after a coup just eighteen months earlier. The main opposition parties had boycotted the referendum after criticiz- ing the proposed new constitution’s vagueness regarding the transition to democratic rule. The Nigerien coup came in response to President Mamadou Tandja’s endeavors to hold onto office beyond the constitutional term limit. He had dissolved the National Assembly and named a new Constitutional Court that allowed him to push through a constitutional referendum (also boycotted by the opposition) to extend his mandate. Niger’s junta, calling itself the Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy, su- pervised civilian presidential elections less than a year after overthrow- ing Tandja. Former opposition leader Seyni Oumarou won in the second round in March 2011. Diplomatic and external economic pressure helps to explain how rare coups have become, and how quickly militaries step aside when coups do occur. Assassinations and attempted assassinations have also become com- paratively infrequent since the 1960s. These are efforts from outside the government to eliminate the most powerful political figure at the time in each country, as recorded by Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken in 2009.10 Their dataset excludes physical attacks made during coups, because those originate from government insiders. Only overt actions are included; a plot to assassinate a leader that is detected and broken up does not count. According to Jones and Olken’s dataset, about two assassination at- tempts took place per year in bottom-billion countries during the 1960s, although fewer than one in seven was successful in killing the targeted national leader. The half-century trend in assassinations roughly paral- lels that of coups. The frequency of these events dropped in every sub- sequent decade after the 1960s but with an uptick from 1995 to 2004, when the average annual number of assassination attempts rose to 1.5― still well below the level in the 1960s. The declining number of as- saults on and murders of top leaders may reflect increased legitimacy, or perhaps the drop is simply an indication of better security measures. It bears noting that the success rate of assassination attempts went up proportionately over the most recent ten-year period, so the absolute 124 Journal of Democracy number of targeted bottom-billion leaders actually killed per year has held fairly constant over time. The last two successful assassinations in the dataset occurred in 2001. That year, King Birendra of was shot to death along with several family members by his son, while a disgruntled soldier murdered President Laurent-Désiré Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The first event contributed to the abolition of the Nepalese monarchy and its replacement with a republic seven years later; the second assas- sination led in due course to the 2006 victory of Joseph Kabila, the slain leader’s son, in Congo’s first multiparty elections since independence. As with some coups, assassinations can have positive fallout. Jones and Olken argue that when autocratic rulers are killed, constructive national institutional reforms often follow. An even more disruptive way for power to change hands is through an intrastate war to remove the sitting national leadership. The Cor- relates of War project has made observations of the onset of civil wars for central control going back to the nineteenth century and through the five recent decades covered by the two time series on coups and assas- sinations. Civil wars for central control leave out other types of internal conflicts, such as wars of territorial secession, where the focal point is not national dominance. To be counted, the fighting must involve the government against a nonstate entity, and there must be sustained combat resulting in at least a thousand battle-related fatalities within a twelve-month period.11 The onset of civil wars for central control has ebbed and flowed in very poor countries since 1960. The high tide for new wars in this category came in 1998, when six conflicts started. On average, about two onsets occurred each year in the 1990s versus about one per year in the 1960s. In the 2000s, however, the rate fell back to 1960s levels. The most recent onset of a bottom-billion civil war for central control recorded by the Correlates of War project is the Houthi rebellion to restore the Zaidi Imamate to . It was fought during the first half of 2007, and ended with a truce and subsequent peace agreement. The year before, the only onset listed is the Third Somali War. This conflict pitted ’s Transitional Federal Government against the Somali Council of Islamic Courts, which wanted to turn the country into an Islamic state. That war lasted 27 months, as indicated by the dataset, when intervening Ethiopian troops routed the Islamic Courts’ militia. Although the rate at which they occur has not dropped to the extent that it has for coups and assassinations, armed internal struggles over national power now tend to be shorter and perhaps less damaging than similar conflicts were in years past. Lacking U.S. or Soviet support, they are fought by smaller armies with lighter weapons. Post-1960 civil wars for central control in bottom-billion countries last 36 months on aver- Arthur A. Goldsmith 125 age, but the average duration for conflicts beginning after 1990 is only 25 months. The government side won about a third of those post-1990 wars. About an equal percentage ended in compromise or stalemate. When a war like this does come to an end, the stage is often set for greater democratization, especially if there is a negotiated peace settle- ment between the warring parties to guarantee a process of national rec- onciliation.12

Institutionalizing Leadership Succession

Incipient democratic modes of contestation have displaced the three main irregular and forcible means of seizing the reins of national pow- er—the bullet is giving way to the ballot. Backed by the encouragement of the international community and the demand of citizens around the world, the principle of popular sovereignty has grown to be the almost universal starting point for deciding who should rightfully run a coun- try. According to the Archigos dataset of political leaders, during the 1970s only about half the top leadership changes in non-OECD coun- tries took place according to prevailing rules (including those covering what happens when a leader dies in office due to natural causes). 13 By 2004, the ten-year average for rule-based turnovers of power had risen to nearly 90 percent of the leadership changes. By far the most common institutionalized method for replacing or reaffirming a national ruler is that of elections (of varying quality), with other accepted practices such as hereditary succession dwindling in importance. According to another new dataset, there has been a notable rise in elections in bottom-billion countries (again, as defined by GDPpc of less than $2,700 per year). This dataset is called National Elections Across Democracy and Autocracy (NELDA). 14 The NELDA project covers electoral contests in independent countries with populations ex- ceeding half a million from 1960 to 2006. Included are elections (for na- tional executives and for national legislatures) in which voters directly elect candidates appearing on the ballot. That leaves out elections for constitutional conventions, but counts second-round and other runoff contests for political office as separate elections. In total, bottom-billion countries held close to nine-hundred national elections over the 47-year span covered by NELDA, with almost half the contests taking place in the last seventeen years following the end of the Cold War. Especially noteworthy is the changing composition of elections, with potentially competitive elections eclipsing noncompetitive ones. The NELDA dataset distinguishes between these two types of elec- tions based on a minimalist conception of electoral competitiveness which requires only that opposition parties must be legal, must be al- lowed to compete, and must actually place candidates on the ballot for the office in question. This is a far looser definition than the of- 126 Journal of Democracy ficial international classification of elections as “free and fair,” which is limited to periodic contests based on universal, equal, and secret suffrage, with a reasonably level playing field for all candidates and equal opportunity for all citizens in every corner of the country to participate. In the NELDA dataset, competitive contests are simply those where an opposition victory is theoretically possible, even if an overwhelming bias favors the ruling party. Noncompetitive elections, by contrast, are plebiscitary events that lack even token opposition. An example of such an event might be the election that held in 2009, when nearly 100 percent of all registered voters turned out and offered virtually unanimous support for candidates associated with the Kim Jong-Il regime and its Workers’ Party. In these monopo- listic contests, the officeholder cannot lose under any circumstances. Through the late 1980s, six of ten national elections in bottom-billion nations were noncompetitive. All the subsequent growth in elections has come in the competitive category, while noncompetitive races have dwindled in number to just a handful per year. To draw the distinction once more, a listing as “competitive” in the NELDA dataset does not mean that a given election was demo- cratic—that is, it may not have been a regularly scheduled event with uncertain outcomes, to use Valerie Bunce’s shorthand definition of democracy.15 The dataset contains 227 competitive “leadership elec- tions” (presidential contests in presidential systems, and parliamen- tary elections in parliamentary systems) for bottom-billion countries, excluding the early rounds where runoffs were allowed. Only 15 per- cent of them, however, both took place on schedule and were not considered at the time to have been locked up by the ruling party, thus qualifying as democratic according to Bunce’s criteria of regularity and uncertainty.16 The remaining competitive elections for national leadership posts can be put into two other categories defined by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way.17 Some are “electoral authoritarian” contests, with so much hege- monic-party interference that the outcome is virtually never in doubt. A larger number blend into Levitsky and Way’s archetype of somewhat less predictable “competitive authoritarianism,” where the establishment works to defend its candidate through fraud and intimidation, denial of civil liberties, and the setting up of legal roadblocks to independent po- litical organizations. Even in these last two types of elections, despots may still find them- selves out of office. Looking across all the final elections for the effec- tive head of state in the bottom-billion group, we find that even in the competitive but nondemocratic contests the incumbent party managed to lose one election of every five in which it fielded a candidate. That is a far better rate of success than incumbent parties can claim in competi- tive democracies, where they win just half the races, but the numbers Arthur A. Goldsmith 127 still show that upsets and surprise transfers of power have a chance of occurring almost anytime an opponent appears on the ballot. Elections are risky for officeholders. The growth in competitive elections in less-than-democratic environ- ments over the past two decades has surprised most observers. It is not that an autocrat’s basic motivation for agreeing to such contests is hard to understand: The political cover to be gained by permitting a dose of formal opposition is worth some risk of losing power, which the autocrat can mitigate in any case by manipulating the election results. Nor is the opposition’s logic difficult to fathom: Even when the electoral deck is stacked, campaigning for office is a good way to build organizational capabilities for the future, although the opposition also risks losing cred- ibility if it makes too many compromises with the ruling autocrat. Both sides may also see elections as a convenient way to divide the rents of office holding.18 This mutual partisan interest in competitive elections is constant, however, and cannot explain the explosion in the number of these con- tests since 1989. The timing suggests that the main factors have been changes in the global arena. One quantitative research paper, for ex- ample, finds that democracy assistance may play a part by increasing trust in political bargains struck among domestic groups. 19 Dictators who stand a good chance of winning competitive elections also tend to respond to political conditions placed on aid. In other words, they will make democratic concessions for cash. 20

Voting, Legitimacy, and Violence A major function of elections is to generate or renew political le- gitimacy. A government whose citizens deem it legitimate need not fear challenges for power by extralegal means; a citizenry that deems its government legitimate will not turn to unsanctioned means to influence power. Win or lose, the casting of ballots can bring all sides together in a shared experience of self-determination that provides normative back- ing for the rulers. The democrazy argument suggests that elections in the bottom-bil- lion countries are more likely to polarize and delegitimize than to do the opposite. Rather than uniting people behind a leader, voting drives them further apart. Even groups with no chance of winning may try to obstruct their opponents’ success using every means possible. If this reasoning is correct, we should regularly observe extralegal acts of political rivalry when contested elections are held in poverty-ridden societies. Recent historical experience raises prima facie doubts about the democrazy thesis. In fact, the spread of competitive elections across the bottom-billion countries has not coincided with a surge in at- tempted (much less completed) irregular leadership changes. The 128 Journal of Democracy lack of an apparent correlation could be a misapprehension, how- ever, so it is essential to explore the within-country variation and to measure the extent to which coups, assassinations, and civil-war onsets occur each time a bottom-billion nation votes. For purposes of analysis, let us consider only competitive final leadership elec- tions as defined earlier; in other words, let us leave out preliminary rounds where runoffs are used, and let us exclude as well the purely monopolistic elections where competition and doubt about the out- come are effectively zero. All told, the poorest countries held 227 contested (but not necessarily democratic) leadership elections over the 47 years for which data are available. Elections that significant groups mistrust are most likely to pro- voke a coup, assassination, or civil war. These unsanctioned means of political competition may take place before the polls open to head off defeat, or they may take place afterward to reverse or spoil an unwanted outcome. Among the bottom-billion countries, there were 24 elections when one or more unlawful attempts to take power or influence leadership occurred during the twelve months leading up to the month in which the election was held. In addition, there was a par- tially overlapping set of 20 elections in which such an event or events occurred sometime during the twelve months following the election month. Finally, three elections had an illegal event the same month as the voting, for a net total of 40 “at-risk” elections—which I de- fine as competitive leadership elections where at least one improper bid for power (abortive or not) occurred within a 25-month period at whose midpoint stands the election month. Note that the remaining 187 “uneventful” bottom-billion elections—all of which lacked any such threats and incidents for a solid year on either side of the vot- ing—dwarfed the number of “at-risk” elections. As Figure 2 on page 129 shows, the absolute annual number of at-risk elections has stayed within a narrow band for close to half a century, with no dramatic increase (but somewhat greater volatility) after 1990, when competitive electoral campaigns became far more common. At- risk elections thus defined are less common among bottom-billion coun- tries than the democrazy model might have you believe. They represent only one election in six. Antigovernment endeavors during the at-risk election intervals comprised forty coups, ten assassinations, and five outbreaks of civil war. The violent actions in this subset of elections tend to bunch up closer to the polling date. About a third of them occur within a sev- en-month bracket around election day, and about two-thirds happen within a thirteen-month bracket. That pattern is compatible with democrazy and the idea that the scheduling of an election is a “sys- tem-perturbing event” that incites politically motivated violence in low-income countries. 16

14 Arthur A. Goldsmith 129 16 12 Figure 2—At-risk and Uneventful Elections in 14 10 Uneventful elections Bottom-Billion Countries, 1960–2006 16 12 8 At-risk elections 14 10 6 Uneventful elections 12 At-risk elections 8 4 10 10 UneventfulUneventful elections elections 6 2

NumberCompetitive of Leadership Elections 8 AtAt-risk-risk elections elections 4 0 1960 1965 1970 1975 19806 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2 NumberCompetitive of Leadership Elections 4 0 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2 NumberCompetitive of Leadership Elections Number of Competitive Leadership Elections 0 196019601965 19651970 19701975 19751980 1985 19851990 19901995 19952000 20002005 2005 Notes: Includes final elections with opposition for the effective head of state. Coverage is of countries with per capita GDP up to $2,700 in 2005 PPP dollars in the given year. Uneventful elections have no coups, assassinations, or civi-war onsets within a 25-month period centered on the election month. At-risk elections experience one or more such events in the 12 months before and the 12 months after the month in which the voting takes place. Sources: Author’s estimates using Hyde and Marinov, “Which Elections Can Be Lost?”; Hes- ton, Summers and Aten, Penn World Table; Jones and Olken, “Hit or Miss?”; Powell and Thyne, “Global Instances of Coups”; Correlates of War Project, Intra-State War Data (2011). Another way to look at the timing of political violence is to convert the competitive elections into “ballot years” and compare the inception of violent acts in those years to what happens in the “nonballot years” be- tween elections. Irregular bids for power are indeed more common around elections. Eighteen percent of ballot years are also “bullet years”—that is, they experience a coup, assassination, or civil-war onset. The rate of such events is almost double that of the nonballot years. Again, this observa- tion is consistent with democrazy. Extralegal political incidents do cluster in the years when low-income countries go to the polls. Collier worries not only about spikes in violence around election day, but also about the risk that contested elections could lead to net gains in irregular bids for power. 21 Looking at this bigger picture, however, there is little empirical evidence of democrazy. Unrest in bottom-billion societies is endemic, and the total volume of politically shaded violence seems unrelated to voting per se. All the world’s adverse elections events since 1960 have occurred in just 34 countries. The same 34 countries have also been the collective site of almost two-hundred additional ad- verse events that have occurred outside the respective 25-month election intervals. In total, states with problematic elections underwent nearly 60 percent of the coups, assassinations, and civil-war onsets undergone by bottom-billon nations over more than four decades. 130 Journal of Democracy

There are additional bottom-billion countries that also witnessed violent bids for power, except that none of the acts took place in direct proximity to a competitive election. Altogether, 56 other nations experi- enced more than 150 extralegal polit- ical acts, or more than 40 percent of Even if the bottom-billion the total. Adjusting for the number of countries did away en- country-years in question (countries tirely with competitive move in and out of sub-$2,700 GDP- elections, the contest for pc status), no significant difference separates the two groups of bottom- power would carry on, and billion countries regarding the annu- political rivals would con- al rate of violent acts. In other words, tinue to use unauthorized irregular efforts to take or influence coercion to try to win it. power happen in most bottom-billion locations and they can begin at any time, not just around elections. The distribution of coups, assassinations, and civil-war onsets calls into question the implication of the democrazy thesis that low-income countries would be better off leaving things be and deferring competi- tive elections until they are substantially richer. In the short term, voting may very well stir the domestic political pot. But voting does not appear to mean less legitimacy and more antigovernment violence over the long run. This is fortunate. Despite disillusionment with democracy in practice, the principle of majority rule continues to have strong backing both from citizens in bottom-billion countries and from those who give those coun- tries aid. There is no turning back to stylized Cold War conditions when dictators could hold power indefinitely without having to face opposition at the polls. If competitive elections are inevitable, it is a good thing if they mainly affect the timing of violent incidents and do not raise the total number of such incidents. My review, based on the latest evidence, of whether competitive elec- tions pose a danger to the world’s poorest nations finds a punctuated but clear five-decade worldwide drop in extralegal efforts to take political power. Looking at this plus other new data showing a jump in competi- tive elections around the globe since 1990, I find limited support for the democrazy thesis and its worry that to hold elections in nations below a certain income level is to risk more unauthorized bids for power. There is a relationship between elections and when these forceful acts occur, but no suggestion that elections are associated with a greater number of forceful acts in very poor nations over time. A point to remember is Weber’s observation about the competition for power being a political constant. What varies a great deal is how much competition takes place through sanctioned versus unsanctioned avenues. Poverty and weak legitimacy go hand in hand, and bottom- billion countries experience higher levels of unsanctioned political Arthur A. Goldsmith 131 competition in the form of coups, assassinations, and civil wars even as those countries officially endorse elections as the only proper way to distribute power. But it is a mistake to attribute the extralegal acts to the elections themselves, when the underlying causes are lack of economic opportunity and wariness about the established rules of the game for politics. Even if these countries did away entirely with competitive elec- tions, the contest for power would carry on, and political rivals would continue to use unauthorized coercion to try to win it.

NOTES

1. Paul Collier, Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 2.

2. Collier, Wars, Guns, and Votes, 15.

3. Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

4. Paul Collier and Dominic Rohner, “Democracy, Development, and Conflict,” Journal of the European Economic Association 6 (April–May 2008): 531–40. Here Col- lier and his coauthor cite $2,750 as the threshold, but I employ the lower figure from Wars, Guns, and Votes, 21.

5. Alan Heston, Robert Summers, and Bettina Aten, Penn World Table Version 7.0, Center for International Comparisons of Production, Income and Prices at the University of Pennsylvania, 2011, http://pwt.econ.upenn.edu/php_site/pwt_index.php.

6. The election-holding poor countries are: , Albania, , Arme- nia, , Bangladesh, , , Botswana, Brazil, , Burma, , , , , , Colombia, , Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Dominican Republic, Equatorial , , , Georgia, , Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, , Hondu- ras, India, Indonesia, , , , , , Madagascar, , Malaysia, , , , , , Nepal, Nicaragua, Ni- ger, , Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Philippines, , , , South Korea, Sri Lanka, , , , Thailand, , , , Yemen, , and . Countries that did not hold any competitive elections while in the sub-$2,700 per capita GDP status (during any period from 1960 to 2006, inclusive) are: Algeria, , Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, China, , East Timor, Egypt, , Fiji, , Iraq, Jordan, Mau- ritius, Morocco, Namibia, Romania, Somalia, Swaziland, Syria, Taiwan, Tunisia, and Vietnam.

7. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. and trans., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 78.

8. Others have looked at that relationship. See David L. Richards and Ronald D. Gel- leny, “Good Things to Those Who Wait? National Elections and Government Respect for Human Rights,” Journal of Peace Research 44 (July 2007): 505–23. They conclude that elections, as events, are not reliably correlated with related human-rights abuses.

9. Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne, “Global Instances of Coups from 1950 to Pres- ent: A New Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research 48 (January 2011): 1–10. 132 Journal of Democracy

10. Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken, “Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutional Change and War,” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 1 (July 2009): 55–87.

11. Meredith Reid Sarkees and Frank Whelon Wayman, Resort to War: A Data Guide to Inter-State, Extra-State, Intra-state, and Non-State Wars, 1816–2007 (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2010).

12. Nancy Bermeo, “What the Democratization Literature Says—Or Doesn’t Say— About Postwar Democratization,” Global Governance 9 (April–June 2003): 159–78; Mehmet Gurses and David Mason, “Democracy out of Anarchy: The Prospects for Post– Civil-War Democracy,” Social Science Quarterly 89 (June 2008): 315–36.

13. Henk E. Goemans, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, and Giacomo Chiozza, “Introducing Archigos: A Dataset of Political Leaders,” Journal of Peace Research 46 (March 2009): 269–83. Archigos identifies the effective leader of each independent state, defined as the person with genuine (as opposed to merely formal) power in a country.

14. It is described in Susan Hyde and Nikolay Marinov, “Which Elections Can Be Lost?” Political Analysis 20 (forthcoming 2012). The data are available at http://hyde. research.yale.edu/nelda/#. Version 1 is used here.

15. Valerie Bunce, “Comparative Democratization: Big and Bounded Generaliza- tions,” Comparative Political Studies 33 (September 2000): 703–34.

16. I classify an election as a regular event if the previous round of normally scheduled elections had not been suspended in the country, and if the polling was held at a time consistent with established procedure. I categorize an election as having an uncertain out- come if no significant concerns were reported prior to the vote about its fairness, and if the incumbent or ruling party had some doubts about victory before the ballots were cast. These democratic criteria of regularity and uncertainty are based on NELDA variables 1, 6, 11, and 12.

17. Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 13 (April 2002): 31–45.

18. Jennifer Gandhi and Ellen Lust-Okar, “Elections Under Authoritarianism,” Annual Review of Political Science 12 (2009): 403–22.

19. Burcu Savun and Daniel Tirone, “Democracy Aid, Democratization, and Civil War: How does Democracy Aid Affect Civil War?” American Journal of Political Science 55 (April 2011): 233–46.

20. Joseph Wright, “How Foreign Aid Can Foster Democratization in Authoritarian Regimes,” American Journal of Political Science 53 (July 2009): 552–71.

21. Collier, Wars, Guns and Votes, 81.