Experimental methods in sociology

An earlier post noted the increasing importance of experimentation in some areas of economics (link), and posed the question of whether there is a place for experimentation in sociology as well. Here I'd like to examine that question a bit further.

Let's begin by asking the simple question: what is an experiment? An experiment is an intervention through which a scientist seeks to identify the possible effects of a given factor or “treatment”. The effect may be thought to be deterministic (whenever X occurs, Y occurs); or it may be probabilistic (the occurrence of X influences the probability of the occurrence of Y). Plainly, the experimental evaluation of probabilistic causal hypotheses requires repeating the experiment a number of times and evaluating the results statistically; whereas a deterministic causal hypothesis can in principle be refuted by a single trial.

In "The Principles of Experimental Design and Their Application in Sociology" (link) Michelle Jackson and D.R. Cox provide a simple and logical specification of experimentation:

We deal here with investigations in which the effects of a number of alternative conditions or treatments are to be compared. Broadly, the investigation is an experiment if the investigator controls the allocation of treatments to the individuals in the study and the other main features of the work, whereas it is observational if, in particular, the allocation of treatments has already been determined by some process outside the investigator’s control and detailed knowledge. The allocation of treatments to individuals is commonly labeled manipulation in the social science context. (Jackson and Cox 2013: 28)

There are several relevant kinds of causal claims in sociology that might admit of experimental investigation, corresponding to all four causal linkages implied by the model of Coleman’s boat (Foundations of Social Theory)—micro-macro, macro-micro, micro-micro, and macro-macro (link). Sociologists generally pay close attention to the relationships that exist between structures and social actors, extending in both directions. Hypotheses about causation in the social world require testing or other forms of empirical evaluation through the collection of evidence. It is plausible to ask whether the methods associated with experimentation are available to sociology. In many instances, the answer is, yes.

There appear to be three different kinds of experiments that would possibly make sense in sociology.

1. Experiments evaluating hypotheses about features of human motivation and behavior
2. Experiments evaluating hypotheses about the effects of features of the social environment on social behavior
3. Experiments evaluating hypotheses about the effects of “interventions” on the characteristics of an organization or local institution

First, sociological theories generally make use of more or less explicit theories of agents and their behavior. These theories could be evaluated using laboratory-based design for experimental subjects in specified social arrangements, parallel to existing methods in experimental economics. For example, Durkheim, Goffman, Coleman, and Hedström all provide different accounts of the actors who constitute social phenomena. It is feasible to design experiments along the lines of experimental economics to evaluate the behavioral hypotheses advanced by various sociologists.

Second, sociology is often concerned with the effects of social relationships on social behavior—for example, friendships, authority relations, or social networks. It would appear that these effects can be probed through direct experimentation, where the researcher creates artificial social relationships and observes behavior. Matthew Salganik et al’s internet-based experiments (2006, 2009) on “culture markets” fall in this category (Hedström 2006). Hedström describes the research by Salganik, Dodds, and Watts (2006) in these terms:

Salganik et al. (2) circumvent many of these problems [of survey-based methodology] by using experimental rather than observational data. They created a Web-based world where more than 14,000 individuals listened to previously unknown songs, rated them, and freely downloaded them if they so desired. Subjects were randomly assigned to different groups. Individuals in only some groups were informed about how many times others in their group had downloaded each song. The experiment assessed whether this social influence had any effects on the songs the individuals seemed to prefer. 

As expected, the authors found that individuals’ music preferences were altered when they were exposed to information about the preferences of others. Furthermore, and more importantly, they found that the extent of social influence had important consequences for the collective outcomes that emerged. The greater the social influence, the more unequal and unpredictable the collective outcomes became. Popular songs became more popular and unpopular songs became less popular when individuals influenced one another, and it became more difficult to predict which songs were to emerge as the most popular ones the more the individuals influenced one another. (787)

Third, some sociologists are especially interested in the effects of micro-context on individual actors and their behavior. Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel offer detailed interpretations of the causal dynamics of social interactions at the micro level, and their work appears to be amenable to experimental treatment. Garfinkel (Studies in Ethnomethodology), in particular, made use of research methods that are especially suggestive of controlled experimental designs.

Fourth, sociologists are interested in macro-causes of individual social action. For example, sociologists would like to understand the effects of ideologies and normative systems on individual actors, and others would like to understand the effects of differences in large social structures on individual social actors. Weber hypothesized that the Protestant ethic caused a certain kind of behavior. Theoretically it should be possible to establish hypotheses about the kind of influence a broad cultural factor is thought to exercise over individual actors, and then design experiments to evaluate those hypotheses. Given the scope and pervasiveness of these kinds of macro-social factors, it is difficult to see how their effects could be assessed within a laboratory context. However, there are a range of other experimental designs that could be used, including quasi-experiments (link) and field experiments and natural experiments (link),  in which the investigator designs appropriate comparative groups of individuals in observably different ideological, normative, or social-structural arrangements and observes the differences that can be discerned at the level of social behavior. Does one set of normative arrangements result in greater altruism? Does a culture of nationalism promote citizens’ propensity for aggression against outsiders? Does greater ethnic homogeneity result in higher willingness to comply with taxation, conscription, and other collective duties?

Finally, sociologists are often interested in macro- to macro-causation. For example, consider the claims that “defeat in war leads to weak state capacity in the subsequent peace” or “economic depression leads to xenophobia”. Of course it is not possible to design an experiment in which “defeat in war” is a treatment; but it is possible to develop quasi-experiments or natural experiments that are designed to evaluate this hypothesis. (This is essentially the logic of Theda Skocpol’s (1979) analysis of the causes of social revolution in States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China.) Or consider a research question in contentious politics, does widespread crop failure give rise to rebellions? Here again, the direct logic of experimentation is generally not available; but the methods articulated in the fields of quasi-experimentation, natural experiments, and field experiments offer an avenue for research designs that have a great deal in common with experimentation. A researcher could compile a dataset for historical China that records weather, crop failure, crop prices, and incidents of rebellion and protest. This dataset could support a “natural experiment” in which each year is assigned to either “control group” or “intervention group”; the control group consists of years in which crop harvests were normal, while the intervention group would consist of years in which crop harvests are below normal (or below subsistence). The experiment is then a simple one: what is the average incidence of rebellious incident in control years and intervention years?

So it is clear that causal reasoning that is very similar to the logic of experimentation is common throughout many areas of sociology. That said, the zone of sociological theorizing that is amenable to laboratory experimentation under random selection and a controlled environment is largely in the area of theories of social action and behavior: the reasons actor behave as they do, hypotheses about how their choices would differ under varying circumstances, and (with some ingenuity) how changing background social conditions might alter the behavior of actors. Here there are very direct parallels between sociological investigation and the research done by experimental and behavioral economists like Richard Thaler (Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics). And in this way, sociological experiments have much in common with experimental research in social psychology and other areas of the behavioral sciences.

Mounk on the crisis of democracy

Yascha Mounk's recent The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It is one of several important efforts to understand the crisis that right-wing populism is creating for liberal democracies in many countries. (An abbreviated version of Mounk's analysis is published in his contribution to the Atlantic in March 2018 (link).) Mounk shares with Madeleine Albright (Fascism: A Warning), John Keane (The New Despotism), and Levitsky and Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) the concern that the political realities that brought Donald Trump to the presidency in the United States have the potential of profoundly undermining our democracy. I share that concern (link, link, link, link). And yet after reading the book, I'm not entirely convinced that Mounk has hit the target quite right. In the end, he sometimes seems to be more of a critic of liberal democracy than of radical authoritarian populism.

To begin, Mounk makes a determined effort to separate "democracy" from "liberalism", where the former concept refers to any system in which the "people" rule and the latter refers to any system that embodies legal and institutional protections of the rights and freedoms of all -- majority as well as minority. In this way he gives credence to the claim by Viktor Orbán in Hungary to have created the basis of "illiberal democracy" in Hungary (link). Here are the definitions that Mounk offers:

• A democracy is a set of binding electoral institutions that effectively translates popular views into public policy. 
• Liberal institutions effectively protect the rule of law and guarantee individual rights such as freedom of speech, worship, press, and association to all citizens (including ethnic and religious minorities).
• A liberal democracy is simply a political system that is both liberal and democratic—one that both protects individual rights and translates popular views into public policy.
• Democracies can be illiberal. (27)

But democracy is not a single-stranded political conception. It is an "ideal type" that draws together several important ideas: self-rule, of course; but also the rule of law, constitutional protection of citizens' rights, and a commitment to the neutrality of political institutions. Democracy is anti-authoritarian; and this means that there need to be principles, rules, laws, and institutions that protect the rights and freedoms of individual citizens. Therefore the only system worthy of the name as "democracy" is in fact what Mounk refers to as "liberal democracy". And what Orbán describes is not democracy -- any more than a counterfeit coin is a coin.

Mounk details the large decline in public confidence in the political institutions of liberal democracies across Europe and North America. He sees this as an especially worrisome feature of our current political realities: a rising percentage of citizens are willing to look with favor on "strong man" government or even rule by the military. And he recites the evidence of contempt for democratic values and institutions expressed by President Trump since 2016, and by the Republican Party for decades before that.

Over the course of his campaign, Donald Trump broke just about every basic rule of democratic politics. He promised to jail his political opponents. He refused to say that he would accept the outcome of the election. He bullied the press and threatened to expand libel laws. He invited a foreign power to sabotage his main competitor. He incited hatred against ethnic and religious minorities and promised to take unconstitutional action against them. (119)

What Mounk does not do is trace the connection between conservative Republican activists, their deliberate strategies aimed at discrediting and demeaning the institutions of government, and the resulting decline in public opinion that he documents. These shifts of public support for democratic values and institutions are not self-generated; they are at least in part the result of deliberate anti-government strategies of the right, in the United States and other countries. Figures such as Grover Norquist ("I simply want to reduce [government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub"), Newt Gingrich (“One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty” (link)), and the Tea Party had a very consistent and extended political message: government is not to be trusted, and the institutions and values of our political system are bankrupt. Surely this propaganda offensive -- fueled by Fox News, talk radio, and social networks -- has played an important role in the decline of trust (and adherence) in the institutions and values of liberal democracy. On this topic I find more to learn from McAdam and Kloos, Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America (link, link).

In fact, chapter 2 of Mounk's book ("Rights without Democracy") could serve as the letters of indictment of a fairly cerebral right-wing populist propaganda specialist. Much of the chapter seems intended to show that liberal democracy is a sham: "As long as you let us call the shots, we will pretend to let you rule" (53). Bureaucrats, judges, international lawyers, and the wealthy make the major decisions, in Mounk's telling of the tale. Mounk gives the impression that the "founding myth" of American democracy (or British democracy) is exactly that -- a myth. And here Mounk is unfair. It is of course true that citizenship was limited in the first century of the US democracy; but it is also true that, through struggle by African-Americans, women, and other excluded minorities, the political system and constitution expanded. We are not the political system we were in 1776 or 1789 or 1861. Nor is it obvious that representative democracy is less democratic than direct democracy -- unless we take it as a definitional matter that democracy means direct decision-making by the population.

Mounk's narrative here gives some credence to the radical populists' claim that "elites are running the country" (in Britain, in Germany, in the EU, in the US), based on the extensive bureaucracies involved in modern government. He discusses bureaucrats and civil servants, judges, independent agencies, and international treaties and organizations as examples of "unelected elites making basic decisions". But this claim is itself far too sweeping and simplistic. The fact that public health specialists offer scientific advice about wearing masks during pandemic -- and governors act on this advice -- is not elitism; it is the result of the principle that "good public policy should be guided by the best scientific understanding of the problems we face." Yes, governments in liberal democracies deploy legions of "technical experts" or "technocrats", and these men and women help to formulate public policies in directions that are often hard to sell on Fox News. But this is how governments should act; and it is part of the shameful performance of the Trump administration that Trump and his cabinet have done everything in their power to silence and ignore the advice of qualified scientists, from climate change to atmospheric science to global pandemic.

Mounk emphasizes the very substantial increase in "bureaucratization" that state agencies have undergone in western democracies -- the creation of large agencies with substantial regulatory authority such as the Securities Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency (64). And he seems to suggest that this process gives some truth to the populist refrain that "elites are running our lives without control by the people". But, as Mounk obviously agrees, a large bureaucracy is unavoidable in the administration and regulation of complex activities like the broadcast spectrum, nuclear power plants, food safety, or pollution. This is not an indication of elitism; it is rather a necessary consequence of highly complex and extended economic and social processes that serve to ensure the health, safety, and security of the public -- the people. A democracy requires regulatory agencies, under the broad charter of legislative action. Government is "big" -- big government exercises a great deal of decision-making authority. Of course! Democratic legitimacy requires that we make these processes more transparent to the public, but the fact of bureaucracy is not a legitimate complaint against liberal democracy.

Mounk gives an extended example from Switzerland to illustrate the way he divides "democracy" from "liberalism". A local community sought to prevent a local mosque from building a minaret; the Federal Supreme Court declared in favor of the rights of freedom of worship of these individuals, including the right to build a minaret; and the populist right took up the issue, brought it to a national referendum, and were able to incorporate a restrictive clause  against Muslims into the Swiss constitution: "Freedom of religion and conscience is guaranteed ... The construction of minarets is prohibited" (48). Mounk describes this as a case in which "democracy" and "liberalism" parted ways: "That is why I prefer to say that the controversy over minarets epitomizes the disintegration of liberal democracy into two new regime forms: illiberal democracy and undemocratic liberalism" (48). But the justices of the FSC are not elite technocrats substituting their judgment for the "will of the people"; this is exactly what a Supreme Court is charged to do within a constitutional democracy. How else are the rights and freedoms of minorities to be defended against the will of the majority?

Mounk notes that populist leaders and parties seek to undermine the press: "In the early phases, the war on independent institutions frequently takes the form of inciting distrust, or even outright hatred, of the free press" (44). He sees this effort as an attack on liberal principles. But the war waged by radical populist leaders against the press (including, of course, Donald Trump) is not merely anti-liberal; it is anti-democratic. Its aim is to disenfranchise the portion of the population that would oppose the populists' policies and action by denying them access to information and fair interpretation by other intelligent, well-informed observers. It is to replace "freedom of thought and speech" with the power of propaganda, and the goal is not merely to deny information to potential opponents, but to shape "knowledge" and political discourse in ways that favor the political fortunes of the populist. Again -- democracy without liberal institutions and values is only sham democracy.

Mounk is of course right in noticing that populists claim to advocate for democracy, by proclaiming to their followers that they are the true "people" and that their will is the political program of the populist movement. But this is charade, as Mudde and Kaltwasser (Populism: A Very Short Introduction; link) and other scholars of populism have shown. When Sarah Palin claims that the "real Americans" are those who live in small racially homogeneous towns in the Midwest, she is making an appeal to a minority segment of the American population. Her "real Americans" do not include people of color, liberals, urban people, gay people, or legal immigrants. This is not an appeal to democracy; it is an appeal to an exclusionary view of "good Americans" and "bad people living in the country".

In brief, Mounk's mid-semester grade for the American democracy is pretty low:

At a minimum, I suggest, any democracy should have in place a set of effective institutional mechanisms for translating popular views into public policy. In the United States, these mechanisms are now significantly impaired. The country's commitment to liberal rights remains deeply ingrained. But the form this liberalism takes is increasingly undemocratic. (92)

This is a C- when it comes to evaluating a set of political institutions; it suggests that perhaps the student should choose a different major. But actually, we have more to work with in our liberal democracy than Mounk believes. And there is a certain amount of risk of contributing to a self-fulfilling prophecy here: part of the problem in our democracy is a declining level of confidence in political institutions and the worth of government -- a decline very specifically and deliberately orchestrated by the right for the past forty years -- and the C- hits us where it hurts.

This is not to suggest that liberal democracy does not need reform. The role of money in politics; the disproportionate influence of big business on public policy; the persistent and deliberate racism involved in voter suppression strategies of gerrymandering and discouragement of minority participation in elections -- these are the fundamental flaws of our existing political institutions, and they clearly demand solution.

And yet -- liberal democracy is the best we have to offer. Modern democratic institutions of government are not the key risk to human freedom in the twenty-first century; the real enemy of individual freedom and dignity is the sustained rise of powerful populist parties and bosses. Levitsky and Ziblatt are closer to the truth than Mounk.

Mounk has a response to these criticisms:

High-minded defenders of liberal democracy believe that there is something uniquely legitimate about the political system to which they are committed. 

Its democratic element, they claim, ensures citizens’ equality. In a monarchy, the king is elevated above his subjects by the accident of his noble birth. In a democracy, by contrast, all citizens get one vote without regard to the color of their skin or the station of their ancestors. 

Its liberal element, meanwhile, ensures citizens’ freedom. In a totalitarian regime, the government can regulate the lives of its subjects in the most minute detail and punish them at whim. In a liberal polity, by contrast, the reach of the law is limited, and citizens are protected against arbitrary interference in their lives. The peculiar genius of liberal democracy is that it is able to honor both of these values at the same time. 

This account of democratic legitimacy is a little too blithe. (129)

Really? Are we wrong to be "high-minded"? In its essence, this is precisely the defense that is needed for the institutions of a liberal democracy: it is a complex of institutions and values aimed at assuring a population of equal citizens the full exercise of their rights and liberties within a system in which they are guaranteed equal rights of political participation. The hard task is to reform, perfect, and preserve those institutions in the face of the forces of reaction.

The rhetorical structure of the book is "diagnosis, causes, remedies." The remedies that Mounk explores include three major areas of progress that are needed for a multiethnic, multiracial democracy: a solution to the problem of "nationalism" (or more generally, of divided cultural identities); a more just set of economic institutions and opportunities for all citizens; and the rebuilding of what he calls "civic faith". Interestingly, these areas of recommended reform align rather well with the list I mentioned in an earlier post:

• A broad consensus that all members of society are treated fairly
• Confidence in a high level of equality of opportunity in social, political, and economic positions
• Confidence that government institutions and officials are reasonably honest and transparent
• Confidence that private influence does not unduly affect the content and application of laws and regulations
• An overriding conviction that we are "one society" consisting of many communities, and that the wellbeing of all depends on the contributions and fair treatment of all
• An effective interlacing of communities through cross-cutting political, social, and economic organizations

The most substantial practical advice that Mounk offers as a strategy for lending strength to our liberal democracy (and resisting authoritarian impulses of some of our leaders) is popular protest and expression of our values in the public space -- real, active political engagement on behalf of a just liberal democracy.

Thankfully, there is a lot that those of us who want liberal democracy to survive the dawning age of populism can do: We can take to the streets to stand up to the populists. We can remind our fellow citizens of the virtues of both freedom and self-government. We can push established parties to embrace an ambitious program capable of renewing liberal democracy’s promise of a better future for all. And if we do win—as I very much hope we shall—we can muster the grace and the determination to bring our adversaries back to the democratic fold. (265)

I find much to admire and learn from in Mounk's book. The complaints offered here are aimed, really, at the lawyerly effort that Mounk makes to build the case against liberal democracy. Much of the narrative provided in the "diagnosis" part of the book is an impassioned argument aimed at demonstrating the correctness of many of the populists' key complaints against the liberal state. And a lawyerly defense of the legitimacy of the institutions of contemporary liberal democracies is lacking. But this concedes too much to right-wing populists. Liberal democracy and right-wing populism are not on the same moral plane. And illiberal democracy is no kind of democracy at all; it is despotism.

A new social ontology of government

After several years of thinking about the nature of government as a network of organizations, I am happy to share the news that Palgrave Macmillan has published my short book, A New Social Ontology of Government: Consent, Coordination, and Authority (Foundations of Government and Public Administration). Thanks to Jos Raadschelders for proposing the book, and thanks to friends and colleagues at the University of Michigan, the University of Duisburg-Essen, the University of Milan, and Nankai University for helping me think through these new ideas. (What a great way to spend a year of sabbatical!)

My goal in this research was to approach the problem of analyzing the workings of government -- decision-making, regulation, knowledge-gathering, enforcement, coordination -- by making use of recent ideas about the nature of the social world in several disciplines. The result is an actor-centered social ontology that aims to take full advantage of recent frameworks of theory in sociology, political science, organizational studies, and philosophy.

Here is the brief description of the goals of the book:

This book provides a better understanding of some of the central puzzles of empirical political science: how does “government” express will and purpose? How do political institutions come to have effective causal powers in the administration of policy and regulation? What accounts for both plasticity and perseverance of political institutions and practices? And how are we to formulate a better understanding of the persistence of dysfunctions in government and public administration – failures to achieve public goods, the persistence of self-dealing behavior by the actors of the state, and the apparent ubiquity of corruption even within otherwise high-functioning governments?

I've tried to combine recent work in the philosophy of social science on the topic of social ontology (the nature of the social world), on the one hand, with recent developments in sociological theory about how to think about social entities. How do organizations and institutions work, from an actor-centered point of view? What do these features of ontology imply about the dynamics that governments are likely to display in routine times and moments of crisis? What is government, really?

Here is what I mean by "ontology" in this context.

What kind of things are we talking about when we refer to “government”? What sorts of processes, forces, mechanisms, structures, and activities make up the workings of government? In recent years philosophers of social science have rightly urged that we need to better understand the “stuff” of the social world if we are to have a good understanding of how it works. In philosophical language, we need to focus for a time on issues of ontology with regard to the social world. What kinds of entities, powers, forces, and relations exist in the social realm? What kinds of relations tie them together? What are some of the mechanisms and causal powers that constitute the workings of these social entities? Are there distinctive levels of social organization and structure that can be identified? Earlier approaches to the philosophy of the social sciences have largely emphasized issues of epistemology, explanation, methodology, and confirmation, and have often been guided by unhelpful analogies with positivism and the natural sciences. Greater attention to social ontology promises to allow working social scientists and philosophers alike to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the nature of the social world. Better thinking about social ontology is important for the progress of social science. Bad ontology breeds bad science. (2)

These are empirical questions; but they are also conceptual and philosophical questions. And when we consider the scope, complexity, and fluidity of government agencies and institutions, it is clear that we need to make use of illuminating theories from sociology, organizational studies, and philosophy if we are to come to an adequate understanding of "government" as an extended social organization.

What I offer in the book is an approach to analyzing the ontology of government that proceeds from an actor-centered point of view. Government officials, functionaries, and experts are actors within organizations and institutional cultures; and government itself is a network of organizations that often proceed on the basis of independent and contradictory priorities and goals. Here is a brief description of the actor-centered approach to ontology that I have taken in this book:

Another important truth about government is that it is made up of actors—individuals who occupy roles; who have beliefs, interests, commitments, and goals; who exist within social relations and networks involving other individuals both within and outside the corridors of power; and whose thoughts, intentions, and actions are never wholly defined by the norms, organizational imperatives, and institutions within which they operate. Government officials and functionaries are not robots, defined by the dictates of role responsibilities and policies. So it is crucial to approach the ontology of government from an “actor-centered” point of view, and to understand the powers and capacities of government in terms of the ways in which individual actors are disposed to act in a range of institutional and organizational circumstances. Whether we think of the top administrators and executives, or the experts and formulators of policy drafts, or the managers of extended groups of specialized staff, or the individuals who receive complaints from the public, or the compliance officers whose job it is to ensure that policies are followed by insiders and outsiders—all of these positions are occupied by individual actors who bring their own mental frameworks, interests, emotions, and knowledge to the work they do in government. (3)

Fortunately, there are a number of important new theoretical tools and frameworks that assist in the project of analyzing the ontology of government. Fligstein and McAdam's formulation of the theory of strategic action fields is deeply helpful (A Theory of Fields). But so are the ideas associated with assemblage theory, synthesized by Manuel DeLanda (Assemblage Theory). And new contributions to organizational theory, including especially work by Scott and Davis (Organizations and Organizing: Rational, Natural and Open System Perspectives), shed a great deal of light on aspects of government action and functioning that are otherwise obscure.

The question of collective agency is an important topic to consider when analyzing the ontology of government. I argue that governments do indeed have a form of collective agency along the lines of the ideas expressed by List and Pettit (Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents); but it is a conception of group agency that depends on the organized activities and plans of the actors who constitute various units of the organization. Moreover, I argue that the disconnects, inconsistent priorities, principal-agent problems, and conflicts of interest that arise within organizations pretty much ensure that governments and other mega-organizations are myopic and unsteady.

Now think of the possibilities of overlap, interference, and inconsistency that exist among the functionings and missions of diverse agencies. Each agency has its mission and priorities; these goals imply efforts on the part of the leaders, managers, and staff of the agency to bring about certain kinds of results. And sometimes—perhaps most times— these results may be partially inconsistent with the priorities, goals, and initiatives of other governmental agencies. The Commerce Department has a priority of encouraging the export of US technology to other countries, to generate business success and economic growth in the United States. Some of those technologies involve processes like nuclear power production. But other agencies—and the Commerce Department itself in another part of its mission—have the goal of limiting the risks of the proliferation of technologies with potential military uses. Here is the crucial point to recognize: there is no “master executive” capable of harmoniously adjusting the activities of all departments so as to bring about the best outcome for the country, all things considered. There is the President of the United States, of course, who wields authority over the cabinet secretaries who serve as chief executives of the various departments; and there is the Congress, which writes legislation charging and limiting the activities of government. But it is simply impossible to imagine an overall master executive who serves as symphony conductor to all these different areas of government activity. At the best, occasions of especially obvious inconsistency of mission and effort can be identified and ameliorated. New policies can be written, memoranda of understanding between agencies can be drafted, and particular dysfunctions can be untangled. But this is a piecemeal and never-complete process. (5)

The book pays attention to the forms of dysfunction that can be seen to arise within organizations and networks of organizations, given the nature of the actor-centered activity that they encompass. (Other experts on organizational dysfunction include Charles Perrow (Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies) and Diane Vaughan (The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA).) So the occurrence of corruption, failure of execution, short attention span, inadequate communication, and inconsistency of effort across related agencies are dysfunctional, but can be seen to be as natural to organizations as friction is to mechanical devices. Here is the general view of dysfunction that is developed in the book:

This chapter focuses on a key consequence of the social realities of government presented to this point: the fact that agencies and bureaucracies represent loosely-linked groups of actors who have a variety of different interests, only imperfectly subject to control by the central executive. This is the key theme of the “natural systems” approach to organizations described in Chapter 4. This unavoidable looseness of bureaucratic organization creates the possibility of several kinds of lack of coherence between government’s intentions and the actual activities of agencies and departments. The chapter introduces the idea of a principal-agent problem and demonstrates that this is an unavoidable feature of organizational functioning. It also applies the idea of “loose coupling” to the challenges associated with inter-agency collaboration. And it touches on an important problem at the level of the actor, the problem of conflict of interest and commitment. The chapter considers a range of organizational mechanisms aimed at enhancing internal controls and compliance. (92)

Government is essential to preserving and enhancing the public good in a complex, interdependent society. In order to bring about effective formulation and implementation of public policy, regulation, enforcement, and protection of the health and welfare of the public, it is crucial to have a realistic understanding of how organizations work, and what can be done to make them as effective as possible. And we need to have an honest understanding of the features of organizational behavior that lead to dysfunction if we are to have any hope of creating governmental (and private) organizations that can truly be described as "high-reliability organizations" (link). Fundamentally this book offers a conception of government as a network of organizations, loosely coupled and subject to imperfect executive management. The key challenge for elected leaders and government officials and experts is how to navigate the limitations of large organizations while achieving the larger part of an agenda for the public good.

Conditions for a resilient diverse democracy

Under what conditions can a modern mass society embodying differences of race, religion, wealth, and political ideology maintain a functioning commitment to democracy and its institutions?

The past fifteen years in Western Europe have witnessed an increasingly virulent threat to democracy in the form of the rise of right-wing extremism. Racism, hatred, and violence have come to play increasing roles in the politics and governance of a wide range of western democracies. And the experience of Trumpism in the United States since 2017 makes anyone who is paying attention rightfully alarmed at the future of democratic institutions in the US as well. Trump's attacks on the Federal courts, his efforts to remove or stifle internal government accountability processes, his explicit politics of division and white supremacy, his demonization of the press, his open admiration of autocrats in other parts of the world, and his celebration of the use of police violence and military force against peaceful protesters make the security of the institutions of liberal democracy increasingly at risk.

Most fundamentally Trump has worked systematically to undermine respect, adherence, and confidence with regard to the institutions of government, and has consistently cultivated his "base" of extremist supporters through a rhetoric of anti-government slogans and racist antagonism. The gun-toting demonstrators against governors who had established sensible policies of social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic are the most recent example (link), and their Boogaloo networks of violent partisans deepen the threat. And only a tiny number of legislators from the president's party are willing to express their opposition to the key Trump messages.

So the situation in Trump's America is alarming. But Trump is merely the spark. What were the circumstances that created an environment where his brand of toxic populist, racist extremism would find substantial political support? And what can be done to help bring the American public back to a strong adherence to our shared political and legal institutions?

John Keane examines the worrisome rise of authoritarianism within western democracies in The New Despotism. His basic thesis is that authoritarian leaders and parties have learned to mimic the language of democracy for their own purposes. Here is William Scheuerman's description of Keane's basic theory in his review of the book in The Boston Review (link):

John Keane’s illuminating study of what he dubs the new despotism persuasively argues that its momentum in China, Hungary, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the UAE, and many other countries offers evidence both for its viability today and its longevity in times to come. A novel political formation, the new despotism impersonates democracy as it feeds leech-like on its shortcomings. Perhaps most ominously, it threatens to make inroads even in long-standing democracies, where the political decay celebrated by Putin and others represents more than a debased, self-congratulatory fantasy. (Boston Review (link))

Here I would like to examine the symmetrical question: what kinds of activism, social reform, alliance building, and civil communication can work to build durable civic identity across groups? What concrete strategies are available, at a range of levels, to enhance the loyalty and commitment of all groups to the fundamental institutions of a liberal democracy? How can the United States -- 330 million people, with huge regional, racial, religious, and social differences to potentially divide them -- how can this highly diverse country build a common identity involving commitment to democratic institutions, the equal worth of all persons, and the rule of law?

There is a great deal of evidence to believe that Trump will lose the November election, and perhaps the Republicans will lose their majority in the Senate as well. Our democracy may be saved by the bell, just in time. But a successful transition to a Democratic president, though a crucial next step, will not suffice. We need to find substantial ways of reinforcing and reinvigorating a broad public consensus about the values of democracy and the crucial role that government plays in securing the conditions of justice and wellbeing for all our population. And this means finding ways of addressing the persistent underlying sources of discontent for a sizable part of our population. We must find effective ways of addressing racial inequalities, including the structural facts about our society that lead to police brutality and violence against people of color. We must address the very great inequalities of opportunity and wellbeing that exist in our society in the twenty-first century. Most persistently, we must find a political consensus around the urgency of addressing global climate change. And above all, we must reaffirm the crucial expectations and commitments that all citizens in a democracy need to share concerning the role of government in our public lives.

The elements of political culture that appear to be needed for a stable democracy seem to include things like these:

• A broad consensus that all members of society are treated fairly
• Confidence in a high level of equality of opportunity in social, political, and economic positions
• Confidence that government institutions and officials are reasonably honest and transparent
• Confidence that private influence does not unduly affect the content and application of laws and regulations
• An overriding conviction that we are "one society" consisting of many communities, and that the wellbeing of all depends on the contributions and fair treatment of all
• An effective interlacing of communities through cross-cutting political, social, and economic organizations

Robert Putnam has something important to contribute to a theory of successful multicultural democracy, including especially his analysis of civic organizations, cross-community collaborations, and cultivation of shared civic values (Better Together: Restoring the American Community). And John Rawls addresses the problem of a liberal democracy with competing conceptions of the good through his idea of overlapping consensus (Political Liberalism). Fundamentally Rawls's view endorses pluralism across multiple conceptions of the good, unified by a common commitment to the fundamental values of equal worth, equal rights and liberties, and constitutional fidelity. He refers to these core commitments as "a political conception of justice," and he believes that individuals who grow up in a "well-ordered society" will share such a conception.

Let us say that a political conception of justice (in contrast to a political regime) is stable if it meets the following condition: those who grow up in a society well-ordered by it – a society whose institutions are publicly recognized to be just, as specified by that conception itself – develop a sufficient allegiance to those institutions, that is, a sufficiently strong sense of justice guided by appropriate principles and ideals, so that they normally act as justice requires, provided they are assured that others will act likewise. (Rawls, "The domain of the political and overlapping consensus," Debates in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, 165)

So we might say that a liberal democracy will be stable when it exists in a society embodying a limited range of inequalities, substantial equality of opportunity, equal rights and liberties for all citizens, communication and collaboration across different groups, and a political culture of shared commitment to the institutions of democracy that is cultivated by these enduring conditions. Under these circumstances perhaps we might have confidence that most citizens will come to possess "sufficient allegiance to those institutions" to allow democracy to continue to function.

This implies that our first task is to seriously address the inequalities and injustices that our society still embodies -- racial inequalities, mistreatment of minority groups, lack of health insurance for millions of Americans, and extreme and growing inequalities of income and wealth. Second is to imagine and implement real economic changes that increase the opportunities that exist for the lower half of the socioeconomic spectrum in this country. Third is to find concrete, impactful forms of collaboration across groups in ways that allow for progress on the challenges that we all face. The broad representation across race, age, and class that is found in the massive peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the country provides an excellent model for this kind of collaboration around common demands for change.

The really hard problem is the fact that there seems to be a significant percentage of the American citizenry that rejects the "political and overlapping consensus" that Rawls postulates. The postulate of the moral and political equality of all people is inconsistent with the racism and white supremacy that Trump has encouraged, and many of his followers are receptive to these values. And yet the worldview of white supremacy is completely incompatible with democracy. Further, the appeal of the language of division and hate finds a ready audience with many of his supporters; so extremist organizations are able to build support through racist appeals. It is difficult to see how to build a democratic consensus that incorporates the 30-40% of voters who support the right-wing extremist agenda. And this seems to take us back to the dynamics of anti-democratic authoritarianism described by John Keane above.

We need a new generation of political leaders and political theorists who can offer new ideas about how to build an American consensus in favor of democracy. Here is how an earlier post on this topic closed back in January (link):

Perhaps the identity that has the greatest potential for success in the U.S. is a movement based on "reasserting the values of democracy and equality" within the context of a market economy and a representative electoral democracy. This movement would demand tax policies that work to reduce wealth inequalities and support a progressive state; environmental policies that align the U.S. with the international scientific consensus on climate change; healthcare policies that ensure adequate universal insurance for everyone; immigration policy that made sensible accommodations to the realities of the current U.S. population and workforce, including humane treatment of Dreamers; and campaign funds restrictions that limit the political influence of corporations. The slogan might be, "Moving us all forward through social justice, economic innovation, and good government." This might be referred to as "centrist progressivism", and perhaps it is too moderate to generate the passion that a political movement needs to survive. Nonetheless, it might be a form of progressivism that aligns well with the basic pragmatism and fair-mindedness of the American public. 

*          *          *

In a different vein, here are several performances of Aaron Copland's 1942 powerful and moving Lincoln Portrait (link, link). Lincoln's words begin at about the 8:00 minute mark.

Who was Angelo Herndon?

In a previous post I quoted Langston Hughes' 1938 poem "The Kids Who Die", which is very powerful in the context of our current crisis of police use of deadly force against black men. "Kids will die in the swamps of Mississippi / Organizing sharecroppers / Kids will die in the streets of Chicago / Organizing workers / Kids will die in the orange groves of California / Telling others to get together / Whites and Filipinos, / Negroes and Mexicans, / All kinds of kids will die / Who don't believe in lies, and bribes, and contentment / And a lousy peace." In the third stanza Hughes writes "To believe an Angelo Herndon, or even get together". Who was Angelo Herndon?

Herndon was a self-educated advocate and organizer for workers' rights and racial equality in the 1930s. He describes his early life of labor and social activism in Let Me Live, published in 1937 when he was only twenty-four years old. His life and arrest and conviction in Georgia for insurrection are described in Charles Martin's The Angelo Herndon Case and Southern Justice. As a teenager Herndon worked as a laborer and miner under highly exploitative conditions, and eventually became an organizer for workers' rights and racial equality. Introduced to the Communist Party in the early 1930s, he found the party to be the first organization he had encountered that was not racist, and he joined the party and became an organizer for the Unemployment Council in Atlanta. In 1932 he was arrested by Atlanta police and accused of insurrection, and was convicted on the basis of his possession of Communist literature. He was defended by the International Legal Defense, affiliated with the Communist Party. His case went to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case twice in 1935. Finally in 1937 the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and found that Georgia's anti-insurrection law was unconstitutional. Law professor Kendall Thomas refers to the Supreme Court decision of Herndon v. Lowry as "generally acknowledged as one of the great civil liberties decisions of the 1930s" (link).

Herndon was a radical and articulate advocate for workers' rights for both white and black workers, and he was very willing to challenge Jim Crow racism when he saw it. Kendall Thomas refers to Let Me Live as an example of "the popular tradition of Afro-American resistance literature", and an instance of "insurgent political consciousness among African-Americans at one key moment in our national past" (2610). As a young man writing Let Me Live, Herndon was scathing in his descriptions of African-American leaders for racial justice including W.E.B. Du Bois, on the ground that they were not radical enough in their attacks on white racism. Quoting Thomas again, "The Angelo Herndon case powerfully underscores the extent to which the history of the struggle of Afro-American people against an oppressive cultural (social, political, and economic) order has also always been the history of a struggle against an oppressive discursive or symbolic order."

The most powerful political organization that influenced Herndon in his teens and twenties was the Communist Party USA. It appears that the Communist Party's program, leaders, and strategies were quite different in the American South, and were adapted to addressing the injustices of Jim Crow racism. Robin Kelley's Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression is a detailed history of black Communism in Alabama. It is a truly fascinating book to read. Here is how Kelley describes the Alabama Communist Party in the preface:

Built from scratch by working people without a Euro-American left-wing tradition, the Alabama Communist Party was enveloped by the cultures and ideas of its constituency. Composed largely of poor blacks, most of whom were semiliterate and devoutly religious, the Alabama cadre also drew a small circle of white folks—whose ranks swelled or diminished over time—ranging from ex-Klansmen to former Wobblies, unemployed male industrial workers to iconoclastic youth, restless housewives to renegade liberals.

What emerged was a malleable movement rooted in a variety of different pasts, reflecting a variety of different voices, and incorporating countless contradictory tendencies. The movement's very existence validates literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin's observation that a culture is not static but open, “capable of death and renewal, transcending itself, that is exceeding its own boundaries.”

The experiences of Alabama Communists, however, suggest that racial divisions were far more fluid and Southern working-class consciousness far more complex than most historians have realized. The African-Americans who made up the Alabama radical movement experienced and opposed race and class oppression as a totality. The Party and its various auxiliaries served as vehicles for black working-class opposition on a variety of different levels ranging from antiracist activities to intraracial class conflict. Furthermore, the CP attracted some openly bigoted whites despite its militant antiracist slogans. The Party also drew women whose efforts to overcome gender-defined limitations proved more decisive to their radicalization than did either race or class issues.

It is genuinely fascinating to see how the ideas of Marx and Engels were considered, debated, and reshaped in the context of racist capitalism in the American south. Herndon's memoir provides numerous examples of his excitement at finding in Marx the language and ideas that he had been seeking to articulate his own construction of the relationship between white owners and black workers. Here is how Herndon paraphrases the Communist Manifesto in his own words (as a man of about twenty): 

The worker has no power. All he possesses is the power of his hands and his brains. It is his ability to produce things. It is only natural, therefore, that he should try and get as much as he can for his labor. To make his demands more effective he is obliged to band together with other workers into powerful labor organizations, for there is strength in numbers. The capitalists, on the other hand, own all the factories, the mines and the government. Their only interest is to make as much profit as they can. They are not concerned with the well-being of those who work for them. We see, therefore, that the interests of the capitalists and the workers are not the same. In fact, they are opposed to each other. What happens? A desperate fight takes place between the two. This is known as the class struggle. (Let Me Live, 82)

Following his release in 1937 Herndon continued to combine activism with literature where he gained some prominence, and he co-edited a short-lived journal, Negro Quarterly: A Review of Negro Life and Culture, with Ralph Ellison for a short time. Herndon left the Communist Party in the late 1940s and died in 1997. (This entry in the New Georgia Encyclopedia provides a few biographical details; link.)

Looking into the life of Angelo Herndon -- stimulated by reading the poetry of Langston Hughes -- I am struck once again by the fundamental multiplicity and plurality of history. It is sometimes tempting to tell a unified narrative of a large historical process -- the rise of liberalism, the struggle of African-Americans for freedom and equality, or the development of radical populism -- as if there were a single main current that characterizes the process. But in reality, almost any historical epoch is a swirling process of tension, conflict, and competing groups, and many stories must be told. This is certainly true in the case of African-American history, where radically different visions of the future and conceptions of needed strategies were at work at any given time. The distance between an Angelo Herndon and a W.E.B. Du Bois is as great as that between Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Eldridge Cleaver or Stokely Carmichael. And yet all of their stories are part of the long history of struggle for emancipation, equality, and dignity that America has lived. That is perhaps part of the meaning of Langston Hughes' refrain: "(America never was America to me.)"

The Kerala dialogue on COVID-19

The Indian state of Kerala has taken an especially active approach to responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Kerala, a state of more than 33 million people, is governed by the Left Democratic Front, having won state elections in 2016. LDF is a coalition of left-leaning parties, led by the Communist Party of India-Marxist and the Communist Party of India. The Kerala government has been consistently focused on equity and progress for the poorest sectors of Kerala society. Significantly, the government's efforts in response to the COVID-19 crisis have fallen into the arenas of both public health and social wellbeing. The government quickly implemented public health strategies recommended by the WHO for responding -- test, trace, quarantine -- very early in the pandemic in Kerala, more quickly and consistently than the national government. Here is a nice summary by Sonia Faleiro in MIT Technology Review (link). 

In Kerala, a different style of leadership was on display. With 15 cases now confirmed across the state, Pinarayi Vijayan, the chief minister, ordered a lockdown, shutting schools, banning large gatherings, and advising against visiting places of worship. He held daily media briefings, got internet service providers to boost capacity to meet the demands of those now working from home, stepped up production of hand sanitizer and face masks, had food delivered to schoolchildren reliant on free meals, and set up a mental health help line. His actions assuaged the public’s fears and built trust.

Kerala's experience with the pandemic has been much better than other states in India. Here is a comparison table with four other states in India as of June 30, 2020, normalized to cases and deaths per million. The comparison is striking. Kerala has less than one death per million, compared to 67 deaths per million in Maharashtra (the state in which Mumbai is located), and 141 per million in Delhi.

A crucial part of the success in Kerala in limiting the impact of the pandemic was the government's early recognition that the pandemic would have disastrous consequences for poor people in the state. The government implemented emergency programs of food and stipends to offset the economic disruptions created by the epidemic. Faleiro describes the social sustenance program implemented in Kerala in these terms:

Vijayan, the state’s chief minister, was the first in the country to announce a relief package. He declared a community kitchen scheme to feed the public, and free provisions including rice, oil, and spices. He even moved up the date of state pension payments. (link)

Earlier this month the government of Kerala hosted a dialogue on the COVID-19 crisis involving extensive discussions with Noam Chomsky Amartya Sen, and Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist of the World Health Organization. V.K. Ramachandran, vice-chairman of the Kerala State Planning Board, conducted fascinating conversations with Chomsky and Sen, and distinguished journalist N. Ram conducted an excellent conversation with Dr. Swaminathan. Links to the dialogues are provided below, and they are all worth viewing. A very good summary of the dialogues is provided in The Hindu here.

Here are a few highlights. Dr. Swaminathan provides a clear, scientifically precise summary of current knowledge about the virus and the best advice available for public health measures to contain its spread. Chomsky points out the connections he sees between the ideological and material commitments of neoliberal governments to corporate profits and their failure to respond adequately to the crisis. The United States government's actions during this crisis are especially egregious -- virtually no effective national policy, on the one hand, and a rush to loosen a raft of environmental regulations during the crisis, on the other. Chomsky underlines the magnifying effects that racial and economic inequalities have had on the distribution of cases and deaths across the population in the United States. He reminds viewers that, terrible as the immediate consequences of the COVID crisis are, the effects of global climate change will be immeasurably worse. Amartya Sen applauds the Kerala government's consistent attention to the immediate welfare and nutrition crisis threatened by the COVID pandemic, and notes how crucial it is for government policy to be attuned to hunger and entitlement shortfall for vulnerable populations. In this respect the COVID crisis has a lot in common with the Bengal famine of 1943, when a sudden collapse of entitlements for poor people led to massive deprivation and eventually starvation (Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation).

Sen and Chomsky have devoted their careers to offering analysis and critique of government policy, and it is very interesting to see how they both respond to the largest public health crisis that we have seen in a century. What is especially important from the Kerala experience, it seems, is that the policy values that a government implements have enormous consequences for the wellbeing, health, and safety of the populations that they serve (or fail to serve). Chomsky's basic view of most liberal democracies is that their policy values are chiefly oriented to the needs of big business, and that this leads to huge inequalities in normal times and in pandemic crisis. Sen has made the case throughout his career that governments should choose policies based on their impact on broad social welfare, not GDP or the stock market. And Kerala presents a fantastic test case: the LDF is a government that is distinctly not beholden to large corporations, it is committed to the welfare of the broad population, and its policies have been highly successful during this crisis in ways that benefit the whole of Kerala society.

Here are the videos.

The Kerala Dialogue on Covid-19

1. Introduction and excerpts from Swaminathan, Chomsky, Sen conversations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK3HqHvhJk4&t=180s

2. First conversation
N. Ram interviews Dr Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist of the World Health Organization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwFGgrHYF4w

3. Second conversation
Dr V K Ramachandran interviews Professor Noam Chomsky, laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgQKOUqwAZU

4. Third conversation
Dr V K Ramachandran interviews Professor Amartya Sen, Thomas W. Lamont University Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynrTz-aYcfs

Professor V. K. Ramachadran, the vice-chairman of the Kerala State Planning Board, conducted the interviews with Chomsky and Sen. His work as a development economist at the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore is discussed here, here, and here.

N. Ram, a distinguished journalist whose work is discussed here, conducts the interview with Dr Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist of the World Health Organization.