Published by Vintage 2010

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Copyright © Paul Collier 2009

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ISBN 9780099523512

For John Githongo: his struggle

CONTENTS

Cover

Title

Copyright

Dedication

About the Author

Also by Paul Collier

Introduction: Democracy in Dangerous Places

Part I: Denying Reality: Democrazy

Chapter 1: Votes and Violence

Chapter 2: Ethnic Politics

Chapter 3: Inside the Cauldron: Post-Conflict Settlements

Part II: Facing Reality: Nasty, Brutish, and Long

Chapter 4: Guns: Fueling the Fire

Chapter 5: Wars: The Political Economy of Destruction

Chapter 6: Coups: The Unguided Missile

Chapter 7: Meltdown in Cote d’Ivoire

Part III: Changing Reality: Accountability and Security

Chapter 8: State Building and Nation Building

Chapter 9: Better Dead Than Fed?

Chapter 10: On Changing Reality

Acknowledgments

Appendix: The Bottom Billion

Research on Which This Book Is Based

Introduction:

DEMOCRACY IN
DANGEROUS PLACES

MY SON DANIEL, NOW AGE seven, may live to see the eradication of war. Or he might die in one. Why each of these is a realistic prospect for today’s children is the subject of this book. War, like disease, has been endemic since the dawn of man. Diseases are now being conquered: in 1977 scientific advance and public action in combination eradicated smallpox. For the first time in history, the world economy looks capable of delivering the material conditions necessary for global peace. But global prosperity also increases the risks: an interconnected world is more vulnerable to any remaining pockets of chaotic violence. Just as the eradication of smallpox depended upon harnessing science through public action, so rising prosperity must be harnessed to secure the prize of global peace.

Wars, Guns, And Votes is about power. Why focus on power? Because in the impoverished little countries at the bottom of the world economy that are home to a billion people, the predominant route to power has been violence. Political violence is both a curse in itself and an obstacle to accountable and legitimate government. It is a curse because the process of violent struggle is hugely destructive. It is an obstacle because where power rests on violence, it invites an arrogant assumption that government is there to rule rather than to serve. You only have to look at the official photographs of political leaders to get the point. In the mature democracies our political leaders smile: they are desperate to ingratiate themselves with their masters, the voters. In the societies of the bottom billion the leaders do not smile: their official portraits stare down from every public building, every schoolroom, with a menacing grimace. They are the masters now that thankfully the colonialists have gone. Wars, Guns, and Votes investigates why political violence is endemic in the bottom billion and what can be done to curtail it.

Since the end of the Cold War two extraordinary changes have occurred, each of which may be opportunities for a decisive shift away from political violence. Both were consequences of the fall of the Soviet Union.

Elections spread across the bottom billion. The image of the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe inspired pressure for political change around the developing world. In the early 1990s national conventions sprang up around West Africa. By 1998 Nigeria, Africa’s largest society, sprang out of military dictatorship. Just as around the first millennium the leaders of Europe’s petty states had suddenly all converted to Christianity to get in step with the times, so around the second millennium the leaders of the petty states of the bottom billion all converted to elections. Prior to the end of the Cold War most leaders of the bottom billion had come to power through violence: success in armed struggle or a coup d’état. Now most are in power through winning elections. Elections are the institutional technology of democracy. They have the potential to make governments both more accountable and more legitimate. Elections should sound the death knell to political violence.

The other encouraging change is an outbreak of peace. For the thirty years prior to the end of the Cold War, violent conflicts were breaking out more rapidly than they were ending, so that there was a gradual proliferation of civil wars. Once started, civil war proved highly persistent: a civil war typically lasted more than ten times as long as an international war. But then, one after another of the ghastly and persistent civil wars came to an end. The war in Southern Sudan was closed by a peace settlement. The war in Burundi was similarly coaxed into a negotiated peace. The war in Sierra Leone was ended by international peacekeepers. The end of the Cold War unblocked the international community to exert itself against the continued struggle for power by means of violence.

The wave of peace settlements reinforced the wave of elections and promised a brave new world: an end to the pursuit of power through violence. How can we tell how these changes will play out? Can we do more than speculate? I think we can. Although the coincidence of these shocks is unprecedented, each can be analyzed based on how they have played out in the past. There have been previous experiences of electoral competition in the bottom billion. There have been many post-conflict situations. This book uses those experiences to analyze history in the making. As you read Wars, Guns, And Votes you may be struck by how fast the research frontier is moving. I get that sense morning by morning as I walk to work wondering whether, during the previous evening, Pedro, or Anke, or Dominic, or Lisa, or Benedikt, or Marguerite has cracked whatever problem we had crashed into by the time I left for home. I hope you get a sense of it too.

Political violence is one variant of the struggle for power. We now see it as illegitimate: might does not make right. In the high-income societies over the past century we have internalized the principles of democracy, and gradually we have come to regard them as universal. Ballots, not bullets, should pave the route to power. Since the end of the Cold War the high-income democracies have taken a further step: from merely regarding these standards as universal to actively promoting them. Despite the tensions over Iraq about whether active promotion should go all the way to enforced regime change or stop short at nonviolent encouragement and inducements, the international community is agreed on the goal. And it has largely succeeded: in the brief period of less than two decades democracy has spread across the low-income world. So what have been the consequences for peace?

The good news is that the world has been getting safer. In fact, despite the catastrophic period of the world wars, it has unsteadily but gradually been getting safer ever since humanity started. Contrary to all those images of the noble savage, early societies were murderous. There never was a peaceful Eden from which we have fallen: peace is something that has gradually been built, millennium by millennium, century by century, and decade by decade. The need for security from political violence has always been fundamental to human society. The great archaeological legacies of antiquity, such as the Great Wall of China and the massive barrier constructed across Jutland by the ancient Jutes against the Germanic tribes, stand as an enduring testimony to the overwhelming priority afforded to collective defense. This priority continued until very recently: for forty years the richest society on earth, America, devoted up to 9 percent of its national income to defense spending to meet the security threat from the Soviet Union.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union an era is over. Despite appearances, the last decade has been rather peaceful. The measure used in this grim academic niche is battle-related deaths. The Armed Conflict Data Set keeps a running tally both of the really large conflicts, those that cause at least a thousand such deaths during a year, and of the smaller ones that nevertheless caused more than twenty-five deaths. Here is what happened according to these measures.

Back during the time of late colonialism—1946 to 1959—the number of wars was running at around four a year and the minor conflicts at around eleven. From decolonization to the end of the Cold War in 1991 there was a pretty remorseless escalation. By 1991 there were an astonishing seventeen wars and thirty-five minor conflicts in various parts of the world running at the same time. If violence had continued to spread at that rate, by now we would be facing a nightmare. Instead, 1991 turned out to be a peak. The world is not as peaceful as during late colonialism but we are down to five ongoing wars and twenty-seven minor conflicts. So this break in trend looks to be consistent with the triumph of democracy: where people have recourse to the ballot they do not resort to the gun.

I have come to regard this comforting belief as an illusion. Our approach to political violence has been based on the denial of reality. In consequence there is a brave new world of electoral competition in ethnically divided societies, some of which have just emerged from years of civil war. From 1991 onward the visible trappings of democracy became increasingly fashionable. A president who had not been elected began to look and presumably to feel like the odd one out. It went beyond fashion: many donors began to skew their aid away from unelected governments. And so incumbent presidents braced themselves and decided to face the voters, sometimes emboldened by the knowledge that their people loved them. Sometimes the voters did not do the decent thing.

In the face of voter ingratitude presidents gradually learned how to adapt to the new circumstances. One or two got caught out before they could win. The first was the decent autocrat Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, who staged an election and lost resoundingly in 1991. At the time of writing, the most recent elections in a society of the bottom billion were those in Kenya, in December 2007. Shortly there will be an election in Zimbabwe. In the years following the defeat of Kaunda, incumbent presidents learned how to win. The Kenyan elections were won by the incumbent, President Kibaki. But within Kenya this was not hailed as a triumph of democracy. Koki Muli, the head of Kenya’s Institute for Education in Democracy, had offered the following description: “It is a coup d’état.”¹ As for the elections in Zimbabwe, you have the advantage over me since you know the result. I have no idea who will win the American election of 2008, but I have a pretty clear idea about the outcome of the Zimbabwean elections: I confidently expect that President Mugabe will be reelected. Presidents have discovered a whole armory of technology that enables them to retain power despite the need to hold elections. These elections play out in the context of weak checks and balances, ethnic divisions, and post-conflict tensions.

The triumph of the post-Cold War international community, settlements of the accumulated civil wars of the post-colonial era, is at the same time an alarming point of fragility. Post-conflict situations are dangerous. Historically, many of them have reverted to violence within the first decade. Increasingly since the 1990s, the healing balm for post-conflict tensions and hatreds upon which the international community has relied, and indeed insisted, has been an election. After all, an election should confer legitimacy upon the victor, and the need to secure votes should ensure that the victor has reached out to be inclusive. That comforting strategy has been based upon the denial of an increasingly evident reality.

If the problem of political violence is going to be addressed, we have to understand why small and impoverished countries are so dangerous. To face the reality of political violence we need to understand its technologies: guns, wars, and coups. I know that guns don’t kill people: people kill people. A government can conduct a very effective pogrom without any guns at all. The slaughter in Rwanda was done with machetes. But in a violent struggle between organized groups, the one with more guns will tend to win: guns do make violence a whole lot easier. And so I start with guns: both their supply and their demand turn out to be bizarre stories. There is an illicit trade in Kalashnikovs that furnishes supplies, and arms races in Lilliput that drive demand.

War has not yet passed into history, but it now happens “elsewhere.” Rich countries no longer fight each other, and they no longer fight themselves. Among the middle-income countries war has virtually disappeared. Even the big poor countries are now pretty safe: China and India have massive armies, but they haven’t used them against each other for more than forty years. The world may not hold the line on nuclear proliferation: from time to time more middle-size powers may wish to posture on the world stage by acquiring nuclear capabilities. But over the past sixty years the first use of nuclear weapons has built up into a formidable taboo that I cannot see any state breaking.

With the arrival of peace among the more powerful countries, the scale of warfare has diminished: we now have small wars in small countries. Usually the violence is internal: the country tears itself apart while the rest of the world watches. Sometimes the violence draws others in, mostly the neighbors, and sometimes the local regional power. Occasionally the international powers intervene: to prevent internal mayhem, as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; to expel an invader, as in Iraq 1; or to force regime change, as in Iraq 2. The uncomfortable fact is that a large group of impoverished little countries remain structurally dangerous. Wars in the bottom billion are nasty, brutish, and long. They are civil wars; their victims are mostly civilians and they last more than ten times as long as international wars. Although the incidence of civil war has dropped, this is because of a wave of peace settlements: there is still the same momentum for new conflicts to start. Quite aside from the conflicts that were not settled, in 2004 four new wars started up. The following year looked a little better, just one new war. But this was not a peaceful year: there were eight new minor conflicts. Wars were back in business in 2006 with three new ones.

Political violence does not have to take the form of warfare with its attendant “battle-related deaths” to achieve its goal of attaining power. Indeed, the most common and effective form of political violence often succeeds without any deaths at all: it is the surgical strike in the form of a coup d’état. The military, whose purpose is to defend citizens from organized violence, is sometimes in a splendid position to perpetrate it. Globally since 1945 there have been some 357 successful military coups. And for each successful coup there are a lot of failures. For Africa, the one region for which there is a comprehensive tally, in addition to the 82 successful coups there were 109 attempted coups that failed and 145 coup plots that got nipped in the bud before they could even be attempted. That is around seven planned surgical strikes for the average country. In many societies presidents are more likely to lose power to their army than through any other route.

Guns, wars, and coups have been the reality of the bottom billion. They have destroyed societies that were confidently expected to develop. The meltdown of Cote d’Ivoire, once the most celebrated society in Africa, shows all three of these technologies in ruinous action over the course of a decade.

Does it matter if political violence in its various manifestations continues to be the predominant route to power? Perhaps the whole notion of exporting our democratic values to these societies was merely a comfortable delusion and they are better left as they were? Of course it matters.

For one thing our democratic values are universal. Governments are not there to command their citizens: they are there to serve them. The journey from citizen servitude to government servitude has been a long one in our own societies. It will probably be a long one in the societies of the bottom billion. We have most surely underestimated the degree of difficulty and promoted the wrong features of democracy: the façade rather than the essential infrastructure. I will argue that in situations in which it is not feasible to build the infrastructure, creating the façade is likely to frustrate democratic accountability rather than fast-track it.

It matters because in the divided societies of the bottom billion, when political power is won through violence, the results are usually awful. The political strongman in a divided society is seldom a visionary leader; he is more likely to be self-serving, or in thrall to the interests of a narrow support group. Visionary leadership is important, but its role is to turn states into nations. The fundamental mistake of our approach to state building has been to forget that well-functioning states are built not just on shared interests but on shared identity. Shared identity does not grow out of the soil; it is politically constructed. It is the task of political leadership to forge it.

It matters because the process of violent struggle for power is hugely costly. Wars and coups are not tea parties: they are development in reverse. Wars may now be small in the sense of few “battle-related deaths,” but the increasing involvement of civilians, and indeed the blurring of the distinction between civilians and combatants, implies that even small wars can have highly adverse consequences. Political violence is not just a curse for the societies in which it occurs; it is an international public bad. Most particularly, it damages the neighbors, something that has profound implications for sovereignty.

The overarching problem of the bottom billion is that the typical society is at the same time both too large and too small. It is too large in the sense that it is too diverse for cooperation to produce public goods. It is too small in the sense that it cannot reap the scale economies of the key public good, security. But the only point of understanding the nature of the problems is that it helps in the search for effective solutions. If the problem is that societies are too large to have an inherited sense of common identity, state building is not, fundamentally, about institutions, which is the fashionable nostrum. There is a prior essential stage of nation building that takes more visionary leadership than has been forthcoming in most of these societies.

If the problem is that societies are too small to supply key public goods, then it is pointless to place national sovereignty on a pedestal. Given the structural deficiencies in their states, the citizens of the bottom billion have little choice but to have recourse to the international supply of essential public goods. To some extent they can do this by pooling their sovereignty, something that to date they have singularly failed to do. But that failure is itself symptomatic: much of the supply of the international public goods that the bottom billion need is going to have to come from the countries that already know how to cooperate to supply such goods: the high-income countries. Yet the indignant defense of sovereignty by the governments of the bottom billion, combined with the pusillanimity and indifference of leaders in high-income countries, radically constrains what international action can realistically achieve. The core proposal of this book is a strategy whereby a small intervention from the international community can harness the political violence internal to the societies of the bottom billion. This powerful force that to date has been so destructive can be turned to advantage, becoming the defender of democracy rather than its antithesis.

To harness the political violence inherent in the societies of the bottom billion as a force for good, we will need a very limited use of international force. After Iraq, international peacekeeping provided by the forces of the high-income countries is unpopular, both with voters in the high-income world and with alarmed governments of the bottom billion. But military intervention, properly constrained, has an essential role, providing both the security and the accountability of government to citizens that are essential for development.

I am aware that I walk a tightrope. Those who regard the societies of the bottom billion as an irredeemable quagmire will be predisposed to regard the proposals in this book as costly idealism. Those who regard these societies as the victims of neo-imperialism will be predisposed to regard the proposals as imperialism in disguise. Above all, those who regard internal political violence in any form as illegitimate will be predisposed to regard the proposal for harnessing it as breaching a fundamental tenet. But the proposals in this book are not costly idealism: they are grounded in analysis and evidence. Nor are they a backdoor form of imperialism. Citizens of the bottom billion have the same rights as the rest of us, including a legitimate aspiration to nationhood. Nor do they undermine the tenets of democracy. My message is that the aspirations to nationality and democracy cannot be achieved by the path currently being taken: fake democracy protected by the sanctity of sovereignty is a cul-de-sac. Just as the high-income world should provide a vaccine against malaria for the citizens of the bottom billion, so it should provide them with security and accountability of government. All three are public goods that will otherwise be chronically undersupplied. Only once they are properly supplied can the societies of the bottom billion achieve their aspirations to genuine sovereignty.

The defeat of political violence is where our illusions are most inextricably bound up with our hopes and our strategies. And it is where our errors, grounded in those illusions, are proving most costly. Each of the changes I analyze is potentially hugely hopeful. But it turns out that each is a two-edged sword. They might well trigger processes that substantially increase violence. But it is not simply a story of “things might go wrong.” Within the limits imposed by modern research methods, I think I can show what will determine whether democracy is going to be transformative or destructive. More alarmingly, to date democracy in the societies of the bottom billion has increased political violence instead of reducing it. But my message is not meant to denigrate the efforts of brave people who have struggled for their democratic rights: I am not an apologist for dictatorship. Only by moving on from illusion can we work out what practical measures could harness the undoubted potential of democracy as a force for good.

¹ “Kabaki Win Spurs Kenya Turmoil,” Financial Times, December 31, 2007, p. 6.

Part I

DENYING

REALITY:

DEMOCRAZY

Chapter 1

VOTES AND VIOLENCE

OUR TIMES HAVE SEEN A great political sea change: the spread of democracy to the bottom billion. But is it democracy? The bottom billion certainly got elections. They were heavily promoted by American and European pressure, and, as the most visible feature of democracy, they were treated as its defining characteristic. Yet a proper democracy does not merely have competitive elections; it also has rules for the conduct of those elections: cheating gets punished. A proper democracy also has checks and balances that limit the power of a government once elected: it cannot crush the defeated. The great political sea change may superficially have looked like the spread of democracy, but it was actually the spread of elections. If there are no limits on the power of the winner, the election becomes a matter of life and death. If this life-and-death struggle is not itself subject to rules of conduct, the contestants are driven to extremes. The result is not democracy: I think of it as democrazy.

The political system that preceded democrazy was personal dictatorship. Usually it did not have even the veneer of an ideology. Personal rule reached its apogee in President Mobutu of Zaire, whose extraordinary system of government is depicted in Michela Wrong’s In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz. Personal rule meant ethnic favoritism and the erosion of the institutions of the state. Mobutu’s power came to rest on greed and fear: his patronage might reward loyalty with unseemly wealth, and his thugs might punish suspected opposition with torture. Where there was an ideology it was Marxist, such as the Derg regime in Ethiopia, and the MPLA in Angola; grim and ruinous regimes that attracted a predictable swath of support among the Western left. More commonly the Marxist ideology was a decorative veneer, a language of politeness appropriate for the circles in which political leaders mixed, much as Christian sentiments must have been de rigueur in a nineteenth-century drawing room. In Zimbabwe, where this make-believe blossomed, there was a politburo and everyone was referred to as comrade. Such undemocratic regimes looked as though they were inviting violent opposition. Mobutu and the Derg were both overthrown by rebellions, and the MPLA faced a huge uprising from UNITA.

Across Africa, Latin America, and Asia during the 1990s, autocracies fell like ninepins. Sometimes citizens took heart from the example of Eastern Europe and massed in the streets, the most stunning instance being the overthrow of President Suharto in Indonesia. Sometimes aid donors made further funding conditional upon democracy, the best-established instance being Kenya, where the diplomatic community recognized that President Moi could be pressured. Sometimes autocrats saw which way the wind was blowing and decided to go with the flow. Autocrats commonly surround themselves with sycophants, and this probably helped the process of democratization on its way. Imagine what an autocrat who is contemplating democratization is going to ask his entourage. There is really only one question: if I hold an election, would I win? And what can a sycophant say? Quite possibly the sycophant has no clue: it has not been his job to gauge public opinion. However, even if he suspects that people detest the president, he has a problem. Hasn’t he been telling the president for years how much his people love him? Those advisers who told the president the truth tended not to last long as advisers.

At least three autocrats got caught this way, Suharto in East Timor, Kaunda in Zambia, and Mugabe in Zimbabwe. All let citizens vote because they were sure they would win. Suharto lost East Timor as a result: people voted overwhelmingly for independence. Kaunda did a little better than Suharto: he managed to get about 20 percent of the vote, so some people did indeed love him, namely those in his home region, which he had favored with public spending. As the results came in he was naturally outraged that citizens had been so ungrateful. Quite what might have happened at that point we will never know. Fortunately, Jimmy Carter was in the country leading a team of election observers. As the results started to come in, Carter sensed what to do. Rushing to the presidential palace, he felt Kaunda’s pain and stayed there until it was too late to annul the election. After all, he had lived through a similar experience. With Carter there in the palace, Kaunda had little choice but to accept the defeat. Whether he would have done so without Carter is an open question: reputedly he then went around the capitals of Africa advising presidents not to make his mistake.

And President Mugabe? By the mid-1990s President Mugabe had followed the fashion, adopting a constitution in which there were multiparty elections and term limits on the presidency. Many dictators agreed to term limits, confident that by the time the limit was due to bind they could change the constitution by one means or another. And so term limits turned into time bombs. President Putin of Russia is, of course, the most spectacular example of a successful constitutional side step: don’t even bother to change the term limit, make yourself prime minister and shift effective power from the presidency to the new position. President Obasanjo of Nigeria tried but failed to extend his term, as did President Chiluba of Zambia. Presidents Deby of Chad and Museveni of Uganda were more successful. President Mugabe decided to change the constitution, removing the term limit and drastically increasing presidential powers. To do this he needed a referendum. It was this that he lost. Unfortunately, the referendum did not coincide with a presidential election, and so Mugabe continued as president, now knowing that he would lose a democratic election. I will return to the problem he faced shortly. For the present I want to stay with the spread of democracy. Country by country, governments subjected themselves to competitive elections. Sometimes they won, sometimes they lost, but either way, opposition was now better able to express itself.

SO HOW HAS THIS SPREAD of democracy affected proneness to political violence? Pretty obviously violence should go down. It may be obvious, but in general it helps to spell out the basis for what we think we know. There seem to me to be two reasons for expecting democracy to reduce the incidence of political violence. I will call them accountability and legitimacy, and they are complementary and so reinforcing. The accountability effect works as follows. In a democracy a government has no choice but to try to deliver what ordinary citizens want. If it is seen to perform sufficiently well, then it gets reelected; if it is judged to be inferior to alternatives, then it loses. Either way, government strives to perform because it is accountable to voters. A dictator might choose to deliver performance that is just as good as this, but for the dictator it is just that, a choice. The democratic government has no option. And in practice, all too often dictators choose to do something completely different, as with Mobutu. So democracy tends to improve government performance by subjecting leaders to the discipline of being accountable. Why might this in turn reduce political violence? Well, obviously, because there is less basis for grievance. If the government performs better for ordinary people, then they are less likely to take up arms against it.

So much for the accountability effect, how about legitimacy? Being elected is now widely seen as the only basis for government legitimacy. In turn, at least according to democratic theory, a legitimate government thereby acquires certain rights. A legitimate government has a mandate to do what it said it would do, and this entitles it to face down opposition to the implementation of its program, at least within limits. In a democracy citizens agree to these rules, and so opposition to a government’s elected program cannot legitimately extend to the use of violence. This provides a further reason for the reduction in political violence. Even if the most extreme opponents of the government do not accept that the government is entitled to enact its program, they will find it more difficult to enlist mass support for violent opposition. They can no longer reasonably claim that their struggle is just.

Democracy should thus deliver a double whammy against political violence: there is less objective basis for grievance, and for any given grievance it should be harder to persuade people to resort to violence against the government.

So confident have we been in asserting that democracy is the answer to political violence that it seems almost churlish to look at the evidence to test whether it is right. The peace-promoting benefits of democracy have become one of the fundamental certainties of the policy world, indeed perhaps one of the few unifying beliefs across the political spectrum. George Soros and George Bush have not agreed on much, but I suspect that they would be on the same side on this one, along with millions of other people.

When the countries of the bottom billion started to democratize I was as enthused as anyone. However, the ensuing years have been more difficult than I had expected. I have little time for outside commentators who turn into tut-tutting judges. Change is difficult and there are strong forces resisting it. It is not that the societies of the bottom billion have failed to live up to my expectations. Rather, I was coming to suspect that I had missed things that in retrospect were becoming evident. Indeed, there had surely been people with doubts all along, but their voices had been drowned out in the cacophony of enthusiasm for democracy. Essentially I came to suspect that theories that were entirely appropriate for countries that were more developed might have been overextended. The societies of the bottom billion may simply be lacking the preconditions whereby the accountability and legitimacy effects were going to work very well. I have to say that I came to these doubts with deep reluctance. But it was time to turn to the evidence.

You might expect that the relationship between democracy and political violence would be settled academic territory. But somewhat to my surprise I found that it was not. It was, in fact, about as close to terra incognita as modern social science gets: I could not find a single published paper. I teamed up with Dominic Rohner, a young Swiss researcher, and got to work.

We got data on virtually all the countries in the world for the period since 1960. Controlling for the other characteristics that were likely to matter, how did democracy affect the incidence of political violence? At first we could find no relationship. To me this nonresult seemed intrinsically unlikely: surely something as salient as the political regime simply had to matter. Then it occurred to us that the relationship might well not be the same across the entire range of economic development. After all, the societies of the bottom billion were highly distinctive in being far poorer than the other democracies. Maybe in poor countries the effect of democracy on violence was not the same as in rich countries. Once we introduced this possibility we found that the political regime always mattered. In fact, democracy had the opposite effect in poor countries to that in rich countries. It was because the two effects were opposing that there had appeared to be no effect at all. So what were the two opposing effects?

We found that in countries that were at least at middle-income levels, democracy systematically reduced the risk of political violence. The prediction of the accountability-and-legitimacy view of how democracy should make a society more tranquil was borne out. But in low-income countries, democracy made the society more dangerous. As if poverty was not miserable enough in itself, the effect of democracy adds insult to this injury. Whereas in societies that are not poor it enhances their already safer conditions, in poor societies democracy amplifies the already severe dangers.

If democracy makes poor societies more dangerous, but societies that are not poor safer, there must be some threshold level of income at which there is no net effect. The threshold is around $2,700 per capita per year, or around $7 per person per day. The societies of the bottom billion are all below this threshold: most of them are a long way below it.

To my mind the key implication of these results was that the accountability-and-legitimacy theory of how democracy would help the societies of the bottom billion must be missing something. Indeed, it must be missing an elephant. Much of this book is devoted to flushing out that elephant. But I have not quite finished with the results of our investigation.

Recall that at higher levels of income societies are safer. It turns out that all the benign effect of higher income depends upon the society being democratic. Indeed, it is more striking than that: in the absence of democracy, as a society starts to get rich it becomes more prone to political violence. Democracies get safer as income rises, whereas autocracies get more dangerous. If it helps, you can think of this as two lines, an upward-sloping one showing how democracies get safer as income rises, and a downward-sloping one showing how autocracies get less safe. The level of income at which democracy has no net effect on violence, $2,700, is simply the point at which these two lines cross over. Applying this to the society with the most astounding income change of our times, China has now passed the income threshold—per capita income has soared past $3,000. So, if China runs to form, year by year its spectacular economic growth is now making it more prone to political violence unless it democratizes.

Our initial work had been pretty heroic in the sense that we had hastened over a host of statistical cans of worms. Much of our work now turned to opening these cans and seeing if the results survived. For example, income is likely to be affected by both conflict and the political regime. Causality might in fact be running in the opposite direction to our interpretation. We checked on this and satisfied ourselves that this was not the explanation: our results were not spurious, at least not on this count. In the small world of the statistical study of political violence, the foremost rival team has been James Fearon and David Laitin at Stanford. Like us, they had a model of the factors that tend to produce violence, but it differed in detail from our own. We decided that a good test of the result that democracy increased the risk of violence for the bottom billion would be to see whether it survived if we introduced it into their model. Unfortunately for these societies, it did survive. To my mind the most remarkable result came when we investigated a range of different forms of political violence. We looked at assassinations, riots, political strikes, and incidents of guerrilla activity as well as full-blooded civil war. To my amazement, the same pattern was true for them all: at low income, democracy increased political violence.

I do not believe that these results reveal unalterable relationships: later I will argue that democracy can be made to work in the societies of the bottom billion. But consider for a moment what would be the implication if they were unalterable. They would imply that judged by the objective of peace, there would be a preferred sequence for economic and political change. The ideal stage at which to democratize would be once a society had already reached a moderate level of development.

As Dominic and I digested these results we started to puzzle over the obvious question: why? The question actually decomposes into three distinct puzzles. First, why was the benign effect of democracy that reduced the risk of political violence dependent upon the level of income: what was it about income that made democracy differentially peace-promoting in richer societies? The second was the converse question of why autocracies become more dangerous at higher levels of income. Finally, and most mysteriously, once these income-related effects of democracy and autocracy were allowed for, there remained a further pure effect of democracy that was making societies more at risk of violence. Like some unobservable dark matter it was lurking as a constant across societies. What was it? These were not easy questions.

The key insight came by the simple psychological technique of imagining myself in the position of being a former dictator in one of the countries of the bottom billion who had caved in to pressure from donors to democratize. How had I kept the peace before and how did democratization change my problem? I was evidently not the first person to wonder about how a dictator might best stay in power. Herodotus reports that when Periander became the young dictator of Corinth, he sent a messenger to the old and experienced dictator of Miletus, Thrasybulus, for advice. Thrasybulus had clung to power very effectively; had he any tips for someone just starting out on the same career? Thrasybulus took Periander’s messenger into a field of corn and, as he talked, repeatedly and systematically snapped off the heads of all the tallest stems. The messenger returned baffled, but Periander got it. Although social science has advanced in the two and a half thousand years since Herodotus, I think that this still gives a pretty fair take on the technology of power retention. If we are to generalize from Thrasybulus, the key is to be preemptive: purge potentially dangerous people before they act. Does democracy affect my ability to undertake such purges? Well, the awkward problem with preemptive purges is that they are not compatible with the rule of law: the technique depends upon punishing people even though they haven’t done anything. This sort of conduct collides with even fairly modest levels of democracy.

The idea that the ability to mount a purge would be reduced as a result of democracy was a plausible explanation for the dark matter. If leaders could no longer mount preemptive purges they might be less able to keep the lid on political violence. This might be why, over and above those effects of democracy that depended upon the level of income, there was the pure effect that increased political violence. Herodotus had given us an idea; now it was time to test it.

We turned to a large political science data set on purges. Believe it or not, these things are measured, country by country, and year by year. We wanted to see whether democracy made purges more difficult, controlling for other possible influences. Sure enough, even a modest degree of democracy radically reduces the frequency of purges. From the perspective of keeping the peace through repression, democracy is a massive technological leap backward.

If you want a practical, real-world, up-to-the-minute example of how democratization can make it harder to keep the peace, try Iraq. Whatever the limitations of the present regime, it is clearly massively more democratic than that of Saddam Hussein. Yet Hussein presided over a relatively peaceful country. It was not an attractive peace, but it was a peace of sorts, and it most surely depended upon preemptive repression rather than citizen consent.

So a weakening of technologies of repression is, I think, a likely explanation for the dark matter: the higher risk of political violence that comes from democracy. Why, then, should the net effect of democracy be increasingly favorable as income rises? I think the answer lies in those effects that I started with: accountability and legitimacy.

The stark and straightforward reason that in the bottom billion the accountability and legitimacy effects of democracy do not reduce the risk of political violence is that in these societies, democracy does not deliver either accountability or legitimacy. So why does it fail to do so?

OVER THE YEARS I HAVE had some very smart students, but undoubtedly the smartest was Tim Besley, now a highly distinguished professor at the London School of Economics and a former editor of the American Economic Review. Tim’s book Principled Agents? is the most serious theoretical attempt to answer the question of whether having to face voters actually disciplines politicians. It is a complicated book, but I think I can give you the gist of it. In our own societies the answer to Tim’s question seems pretty obvious. If an incumbent politician had not even tried