Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
287 | Jean-Paul Faguet on Institutions and the Legacy of History
Mon, 26 Aug 2024
One common feature of complex systems is sensitive dependence on initial conditions: a small change in how systems begin evolving can lead to large differences in their later behavior. In the social sphere, this is a way of saying that history matters. But it can be hard to quantify how much certain specific historical events have affected contemporary conditions, because the number of variables is so large and their impacts are so interdependent. Political economist Jean-Paul Faguet and collaborators have examined one case where we can closely measure the impact today of events from centuries ago: how Colombian communities are still affected by 16th-century encomienda, a colonial forced-labor institution. We talk about this and other examples of the legacy of history.Support Mindscape on Patreon.Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/08/26/287-jean-paul-faguet-on-institutions-and-the-legacy-of-history/Jean-Paul Faguet received a Ph.D. in Political Economy and an M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics, and an Master of Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is currently Professor of the Political Economy of Development at LSE. He serves as the Chair of the Decentralization Task Force for the Initiative for Policy Dialogue. Among his awards are the W.J.M. Mackenzie Prize for best political science book.Web pageGoogle Scholar publicationsWikipediaAmazon author page"Encomienda, the Colonial State, and Long-Run Development in Columbia," J.P. Faguet, C. Matajira, and F. Sánchez.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Colonialism is an idea that is bandied about in the discourse these days, usually with the subtext that colonialism is bad. It is bad for the powerful, rich country to impose its will on some smaller, less well-equipped to defend itself part of the world.
But, you know, it wasn't always thus that colonialism was thought of as bad. Maybe in the United States it has a bad rep. We started out as colonies and we needed to have a revolutionary war to overthrow the yoke of the British Empire.
But there are other countries where they want to make an argument that by going into other parts of the world that are less enlightened, less developed, less rich than they are— They can bring an element of civilization, or they can spread laws or institutions. And even if it wasn't quite fair all the time, it wasn't all peaches and cream, maybe there's some lingering good effect.
Now, let me not be ambiguous here. Colonialism is bad. I think it is bad. I think you could easily argue that it's bad purely on sort of moral ethical grounds. There should be a right of self-determination of countries. You can help them, but maybe you can help them without taking them over would be my perspective.
But as a scientist, you also want to be careful and nuanced and empirically based and say, OK, maybe some bad things happened in the past under the name of colonialism or whatever. Were they entirely bad? Or were there aspects that actually were good? Was civilization actually brought? Or was literacy or better roads or something like that to a different part of the world? Well, guess what?
You can do some of that. You can ask these questions. The answers are that it's complicated. Lots of things go into these questions, and so there's no clean and crisp answer to be had.
But it's also a very difficult question to ask because if you talk about the different experiences of different countries, different countries have a lot of ways in which they're different geographically, in terms of resources, in terms of the culture and the institutions that are already there before the colonizers come in. So it's going to be hard to get very specific answers.
Today's guest, Jean-Paul Foguet, is a political economist at the London School of Economics with a particular emphasis on Latin America. But he's interested in how different countries have developed over time and the legacy of history in playing out to the extent where we are today, right? We have all sorts of things going on in the world. Different countries are different from each other.
How much does it matter what the situation was 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 500 years ago, for that matter? How much is there a lingering historical impact, whether it's from colonialism or anything else? And I think that this is a great topic to talk about here on Mindscape for a couple of reasons. One is that the questions are super important and difficult to answer.
We think we each have experience growing up in whatever country we grew up in. When you talk about the successes of government or of other social institutions, it's too easy to generalize from an n equals one kind of data set, right? You know your experience, and you want to— go from that to theorize about how things must be more generally. But science isn't like that.
You got to actually dig into the data and you have to be able to compare differences from place to place. And that's exactly what Jean-Paul's work allows us to do. And the other thing that is fascinating about it is the methodology. You know, I love how good social scientists are at striving against the difficulties that you have in not being able to do controlled experiments.
Like social scientists are not going to found a country and give it some terrible history just so they can actually figure out the impacts of that history hundreds of years later. So we'll talk about two specific case studies here. And as I said, Jean-Paul specializes in Latin America, South America. So we'll talk mostly about Colombia.
where there is a long colonial history going back to the 1500s and the Spanish conquistadores. And the great thing about this in terms of modern day social science is that some areas of what we now call Colombia were in fact governed by the Spanish, others were not. So you can ask the question, did that legacy of colonial domination in early Colombia in the 1500s, does it still manifest today?
Are there still differences from place to place? And the answer, interestingly enough, is yes, and there are many positive results of that colonial history era in Colombia. The areas where there were Spanish conquistadores doing—the technical term is encomiendas. That's what these little areas were called where the Spanish had their fiefdoms.
They set up infrastructures and institutions that helped those areas still get better, still improve historically over the five centuries to come. But of course, there's also downsides. There's also plenty of historical examples where it doesn't work. So that's why social science is complicated and physics is much better.
The other example we'll look at is in Bolivia, a much more recent phenomenon, where there was a political party system that was weirdly persistent in Bolivia from, let's say, the second half of the 20th century. It's weird because Bolivia was not stable or persistent at all.
There was constant economic fluctuations and coups, and there were votes and then dictatorship for a while and back and forth. But the same kind of political parties seemed to persist. And then they collapsed. They collapsed in the early 21st century. So Jean-Paul asks, why is that?
And I won't give away all the answers right here, but the answers are kind of relevant for political issues going on in other countries right now, including the U.S., Western Europe, and elsewhere. It's a wonderful little exploration of the dynamics, the complicated, rich, super-duper fascinating dynamics of human beings trying to govern themselves. It's a miracle we do it at all.
There are a lot of kind of pessimistic lessons from this podcast, but that's the one optimistic lesson, that we human beings, despite all the weirdness, we do manage to govern ourselves a little bit. Maybe by being good scientists, we can learn how to do it better. So with that, let's go.
Jean-Paul Foguet, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be with you, Sean.
Now, we're going to get into a couple of papers you've written recently. And I love the fact that we're going to get into sort of the nitty gritty of what it means to be a modern social scientist. It's very different than being a physicist where we build a piece of equipment and then smash things together, whatever. But let's start with very, very broad issues to get the audience kind of grounded.
While reading your papers, I can't help but come away wondering, how is it that human beings are ever able to govern themselves? Do you get that feeling by doing this work at all?
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And the simple one sentence answer is nobody really knows. Sometimes it goes well and very often it goes badly. And kind of the big intellectual project is to try to figure out when and why and how and what variables you can dial up and dial down to generate better governance for better outcomes. And we still don't really know.
We have very highly contingent hypotheses with some some bits of evidence for certain cases, but you know, what happens to be working in modern Germany, but definitely did not work in Germany from the end of the 19th century to the 1940s, or what's been working at least until recently in the U.S., doesn't give you very much information about the rest of the world.
Well, and the history matters. And I get the impression that a lot of pundits and commentators, probably not professional academics, but they like to look at what's happening in their country and then propose theoretical explanations for it. But this idea of looking at different eras, looking at different countries, that actually is hard work.
Yeah, it's hard work. It's hard work empirically, and it calls for very different sorts of tools across, in my field, across both heavy econometric, quantitative sorts of evidence, but also qualitative evidence, where you might go and spend weeks or months in the field interviewing people and observing communities and trying to get qualitative sources of information on things like
why some people manage to govern themselves well or badly. At the really micro level, like in a village, can they solve collective action problems around the agricultural cycle? Or at a macro level, like what's going on to democratic institutions in the U.S. today?
One thing I got to ask about, because we recently had Duran Asamoglu on the podcast, and he is someone who has been... Yeah, he's fantastic, but he's also been thinking hard about this idea of institutions and exclusive institutions and inclusive institutions and... Or extractive, I should say, versus inclusive institutions.
And one of your goals is to kind of go a little bit more deeply than that.
Yes, yes. Absolutely. So... Asimoglu and his co-authors, Robinson and Johnson, wrote a paper that re-kicked off, so to speak. It kicked off again a new literature in the political economy of development that had kind of been forgotten. Nobody was working on this in the 1980s and 90s.
When I was a graduate student in the 90s, for example, people were doing much more kind of traditional economics sorts of things. And they brought it back. Now, I mean, kind of a fun fact. I don't know if Duran would agree with this. I kind of think he might. over a beer, but I don't know that he'd want to agree with it publicly in a public picture.
is that he and Jim Robinson in particular, because they've worked together longer in this train of research, they've kind of brought Marxism back into the discussion. I don't mean Marxism as in, you know, Leninism and the Soviet Union. I mean more like classical political economy where economic factors tie up with power and who has power and how that gets expressed in government patterns.
And the two kind of feed back to each other all the time, as opposed to especially North American political economy that tries to maintain the two things distinct. It says you get richer, you don't, and you're a legislator who gets lobbied or not, but the two things don't blend that much. And part of what these guys are saying is these things are completely intertwined and we can't ignore it.
Well, it's interesting that you think of that as somewhat Marxist. I mean, I guess I'm very much an outsider here, but when I hear Marxist, again, in the non-USSR sense of the word, I think of kind of economic class determinism. And I think that in what you're saying and in what Daron's saying, ideas matter a lot, right? Yeah.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so they're not doing that. They're not following down the Karl Marx line of economic determinism or material dialectics. What I'm saying about them, and again, they may not agree with this characterization. They're just showing that institutions are at some level the expression of economic power applied to politics, which then feeds back into economic power.
And the two, it's a continuous cycle. And if we try to ignore that or keep these fields too distinct, then we're missing possibly the key part of what's going on in the world.
And that kind of sort of feedback interplay mechanism is very much in line with the attitude of the Santa Fe Institute, where I first ran into you and where you are sitting right now, even though I'm in Baltimore while we're having this discussion.
That's right. That's right. Yes, absolutely.
And a particular kind of idea that you've emphasized is the role of culture in development, that it's not purely economic determinism, that human beings have attitudes that we get from psychology, from our other fellow human beings in a society, and those also help influence the development of institutions and their success.
Yeah, that's right. Because the institutional literature has been on a a long journey and when the ideas first came up, so one of the earliest but very clearest statements of what our institutions came from Douglas North around 1991 where he published a very famous book, The Great Douglas North, recently deceased. He said institutions, you know, what are they?
It's this fuzzy word that means everything and nothing at the same time. So he said, let's say institutions are the rules of the game. So an institution, for example, is football, let's say, like as in soccer or American football or any sport. And then
Particular teams are organizations that are operating within the framework of the rules that define a particular game where it clearly delineates what is fair and what is unfair play and how you win the game. So you try to get the lowest number of strokes in golf or the highest number of goals in football or whatever it is.
And so there you get a nice delineation between institutions and organizations.
And what we saw almost immediately, and there's a French theorist called Pierre Bourdieu, sociologist, operating at about the same time, the 80s and early 90s, is that given rules that you can write down in black and white, like the rules of football or the institution of marriage, my family and your family are organizations within the broader institution of marriage, which are the rules about how people relate to each other and how families interact.
and so on and so forth. You transfer these rules in black and white from one context to another country, another cultural context, and they don't work, or they have completely different outcomes. The rules are the same, right? So to give you two examples of that, most of the Latin American countries essentially copied large amounts of their constitutions from the American constitutions.
So go back in history. The first American Articles of Confederation were a dismal failure. The U.S. was falling apart, not working. And then you got a second convention and you got the current American Constitution, you know, before all of the amendments. And this has been a great success up until now.
So the Latin American republics come up a little bit later in the early 1800s, and they basically copy large amounts of it. And these institutions in Latin America do not work the same way that they work in the U.S., even though articles are copied almost verbatim. Or in Africa, you have countries that were large numbers of countries colonized that had been colonized by the French. and the Brits.
And when they left, they basically left similar public administrations and constitutions that were written in a great rush in the late 50s and early 60s that looked very similar to one another. But man, these institutions work in very different ways. Some of them are stable. Some of them are horrifically unstable. Some are actually pretty honest and straightforward. Others are massively corrupt.
But you look at the black and white and it's almost identical or very similar.
So that I'm not afraid to participate in conversations. And here's a special holiday treat for our listeners. Right now, get up to 60% off your Babbel subscription, but only for our listeners at babbel.com slash mindscape. Get up to 60% off at babbel.com slash mindscape. That's B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash mindscape. Rules and restrictions may apply. Right. So you start asking why it's different.
One of the things you've looked at a lot is the legacy of colonialism, people coming in and pushing other people around, how that affects things. Before we get into your work, what is the conventional wisdom about that? Is the thought that where there is some colonial past that makes development faster or slower or better or worse?
Sean, this is about as charged a question as it's possible to ask these days. That's why we pay you the big bucks. So I've got a two part answer to that. On the first level, you know, it kind of is a normative issue.
I don't think anyone really thinks or certainly no one is willing to say out loud that colonialism was a good idea and we should repeat it in the sense of foreigners taking over foreign society, foreign people and pushing them around and making them do things that they don't want to do. Nobody thinks this is a good idea.
And although there are many, so nobody, I mean, you know, academics and researchers working in this field. Partly you can't say it because you'll be pilloried, but also like I would never say that and I don't know anyone serious who would say that in the way that people did until fairly recently.
I mean, you know, as late as the 70s, there were still academics holding forth that, you know, thank God for all of these countries that were colonized by the British and got civilization, you know. People would make that argument. Nobody says that anymore. Now, there is a separately...
a series of interesting questions about what were the empirical effects of colonialism, because it did happen and it had lots of effects. And the best statement, you know, the sort of the cutting edge of the field today is that colonialism was a complex treatment that did a number of different things, many of them bad, some of them absolutely horrific, immoral, etc.
But others, you know, had good effects, like the colonies, without doubt, built some infrastructure. And as between in places that didn't have paved roads and didn't have railroads, as between having them and not having them, it was better to have them. So the process of generating that was awful. And illiberal and abused human rights, etc.
So that's not to say, thank God for colonialism because now India got railroads. No, that's not the argument. On the other hand, you can try to separate what is the incremental effect or the marginal effect of having the railroads. And without doubt, that led to economic integration and lower transport costs.
And it makes it easier to have a national economy than before when these places just operated as separate sort of economic spheres and fiefdoms.
Yeah, I think that makes perfect sense. I'm glad that the field has gotten to that point. I mean, it's certainly not an argument about whether or not colonialism is good or bad, if only because there's a moral argument there, right? Like people should determine themselves.
But we can still, as social scientists, ask, okay, what are the specific long-term legacy impacts of having that colonial background?
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So that's the way in which the field has moved. And that sort of ties back to your previous comment about Asimoglu, Johnson, Robinson's work and that whole stream. Not only them, people like Engerman and Sokoloff or North, Wallace and Weingast have a major or Besley and Pearson have major books and major streams of research trying to answer questions along these lines.
And now what my co-authors and I and a couple of other people, but literally a couple of other studies are trying to do is is break up this idea of institutions as high level national complexes in multidimensional space that are either extractive or inclusive. We think that's just like way too high level of aggregation in multiple ways. In terms of space, institutions are not only national.
You have a country like India or Brazil or the US for that matter. And there's a lot of institutional variation beneath the national level, right? Mississippi is not the same as Massachusetts in lots of important ways.
And also separating it in terms of dimensions because a set of institutions, you can break it down into the legal system separately from that policing, separately from that electoral norms, separately from that the political party system and its dynamics.
operating within a set of electoral rules, for example, like is it first-past-the-post or is it proportional representation, and on and on and on and on. And so we start looking at particular institutions and how they vary across space, and then we actually come up with very different answers compared to the big extractive versus inclusive argument.
I mean, it's almost inevitable when you start looking more closely, you're going to find all sorts of little structures that were glossed over by the big picture that had been put forward, right? Yeah.
Yeah, and I want to say I'm grateful to Duran and others for the big picture because, you know, maybe quite my view is without that, we wouldn't be having these discussions now. It sort of it brought so much interest to the field that then helped generate data that then pushed people like us to go, well, hang on a minute. You know, what if we go deeper, which is really all we're doing.
So let's go deeper. Let's go to Colombia. I mean, let's go back to the 16th century, which is kind of amazing that we can ask questions about the impact of the 16th century on what was going on today. So what was going on in Colombia back in the 1500s?
Okay, so fantastic. Thank you for that. I love talking about this, and I tend to go on, so you should interrupt me.
Please, we're here to go on.
So the Columbus sails over and discovers Hispaniola, which is now Dominican Republic in Haiti. And pretty quickly they kind of run out of room in the sense of an empire that can sustain itself. And there's not that much gold there. Columbus dies thinking he made it to India, right? He's convinced he's in the Indies as in Asia. So he never actually realized where he was.
And that kind of ignorance is shot through this whole project for the first hundred years at least. From there, the colonialists go to Mexico and they start making their way down through Central America and they make it to Colombia. And they have an outpost in a place called Santa Marta, which today is an important city on the Caribbean coast of Colombia.
And this colonial outpost is a little place. It's got about 40 soldiers and maybe... maybe eight or 900 people, Spaniards, who are living there. And the indigenous people that they're predating on are fierce, they have poison arrows, they know the geography and the flora and the fauna way better than the Spanish do.
Half the Spanish who are there are still convinced that they're on the coast of India, right? And they start to suffer from their clean water gets contaminated. They've been marauding around digging up graves to steal the gold and ship it back to Spain. But that's running out. They're not really finding any more graves. The Indians already have decided.
At the beginning, they were kind of hedging their bets, saying, can we work with these people who are these weird people? They saw the Spaniards, a Spaniard knight mounted on a horse and thought this was one animal. They thought it was a godlike messenger, literally, because their cosmology predicted that the gods would send messengers who would have some sort of fantastical form.
And they thought these people were some other kind of either a spirit or a new animal that they'd never seen. But by 1536, 37, they figured out they don't like the Spaniards, and they're not cooperating, and they're often killing them. And the whole colony is on the verge of collapse, which means that the entire colonial project in northern South America is on the verge of collapse.
And in order to try to save colonialism and save these Spaniards from basically being wiped out, there's a guy called Jimenez de Quesada – who decides to lead an expedition south trying to get to Peru because they've heard news of fantastic riches, like unbelievable amounts of gold that Europeans and possibly in the world had never been seen before that are coming out of Cusco and the Inca Empire.
And this sort of, the flows of gold, A, sustained the entire Spanish Empire, and B, was all that Europeans talked about for about a century. It's unimaginable riches. So they're on the northern coast. Those of you who know your Latin American geography, they're on the northern coast of Colombia, which is pretty much the northern tip of the continent. And they're trying to get down to Cusco.
And so they set off walking, right? Because they're going to do this walking. And after 11 months, the 800 soldiers, the expedition of 800 people that left Santa Marta, after 11 months, they finally struggle up onto the savannah of Bogota. And only 170 of them have survived. 630 have died of drowning, of diseases, of hunger and being killed by the Indians. Right.
And they're really not very close to Peru at all. This idea they're going to walk there is just crazy. They had no idea where they were. Many of them thought that all of South America was an island and that they could just sort of walk from one end to the other.
And they get there and they meet a much, much, much larger force of indigenous warriors controlled by the chief of Bogota, who is the top chief, the first chief in a confederation. It's not an empire unlike the Aztecs in Mexico and unlike the Incas in Peru and Bolivia. It's more of a confederation of chieftains, but the one from Bogota is the biggest and most powerful one.
And these guys could have crushed the Spanish, and somehow they didn't. And this is one of the great historical mysteries. No one knows. In Mexico, it was a closer run thing, and they were basically defeated, and they came back and triumphed. In Peru and Colombia, no one can understand.
In Cajamarca, Peru, where Pizarro defeated the Inca Empire, and in Bogota, Colombia, nobody can understand how this happened. Because they had something like 30,000 warriors in Peru and more than 10,000 warriors in Colombia. And in both places, there were about 170 Spanish, 176. in Peru, 170 in Colombia. And they won because of the element of surprise, psychology.
They had gunpowder and they had steel. And the indigenous warriors that they were fighting had slings where they threw rocks and they had clubs and bows and arrows. And that's all they had. They didn't have swords because they didn't have steel. So they had clubs, right? But even so, 10,000 people with these arms could have beaten 170.
Maybe many of them would have died, but they could have just destroyed them, and they didn't. And the answer has something to do with the psychology and also the cosmography in the sense that they were convinced, many of them were convinced that these people were from the gods, so they had to listen.
And so, yeah, I mean, I guess they could have defeated them if they had tried their best. But for whatever reason that we don't quite understand, because the history is written by the winners, we're not exactly sure why they didn't try their best.
Yeah, exactly. And I mean, the history is written by the winners. The only written records we have is from the Spaniards.
Okay. And so that means what? I mean, I guess it's tempting to think that now the Spanish rule over Colombia, but it's more complicated than that. I mean, they're not actually, there's not enough Spanish to really rule over Colombia.
Yeah, that's right. So the... It's kind of, it's hard to think ourselves, it's a big exercise to think ourselves back into the 16th century. because the entire world was different, right? It's like all of our norms and expectations about individualism, about the kind of things that motivate people to do the things that we do, about how people relate to each other were completely different.
The Spaniards that were conquering Colombia were basically coming out of a late medieval culture where they were intensely religious. They really believed in God. They believed that the Christian and Catholic God was superior, you know, the one true God. And if you didn't believe, you're going to hell. And that the Spanish emperor was the agent of the one true Catholic God and so on and so forth.
And that's just like that's so alien to the world that we live in today. It's kind of hard to think ourselves back. Now, the Spanish American empire was something like, you know, 50 times the size of Spain, and they're trying to run it from across the ocean with 16th century technology, right? So, you know, imagine that. It was not the Spanish army, like the U.S.
army goes and conquers Afghanistan or conquers Iraq. That's not how it happened. These were privateers that had a license from the emperor to come and explore, and they got that legal right and sort of, you know, the support of Spain on the high seas against English and other pirates, et cetera.
But basically they came here, they mounted their own expeditions with private investment, and they were going to get to keep the explicit terms of these legal agreements with the crown is that they would get to keep 80% of all the treasure, et cetera, that they found, and 20% had to go back to the crown.
So, you know, the license was an exchange for la quinta, which is a fifth, right, of everything. So the Spanish come, they conquer, they take over the whole savanna around Bogota, which is the major population center in what is today Colombia.
And so then these conquistadores who have been risking life and limb, 630 of them died just in the expedition from Santa Marta, not including those who never made it to Santa Marta from Spain, right? is incredibly risky, at huge cost to themselves. They have invested directly in this, their own money, the senior people, and huge amounts of effort and risk, the more junior people.
They also have other investors back in Hispaniola, back in the Canaries, and back in Spain, who have also invested in this expedition, a bit like you invest in a company, right? The way they're going to make it pay for all of them is the conquistadores divide up the indigenous people and they divide up the land. The more senior ones get large numbers of indigenous people.
The less important ones get, you know, smaller plots of land and smaller numbers of indigenous people. And they basically force the indigenous people to work for them. And then they then because their goal, unlike. colonialism in say Massachusetts or Ontario or Virginia, right?
Where if you and I got on the boat from England, let's say you and I are in Liverpool or Southampton and we got on the boat and we're thinking, should I go to Virginia or should I go to Columbia?
well, you probably couldn't go to Columbia if you weren't Spanish, but leaving that aside, then you're going to go to Massachusetts or Virginia and you're going to get a small piece of land and you're going to work it with your family, right? And you and your wife are going to have children and you're going to work the land and so you're going to have a few acres, right?
That's not what the Spanish were doing. The Spanish wanted to set themselves up as lords with hundreds or thousands of people working for them so they could live this great, this grand life. And they would never work again, having risked it all to get there in the first place.
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And did most of the Spanish conquistadores imagine going back to Spain at some point? Were they purely just trying to extract and leave, or were they setting up a new life?
The idea, the objective was to set up a new life and be great lords in South America. So a sharp parenthesis, amongst Latin Americans today, my mother's from Colombia, I have a huge Colombian family, the kind of story that Colombians and Latin Americans like to tell ourselves is
is that it was these great lords who came from Spain to conquer Latin America because this makes us the descendants of great people. No, the great lords were living in their castles in Spain. Why would they go to Colombia in 1530? No, I mean, they're probably not gonna survive for starters.
So the people who went were the second, third and fourth sons of the minor nobility who didn't have that much to inherit because the first son was going to inherit what there was and there probably wasn't enough to share.
So, you know, we were getting the second, third and fourth class of now, you know, these were people who were educated in the main, not all of them, but in the main and who had some means because they had to finance themselves to get to Colombia. But they weren't the great dukes and lords of Spain.
So what they wanted was to set themselves up in Colombia to live a better life than they could have had back in Spain. Many of them became so wealthy that then they went back and forth. The objective was to capture resources, build a grand house and have hundreds or thousands of people forced to work for you.
But fortunately for the modern social scientist, there were not enough of them to comprehensively take over the whole country. So we have a situation where some locations had this system, which is basically slave labor, right? And some were left more or
To give you rough numbers, there are about 1,120 municipalities in Bolivia today, just to use a standard modern unit of territory. The Spanish made it to, now, you know, obviously they weren't working in municipalities, but they made it to about 350 modern Colombian municipalities. They didn't even fully occupy all of the, each of those municipalities.
You know, they did some of the central ones around Bogota, some of the more distant ones, they only made it to one or two points in those municipalities, but they never made it to the other two thirds at all. In 300 years of colonialism, they might've walked through it, but they never established a presence, right? Um,
One of our findings is about, sort of to give you the bottom line of the paper, is about the importance of building institutions of the state. And the kind of shocking thing is that Columbia became independent in 1821. Today, it's been independent for more than 200 years. And we, the Columbians, including partly myself, have yet to finish fully occupying the space.
Because there are places today in 2024 where the Colombian state has yet to arrive in the sense that there's no police station, no local mayor's office, no school and no hospital. But there are people? There are people living there. Oh, yeah, yeah, sure.
There are poor farmers living there, and they're kind of self-organizing and trying to solve their own problems and maybe provide some potable water or deal with where should we throw the garbage. But the Colombian state is not present.
So if you and I get on a plane and go to Bogota now, I just came back from there a few days ago, it's a modern, incredibly sophisticated city, and the government is big. The municipal government of Bogota, let alone the national government, It's big and does amazing things, but in other parts of the country, it's just absent. It's just like not there.
Right. And so that's something that we who grew up and are familiar with the United States are just not quite familiar with. Like the U.S. government governs the whole country one way or the other.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. Exactly. There were periods in American history during the expansion where there was a piece of land that, you know, a big like the state of New Mexico, where I am right now, had been claimed. But it was, you know, in the process of being occupied. But at some point it got occupied. And the state is very strong. It's decentralized. It's federal. It's highly robust.
And it's present. You may not like what it's doing everywhere, but it's present everywhere.
So the wonderfully ambitious, audacious question you want to ask is, can you go back into the historical record, look at where the Spanish were in control, where they weren't, and compare that to what things look like today? I mean, it would not be super surprising if the answer were, there's no relation. It's been hundreds of years since this has happened, but that's not exactly what we find.
Yeah, exactly. So maybe I can illustrate this nicely if I just tell you the story of how this paper came about. My longtime co-author and one of my best friends in academia and beyond, he's just a wonderful person, is Fabio Sanchez, Professor Fabio Sanchez, who's a very senior professor at Los Andes, which is one of the best universities in Colombia, especially in economics and political economy.
He calls me up one day. We've been working together for years. He calls me up one day and he says, you know about the encomienda, this nasty institution? I'm like, yeah, yeah, I know. It was bad news during colonization. He's like, we have preliminary evidence that it's tied to better development outcomes all over Colombia. I'm like, you're kidding me. This can't be true.
Now, for context, this phone call happens in about 2016, early 2017. No, 2016.
And this is a time when people like Nathan Nunn, who was then at Harvard, and Leonard Wanchikun at Princeton, and a bunch of other people are putting out a lot of papers, really innovative, empirically sophisticated papers that show the horrible effects of slavery, not just then in those places where slavery happened, but today in those places that had suffered slavery over the past two or three hundred years.
So the things like... in places where there was severe slave trafficking on the western coast of Africa, today people trust each other less. And they can link that empirically to the fact that you had marauding slave parties and different ethnic groups that were pitched against one another by the English and Portuguese and others for the sake of trading slaves.
And that has impacts today on people's inter-group trust, like between different ethnicities in Africa. let alone things that are easier to understand, like education and health outcomes are worse today in places that suffered a lot of slavery. So the encomienda is not slavery. It's very broad similarities. It's also forced labor.
But when you look at the specifics, it's quite different from slavery, but equally nasty, actually arguably worse than slavery in some ways. How could it be having positive effects on development outcomes today? And it's very strong effects, not just economic development as in GDP per capita or productivity or wages, but also health, education, infant mortality, literacy.
Also institutions, like local institutions and places that did have encomienda are stronger and more capable today in Colombia than comparable places that had no encomienda. So how can this be true? And so the story of this paper is that we spent the past seven years trying to break this down, like throwing everything we can trying to make the result go away.
And it's there regardless of what we do. And so we think it's a really strong empirical result.
And it's interesting because I mean, I can't it's probably unfair. I can't help but think of the United States. Right. Where to a very good approximation. States that had slavery are less economically developed, you know, have worse universities, worse health care than states that did not have slavery or which abolished slavery relatively quickly. So I guess the moral is that it's complicated.
It is complicated. Yeah, that's a fantastic. So, you know, part of the next frontier of research is to make those sorts of comparisons. But we're not there yet. And it would be methodologically complicated. But I mean, but hugely interesting as you lay out.
So our answer, and it took us years to, you know, we had an intuition about it, but it took us years to prove it, to really show it econometrically, is that, and I want to be really clear about this, the encomienda, so let me say quickly how the encomienda worked, because it's important to understand this.
So encomienda comes from the Spanish word encomendar, which is to recommend or to put in the care of. And so the deal with the encomienda is that you had a Spanish Lord, a conquistador, who just finished conquering a bunch of indigenous people.
And then he received a license from the empire to extract labor, to force them to give him labor on his farm or in the mines or in his household, like to cook his food and clean his house, work his fields. And in exchange for that, the Lord taught them the one true Catholic and apostolic faith, which meant that they had a chance of going to heaven.
And this was seen as, you know, an exchange, right? I think I don't need to say anything more about that exchange. So this is what the word encomienda means. So the way in which the encomienda worked was that the Spanish Lord taught the indigenous people Catholicism and therefore gave them a chance to go to heaven. And they, in exchange, had to work for him.
We're adamant in the paper that the encomienda itself, this labour extraction institution, is not what led 500 years ago, is not what led to better development outcomes today, but rather There is a chain, which is, I think, a nice, neat, logical chain that makes a lot of sense.
The presence of encomienda gave these lords a very strong incentive to set up local institutions to protect their property rights. One of which, one of the key ones of which was the encomienda. So, you know, a lord arrives, they conquer the indigenous people. He has a thousand indigenous people working for him.
Over the following 100 years, who's to say that somebody else isn't going to come and grab them from him or his children, right? He wants to maintain this. He wants his kids to inherit it, so on and so forth, along with the grand estate and the house and all of the goods and wealth that these indigenous people working for him have. have permitted him to accumulate.
So the presence of encomienda itself doesn't create great development outcomes 500 years later. It generates strong incentives to invest in local institutions. And then those local institutions, once they get going,
in a context of an empire that was very distant from Spain, where the imperial government in Bogota, in Lima, in Mexico was chronically weak forever, for the entire 300 years that the Spanish were in South America. Then having a strong local institution really matters in terms of dispute resolution, protecting property rights of these Spanish lords.
And then later on, they start doing other things almost immediately when they're set up. And this is very clear in the historical records. So one very SFI aspect of this paper is that it's multidisciplinary and it has lots of different kinds of evidence, including deep history from observers at the time in 1530 and 1560. And we're just quoting them alongside the econometrics.
I do want to note that if it were true, a trade of eternal salvation for a few decades of indentured servitude would actually be a good trade.
Well, yeah. So going back to medieval Spain, if you actually believe that – and I think some of them probably did. Some of the Spanish probably did. But I'm sure many of them were cynical. But then – exactly. These guys are going to hell. At least we're going to save them from that.
Right. Exactly. OK. So – but it's very interesting. So the – You're explaining what's going on here in the sense that it's not the indentured servitude that led to better outcomes centuries later. But in order to get that system off the ground, you had to lay some groundwork in terms of institutions and infrastructure that actually did kind of linger on for a long time.
Exactly. So these institutions, another parenthesis, that when we talk in political economy or public economics about the state, the state in the sense that we know it today really only comes about in the 20th century in most of the world. It has its origins in the 19th century. in Europe and North America. But in the rest of the world, the state is doing almost nothing, like the national state.
It gets very few resources in terms of taxation, and it just basically maintains an army. And in some countries, a currency, in other countries, not a currency. Colombia didn't have a single currency until about 70 years after its creation. I mean, it was unbelievable, right?
So these local institutions in 1539, let's say, and thereafter, are doing important local jobs in terms of provision of potable water. So, for example, in Tunha, which is a second institution, encomienda-based municipality that's founded in Colombia by the Spanish. They basically dig trenches in a canal and they bring potable water from the mountains into a fountain in the middle of town.
And in 1539, this is the source of potable water. And then the Spanish lords send their indentured servants out to like fill urns with water and take them back and that's what they drink. But it's the encomienda-based local government that's doing that. They manage waste. They regulate commerce.
So if you're selling food or if you're tanning leather or if you're engaged in commerce more generally in the town, it's the local government that's regulating you and making sure that the food isn't unsafe, etc. So it's actually... It's a more capable and more involved, more sophisticated local state than I certainly ever expected for 1500s full stop, let alone 1500s Latin America.
And then these places, the state sort of grows in capacity. And I guess the simple baseline comparison is that where there was not encomienda, there's no incentive for anyone to set up the colonial state. There have been indigenous institutions throughout Latin America, but especially in places like Colombia, they're just demolished because you have population declines in excess of 95%.
So if 95 percent of the indigenous population has died, the institutions that they ran fall completely apart. And they're basically, you know, scattered people like trying to run away from the Spanish or a couple of tribes off in the Amazon or in the Sierra Nevada in the north. So, you know, institutions of government collapse.
Yeah, I mean, that's a very good point. So it's not necessarily that the colonialist institutions were better. It's that they were able to survive because the other areas were kind of run to the ground. Exactly. That's exactly right.
And as a careful scientist, of course, I want to raise my hand and say, well, how do you know that the areas in which you're getting better institutions and better development weren't just better places to live? I mean, maybe there's a confounding variable that explains both without giving colonialism the causal power here.
Yes, very good. You've put your finger on exactly the empirical challenge and the threat to our result, which is what economists call locational fundamentals. And so to expand a little bit on what you said, the argument would be, well, where did the Spanish go? The Spanish went to where there were large numbers of indigenous people because they wanted to enslave them and get them to work for them.
Where were these indigenous people living? They're living in places that tend to be more favorable to development anyway. Because the soils are better, there's a ready source of water, there's easy access to trade routes, you know, rainfall. I mean, whatever it may be. Maybe there are subsoil minerals that they're exploiting.
Whatever it may be, but there's some fundamental thing that's driving the modern day development outcomes. And the encomienda is just sort of accommodating itself to that. It's not the causal factor. So what we do... And I'm going to get a little bit into the nitty gritty of the methodology. We use a method called neighbor pair fixed effects.
So the idea here is that all else equal, any two neighboring municipalities in Colombia are going to tend to be similar in terms of these locational fundamentals. They're going to have similar soil, similar rainfall, similar amounts of gold or absence of gold or whatever it may be.
And so we're gonna use a methodology that compares neighbor pairs where one did and the other did not have encomienda. And so ideally these things should be similar in every way that we can't measure. We're also gonna control in our regressions for all the things that we can measure. So we have a ton of, Colombia has very good quality data.
One of the nice things about working in Colombia is that it's one of the best qualities of data of any Latin American country and amongst developing countries generally. Data is held to be good quality in places like India, Brazil, Mexico, and also Columbia. So we have lots of data on locational characteristics that can be measured.
And then we look at neighbor-pair differences where anything that is not measured is presumably controlled for just by virtue of being a neighbor, where one has encomienda, the other doesn't. And so this is one means of identification, but many people say, well, okay, that's okay, but it's not good enough. So then we take one additional big step
which is what in econometrics is called instrumental variables, where we come up with an instrument which is ideally highly correlated with the thing that we're trying to pin an argument on, which is the encomienda.
So our instrument is highly correlated with the presence or absence of encomienda, but it should be uncorrelated with the outcome variable that we're trying to ascribe to the encomienda, which is modern development outcomes like health, education, GDP per capita, etc., And so we've tried different instruments.
And one of my junior colleagues, a Colombian called Laura Soto, I mean, this was a team effort and, you know, everybody contributed to it. But I think she had the fundamental spark, the initial idea, which was she was reading the accounts of a guy called Tomas Lopez from 1560, who was an imperial leader.
um agent sent by the crown to to gather information to allow for better taxation of these spanish lords who are making like you know good modern day businessmen and trying to evade taxes like crazy right and again with 15 with 16th century technology evading taxes wasn't that hard this guy was sent by the crown to just like take take a census a catalog as it were catalog
how many Spaniards were where, how big their farms were, how big their houses were, and crucially for us, how many encomienda Indians they had working for them. How many pigs, how many horses, all this kind of stuff. But crucially for us, how many encomienda Indians they had working for them.
And what Laura, what my colleague saw is that this guy describes exactly the route that he took through Colombia. And he says, I'm going to try to find where all these conquistadores are. How am I going to do that? Well, the best way I can come up with is just to try to retrace their steps because wherever they got to, you know, was via their path.
So I'm going to try to take the same path that they all took to get where the places are that they founded, you know, towns and villages. or where they have encomiendas. And so we then combine that. This is another very SFI thing. We combine that with modern data from the NASA mission that is mapping the geography of the planet.
We take the subset of data on Columbia that measures and catalogs all the ravines, the rivers, the forests, the valleys, all of this geographic stuff. And we use that to calculate the least cost path for between all the places that we know this 1560 imperial agent went to who was trying to recreate their steps.
So a very long-winded way of saying that our instrument in this case is the path of the conquistadores through Colombia that they took founding all of these encomiendas. And then we measure the distance from each municipality to the closest point on that path. And that's our instrument, which we argue is highly correlated to where the encomienda is or was in 1560.
But it should be the distance to the path should be uncorrelated to education, health, infant mortality or GDP per capita. There's no reason for that distance variable to map on to modern development outcomes.
And then the answer is that when you control for all these things, yes, the encomienda did have a noticeable effect on modern development outcomes.
It's a very strong statistical correlation across 20 different measures of development outcomes, human capital, social capital, institutional development, and crucially economic outcomes today. And all of these outcomes today are around 2005-2010. So modern 21st century outcomes are being driven by the encomienda in 1560.
And this, you know, by itself is a kind of a stunning outcome because you think, okay, this thing in 1560 was really important and it structured the Spanish empire in lots of important ways in 1560. How can it be having an effect in the 21st century? And yet, you know, this is what we find.
And again, seven years trying to break it down and make it go away and it doesn't go away regardless of what we throw at it.
Well, I mean, I'm sure there's many more things to say about this, but I don't want to miss the opportunity to also switch to your Bolivia paper, which is in some senses completely different. But in some sense, there is absolutely a similarity of sort of both spirit and answer.
So in the case of Bolivia, we're asking a much more modern question and not even about, well, about political parties, I guess, is the short way of saying it.
Yeah, so that paper is about the stunning collapse of Bolivia's political party system around 2003, 2004, which was a political party system in a country with chronically weak democratic institutions and many coups and general institutional instability, but a political party system, meaning a set of political parties competing in a given country
ideological and political space against each other that was remarkably stable between 1952 and 2002. This system got set up after the revolution of 1952 and the system persisted. The same political parties came back After coups, after macroeconomic shocks, after guerrilla uprisings, Che Guevara didn't die in Cuba and he didn't die in Argentina.
He died in Bolivia where he was trying to stoke revolution. And the political party system was completely robust to this.
So even if it was not a democracy, even in those moments when Bolivia was a dictatorship, we still had these political parties.
Yeah, exactly. You still have the political parties that were still there. Some of them would have been cooperating with the dictator who happened to be there in power at the moment. And in any event, when the dictator fell, the same parties, even the same individuals would come back.
So, you know, if you trace Bolivia's presidents and cabinet ministers who then ascend to presidents, it's just remarkably stable for 50 years after the sorts of shocks that would have, and in fact, in other countries, did bring down entire political systems. And the Bolivian parties were robust to this. And then suddenly the whole system falls apart in 2003.
According to popular understanding, it's the kind of thing that you read even in the educated press, like the New York Times or The Economist or whatever, it seems to be caused by a series of demonstrations against water privatization in Cochabamba and then against provision or construction of a gas pipeline to Chile, to the historic enemy, Chile. They fought a war in the 19th century.
Like the idea that a couple of demonstrations in Cochabamba and La Paz brought down political party systems that have withstood 50,000 percent inflation and something like 15 coup d'etat is absurd. Right. No, it can't be.
So I'm sorry, but it seems like they're kind of. two mysteries. One mystery is how that political system, party system, I got to be careful, it's not the political system that survived, it's the party system that survived. The party system, yes, exactly. And so both how it survived for so long and then why it collapsed are kind of both interesting questions.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. So I can answer the first question better if I answer the second one first, and then the first one becomes quite kind of clearer. So the
The theory that I use in this paper is something that was created by a couple of very smart political scientists who did political sociology in the mid-20th century called Martin Lipset and Stein Rakan, and they were analyzing Western Europe. And their theory is that a political party system will operate in an ideological and programmatic space.
Now, by programmatic space, I mean, what are the issues and how do you combine different issues? So it's not obvious, for example, that if you're pro-business, you're going to be, I don't know, anti-LGBTQ or something like that. That happens to happen. In a number of countries. In other countries, it doesn't necessarily, those issues don't combine in a particular way.
Or if you're right wing, you're going to be pro-farmer. It's not obvious that that would be the case, but it does happen in some places and it doesn't in others. So what they say is that a political party system should have main characteristics that map onto the main political cleavage. And they coined this term, a political cleavage, which defines the society.
And so through a series of historical processes in Western Europe, you get a party system that's left versus right, where left is pro-worker party. Pro-larger government with bigger taxes and a bigger welfare state that's in favor of the little guy, as it were. And right wing is pro-capital, pro-business. Capitalism, the owners of capital, the owners of businesses, factories, etc.
Pro-business, lower taxes, a smaller state. And in Europe, this also maps into center versus periphery because of the nature of the national revolution that happened typically in Germany and Italy in the 19th century, the 1800s, for example.
So without getting too much into detail on Europe, what I find for Bolivia is that Bolivia had kind of the wrong political party system built on a false cleavage that did not define the Bolivian society and wasn't reflected by Bolivians, by who they are, by the main things that do actually characterize Bolivian society.
Bolivia also had a version of the European and North American left versus right. The problem is that Bolivia never had an industrial revolution.
Bolivia to this day is still a country that is predominantly an agricultural and then also a natural resource exporter, where the working class, the self-identified working class that thinks of itself as a class, like people who vote Labour in the UK, or especially if you go back to the 1950s, 60s and 70s, people who voted Labour in the UK, people who voted Labour
social democrat in Germany, for example, or Holland, or a number of European countries, people who voted for the socialists in France, were a self-identified working class who, in 1950s Britain, for example, spoke with similar accents, wore flat caps, tended to live in similar neighborhoods, dressed in a similar way, had a similar accent, in opposition to people from the right wing, who tended to be richer, who were educated in a different way, who used different clothing and had a different accent.
So this whole complex of things, which is reflecting the key divide in that society, which is, are you a worker or are you an owner of capital or owner of land? So that divide just didn't mean anything in a country like Bolivia, which never had an industrial revolution, didn't have a self-identified working class.
And I stress that Bolivians work really hard and poor Bolivians work really, really hard. But they see themselves as farmers or as Quechua and Aymara speakers, as members of the Ayu or the Maiku if they live in rural Bolivia, or they see themselves as migrants or the children of migrants to the city who might live in peri-urban areas. But they don't see themselves as a working class.
That's just not who they are. And it didn't have, you know, on the right side of that divide, it didn't have a lot of capitalists who own a lot of capital because there's not that much industry in Bolivia. So I'm sorry.
So the pre-2003 party system did reflect that kind of familiar European left-right divide, but Bolivia didn't.
But the society didn't. Exactly. So now... Why was this the case? So I've kind of gone halfway to answering the second question. So let me flip back to the first one. Why was this the case? Well, I think the people who made the revolution in 1952 were the illustrated sons of the upper middle class, the bourgeoisie, not the richest people in the country. The revolution was against them.
But it was sort of middle class professionals and educated people. And so I think there are two things. One is that it was aspirational. What they wanted was a state driven industrialization program that was rapidly going to industrialize the economy and create a working class. So you're going to have capital. The capital was going to be largely in the hands of the state, but that's all right.
And you're going to have a working class. And also because I think they looked around in 1952 and they thought, you know, what is the leading edge of what we want our society to look like? Where do we want to go towards? They looked to the US, Germany, Who were the leading? I guess Western Europe was rebuilding. So all of these countries have left right political systems.
And so it's aspirational. It's like, OK, we're not there yet. It doesn't quite fit now, but hopefully soon if we succeed. You know, so we may as well start with that now. The other thing, of course, is that the real cleavage in Bolivia is ethnic identitarianism.
Because for all the stuff that we were talking about in the first part of this chat, what Bolivia did not have was an industrial revolution. What it did have was 300 years of Spanish colonialism that completely remade the society from its genetic stock outwards. And so the key divide, Bolivia, unlike Colombia, unlike most of South America,
But like Guatemala and to a lesser extent, Ecuador, Bolivia has a large number of indigenous people who self-identify as indigenous people, who look and sound like indigenous people, dress like it. Their first language that they speak at home is a non-European language.
It's typically Quechua or Aymara, those are the dominant two, or Guarani or any of another 30-some much smaller indigenous languages, especially in the Amazon region. And this is roughly, people, there's not a good measurement of this, different censuses have thrown up different numbers, but it's between 55 and 60% of the population, roughly, consider themselves to be indigenous.
As compared to Colombia, for instance? Oh, it's three. Three percent. Okay. Three percent. Very different.
Yeah. And in Mexico and in Argentina, Chile, the numbers vary, but they're low single digits. Whereas in Bolivia and in Guatemala, the indigenous people have really endured. Also in the highlands of Peru, but the lowlands of Peru are all, everyone's mixed up. So Colombians are all mixed up in one way or another. It's basically mestizo, some blend of indigenous people.
with Spaniards, and then with some inclusion of blacks, all the slavery in Colombia. In terms of numbers, it was a horrible institution, but in terms of numbers, there were never nearly as many slaves as in the American South, for example. It wasn't that big a deal.
So in modern Bolivia, are there political parties just organized along different cleavages?
So that's what happened. What happened with the collapse of the political party system is that a couple of institutional struts that had been sustaining the old system were pulled away in the turmoil around the time that Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada was chased out of the country.
Because of these demonstrations, there's a big demonstration in La Paz in particular, where something like 60, 65 people were killed by the police and the armed forces trying to repress the demonstration. And you just, you can't do this in Bolivia. You can actually do this in some countries, but killing 60 people is not acceptable in Bolivia. And the whole society rebels against it.
And so the president had to flee.
And then you got a period of turmoil when you got the rise of Evo Morales So what we all know if you read the popular press About Bolivia is that you know the first indigenous president in the history of Latin America and that's completely true But that's not the story the story is the collapse of the previous elite led left-right system that just did not represent Bolivia and then
largely because of decentralization. And when you created all of these local governments, you got a new class of politician competing for local government jobs, positions that you didn't have before, because before the local governments literally didn't exist. Everything was run out of La Paz.
And with a lag of about 10 years, they realized, wait, we don't have to join these elite political parties led by the rich white people who live in the expensive suburbs of La Paz, we can form our own political parties. And then when they start doing that, it's like, what kind of political party should we have?
And they form it based on the real cleavage that actually defines society, which is ethnic, identitarian, and geographic. Bolivia is a relatively big country by world standards. It's twice the size of France, which is the biggest country in Western Europe. And it's geographically and ethnically very, very diverse.
So then who you are, what ethnic group you're from, whether you're from the highlands or the lowlands or the jungle is the big thing that really matters. And it kind of determines your worldview, not capital versus labor, because there's no labor and there's very few capitalists. And so then a new political party system springs up that's basically that.
And the new divide is basically your ethnic and regional identity.
agree or at least work with people you don't agree with everything about. I mean, the idea of a political party, especially in a presidential system like ours, where only two can be viable at any one time, is asking a lot. I mean, why should, like you said, why should our opinions about economics line up, correlate with our opinions about cultural issues or international relations?
Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's true. And so I wrote another paper for like an academic outreach journal called the Journal of Democracy that's trying to speak to the profession, but also to people beyond political scientists.
And what I argue there is that Bolivia, because it was an institutionally weak democracy, but it's subject to many of the same international pressures that we're seeing play out in the US and the current election in Europe, in Britain with Brexit or the rise of the far right in France and Germany and all over Europe.
The same kinds of things, issues to do with immigration and identity, you know, are the migrants a threat to the English identity in the countryside when suddenly you get a bunch of people from Afghanistan or Somalia in little, you know, quaint English villages in the countryside and the people who live there are completely shocked. This is, you know, so foreign to them.
These sorts of things hit Bolivia harder because it's an institutionally weak country and so it's a canary in the coal mine in the sense that we see the effects there first I think in a different form, Brexit, the rise of Trumpism in the US and MAGA republicanism, or the rise of the far right and the collapse of the traditional left in Europe.
The traditional left in Europe is really based on workers' parties and unions. The left-wing parties are tied umbilically to the union movement in the sense that they're financed largely by union-paying members and their dues go to the union and get transferred to the left-wing political parties. And all of that is falling apart.
And it's falling apart for some interestingly similar reasons as to what happened in Bolivia because people work hard in Britain and Germany and France today, but they don't see themselves as a working class. That's not how they conceive of themselves. They don't wear the flat cap, they don't speak with the accent, they don't eat the same food as all the other people who work.
Partly because their conditions of work have changed. You're not working in giant factories that employ thousands or tens of thousands of people where you go to the same place and you clock your card and you work on an assembly line next to 500 or 1000 people who are just like you. So now you're an Uber driver and you think you're an entrepreneur, right? And you're going to get rich one day.
You're an independent businessman who's subcontracting to Uber and maybe you're driving your own car. Maybe you're driving a car that belongs to another entrepreneur, but you don't think of yourself as a working class. And so that left-right politics is in steep decline all over the West. And the question is, what is going to replace it?
And from my point of view, the scary thing, and again, this is linked to Bolivia, is that if it gets replaced by identity, identitarian politics,
Meaning, you know, in Europe, white Europeans who have been there for a long time and are Christian and speak the language versus brown or black skinned people who come from further away, who have a different language, a different religion, different food. If that's what it gets to be about, then this is really dangerous.
In some countries, Protestants versus Catholics is still a really big divide, for example, in countries like Holland, for example, or for that matter, Germany. If politics goes from being left right. So the thing about left right politics is that it's always possible to find a positive, some solution that gets everyone makes everyone happy. because you can expand the pie.
Left versus right is basically about how do we divide profits between the owners of capital and the guys who make the stuff using that capital that makes the profits, the workers.
It's economic at the end of the day.
At the end of the day, right. So as long as we can keep the economy growing, we can give some to the capitalists, some to the workers, and maybe it'll fall apart, but there's at least a chance that we can find a solution because the pie keeps growing. If it's about who you are, then either one ethnic group is on top or the other ethnic group is on top.
And if I can't, you know, if I'm a member of one, therefore I'm not a member of the other, I'm in or I'm out. It's very difficult to find some sort of, you know, agreeable solution to that. Okay, that's a depressing thought. It turns positive sum games into zero sum games. And zero sum games in terms of political stability are scary. Right.
Absolutely. I mean, and in the U.S., I can't help once again connecting it to polarization in the U.S. I mean, it seems, and I've had other previous podcast guests talk about this, that back in the day, you know, the parties had more overlap, right? There were more socially conservative Democrats. There were more Rockefeller Republicans who were sort of socially liberal.
And for whatever, a collection of reasons dealing with geography and technology and politics— they're more effectively sorted now, right? It's clear what the differences is between the parties. And even if it's still mostly a political one versus an identity one, it still makes it harder to work together, to imagine that what we have here is a common project.
We just differ on some strategic details.
Yeah, that's exactly true. There was actually a fascinating visualization of this done by an undergraduate, I think at Harvard a few years ago, when this began during, I think when Obama was president, when it began to be clear the extent of polarization in the U.S.
And he would just sort of drew little circles and colored them for each legislator in the House and the Senate and colored them by their ideological leanings based on their roll call vote. So they had cast a vote in favor of this or that policy. And from that, he mapped where they were in terms of left versus right.
And what you see is that there's enormous overlap amongst the parties all through the 20th century. So there were many Republicans who were to the left of many Democrats. So you go back to the 50s and 60s, many Southern Democrats were actually fairly right-wing people. And many liberal Republicans from the Northeast were actually fairly left-wing people.
And they belonged to one another party almost for tribal reasons or historical reasons, not for strictly ideological reasons. And when you see this visualization through time, they just separate. And now there's no overlap. And that's also scary because that's how you get the sort of dynamics in the House today where, you know, they vote en masse in favor or against.
And so there's almost no point in even having a vote in the House because, you know, as according to how many congressmen there are, you know, you know which way it's going to go with almost 100 percent certitude.
Yeah, and presidential elections, FDR, and then decades later, Reagan on the other side could win 48 states, right? Yeah. You can't imagine that now.
You can't imagine that now. There's another really scary result. This is from a brilliant political scientist, one of the great lights of his generation called Adam Baworski, who's now at NYU. He's emeritus now at NYU. And he's done a bunch of brilliant comparative political scientists.
who studied democratic stability and instability across the world, but in particular across the well-established, highly institutionalized democracies. And what he finds is that the American-style system of presidentialism and separation of powers only really works in the United States of America. Many, many, many countries have copied this system. All of Latin America copied it.
And it doesn't work anywhere except for the U.S. So again, American exceptionalism, except kind of in its dark form, because this system is only worked up to now in the U.S., everywhere else in the world, Westminster-style parliamentary democracy, where you have a really effective steam valve, sort of an escape valve.
When conflict gets very high, you just have a vote of no confidence, you bring down the government, it triggers an election, and then you get a new constellation of parties, representatives, and
You know, either the same party comes back, but in a new form, or you get a coalition, or the other party, you know, Labour wins, as just happened now in the UK, thank God, because the old government was just a disaster.
You don't have that in the American system, where, you know, a party that's hobbled, like, staggers on, and resentment builds up, and then finally you get an election, you know, after four years, and God only knows what happens then. And this is kind of scary, because... This is not necessarily what he argued. I'm kind of bringing his argument to the current day.
But this ideological overlap that we used to have that you mentioned between Republicans and Democrats is part of what made this exceptional American system work. And now they segregated. And I think now is an open question as to whether it can continue working. Especially when the ideological polarization hits the Supreme Court, right? Exactly, yeah. It's absolutely everywhere.
And I think you're, I mean, this is, you didn't quite say it, but with the example of Bolivia, where you had a system that worked pretty well for a while and then suddenly collapsed because it was unstable and the pressures built up. I can imagine that the success of the American presidential system, you know, sort of we lucked out a little bit.
And now that they have sorted into two very, very different parties, it's going to be harder. Does this... Would you make the argument that there is something simply objectively better about a more parliamentary system when – because it sort of gives the possibility of a 10 percent third party still having viability in a way that in the United States is just impossible?
Yeah, so there are two separate issues here. One is a parliamentary system versus an American-style presidential system, and the other is a system of voting. So here, you know, compare the U.S. at one end to Britain in the middle to a continental European country on the other end, where they have proportional representation. The U.K.
still has first-past-the-post, so in any constituency, like in the U.S., only one person is going to win that seat, and if you get, you know, 20% of the vote, you still lose the election and they elect somebody from one of the main two parties. So you're really penalized for being the third party. In Europe, you have proportional representation.
So if you win 10% of the vote, you're going to get 10% of parliament. And then, A, you're there. In the UK, the Liberal Democrats are nowhere. Well, they're not nowhere, but they're well below their... Actually, the better example is the recent right-wing Reform Party, which I don't like at all, of Nigel Farage, who won something like, I can't remember now, it's either 15 or 20% of the vote.
I think it was around 15% of the vote. And I think they only got one or two seats in parliament in a parliament of 600 plus seats, right? So, I mean, they won out of all proportion to their representation. Whereas in PR, then you win 10%, you have 10% of representation, you have a voice in parliament, and it's likely you're gonna be involved in some sort of coalition government.
So the way political scientists think about this is that first past the post takes relatively small electoral majorities and turns them into big legislative majorities. Right. The Labour Party in this last election quite recently only won 35 or so percent of the vote, but they have a huge stonking majority. I mean, a vast majority in Parliament.
And so they can do all kinds of things and pass legislation. Walter Badgett, a constitutional thinker and one of the most important editors of The Economist magazine, called it an electoral dictatorship. Because there's so much power. It's interesting because it's much more powerful than the American executive, but it's also much more brittle and then it can fall. Right. Right.
I mean, you've seen how many prime ministers cycled through just over the past couple of years in the UK. when there was one American president, right? But then each of those prime ministers could do things that are beyond the wildest dreams of an American president in terms of changing policy or passing legislation.
Well, that's what makes it very interesting to me. I see lots of benefits of both a parliamentary system and proportional representation for people. But since I haven't lived under those systems, I wonder about... the hidden worries. The good thing about the American system is supposed to be checks and balances, right?
We can have different control over the legislature, the courts, the presidency, and when the country is literally split, maybe that's a good thing. Whereas like you say, if you have the system where suddenly you have a big majority in parliament, there's not a lot that can stop you from implementing your agenda for better or for worse.
Yeah. Well, your parliamentarians can stop you if they start words. Let's say things are going badly. So let's just run the current experiment in the UK forward. And let's say that for whatever reason, Keir Starmer and the new government becomes unpopular in a couple of years time. Now, you know, they have a mandate for up to five years.
It's the prime minister can choose when he calls an election. And so he has the power to choose an election at the moment that is best for him or her. But in principle, it's up to five years. But let's say he gets very unpopular because he makes some dumb policies and or there are some macro shocks to do with the war in Ukraine or the economy or something along these lines.
If his own parliamentarians start worrying that they're going to lose their seat by continuing to support his government, they're going to just turn against him. And so you saw this when the shoe was on the other foot with the Tories during all of the morass, the debacle with Brexit, debacle for the country, but also debacle for the Tory party that prosecuted it.
And they brought down one after another of their own prime ministers that they had put in place because individual MPs thought, if I keep supporting Liz Truss, you know, there's no way I'm going to lose. There's no way I'm going to get reelected in my constituency. So even there, there's this kind of escape valve within the party if you have an unpopular or unsuccessful government.
To complete the story, the thinking is that whereas first past the post turned small majorities into big electoral, into big legislative differences that then, you know, strong governments that can do what they want to do. That's a good thing in the sense of getting a big change, sending a big signal and getting differences in policy.
The opposite is the continental proportional representation system where you never really get a clean sweep of government or of political parties. Let's say that you have a new election and then some parties go up a few percentage points and other parties go down a few percentage points.
And what happens is you get a minor reshuffling of the government, but often it's the same parties or all but one of the same parties in the new government, which looks a lot like the old government. Same people. Yeah. the British and American systems is like clean sweep. It's like, get out of here. We're tired of Republicans. We're going to have Democrats. We're tired of Democrats.
We're going to have Republicans. Yeah. Right. If things are going pretty well, the continental system is better. Yeah. Right. Because it represents what people, people's honest, um, freely expressed sincere desires better because some people are really sincere green voters and that's what they care about. And some people are really hard right and they're there. They're not being repressed.
Their voices are being heard. When things go bad, what you actually need is a clean sweep and the continental system doesn't provide it.
There's probably some mathematical theorem to the effect that there is no system that works well all the time.
So I think I would need someone like you to show that mathematically because that's probably beyond my field. But yeah, that's the general wisdom.
Okay, I know that it's late, but I can't let you go because one more question, mildly relevant. We just had an election, quote unquote, in Venezuela, right? like days before we're talking about this, and I'm sure that it's going to be on the mind of some of our listeners. Now, it seems like less of an interesting social science problem and more just like corruption and autocracy problem.
Yeah. Okay. So a quick context, Venezuela was the most sophisticated, the richest, and the most politically stable country in Latin America. Venezuela and Argentina usually were competing to be the richest, but Venezuela has a fair claim for a large part of the 20th century. In the 50s, it looked like it was in GDP per capita terms, because it was only about 20 million people.
It looked like it was going to overtake the U.S. The wheels start falling off the cart in 1978. And then in the 90s, things get worse. Hugo Chavez tries to mount a coup. He fails but becomes a big figure and then he actually gets elected president. And at that point, Venezuela goes into really steep decline because these crazy, what he calls 21st century socialism policies, it just like got.
Venezuela had had a highly politically mobilized population where 90% of people were members of a party and 90% of, sorry, were registered as voters and 90% of registered voters voted in elections. Wow. Which, compared to the U.S. or the U.K., is crazy. It's wonderful. It's an unbelievable level of political participation. And the wheels totally fall off the cart.
He dies, Hugo Chávez dies, and he has to live with Inigo Las Maduro, who just makes things worse. And the country is becoming an autocracy. The economy, it had a very sophisticated economy. productive sector in the sense of being an industrializing country where a lot of industries were located in Venezuela and made things that were consumed domestically.
They were even beginning to export some industrial products. All of that gets gutted, and today it's oil. And oil is around the government. The government sucks oil out of the ground, pays off members of the military to continue supporting it. If you're an elite tied in with the government, you do extremely well, and everybody else is
working in the informal sector, selling chewing gum or driving illegal taxis and just like trying to make ends meet. And about a third of the population has fled the country, the largest single number to Colombia. So the opposition says that they have clear evidence, voting evidence, because they were present in as many different voting locations as they could be.
that they won and they won by large double digit majorities. They think that they won something like 70% of the vote and that Maduro is just stealing it, which to me, it looks like that's happening. What is not clear to me is how much evidence do they have? I'm sure they have some evidence, but is it anecdotal or is it really broad evidence?
1988.
So I got there just in time for that, just after I'd graduated from an undergraduate. And he held a plebiscite and he was so arrogant, he thought he was going to win it outright. And happily for democracy, he allowed independent observers to be present at all the mesas de votación, the places where people went to vote.
And he allowed a process where each vote was opened and shown publicly to observers and then counted. And then what the Chilean Democratic opposition did was to organize a series of reporters who were just like reading out the results.
And when each Mesa had finished counting, they gave the totals and they relayed this back to Santiago to an independent radio station that was just like calling it out. And so at some point he tried to steal the election. When it became clear he had lost, he was flabbergasted. He had no idea he was gonna lose. When it became clear that he had lost roughly 60-40,
then they turned out the lights on the electoral authority and they tried to steal the election. But by then it was clear because there had been independent observers at every single place where Chileans voted. So, you know, at this point it's just, you know, he's going against reality. And happily Chile is too sophisticated society with too many educated people to allow that to happen.
So are we going to get that kind of thing in Venezuela now or is it going to be able to steal it? And I think it's all down to how much evidence they have.
For what it's worth, and maybe not that much, I'm not going to push this too hard, but Kieran Healy, who was a sociologist, previous Mindscape guest, did the fun thing of, in the Venezuelan, reported vote totals. He took the number that was reported as voting for a single party and just divided it by the total number of votes. And so you get a fraction. Okay, that's fine.
Between zero and one, it's not that bad. But the fraction, which you would ordinarily expect to be like, you know, 0.5438, whatever it is, the fraction is 0.54300000000. Which means that what happened is someone took the vote total, multiplied it by 54.2, and made up the reported vote total from that, rather than... That makes sense. A regular number. So I don't know.
It's certainly not going to hold up in a court of law. And maybe it actually just is a coincidence. But the chance of being coincidence is you can quantify it, right? One part in 10 to the 5 or something like that.
Yeah, yeah. Vanishingly small. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. No, I mean, that's my intuition is that they were cheating in all kinds of ways. And the question is, are they going to try to – In past elections, I think he would have freely, if they had been free and fair, he would have lost, but it was closer. It's one thing to cheat if you're losing 55-45.
It's something else to cheat if you're losing 70-30. And having lost 70, like the people know, Venezuelans know this, right? They know that in my community, in my neighborhood, in my town, they have a sense. Try governing a country where you just lost an election 70-30 and then you declaimed that you won it. Yeah, it's going to be tough.
All right, so I'm going to let you go, but very last question, very simple, using all of the powers of your political science, developmental, economics knowledge, how is democracy in the United States doing? Is it going to last?
Oh, God, this is the scariest question of all in my field, Sean, because you try... I have a friend, a Brazilian friend, who says when he's in a seminar and people complain about from developing countries, the US does this and the US does that. He says, yeah, absolutely. The US has done all kinds of things. It's made mistakes. It's done malicious things in Vietnam, et cetera.
But you just try being a developing country in a world where the US is an autocracy or is a dysfunctional democracy. And then it's actually being run by China plus Russia, by whom? So this is a terrifying question. We talked about the kind of very academic ideological separation that's happened in the country amongst voters and amongst legislators.
There's something additional which is even more terrifying, which is that one of the two political parties has been taken over by, frankly, crazy people as far as I can tell. many of whom seem to want to degrade the institutions of democracy itself, break down the checks and balances and warp in really fundamental ways how democracy works.
And this has never happened before in the American experience. You had Democrats and Republicans who often fought viciously, who accused each other in the 19th century of being child molesters and homosexuals and all the worst things you could say at the time, right? but they didn't actively try to degrade the institutions of democracy. There was respect.
The other guys won, that really sucked, but oh well, we're gonna continue playing fair because we'll get our chance four years from now. And some of these people at least are trying to degrade the institutions. And I fear if they get into power,
then, you know, a system with all the problems that we talked about with ideological polarization, where additionally people are trying to break the rules or change the rules to systematically favor one side, the minority side over the other, you know, it's not a system I want to live in.
Yeah, me neither. So I guess we've got to keep working to keep it a little bit better than that.
Yeah, I don't want to end on such a dark note. I hope... I don't want to speak ill of all Republicans, but I think the MAGA people are really toxic and really dangerous. And so I hope if this election is not won by them, then there is a generational change and an ideological change in the Republican Party.
Because then, you know, Trump and his followers will have lost too many elections and they'll say, OK, we have to try something different. And then hopefully the system reverts. The US has been in bad places before, but it hasn't been in this particular bad place. And that's what's scary.
Yeah. Well, you know, something about crisis, forging virtue or something like that, I think we'll have to see whether we can rise to the occasion or not. But you've given us a lot to think about. Jean-Paul Foguet, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.
Bye.
Bye.