Алистер Смит - The Dictator's Handbook - Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

This is true outside of the United States as well. As governments shift toward or away from democracy, or leaders experience different degrees of dependence on large or small coalitions in different parts of their domain, they adjust their private goods giving accordingly. We can see this by comparing two transitional democracies: Tanzania, which seems on the way to expanding its coalition, and Russia, whose coalition seems to be shrinking.

Earlier we talked about how Tanzania’s parliament, the Bunge, superficially looks like it reflects the structure of a large-coalition democratic government. We saw that, beneath the surface of apparent democracy, it is a transitional regime that retains many characteristics of a small-coalition environment. That is, the selectorate expanded more quickly that the winning coalition, emulating a rigged system. This standard problem of transitional regimes is accomplished through a variety of means that restrict how large the coalition can be even as universal suffrage is introduced. One of the ways in which the coalition is kept artificially small in Tanzania is by reserving many parliamentary seats for women who are indirectly elected by the parties in parliament and by permitting several members of the Bunge to be appointed by the president. The result is that the true size of the required winning coalition is much less than a majority of the legislature. And when we zoomed in on district-level elections in Tanzania, we realized that, just as in multicandidate elections in Bell, California, in Tanzania’s parliamentary districts a winning coalition only requires one more vote than the second largest of the many parties competing for office. This translates into needing less than 10 percent of the vote, and very often much less. To get that crucial percentage, the government doles out private rewards.

Tanzania’s main crop is maize. The government therefore selectively provides vouchers for subsidized purchases of maize seed. The vouchers to different districts are of varying value, providing two opportunities to observe private rewards at work. Our perspective implies that who gets vouchers and how much the vouchers are worth should be driven by the size of the winning coalition in each district. After all, the voucher program could just be a central government reward to loyal, small-coalition constituencies. Large-coalition districts, in that case, would be unlikely to receive vouchers or would only receive vouchers of little value even if they are heavily dependent on maize production and are impoverished.7

In providing vouchers, the Tanzanian central government confronts an opportunity to equalize or distort economic and social conditions. It could make decisions purely on a needs basis (poverty and low productivity) or it could make decisions to dole out resources on a political survival basis; that is, rewards for the politically loyal rather than the economically needy. And what do you think they do? Without boring you with the details of the statistical analysis of the data, here are the essentials when it comes to maize vouchers in Tanzania.

As we have sadly come to expect, the impact of coalition size is substantial, with a doubling of the size of a district’s presidential election–winning coalition being equal to about a 69 percent decline in the prospect of receiving vouchers. The value of the vouchers is even more dramatically responsive to coalition size than is the likelihood of receiving them. Looking only at the districts that actually received vouchers we found that doubling the number of district-level essentials (remembering that the districts receiving vouchers are selected on the basis of having a small coalition to begin with), produces about a one third reduction in the value of the vouchers they got. Thus we find that even among the small-coalition districts—those most likely to receive vouchers—the central government sharply discriminates between those that value private goods the most (the smallest coalition districts) and those that value such goods least (the relatively larger small-coalition districts).

How about handing out vouchers on the basis of need? It turns out that productivity is linked to the odds of getting vouchers and to their worth—but it is the higher productivity districts that do better, not the ones needing help improving their productivity. As for poverty and vouchers—it turns out that need has no impact on the use of vouchers to help stimulate the agricultural economy, the very purpose the government gives for the program. Leader self-interest once again trumps a choice to do what’s best for the people, except, as expected, when the district-level winning coalition is large. In those districts, just as we have learned to expect, there are more effective public policies. People living in the large-coalition districts, for instance, have better access to healthcare, lower infant mortality rates, and more residential electrification than those living in small-coalition districts.

Without a doubt, corruption is endemic to small-coalition regimes. Governments that transition from autocracy to democracy diminish corruption in the process. Tanzania, for instance, seems to be slowly improving in its governance. In 2010, Transparency International ranked it as 116 out of 178 in corruption, considerably better, for instance, than Russia. As we have come to expect, governments like Russia’s, which are making the transition in the opposite direction, gradually abandoning their shifts toward democracy in favor of a smaller coalition autocracy, embrace corruption as crucial to their leadership’s political survival.

As we have noted, Russia is among the world’s most corrupt states. As such, the political logic of private goods can be seen vividly in the workings of its corruption.

Low salaries for police forces are a common feature of small coalition regimes and Russia is no exception. At first blush this might seem surprising. The police are crucial to a regime’s survival. Police officers are charged with maintaining civil order—which often boils down to crushing antigovernment protests and bashing the heads of antigovernment activists. Surely inducing such behavior requires either great commitment to the regime or good compensation. But as elsewhere, the logic of corruption takes a more complex turn.

Though private rewards can be provided directly out of the government’s treasury, the easiest way to compensate the police for their loyalty—including their willingness to oppress their fellow citizens—is to give them free rein to be corrupt. Pay them so little that they can’t help but realize it is not only acceptable but necessary for them to be corrupt. Then they will be doubly beholden to the regime: first, they will be grateful for the wealth the regime lets them accumulate; second, they will understand that if they waver in loyalty, they are at risk of losing their privileges and being prosecuted. Remember Mikhail Khodorkovsky? He used to be the richest man in Russia. We do not know whether he was corrupt or not, but we do know that he was not loyal to the Putin government and duly found himself prosecuted for corruption. Police face the same threat.

Consider former police major and whistleblower, Alexei Dymovsky. 8 Mr. Dymovsky, by his own admission, was a corrupt policeman in Novorossiysk, a city of 225,000 people. He noted that on a new recruit’s salary of $413 a month (12,000 rubles) he could not make ends meet and so had to turn to corruption. Dymovsky claims he personally only took very small amounts of money. Whether that is true or not, we cannot know. What we do know is what happened next.

In a video he made and sent to Vladimir Putin before it became famous on YouTube, “Mr. Dymovsky also described a practice that is considered common in Russia: When officers end their shifts, they have to turn over a portion of their bribes to the so-called cashier, a senior member of the department. Typically, $25 to $100 a day. If officers do not pay up, they are disciplined.” According to his own account, Mr. Dymovsky eventually grew tired of being corrupt and feeling compelled to be corrupt. As the New York Times reported, he inquired of Vladimir Putin, “How can a police officer accept bribes? . . . Do you understand where our society is heading? . . . You talk about reducing corruption,” he said. “You say that it should not be just a crime, that it should be immoral. But it is not like that. I told my boss that the police are corrupt. And he told me that it cannot be done away with.”