Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • When Your Epistemology Won’t Cooperate with Reality

    Via @betsylevyp, I came across a new paper by Maya Sen and Omar Wasow on race and causal inference. It’s excellent, well worth a read.

    The title of this post is not a critique, not exactly. It’s a reflection on the problem that Sen and Wasow confront. The issue that the currently dominant theory of causality in most social science—which is really an epistemology of causality rather than a theory of it—defines causality in terms of differences between outcomes in a unit that occupies both treatment and control states. This entails that the unit could in principle occupy both treatment and control states. In other words, manipulability is the foundation of studying causal effects. This “causation requires manipulation” framework is usually associated with the Rubin causal model but has a much longer pedigree in philosophy.

    Our problem is that race—and other things like gender, height, etc.—is not manipulable. That means that no matter how perfect the design, the difference in outcomes between two different racial groups cannot be interpreted as “the effect of race.” This bothers many people, mostly philosophers, but also me. It suggests that our epistemology of causality must be somehow mistaken. We should be able to ask questions of the type “what is the effect of race on Y?” Reality demands it. I can’t count the number of times I’ve stayed up late debating this point.

    Sen and Wasow solve the problem by appealing to a constructivist conception of race, which renders some aspects of race manipulable. It’s a smart move and one that I endorse. But I am just as eager to read a thorough critique too. One preliminary thought is that their constructivist understanding of race is situationalist, so what we manipulate is not race itself or the sticks the constitute it, but the conditions under which race is understood, encountered, produced, etc. That strikes me as somehow different than manipulating the un-manipulatable.

  • Can Procedural and Substantive Democracy Move in Opposition Directions?

    It is possible for the electoral dimensions of democracy to become stronger at the same time that the substantive dimensions of democracy weaken or erode?

    Some background:

    1. Next Thursday, I’m participating in a Brown Bag discussion at Columbia with Joseph Liow, Duncan McCargo, and Ann Marie Murphy. Our collective task is to think about prospects for democratic backsliding and democratic progress in Southeast Asia. (Come on by!) My individual task is to do this in the context of Indonesia’s new Jokowi administration.

    2. Separately, I recently participated in a USAID-funded project on democratic backsliding. As part of that, I put together a short memo in which I tried to lay out a typology of varieties of democratic change. Borrowing the distinction between procedural versus substantive democracy, I produced this nine-fold typology of varieties of democratic change—assuming, of course, that this is change within a democracy rather than a discrete shift to authoritarianism.
    Screen Shot 2014-11-06 at 11.13.19 AM
    The typology is defined by possibilities of change. For example, if the latent probability that executive authority is allocated in competitive elections between political parties decreases (the procedural dimension), and rights and liberties are curtailed (a short-hand for the substantive dimension), then I want to call that “democratic degradation.” If rights remain the same but procedures corrode, I term that “authoritarian creep.”

    And as originally written, the typology had no term for 2 out of the 9 categories. Those are the combinations of “more procedure less substance” and “less procedure more substance.” At the time that I developed the typology, I hypothesized that those are not logically possible, what Colin Elman terms “logical compression.”

    But I am now reevaluating this in light of the new Jokowi administration. It strikes me that it’s entirely possible that Indonesia has become more procedurally democratic in the past year, but that we could nevertheless see further deterioration in the substantive dimensions of Indonesian democracy.

    But looking comparatively this would be rare, so my best guess is that it is possible, but not probable. As a hopelessly imperfect exercise, let’s just examine how frequently—in the cross-national context—we observe a decrease in civil liberties (as defined by Freedom House) alongside an increase in political rights (also defined by Freedom House). Here is a jittered scatterplot.
    PR vs CL
    Out of 6668 country-years around the world, we observe only 32 country-years (< 0.5%) where civil liberties decrease while political rights increase. But of course, if you don't share my evaluation that Indonesia's procedural democracy was strengthened over the past year, then you might consider deterioration in substantive democracy more likely (and in fact, 333 country-years around the world show civil liberties decreasing while political rights stay the same). But it's still relatively rare. But then again, it happened in Indonesia last year.

    In all, food for thought as we read the tea leaves of the new Jokowi administration, and as we conceptualize possible trajectories for Indonesian democracy over the coming years.