Tom Pepinsky

Category: Research

  • Illiberal Regimes and Internet Goggles

    In the past month we have witnessed two illiberal regimes tested by vigorous domestic oppositions. Malaysia’s competitive authoritarian regime survived a stiff electoral test. Turkey’s electoral democratic regime is facing down protestors in Taksim Square. These events were closely followed by observers from around the world, due primarily to the availability of real-time, unfiltered, sympathetic internet coverage.

    I want to propose that the internet distorts our understanding of politics in illiberal regimes. Not for country specialists—careful analysts of Malaysia and Turkey know that there’s a lot more to understanding these regimes than events in either Taksim or Merdeka Square can capture. But for causal observers, and superficial scholars, and also potentially for those in the position to make important decisions about policy, internet goggles obscure just as much as they reveal.

    The specific problem is the reduction of the regime to its anti-opposition tactics. Internet goggles do this for regimes like the AKP and the BN because that behavior is what you can observe.

    Reducing these regimes to their anti-opposition tactics is problematic in at least two ways. First, it ignores the historical context of current politics, and thereby obscures the conditions through which regimes come to power. In both the Turkish and Malaysian cases, these conditions are rooted in specific understandings of religion and the state, between the party and the market, between popular voice and political order, and between material prosperity and social concerns. (There are some parallels between the specifics in Malaysia and Turkey, but just as many differences.)

    Second, highlighting anti-opposition tactics discounts the popular support that each regime does have, and the non-electoral mechanisms through which the regime stays in power. The problem lies in the fact that the relationship between the incumbent regime and much of the population is not spectacular—which I mean in literal terms, as in “not a spectacle.” The everyday politics of regime maintenance is relatively boring. Yet without understanding why Istanbul votes for the AKP, or why Johor goes for the BN, the meaning or significance of anti-regime protest and the regime’s response is hardly possible. It is hard, reading accounts such as this or this, to understand why anyone would support the AKP or the BN.

    The consequence is not just that the media coverage isn’t comprehensive, but that the analysis based on that coverage is misleading because it misses the “real action” of regime maintenance. A quote from Clive Kessler‘s review of GE13 in Malaysia makes the point well.

    For many of those intelligent, persuasive and globally-networked young Kuala Lumpur cosmopolitans, the Malay heartlands and those who live there are just as foreign and remote a world as they certainly were to the visiting journalists. The young sophisticates with their congenial “discourse” and “narratives” were nice people, but a very poor guide to what the election was really about —— how it was being conducted where it really mattered.

    But, to those who were running the “real” campaign that inattention was no problem. On the contrary. Let the foreign press write the stories that might please them, that seemed to centre upon the overseas journalists’ own effete concerns, not those of the rural Malay voters. Let them chase after stories that led them away from the real story, the main action.à

    So let me stipulate that the AKP’s actions reveal it to be both brutal and indifferent to the Occupy Gezi protestors, and by extension the Turkish opposition—secular, cosmopolitan, leftist, or otherwise—in general. That observation, which all the world can now see plainly, means something different for a regime which can turn out 50% of the country’s voters at election time than it would in a regime that has to rig or otherwise throw elections. The harsh crackdown in Taksim Square would also be a different story altogether if it were taking place in Merdeka Square in Kuala Lumpur.

    As we watch the unfolding situation in Turkey through the goggles of Twitter and Tumblr and the Times, then, take care in drawing strong conclusions about Turkish politics from what we can perceive about the events on the ground. Just like the planned Black 505 rally in Malaysia, the current protests in Turkey cannot do justice to the forces that put AKP in power, or the mechanisms through which it stays in power. For that, less spectacular but no less troubling issues such as the Sledgehammer affair are the place to start.

  • Theory and Causal Identification

    Two lessons from my methods courses early in graduate school have been fundamental to the way I do political science.

    1. Lesson One. Data can never “speak for itself.” Only theory can tell you what what correlations mean, what empirical models are sensible, and in general how to interpret statistical results.
    2. Lesson Two. Causal inference is one of the central endeavors in social science. Moreover, when it comes to causal inference, experiments are the gold standard, and everything else must be measured against the experimental template.

    It is no exaggeration that these have shaped everything that I have done since my second year in graduate school. Both lessons seem very reasonable, if idealistic. Yet I am increasingly convinced that these two lessons are not self-evidently compatible with one another.

    Here’s what I mean: causal effects in the Rubin causal model are defined as differences between outcomes in different treatment states. I emphasize here defined. In the potential outcomes framework, this is what it means for something to be a cause of something else. There is nothing deeper.

    So where does theory (Lesson One) enter into this understanding of causality? Nowhere. If you have a treatment, the average treatment effect can be calculated irrespective of the theoretical implications or assumptions associated with it. And it truly is the causal effect by the definition of causality above. If you have a quasi-experiment in which you can claim that the treatment-like variable is strongly ignorable, or an instrument or forcing variable, then the some kind to treatment effect can be estimated from the data.

    There is a tension, then. Of course, no one goes around randomly assigning random treatments and then calculating their effects. But if you did that…you could calculate treatment effects, and they would indeed have causal interpretations under the model of causality that underlies the experimental template for causal inference. Somehow, “proper” research means using theory (that is, following Lesson One) to guide the production of causal inferences. That is the contested and messy part of the research process, one that cannot be achieved by faithfully adhering to Lesson Two. Worse yet, Lesson One doesn’t provide clear guidelines either.