Tom Pepinsky

Category: Research

  • Should You Vote in an Undemocratic Election?

    Many people living in non-democratic systems face a difficult personal decision when their regimes hold elections. Should they participate in the election, on the hope that doing so might overturn the regime by surprise, or that it might at least generate some sort of accountability from the regime? Or should they abstain, stay at home, to avoid being complicit in legitimating a regime that is fundamentally uninterested in democracy or popular voice and which has no intention of losing? As it turns out, we have few guides for helping us reason through this moral question, despite the fact that authoritarian regimes that hold elections are increasingly common around the world.

    In a new working paper (PDF), Turku Isiksel and I provide a framework for helping us to resolve this tension. The starting point is that democratic theorists and political philosophers have devoted substantial effort (see e.g. here) to the question of the moral obligations to vote under democracy (either idealized or actually-existing democracies). But authoritarian elections are fundamentally different, and these differences undermine many of the arguments that might either justify or obligate citizens in democracies to participate in elections. Many of us believe that good citizens always vote in elections—but authoritarian elections are a different affair, and it might be the case that good citizens don’t vote in authoritarian elections.

    So, should you vote in an undemocratic election? The short answer is it depends. The long answer is that the obligation to vote in an authoritarian context depends on background assumptions about what value we attribute to this particular form of political participation, the anticipated consequences of collective voice in an authoritarian regime, and expectations about whether democratic habitus under authoritarianism is a foundation for democratic citizenship some point in the future.

    There’s lots more to chew on in the paper itself. Here is the abstract.

    When accounting for why elections, voting, and political representation are meaningful and valuable practices, political theorists tend to assume that the political system in which these institutions occur is broadly democratic. However, authoritarian regimes also make use of these institutions. Furthermore, recent empirical research shows that elections in “hybrid,” “competitive authoritarian,” or “pseudo-democratic” regimes matter. They can stabilize authoritarian regimes by giving them the veneer of popular approval, although they can also provide opportunities for unseating incumbent regimes. Are the ethics of political participation—and, specifically, of voting—fundamentally different in non-democratic regimes? Do the same civic imperatives that support voting in democracies come out in favor of boycotts, abstentions, or even civil disobedience under electoral authoritarianism? Can citizens expect elections and electoral participation to increase the chances of a democratic transition? We argue that more complex moral considerations confront voters in authoritarian regimes compared to voters in democratic regimes, since the answers to these questions hinge in part on the role elections play in authoritarian states. We argue that a voter’s judgment must depend not merely on principled justifications for political participation but also on prudential considerations about the impact that electoral participation is likely to have on the regime’s longevity. We enumerate some of these considerations.

  • On Mankiw and Cochrane on Writing

    Via Greg Mankiw, I discovered this short compendium of excellent writing advice from two very good economics writers. These principles mostly apply across the social sciences. I say “mostly” because there are some exceptions. Here are my marginal notes on what’s most important in this list, and what to ignore.

    Points 4 (Clarity) is the key. From it follow Points 5, 6, 9 (Efficiency, Skimming, and Punchlines). Effective social science writing is easy to digest, especially in snippets and introductions. The best start-to-finish papers don’t have to be read start-to-finish.

    Points 10 and 11 (Knowledge and Responsibility) are more even important than they might seem. “Much bad writing comes down to trying to avoid responsibility for what you’re saying” follows directly from George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language:

    The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

    Points 12 and 13 (Feedback and Editors) are also essential. It is very, very hard to write effectively without feedback from a trusted source or two. My first trusted sources were my parents. But these two points come into some conflict with Point 8 (Individuality). In my experience, committees can be quite useful in generating effective writing. The trick is managing the division of labor.

    And this brings me to the point with which I most strongly disagree. In my view, Point 7 (Competition) is incorrect. Not as a matter of taste, but as a point of fact. For almost all people, “The benefits of writing the 10th best [book] are” actually quite large. The perfect is the enemy of the good-enough-for-impact/tenure/acknowledgment. What this means is, perniciously, that lousy writing generally survives unless you work to get rid of it.

    I’d like to imagine a world in which all social science writing is effective, meaning that it no longer distinguishes between (to continue the example) the first-best and 10th-best books. However unlikely we are to find ourselves in that world, it would be one in which the social sciences would better shape the public debate. Until then, Mankiw and Cochrane’s principles apply.