Tom Pepinsky

Category: Research

  • The Culture of Political Culture in Indonesia and Malaysia

    What do Jokowi‘s Mental Revolution and Abdullah Ahmad Badawi‘s Islam Hadhari have in common? They are both normative expressions of desire for a new kind of politics that is more ethical, just, humane, and progressive, even if they differ in how this ought to be manifest. But Mental Revolution and Islam Hadhari also share an assumption about what is wrong with the societies in which they would operate: they both appeal to problems of national character. They presuppose that “what is wrong” with politics ultimately lies with societies themselves, such that changing mass cultural mindsets is a precondition for political change. The problem, in other words, is political culture.

    I explore this idea at greater length in an essay entitled “Adab and the Culture of Political Culture,” prepared for an upcoming conference on adab in Southeast Asia. Adab means something like manners or etiquette or comportment, and my brief is to write on its politics in Southeast Asia. But aside from a version of the mirrors-for-princes genre that can be found in classical Malay literature, it is hard to discern exactly what the politics of adab is. So instead, I reflect on the way that adab and words formed from it—beradab, peradaban, berkeadaban—are used both in popular discourse and by political elites. Doing so highlights, first, the general vagueness of how adab and its derivatives are actually used, but second, a common belief that politics is ultimately an expression of national character. A civilized politics (politik beradab) is an expression of a civilized nation.

    I am not proposing that adab denotes a particular vision of political culture in Indonesia and Malaysia. Rather, that its use simply reflects a cultural predisposition to believe that political culture is somehow problematic. This is a “second-order political culture,” or a culture of political culture. There is surely nothing unique to Indonesia and Malaysia about this. However, it is easy to see how a culture of political culture is a convenient distraction from an alternative diagnosis of “what is wrong” with contemporary politics, one that focuses on the failures of politicians or political institutions.

  • Simple Models for Complex Politics

    Politics is complex. For scholars of comparative politics who study domestic politics in an increasingly globalized world, understanding the interactions among local, national, transnational, regional, and global forces is essential. So how should we proceed? One view is that grasping complexity means discarding simple theories and spare models of politics that do not reflect the complexity that we know exists. The position is intuitively appealing: complex problems require complex tools.

    There is, however, another view. My colleague Andrew Little and I have recently finished a new paper on formal theory in comparative politics entitled “Simple Formal Models in Comparative Politics” (PDF). It is written as part of a dialogue on the future of comparative politics, and responds (in part) to work by Philippe Schmitter (see e.g. here) in which complexity[*], multi-level politics, and the dangers of simplifying assumptions figure prominently. Part of the paper is a clarification of the state of formal theory in comparative politics. We show that formal theory still occupies a relatively small part of the work being done in comparative politics, and that there is scant evidence that this is going to change any time soon. We also comment on some common beliefs about what models and assumptions are for which, sadly, remain all too common in the discipline.

    But more interesting and broadly relevant is what comes next. We argue that in a world of complex interactions, simplification—in formal theory as in other kinds of theorizing—is a virtue, not a vice. We explain why in detail in the paper, but at root is the fact that theories are always simplifications, and descriptive accuracy is but one criterion by which a theory ought to be judged. We also suggest that professional incentives lead modelers to create formal models that are more complicated than they need to be. Our suggestions for how simple models of politics (formal or otherwise) might join together with the “complexity-embracing” modes of research is a nice parallel to recent contributions by Gehlbach (PDF) and Lorentzen et al (PDF). Our perspective on theory-as-simplification also parallels Healy’s colorful reflections on “nuance” (PDF).

    So yes, the politics is complex, but this does not mean our theories must be also. Instead, we need multiple just-simple-enough theories, and continuous collaboration with case experts and other empiricists to know what “just-simple-enough” means.

    Note

    [*] Without speaking for my coauthor, I doubt that this is a particularly revolutionary idea when the term “complex interdependence” is nearly a century old, and prominent scholars have been asking questions like “is the traditional distinction between international relations and domestic politics dead?” longer than I have been alive (see Gourevitch 1978).