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- Kim Philby#9330
Hello dear students!
Some of you have asked whether I would be interested in hosting a lesson on a topic I know something about. I put out feelers to those who expressed the most interest, and they picked Politics of Authoritarian Rule by Milan Svolik. However, as I suspect that most of you don’t own the book, and while I will always endorse going out and buying it, I have instead chosen to record me reading three chapters for you to listen to.
The class will proceed as follows: For the first three weeks we will go over the first two chapters. Meanwhile, we will read two papers, called Deliver the Vote, and Power Sharing and Leadership Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes, and chapter 4 of the book, which we will discuss in the first two weeks of August. In preparation for the last two weeks we will read two more papers, Which Democracies Will Last?, and Learning to Love Democracy. The recordings and the papers are all found on my Google Drive, where I have made a dedicated folder to the material.
As an introduction to Milan Svolik, I could go over his research or publications, but that is what the class itself is about, so instead I will prepare you to read a lot of game theory. I don’t need you to be able to redo the game theory logic or any of the Rational Actor Modelling (RAM), but I do want you to be able to at least follow along with what Svolik is trying to say. That part is both not quite as tough, but also far more crucial to trust the arguments and predictions that Svolik puts forward. I could, again, ask you to purchase books on the topic (Such as Scharpf’s Games Real Actors Play or Tsebelis’ Nested Games: Rational Choice in Comparative Politics), but if I don’t expect you to buy Svolik’s book, you sure as hell can’t be expected to buy game theory books. Instead, I merely suggest that you skim through the relevant Wikipedia page, and keep the Stanford Encyclopedia open when reading.
As a note on my own recordings. I have left out all traditional references. I would refer to the book in-text as “(Svolik, 2012)”, which disrupts the reading. If I leave out specific sub-chapters, such as appendices, I note so in the recording. In Chapter 4, where we will get into formal modelling, I will leave out as many of the equations as I can, because when reading them out loud, they become meaningless babble. Lastly, I’m not a perfect reading machine. I don’t podcast, and I don’t have a studio for this. As such, the sound isn’t great, there will be artefacts, and it is unedited. I have tried to confirm that the sound won’t make your ears bleed or give you cancer, but I make no promises apart from that.
My role in this class will be that of a moderator or TA, not of a lecturer or someone to point at you and ask specific questions about the percentage on page 25. I will ask questions to prompt your intuitions, to make you doubt yourself, Svolik, or others, but I won’t (and can’t) make it interesting unless you choose to engage with the material and each other. I offer this Summer class as an optional.
For this week, we listen to the two first chapters of Svolik’s book. The figures and tables mentioned are accessible as pictures, with chapter 1 here and chapter 2 here.
We will discuss the implications of the theoretical considerations and what empirical implications they may have. As with any academic text, the introduction really sets up what we are going to learn about, and what we aren’t going to address at all, so an obvious first question is how Svolik delineates between democracy and dictatorship, as first one of kind and then of degree. This contrast is important in the field of comparative political science, but for our purpose here, we should first clear up whether we understand what he means by that, and if we agree with his assertion.
What is/are the central feature(s) that distinguishes between democracy and dictatorship? With the criteria Svolik uses, what does that mean for our field of study?
How should we think about different types of dictatorships?
If dictatorships are, in a way, the residual category for those systems of government where violence is an inherent and unavoidable factor in politics, what is that saying about democracies? Are we merely democracies contingent on our ability to resolve our differences by words and votes?
If a system allows multiple parties and contested elections, but the coalition in power just gets 60+% of the vote for decades and decades, do we call that a dictatorship, or do we call it Sweden during the Swedish Social Democratic Party’s hegemonic period (Roughly 1936-2002)? How do we contrast that to Mexico during the PRI years, where the PRI won every election between 1929 and 2000 (So roughly the same period) but which we call autocratic?
The data presented are only building blocks so far, but we can still consider the rationale for replacing the various adjective-autocracy or adjective-democracy labels. Do we find Svolik’s arguments convincing? Why, why not? Using the metrics Svolik outlines (Military involvement, limits on political parties, legislative elections, executive elections), pick two dictatorships, one that is indisputably autocratic and one that would have been categorised as an adjective-dictatorship or adjective-democracy in another system, and see where they fall. What are the differences between the hardcore and the softer dictatorships you picked, by Svolik’s parameters?
ps. There won’t be a final paper or a grade. If you listen and read along, you get an A in this class.
Some of you have asked whether I would be interested in hosting a lesson on a topic I know something about. I put out feelers to those who expressed the most interest, and they picked Politics of Authoritarian Rule by Milan Svolik. However, as I suspect that most of you don’t own the book, and while I will always endorse going out and buying it, I have instead chosen to record me reading three chapters for you to listen to.
The class will proceed as follows: For the first three weeks we will go over the first two chapters. Meanwhile, we will read two papers, called Deliver the Vote, and Power Sharing and Leadership Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes, and chapter 4 of the book, which we will discuss in the first two weeks of August. In preparation for the last two weeks we will read two more papers, Which Democracies Will Last?, and Learning to Love Democracy. The recordings and the papers are all found on my Google Drive, where I have made a dedicated folder to the material.
As an introduction to Milan Svolik, I could go over his research or publications, but that is what the class itself is about, so instead I will prepare you to read a lot of game theory. I don’t need you to be able to redo the game theory logic or any of the Rational Actor Modelling (RAM), but I do want you to be able to at least follow along with what Svolik is trying to say. That part is both not quite as tough, but also far more crucial to trust the arguments and predictions that Svolik puts forward. I could, again, ask you to purchase books on the topic (Such as Scharpf’s Games Real Actors Play or Tsebelis’ Nested Games: Rational Choice in Comparative Politics), but if I don’t expect you to buy Svolik’s book, you sure as hell can’t be expected to buy game theory books. Instead, I merely suggest that you skim through the relevant Wikipedia page, and keep the Stanford Encyclopedia open when reading.
As a note on my own recordings. I have left out all traditional references. I would refer to the book in-text as “(Svolik, 2012)”, which disrupts the reading. If I leave out specific sub-chapters, such as appendices, I note so in the recording. In Chapter 4, where we will get into formal modelling, I will leave out as many of the equations as I can, because when reading them out loud, they become meaningless babble. Lastly, I’m not a perfect reading machine. I don’t podcast, and I don’t have a studio for this. As such, the sound isn’t great, there will be artefacts, and it is unedited. I have tried to confirm that the sound won’t make your ears bleed or give you cancer, but I make no promises apart from that.
My role in this class will be that of a moderator or TA, not of a lecturer or someone to point at you and ask specific questions about the percentage on page 25. I will ask questions to prompt your intuitions, to make you doubt yourself, Svolik, or others, but I won’t (and can’t) make it interesting unless you choose to engage with the material and each other. I offer this Summer class as an optional.
For this week, we listen to the two first chapters of Svolik’s book. The figures and tables mentioned are accessible as pictures, with chapter 1 here and chapter 2 here.
We will discuss the implications of the theoretical considerations and what empirical implications they may have. As with any academic text, the introduction really sets up what we are going to learn about, and what we aren’t going to address at all, so an obvious first question is how Svolik delineates between democracy and dictatorship, as first one of kind and then of degree. This contrast is important in the field of comparative political science, but for our purpose here, we should first clear up whether we understand what he means by that, and if we agree with his assertion.
What is/are the central feature(s) that distinguishes between democracy and dictatorship? With the criteria Svolik uses, what does that mean for our field of study?
How should we think about different types of dictatorships?
If dictatorships are, in a way, the residual category for those systems of government where violence is an inherent and unavoidable factor in politics, what is that saying about democracies? Are we merely democracies contingent on our ability to resolve our differences by words and votes?
If a system allows multiple parties and contested elections, but the coalition in power just gets 60+% of the vote for decades and decades, do we call that a dictatorship, or do we call it Sweden during the Swedish Social Democratic Party’s hegemonic period (Roughly 1936-2002)? How do we contrast that to Mexico during the PRI years, where the PRI won every election between 1929 and 2000 (So roughly the same period) but which we call autocratic?
The data presented are only building blocks so far, but we can still consider the rationale for replacing the various adjective-autocracy or adjective-democracy labels. Do we find Svolik’s arguments convincing? Why, why not? Using the metrics Svolik outlines (Military involvement, limits on political parties, legislative elections, executive elections), pick two dictatorships, one that is indisputably autocratic and one that would have been categorised as an adjective-dictatorship or adjective-democracy in another system, and see where they fall. What are the differences between the hardcore and the softer dictatorships you picked, by Svolik’s parameters?
ps. There won’t be a final paper or a grade. If you listen and read along, you get an A in this class.