Interests and Cognitive Dissonance

In my mind, one of the biggest challenges facing IPE research is how to accurately model the link between interest formation and interest aggregation. (SBD said something about this in conversation the other day, and i've been mulling it over since.) Quite often in IPE we infer interests from economic models. E.g., the scarce factor/sector of production should prefer trade protectionism, while the abundant factor/sector should prefer openness. Or we infer "government" preferences based on the partisan composition of the ruling coalition or executive. I think we all know that these are shortcuts that can't be justified in all circumstances, but as a first cut these types of assumptions often make sense.

But sociologist Fabio Rojas has some newish research (with Michael Heaney) arguing that political mobilization is highly dependent on contextual factors, even if political preferences remain constant. They produce the above graph showing that Democrats stopped showing up to anti-war rallies after Obama became president, and conclude:

Social movements and parties rely on each other. Movements benefit when partisans appear because they can bolster their numbers. Parties use movements as platform for partisan grievances. But there’s a drawback, electoral victories mean that the rank and file will stop showing up.

People don't want to mobilize against their own side.

Some have been perplexed by the Obama administration's foreign policies. Not only has he not reversed some of the Bush administration's detainee policies as he promised he would during the campaign, but he's escalated in Afghanistan and Yemen, and now gotten involved in Libya. This research suggests that one of the reasons he's taken these actions is because he is not constrained by partisans from either party: Democrats will tend to stand by their man, and Republicans tend to favor (or not oppose) military action in general. As the researchers say:

“What’s left in the antiwar movement today is the hardcore,” Heaney said in the interview, “the people who are more or less professional activists. It’s just a small group of people that’s left.”

In other words, this is not the median Democratic voter, much less the median voter in the general population.

This research was just picked up by ABC News, and for good reason. It suggests that we may need to complicate our inference-based models of interest formation and aggregation. It also suggests that if we do, we have an opportunity to get a handle on many substantive questions of interest.

Rage Against the Machine

Remember when I wondered where the anti-globalization protesters went? Turns out they migrated to Canada. It's hard to find clear reporting on the numbers of protesters or their specific activities, but apparently about 180 have been arrested so far. Still nothing like the Battle in Seattle, but it's not nothing.

More on the (Lack of an) Anti-Globalization Movement

Well. I type up a late-night blog post to give myself a temporary break from paper-writing, and wake up to find it the weekend topic du jour in the IPE blogosphere.

First, Drezner builds me up ("rising young blogger"... I'm not that young, and not rising that much either) before tearing me down:

Hmmm.... no, I don't think Winecoff is correct. Even if it's true that the kids today care more about environmental degradation than labor abuses, this shouldn't stop them from protesting at economic summits. Indeed, from the mid-nineties onwards, protests against labor and emvironmental abuses have gone together like racism/sexism/homophobia accusations.

Also, I would dispute the empirics of Winecoff's assertion. The protests didn't die out with the change in the decade -- they were pretty robust at G-8 summits in the first part of the naughties, as well as the 2003 Cancun WTO Ministerial and the 2005 Hong Kong Ministerial. This is a more recent phenomenon.

If I'd done a better job of anticipating criticisms I would have addressed Drezner's first point ahead of time. Of course I agree that protests against labor and environmental practices often go hand-in-hand, but that's because protestors often see both of those issues as symptoms of a bigger disease: globalization forces developing countries into a race-to-the-bottom that erodes labor and environmental standards (and erodes cultural diversity and norms of reciprocity, etc.).

(An aside: those sorts of protests have generally be focused at the WTO and G-8/20. The IMF doesn't have anything to do with environmental politics, and the proximate cause for this discussion is an IMF protest.)

However the focus of environmental activists in the recent past has not primarily been about how globalization leads to race-to-the-bottom dynamics in the developing world; instead, it's been about how to convince national governments and their citizens in the developed world to agree to reduce carbon consumption. The WTO doesn't have much to do with this, although it eventually could if nations start slapping carbon tariffs on each other. But a prerequisite to that is getting national governments to agree to meaningful cap-and-trade regimes or carbon taxes, so activism has shifted to the national level for the time being.

As to my "empirics"... I don't have any. It was just a casual observation, and I didn't mean to imply that there was a strict shift in protest activity from "Tons" to "None" around the turn of the millennium. Merely that anti-globalization protests have tapered off over the past decade as the institutions associated with globalization have been less active. I still think that correlation holds pretty well, and it's even pretty consistent with what Drezner says. I think he's completely wrong about his Business Cycle Theory of Economic Protests, however:

During boom times, antiglobalizers score political points by stoking fears of cultural debasement and environmental degradation. During leaner years, naked self-interest becomes the salient concern: in the current economic climate, American opponents of globalization talk less about its effect on the developing world and more about the offshore outsourcing of jobs.

First of all, there's nothing in that that suggests that overall protests against globalization should decline during lean years, only that the anti-globalizationists should be complaining about slightly different things. In fact, we've seen an uptick in protest activity in the U.S. since the financial crisis, as we should probably expect. It's just that they're not complaining about globalization because the IMF/WB/WTO are not perceived to have had much to do with the current crisis. Instead, focus has shifted to other issues like deficits, health care, and corporate welfare.

Simon Lester agrees with my earlier point that there are fewer globalization protestors because there is less to protest about: the WTO, IMF, and WB have been much less active in recent years than they were in the 1990s. He also suggests that some protestors may have switched from anti-globalization to anti-war, and Stephanie Carvin pops up in comments here to say something similar. This makes a lot of sense to me (although those protests have also mostly dried up too, in the States at least; Carvin suggests they are alive and well in Europe).

It also backs up what was my original point: protestors have one-track minds. If they're focused on the war in Iraq then they aren't focused on labor rights in Latin America. If they're focused on getting the U.S. government to institute a cap-and-trade regime then they pay less attention to the World Bank subsidizing undemocratic governments. And if the IMF hasn't done anything onerous in a decade, then there just isn't much to protest.

I don't think this is permanent. I think protest activity changes with events. If we end up getting a wave of sovereign debt crises, and the IMF imposes austerity as a condition of loans, then we'll likely see IMF protests pick back up. If Doha ever moves towards completion without environmental protections built in, then we'll likely see more anti-WTO protests. But right now those issues just aren't very pressing, so protestors have moved to other things.

Will the Last Anti-Globalizationist Turn Off the Lights?

Drezner points to this WaPo item, noting that IMF protests ain't what they used to be:

Opponents of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are protesting in the nation's capital.

About 20 activists gathered early Friday afternoon ahead of IMF and World Bank meetings this weekend in Washington. They say the international institutions favor banks and corporations and drive struggling economies into debt and poverty.

20 whole activists? Well blow me down. The G-20 protests in Pittsburgh last year weren't much more impressive. (The protest was at its largest when unaware Pitt students joined protestors and started chanting "Let's Go Pitt!") But this doesn't actually surprise me too much. In teaching over the past few semesters I've noticed that my students generally have no idea that the IMF, World Bank, and WTO are controversial organizations. Even fewer of them know why they're controversial. This is in stark contrast to my undergrad days, which coincided with the Battle in Seattle and other large protests. Then the anti-globalizationists were loud, proud, numerous, and armed to the teeth with a brainful of "Did you know?" statistics and the good humor of Adbusters (where the image above originated). Now nobody on campus seems to care too much.

I wonder why? I can think of a few possibilities. First, the protests were loudest in the 1990s because of NAFTA (1994), the establishment of the WTO to supplant the GATT (1995), the fairly brutal "Big Bang" liberalization of the post-Soviet economies throughout the 1990s, the harsh austerity measures that came with IMF aid following the East Asian financial crises (1997-8), and the accession of China to the WTO (2001). It was a pretty active decade for neoliberals, which means it was a fairly active decade for anti-capitalists and anti-globalizationists despite the collapse of the Soviet system a few years prior.

Since 2001? Not much has happened on the globalization front. Doha is stuck in limbo, even modest FTAs with small countries have been slow in progressing through Congress, and the IMF had basically nothing to do for nearly a decade. Now that the IMF has been pressed into action again it's largely taken a more accommodating line toward recipient states, and it's pretty difficult to argue that Greece, e.g., is a victim of Western economic imperialists. The globalization of the Naughties was a kindler, gentler, calmer globalization compared to the Brave New World Is Flat globalization of the 1990s.

But I think that's only part of it. I think a better explanation is that people in general, and college students in particular, only have attention for one cause at a time, and environmentalism has definitely become the sexy issue over the past 8-10 years. When I hear people complain about China's trade practices these days, the arguments are less about the use of sweatshop labor and more about environmental degradation. To me it seems that the one has simply supplanted the other as the most pressing issue for the socially conscious.

I don't have a good explanation for why the shift has occurred, and maybe my experience isn't representative. I'd love to hear views from others that either confirm or deny my impression. Then again, if only 20 bother to show up for an IMF protest in D.C., maybe there's something to it.

(UPDATE: Drezner responds, and I fire back here.)

New Protests in Iran

Big protests throughout the streets of Tehran, Iran today.

The protests, taking place on the holiday marking the death of Shiite Islam’s holiest martyr, were the bloodiest — and among the largest — since the uprisings that followed Iran’s disputed presidential election last June, with hundreds of thousands of people thronging Tehran alone, witnesses said. There were reports of hundreds of injured people and numerous arrests.

In Tehran, thick crowds marched down a central avenue in mid-morning, defying official warnings of a harsh crackdown on protests as they chanted, “Death to the dictator!” They refused to retreat even as police fired tear gas, charged them with batons and discharged warning shots.

The police then opened fire directly into the crowd, opposition Web sites said, citing witnesses. At least four people were killed, the Web sites reported, and photographs circulated of a man with a bloodied head being carried from the scene.

One of the dead was Ali Moussavi, Mr. Moussavi’s 35-year-old nephew, the Parleman News Web site reported. He was shot near the heart at midday in Tehran’s Enghelab Square, the report said.

Developing...