On Obama, Race, and Political Survival

Ta-Nahisi Coates has been (rightly) given a lot of praise for his thoughtful essay on how race relations has affected Obama's presidency and the current political environment. He does a good job of highlighting some key political science research demonstrating that Obama's race cost him a non-negligible number of votes in 2008 -- roughly 3-5% of the popular vote overall -- and that race has shaped his presidency in powerful, if subtle, ways.

Most of the attention both in the article and surrounding it has focused on the broader American culture, histories of black political participation, and the reasons why Obama has largely declined to discuss race at all during his presidency. I find that interesting, but I find it interesting less as an endpoint of discussion and more as the setting for a bigger topic: politicians' quest for political survival. Coates plays around with this a bit in the essay, and ends up critical of Obama for not directly taking on difficult issues regarding race in America. But in the interview above, Coates admits that while this makes him angry it is almost surely the correct decision. That is, if Coates' argument about current race dynamics in American politics is true, then Obama could not gain or maintain power by emphasizing race. Coates concludes -- literally -- by saying that Obama's supporters in the African American community (and elsewhere) understand this, so they are willing to overlook or at least forgive his inaction on issues they care about.

In ending the essay there Coates missed an opportunity to have a broader discussion about the politics of reform and change. Because this issue is not limited to Obama, nor to race. It affects all politics, and all politicians. Coates' mission in writing the article was to comment on race in American politics as it relates specifically to Obama, and he did a good job in that, but thinking more broadly can help us identify similar dynamics elsewhere. It can also prevent us from making conclusions like this one, the only part of the essay in which Coates deals directly with foreign policy:

The political consequences of race extend beyond the domestic. I am, like many liberals, horrified by Obama’s embrace of a secretive drone policy, and particularly the killing of American citizens without any restraints. A president aware of black America’s tenuous hold on citizenship, of how the government has at times secretly conspired against its advancement—a black president with a broad sense of the world—should know better. Except a black president with Obama’s past is the perfect target for right-wing attacks depicting him as weak on terrorism. The president’s inability to speak candidly on race cannot be bracketed off from his inability to speak candidly on every­thing. Race is not simply a portion of the Obama story. It is the lens through which many Americans view all his politics.

Italics added. This may indeed be true, but it doesn't have to be true to explain Obama's behavior. It is well established that Republicans "own" foreign policy as an issue; that is, voters tend to believe that Republicans manage foreign affairs better than Democrats. This was true before Obama, and it will likely be true after Obama. The question is whether they'd trust a black Democratic president less than a white Democratic president. This is a different question than any Coates asks, and he can't answer it. (Note that Obama is up 12 points over Romney on foreign policy.)

And even if it is true, we don't know how this would motivate Obama toward more aggressive behavior. After all, if Obama wanted to be seen as "getting tough on terrorism" there are more public ways of doing that than sending flying robots over remote parts of Yemen to take out individuals that Americans have never heard of.

What we do know is that, whatever his race, Obama has an incentive to consolidate power. We know that he has done very little to roll back the expanse of executive power conceived during the Bush administration, and has continued that expansion in at least some areas. We know -- as Coates says in the interview -- that Obama's first motivation is to win elections. Unless he first does that nothing else is possible. There are many bones to pick with selectorate theory, but at its core it's pretty hard to deny that the logic of political survival is sound at its core. So if we were hoping to explain why Obama has chosen to expand the drone program, continue assassinations of questionable legality, renege on his campaign promise to close military prisons, further derail the Doha round, and violate Pakistan's sovereignty in pursuit of bin Laden -- all policies that would have been likely under a McCain presidency, much less that of another Democrat such as Hillary Clinton -- Occam's Razor would dictate that we rely less on race dynamics than Coates suggests, even if that is precisely where we should look to explain Obama's actions in other policy areas.

In other words, the fact that Obama is a black president in a country with a complicated past (and present) of racial politics might go some distance in explaining why Obama say less about race than any other Democratic president since 1960. But to make that explanation cohere we can't just leave it at that and then complain, as Coates does, that "a total submission to [prejudiced voters] is a disservice to the country". What matters is that Obama wants to keep power, and he'll do what he needs to do to keep it. Service to the country, which means nothing at all when stripped of its normative assumptions especially in this context, is not Obama's concern.*

What does this mean? It means that while Obama may be different from every other American president in one respect, he is exactly the same as his predecessors in another. It is the latter fact that best explains his presidency, including his approach to racial politics, and not the former.

*And if "service to the country" could mean anything with any substance, "total submission" to the voters -- whether prejudiced or not -- seems like the most likely candidate to me.

Political Survival in Syria

I've got my issues with selectorate theory, but I think this take from BdM & Smith on Assad is pretty right.

The Selectorate in Theory and Practice

Bueno de Mesquita and Smith continue their guest-posting at the Monkey Cage with this, which basically describes how time inconsistency problems can affect politics. (Michael Lewis recently wrote a case study of this process in California which, for all its faults, is better than his essays on Europe.) Before I get into my criticism, let me say that I value their work on selectorate theory, even though I think it has some problems. I value it for a few reasons: because I think the dynamics they are trying to model (basically a formalization of a strand of public choice econ) are very important for the study of politics even if their theory isn't a finished product, and because they provide a central theoretical paradigm for other scholars to use as a foil for their own research.

Anyway, enough throat-clearing. As this post, and the titles of their books on selectorate theory -- The Logic of Political Survival and The Dictator's Handbook -- make clear, theirs is a theory of comparative politics, not international relations. Nothing wrong with that, but it leaves them susceptible to problems that scholars who primarily operate in one subfield often have when crossing over into another. Specifically, they tend to make assumptions that seem reasonable but are nevertheless highly contentious. This post illustrates one of them. BdM and Smith write:

It is certainly true that bankers and businessmen wrote loans they suspected would not be repaid; they buried debt on the balance sheet; and, in extreme cases, committed outright fraud. These actions, and hundreds of others like them, provide rewards today, accruing costs that must be paid in the future. Why run up so much debt? Easy, paying costs in the future is someone else’s problem. It certainly won’t be the executive’s problem if she does not survive at the top today. Business leaders happily – and smartly – mortgage their firm’s future to ensure that they retain control now. Lavish payments even when performance is poor is the norm, not the exception.  

As much as politicians chide business leaders, they too love debt. It lets them buy loyalty now. Repayment is some future leader’s problem. Politicians hate to pay as they go. They love to make expensive promises that they don’t have to fund. For instance, politicians love to pay public sector employees with modest wages and fantastic defined pension benefits. This means less to pay today on their watch and more to pay on someone else’s tomorrow. What could be better!

On the one hand this seems more or less incontestable: politicians would prefer to buy support now and have someone else pay later. As the theorize later in the post, autocracies are more prone towards debt accumulation than democracies. I'm sure this is true in many contexts, and Oatley has some recent research that backs it up, but the example they introduce as illustrative of the broader phenomenon -- the actions of bankers -- gives us reason to question their narrative. Bankers acted the way they did in part because of policies that rewarded this behavior. The financial sector profited enormously from the legal and regulatory structures in the United States and around the world over the past few decades, and there was always an expectation that the government would support them in times of trouble. The Fed made that guarantee via the Greenspan/Bernanke "put", and the fiscal authorities did as well, setting a clear precedent of interventionism through a series of fiscal interventions from 1980s-2000s.

In democracies the "selectorate" -- the group whose support politicians must maintain to stay in office -- is assumed by BdM/Smith to be 50% of the population, or near that number. And yet the most energized political movements on both sides of the ideological spectrum right now, the #OccupyWallStreet and Tea Party groups, both formed in large part in reaction to policies that benefited bankers over the masses. These policies were enacted by both major political parties in two different presidential administrations, and do not benefit 50% of the population. They benefit a very small minority of it, hence the "We are the 99%" slogan of #OWS. In general the economy of the US and other industrialized democracies has become much more unequal over the past several decades, and  there has been little or no movement towards redistribution to mitigate the trend. A more progressive tax system would definitely benefit more than 50% of the population, yet the government finds it very difficult to pass a several percentage point marginal tax increase on millionaires.

Not only can selectorate theory not explain this, it would predict the opposite. More generally it would expect the majority of the population in an increasingly-unequal society to favor highly redistributive policies, and it would expect politicians to respond to this demand. BdM/Smith might be on stronger footing if they adopted the Rajan thesis that the government countered stagnating median wages by expanding credit access, but even this would depend on the claim that 50% would prefer more credit to more income. This seems dubious.

It seems more likely, to me, that the idealized account of democracy that selectorate theory provides is incomplete. The strength of selectorate theory is that it can accomodate more complex accounts of preference creation and aggregation relatively painlessly, but the weakness of the BdM/Smith application of selectorate theory is that they seldom take the more complicated steps that are necessary to reach conclusions that match our empirical understanding of the world. That leaves us in a place where selectorate theory is potentially valuable if used with care, but the primary proponents of selectorate theory -- in emphasizing parsimony over accuracy -- end up reaching conclusions that are pretty clearly wrong.