The Dictator's Handbook

The Dictator’s Handbook

by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, 2011

I was impressed with this book. Its tone is very cynical, which I enjoyed, but in the end it is strongly pro-democracy. This book clearly explains why authoritarian regimes tend to be unpleasant places for the common people to live, and democracies are far preferable.

Bueno de Mesquita and Smith’s main argument boils down to the importance of coalition size.

In any regime, there are three groups of people. There are the “interchangables”, basically anyone with a modicum of political power, whether they are voters in a democracy or potential officials in a dictatorship. Then there are the “influentials”, the people with actual influence. In a democracy, these are the people who actually vote. (Or, if there’s bloc voting going on, these are the people who control the votes.)

Finally, there are the “essentials”, also called the winning coalition. This is the smallest possible number of people whose support the leader actually needs, in order to stay in power. In a democracy, the coalition is a sizable fraction of the population. In an authoritarian regime, it is a very small fraction of the population. This is the primary difference between democratic and authoritarian governments and for this reason the book generally refers to large-coalition and small-coalition regimes to describe the two types.

According to The Dictator’s Handbook, every difference between the behavior of democracies and authoritarian governments can be explained by the differing incentives in place for large-coalition and small-coalition leaders. In the authors’ words, “when the coalition of essential backers is small and private goods are an efficient way to stay in power, then the well-being of the broader population falls by the wayside”. (p 13) What does this mean?

In a small-coalition regime, the leader can buy the loyalty of the essentials through extravagant salaries, gifts, or encouraging them to use corruption to extract money where they can. In a large-coalition regime, the leader cannot possibly afford to buy the support of enough individual people this way. Instead, the government must spend money on public goods to gain enough support. If the coalition is large enough, these goods benefit all the people, whether they are actually in the winning coalition (in other words, they voted for the leader) or not.

In a small-coalition regime, leaders are incentivized to provide primary-school education and enough health care to keep workers in shape, but not to fund quality higher education (You don’t want to give the unwashed masses any dangerous ideas! The elites send their children abroad to be educated) or good health care for babies and elderly people (they don’t work). In a large-coalition regime, these things must be funded to keep the large number of essentials happy. This is why clean drinking water is far more widely available in democratic countries than in autocracies of similar economic status.

In a small-coalition regime, corruption takes the bite out of regulations designed to minimize the impact of natural disasters, and leaders are primarily incentivized to make sure the influentials are not harmed -- for instance, neighborhoods where favored constituencies live tend to be better protected against flooding. In a large-coalition regime, these regulations are actually followed -- this is why earthquakes tend to produce far higher death tolls in authoritarian regimes than democracies. Also, if there’s a perception that the government’s response to a disaster was feeble or incompetent, this could severely damage a democratic leader’s standing (see Bush and Hurricane Katrina), but not an autocrat’s (see Myanmar’s military leaders and Cyclone Nargis, which killed far more people than Katrina). Democrats have incentives to minimize damage and relieve the common people’s suffering. Authoritarian leaders, generally speaking, do not. Heck, if a leader is really lucky, a huge death toll might mean loads of foreign aid payments!

In a small-coalition regime, the leader can tax the people extortionately (through a variety of formal and informal means) and then turn around and provide subsidies to favored groups. In practice, this usually means a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. In a large-coalition regime, people might feel heavily taxed, but that’s because every cent they pay in tax is through official channels. What’s more, they benefit from far superior public services.

The authors make a spirited argument that democracies provide far better public services and are just plain nicer to live in than authoritarian regimes.

Several months ago, I read Democracy for Realists by Achen and Bartels (towards the bottom of the linked post), which convincingly argues that elections in democracies do not necessarily result in good governance. But the book’s authors still prefer democracy to the alternative, and in the last chapter they list some of the benefits of democracy as they see it (which I summarize in that post’s last bullet point).

Frankly speaking, I think that what Achen and Bartels come up with with pale in comparison with the defense of democracy in The Dictator’s Handbook, which gives one well-supported reason after another why a government that is forced to be accountable to the people is far nicer to live under, even when factors such as differing levels of economic development are accounted for.

The authors hold that it is advantageous for the coalition size to be very large -- in other words, they think as many people ought to be involved in selecting leaders as possible. They are not fans of gerrymandering or the Electoral College in the USA. They also think it’s a bad idea for a democracy to have large numbers of long-term residents who can’t vote, and so they strongly support all democracies liberalizing immigration laws to give immigrants a plausible path to citizenship.

None of this is meant to imply politicians in democracies are morally better! Democracies are far nicer places for the common people to live, but democratic leaders are just as cynical as despots; they just have different incentives in place.

Look at the use of foreign aid. We may have this idealistic image of aid going to help poor individuals in developing countries, but democracies know very well that most of the aid given to authoritarian regimes gets skimmed off. That’s fine with them, because the real purpose of aid is to persuade the recipient to adopt policies favored by the donor. During the Cold War, Western governments spent substantial sums of money to persuade small-coalition regimes to tilt toward them and away from Communist countries.

It’s far more cost-effective to influence small-coalition regimes than large-coalition regimes in this way. In the 2003 Iraq war, the USA would have liked to use Turkey as a base to invade northern Iraq, but Turkey was just democratic enough that the government’s price was simply too high. Letting the Americans invade Iraq from Turkey would have been highly unpopular among the Turkish people, and the government would have had to spend far too much to keep its winning coalition together. Authoritarian Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, with fewer people who needed appeasing, were much cheaper.

The authors supply plenty of case studies taken not only from governments (the rise and fall of Liberia’s Samuel Doe) but also corporate politics (the rise and fall of HP’s Carly Fiorina). There is a rich variety of other examples.

Unfortunately, I don’t know just how trustworthy these examples are. When they wrote a paragraph on Taiwan’s democratization, something I actually know something about, I found their description to be insultingly dumbed-down and inaccurate. This, in turn, caused me to wonder what other problems were lurking in other examples which I don’t know so much about. As the book relies heavily on these historical examples to illustrate its points, this is a significant flaw. That said, the main themes of the book still stand.

My description above doesn’t come close to covering the whole book. Some other bits of note:

• When we hear about authoritarian leaders borrowing huge sums of money and spending it lavishly on their families or their supporters, we might condescendingly think they are foolish and ignorant when it comes to money, but in fact they are acting entirely rationally. Debt can be left for future regimes, but their small coalition needs to be kept happy in the short term or they may find themselves thrown out of power. 

• And speaking of money, debt relief for developing countries sounds like the morally right move in theory, but in practice it tends to merely extend a financial lifeline for authoritarian governments. In the authors’ opinion, it is better for the affected countries in the long term to force profligate autocracies into financial crises that are likely to bring about their ultimate downfall.

• Autocrats do not necessarily have an incentive to provide good infrastructure for the people. It’s enough to maintain the absolute minimum to keep local economies grinding along. If the country has natural resource wealth, that’s a different story; the government of course has to keep those extraction industries humming along, but they’re there to enrich the leaders, not help the people. (Large infrastructure projects that could legitimately help the people do have their use: they are prime opportunities for large-scale corruption.)

• Encouraging government officials and business leaders to be corrupt not only makes them fat and happy, but it’s also a way to enforce compliance and loyalty. If everyone is guilty of corruption to some extent, anti-corruption drives (which are, of course, selectively enforced) become a very useful tool to eliminate whatever potential troublemakers the regime sees as a threat.

• We often hear that democracies do not go to war with other democracies. But apparently what’s actually going on is that democracies are extremely reluctant to go to war unless they are certain of winning, and will try to exhaust all diplomatic solutions first. Authoritarian governments are far more willing to go to war, and are much more likely to cut their losses and quit when things go badly. This is because a loss in a war (or just suffering significant casualties) can bring down a democratic government, but is less likely to end an authoritarian regime. Also, democracies tend to go to war to achieve policy goals; autocrats tend to fight for land or treasure. This does not necessarily give democracies the moral high ground; there are many examples of democracies picking on weak opponents, some of which have large-coalition regimes of their own. “War for democrats is just another way of achieving the goals for which foreign aid would otherwise be used.” (p 237)

• It’s awfully risky for the boss to have competent people close to him, because they could be potential rivals. In pre-modern times, employing competent eunuchs was often the solution, as they would never be acceptable leaders in their own right. That doesn’t work so well nowadays, but there are other ways around the problem; note that Saddam Hussein’s right-hand-man Tariq Aziz was a Christian, which meant he was never a plausible replacement for the boss.

• There’s an inverse correlation between the straightness of the road connecting the capital city and its major airport, and how democratic the government is. In a dictatorship, you don’t need to worry so much about the people you displace when you build a major highway. Also, a nice straight highway to the airport is useful if your regime is collapsing and you need to leave the country in a hurry.

• The process of democratization is an inherently good thing -- it’s a shame established democracies so often pay lip service to it but don’t actually mean it. Democratization doesn’t necessarily mean having a benevolent leader -- for instance (if I can trust the book’s example), Jerry Rawlings of Ghana was an authoritarian ruler who led his country down the path to democracy because it was the best option open for him to stay in power. Also, simply holding elections is a much less meaningful step on the road to democratization than is often assumed, and free elections should not be seen as the main objective. (Joshua Kurlantzick also makes this point in Democracy in Retreat.) The authors write, “Ultimately, elections need to follow expanded freedom and not be thought of as presaging it!” (p 278)

Forbidden Nation

In his 2005 book Forbidden Nation, Canadian journalist Jonathan Manthorpe tells the history of Taiwan. More a book-length work of journalism than an academic work, Forbidden Nation does not strive to be comprehensive. Fortunately, it is well-written and engaging -- but in the end, I wished Manthorpe had paid more attention to certain aspects of Taiwan’s history than he did.

The preface gives us a concise recap of Taiwan’s international position, told from a pro-Taiwan perspective. Apart from the references to President Chen Shui-bian, every sentence in the preface could have been written in 2018 rather than 2005. (The book jacket proclaims in now thirteen-year-old prose: “It is clear that Taiwan has now entered the decade in which its independence will be won or lost.”) The chapter that follows describes the shooting of Chen and Annette Lu the day before the presidential election in March 2004, using the attempted assassination as a frame to introduce other issues in Taiwanese history and society, such as the last years of the KMT dictatorship and the deep roots that organized crime has in Taiwan.

Manthorpe then takes us back in time, to give us a fuller history of Taiwan’s place in the world. This is where we begin to see that Manthorpe is primarily going to show us Taiwan through foreigners’ eyes. Of course, this is unavoidable in the beginning; the native Taiwanese of the first millennium AD did not write things down for future historians. It’s amusing to read the very early attempts by China to subjugate the island (which they tended to get mixed up with Okinawa). The first time China tried to assert military supremacy over Taiwan came in 607 AD, when a military expedition headed by General Chen Ling tried to get the islanders to acknowledge the supremacy of the Emperor of China. The Taiwanese were not interested.

As time passes and written documentation of Taiwan becomes more abundant, Taiwan’s place in the East Asian geopolitical and economic scene comes into much sharper focus. Manthorpe dedicates ample space to the 17th century, starting with the pirate-businessman Li Dan (spelled Li Tan here), who built up a great international business empire in the spaces between Chinese, Japanese, English and Dutch authorities. His heir was Zheng Zhilong (Cheng Chih-lung), who founded the Zheng (Cheng) dynasty, of which Zheng’s son, who became known as Koxinga, is the most famous member. When it comes to descriptions of the age of Koxinga, one could do a lot worse than Manthorpe’s work. The book describes how Koxinga’s forces actually came very close to toppling the Qing entirely when they besieged Nanjing in 1659, a fact that I had been entirely unaware of. According to Manthorpe, the Qing were saved only when they launched a well-timed attack on Koxinga’s forces just after Koxinga and his top aides drank themselves silly celebrating his birthday.

Koxinga was, of course, the one who kicked the Dutch off Taiwan in 1662; his descendants then ruled the island until 1683. Manthorpe provides a detailed and readable account of Koxinga’s conquest of Taiwan, and then the years of his family’s rule. Assuming his description is accurate (I’m no expert), this is not a bad short introduction to Taiwan in the 1600s.

But here we see one of my two big gripes about the book. Manthorpe does a good job bringing history to life through concise biographies of people who are important to Taiwan. Li Dan, the pirate lord from Fujian. The Zhengs, also based in Fujian. Liu Mingchuan, the Qing governor of Taiwan in the late 19th century. And many Westerners who played small parts in Taiwan’s story are also remembered. For instance, there’s Maurice Benyowsky, a Hungarian count who found himself on Taiwan’s east coast in 1771. (Long story.) He gets a full page, and just to be clear, I don't deny he had an interesting life. Even George Psalmanazar, famous for regaling western Europe with his fascinating and entirely made-up tales of life in Taiwan (which he almost certainly never visited), gets a page.

But no Taiwanese individuals prior to the 20th century seem to have any agency at all in Manthorpe’s pages, apart from a few rebel leaders who were all eventually chopped to pieces by the Qing authorities. Of course, one could certainly argue that this reflects reality; Taiwan’s destiny prior to the last decades of the 20th century was indeed primarily in the hands of outside forces. But I would have liked to see more Taiwanese perspectives. It would have been interesting if Manthorpe had chosen some local Taiwanese people who represented different aspects of pre-modern Taiwanese society and fleshed them out to the same extent as the various Chinese and Western figures he described. For the record, the earliest Taiwanese individual who Manthorpe seems to think warrants much discussion is Lin Hsien-tang, political activist in the early 20th century.

Into the modern era, Manthorpe’s focus continues to be rather idiosyncratic -- why does he give us so many more biographical details of Chiang Ching-kuo’s life, as opposed to Chiang Kai-shek or Lee Teng-hui, for instance? He devotes several pages to relations between the PRC and the USA from the 1960s to the 2000s, which is not unreasonable, but it makes it all the more frustrating that he pays comparatively little attention to the White Terror and Taiwan’s democratization. This is my other big source of dissatisfaction with “Forbidden Nation”. I suppose it’s unfair to criticize Manthorpe for where he chooses to focus -- after all, it’s his book, not mine. But the impression one gets from these sections is that the Taiwanese are people that things happen to, rather than people who do things.

Manthorpe concludes by looking at the results and aftermath of the 2004 election, and I feel he’s ending on a high note by putting the focus in the final chapter squarely on Taiwanese politics and its relations with China. For all my gripes, Forbidden Nation is well-written and informative about the areas where it chooses to focus on. I wouldn’t recommend it as a general history of Taiwan for newcomers to the topic, but it’s an interesting read for those who are already knowledgeable about Taiwan -- and know what he’s giving short shrift to.

Forbidden Nation covers similar ground to Denny Roy's Taiwan: A Political History, which is near it on our bookshelf. Overall, Roy’s book goes into much more detail, especially about the ROC period, although it was written before the 2004 elections. The tone of Roy’s book is also much more objective -- while he’s obviously sympathetic to Taiwan as a nation, he doesn’t state his pro-Taiwan views as explicitly as Manthorpe (and I’m not saying this because I disagree with Manthorpe -- in fact, I largely agree with him). Manthorpe’s book has a much livelier prose style and is a quicker, easier read.

Three on Politics

Democracy in Retreat by Joshua Kurlantzick 

In the years following the fall of the Soviet Union, democracy appeared triumphant around the world. Yet now, in the second decade of the 21st century, things appear very different. People in countries that transitioned to democracy now feel disenchanted with it, and in many places authoritarianism is creeping back. This 2013 book attempts to explain this situation. 

Kurlantzick examines a range of countries, including Thailand, Malawi, Egypt and Taiwan, and he looks critically at what Western democracies have done to encourage democratization, as well as China’s emergence as an alternative model. Thailand seemed to make concrete steps towards democracy and then regressed, while Malawi's economic problems that accompanied democratization have left many people cynical.

Taiwan has, if anything, consolidated and strengthened its democracy in the years since the book was written in 2013. The country does not come off looking so great here, as Kurlantzick focuses on the excesses of the Chen Shui-bian administration that followed the country's democratic transition. But I do appreciate that he treats Taiwan with dignity by dealing with it on its own terms, rather than as an eccentric appendage of China. 

Some notes that represent my takeaway from the book: 

• The so-called Washington Consensus caused people to associate the adoption of democratic systems with World Bank-sponsored economic policies in the early 2000s. This indirectly did massive damage to democracy’s reputation when the economic crisis of 2008 hit. Democracy had become tied to economic reform in many people’s minds. When economic reform failed, people's impression of democracy took a hit along with it.

• Another reason why people become disenchanted with democratization: it often seems to lead to increased corruption. Sometimes this is merely perception. In authoritarian regimes, it’s easier to hide corruption (see China’s ability to suppress news), while in a country with a freer press, muckracking journalists are able to blow up corruption scandals. But it can also be genuine. When you have free elections, the incentives for corruption become so much greater, because political campaigns in fair elections need money. Not just for campaign advertising and other legitimate expenses, but also for vote-buying and other shady tactics that are not necessary in fully authoritarian systems. 

• Western countries often focus on elections as if they’re the be-all and end-all of the democratization process, while neglecting other things such as a fair judiciary and the promotion of NGOs and civil society. Also, it certainly doesn’t help matters when the USA gives the impression that it thinks free elections would be a great thing just so long as the Washington-approved candidate wins. 

• They also promise too much. The West proclaims, when you become a democracy, your economy will improve and it will be all roses and unicorns! And then when that doesn’t happen, the middle and lower classes become discontented and pine for authoritarians again. By contrast, look at Nelson Mandela, who encouraged South Africans in the 1990s to believe in democracy while also warning that it would be a long, hard road. 

• Many democratic developing countries, such as India and Brazil, are wary of criticizing the internal affairs of other, more authoritarian developing countries because they remember colonialism and interference by outsiders. 

• The elites in newly democratized countries were often the oppressed opposition under the old authoritarian regime, and they may continue the same mindset once they are in power. Unfortunately, what worked for them when they were bravely resisting their authoritarian oppressors may not transfer well to the new reality when they’re the ones in charge. 

• Note that even when democracy is in decline, things aren’t as bad as the worst days of authoritarianism in a country that’s never seen democracy. Putin’s Russia is not as bad as Stalin. Thailand in 2010 is not as bad as Thailand in the 1970s. 

Umbrellas in Bloom by Jason Y. Ng

This is an account of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement of 2014, told by local activist Jason Y. Ng. It doesn’t pretend to be unbiased, which is fine with me. Ng is very clear and upfront about his pro-democracy opinions and his involvement with the movement -- he was one of the regular denizens of the camp at Admiralty, where he helped students with their schoolwork and was apparently a fixture of the political discussions there. I’m putting this all up front in case anyone wants to say some variation of “Dude, Ng’s biased and he lets his opinions seep into his reporting!” My response would be: Duh, of course he’s got opinions, it’s a personal account. 

The Umbrella Movement was the physical manifestation of Hong Kongers' displeasure at how they were being treated by Beijing. After seventeen years of "One Country Two Systems", it had become clear that the Chinese government had absolutely no intention of giving up its heavy-handed interference in Hong Kong's internal governance. For several weeks that autumn, three urban sites in Hong Kong were occupied by large groups of protestors. While they did not succeed in getting Beijing to back down, they got the attention of people across the world. The Umbrella Movement may well turn out to have been the proving ground for a new generation of Hong Kong leaders -- people who the Beijing government would very much like to shut up for good right now.

I like visiting Hong Kong. It feels like more of a busy, bustling city than Taipei, and so it’s is good to visit once in a while just to experience the contrast. It is fun to explore and the food is excellent. Every time we go, we spend some time roaming the ground floor of Chungking Mansions growing inexorably fatter and fatter. But I feel like I’d only have to live in Hong Kong for a short time in order to feel disenchanted with it. Part of it is the fact we’d probably end up paying twice as much rent to live in half as much space. But I’m also afraid I’d get incredibly disheartened with the politics if I followed it on a day-to-day basis. 

From a Taiwanese perspective, Hong Kong is a warning of a dystopian possible future. The more Beijing tightens its grip on HK’s political system, the more convinced Taiwan becomes that they don’t want any of that, no sir. 

I admit that my background knowledge about Hong Kong is not terribly substantial, so I won’t comment on Ng’s book in a deeper way than this. But I do appreciate the information he provided about how Hong Kong elections work (or at least, how they worked in 2014), and the gap between what locals want from the government and how Beijing is shaping things -- which is rather ironic, as Ng seems to think this is the most boring part of the book! 

He also gives rebuttals for the most common arguments that you hear from the pro-Beijing side -- that discontent in HK is caused by Western interference aimed at destabilizing China, that Hong Kongers are merely jealous that they’re not Asia’s premier financial capital anymore, and so on. 

Ng also adds some of his own thoughts on protest movements, how they can work, and some of the potential dangers. My own knowledge of the theory and practice of street protests is shamefully lacking, given that if anything they’re growing in importance both in my country of citizenship and my country of residence. I do notice a copy of L. A. Kauffman’s Direct Action sitting on my bookshelf unread. Hm... 

Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government by Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels

This is a pessimistic title but I’ve got good news: it's mostly stuff you probably already suspected. That’s a relief, perhaps? 

Let me make one thing clear immediately. This book is about elections. It is not about a free press, freedom of assembly and association, a thriving civil society, the rule of law rather than the whims of those in power, the freedom to not be oppressed by a tyrannical government, or any of the other things that we associate with democracies rather than authoritarian systems. At least, not directly. You could certainly make a case that free elections are a necessary precondition for some or all of the other good stuff. 

In other words, this book is not repeat NOT making the case that democracy is no better than authoritarianism. 

Rather, it focuses on demolishing the idea that free elections, by themselves, produce responsible government attuned to what the voters want. Achen and Bartels center their argument around what they call the “Folk Theory of Democracy”: the great masses of people have sufficient good sense to make wise decisions at election time, even if many individual voters are severely lacking in this regard. 

The book attacks this idea from several directions. When voters are passing judgement on the performance of the party in power, how can they assign credit or blame accurately? Is even possible for most voters to vote for the party that fairly represents their views, when voters’ choices are dictated from the top down by the parties? And this presupposes that most voters even make voting choices based on coherent already-existing beliefs, when there is quite a bit of evidence that for many (most?) people, their political views are a consequence of their party and group loyalties, not a cause of them. 

The authors make a convincing case, and anyone who feels a sense of deep disagreement or revulsion with the previous paragraph should give it a read so that they can respond to it. 

How does it mesh with the two other, unrelated books I wrote about above? Well, Kurlantzick’s book does take aim at people who see free elections as the be-all and end-all of democratization, which fits with Achen and Bartels, though coming from a different direction. As for Ng’s memoir of the Umbrella movement, one might think I’d suffer cognitive dissonance by reading the book so close to Democracy for Realists. The events of 2014 were the result of calls for free elections, after all. But the underlying issue was the desire that the future of Hong Kong ought to be in the hands of Hong Kongers, and free elections for Hong Kong would, by the very definition of “free”, not be controlled by Beijing. Nothing in Achen and Bartels’ book undermines that. 

I am strongly pro-democracy, and I remain so after reading Achen and Bartels' book. They weren't trying to make people give up hope on democracy. They merely want us to have a realistic view of what elections actually are. Democracy for Realists makes important points about human nature and politics -- points that many of us have probably suspected for a long time, but that here are stated clearly and openly.

 Some bits that stick in my mind, weeks after I finished it: 

• There’s a wonderful section about how an uptick in shark attacks in New Jersey in 1916 may have cost Woodrow Wilson a considerable number of votes in that state. Wilson, of course, did not run on a pro-shark platform. But the shark attacks might have contributed to a sense of bad times, which puts voters in a mood to punish the incumbent. It didn’t change the result of this particular election, but the authors go on to make a far more alarming suggestion. They estimate that if not for the effects of voters “punishing” the Democrats for poor climate during the late 1990s, Gore might have comfortably beaten Bush in the Electoral College. 
• Economic performance in Q14 and Q15 of a Presidential administration’s term is a fairly strong predictor of the incumbent party’s reelection. By contrast, there is no strong evidence that voters consider the economic performance in previous quarters. This is a major flaw in the so-called “retrospective” theory of voting, the idea that elections are a judgement on how the party in power has handled things (which in practice often means the economy). When you consider the length of a Presidential administration, basing your judgement on economic performance in the two quarters just before the election means you’re practically letting random chance decide. 
• Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936 is often described as voters ratifying the changes in direction that Roosevelt and his team had brought to the government during the Great Depression. But Roosevelt’s success in 1936 owed a lot to rising incomes in several key states. Voters who felt themselves to be better off chose to reward him. If Roosevelt had had to run for reelection in 1938, when ordinary Americans felt the economy to be much weaker, he might well have lost. 
• And speaking of the Great Depression, it actually brought about a strong sentiment of “throw the bums out” across a wide range of countries. The authors survey several Western democracies, which shared the common feature of punishing the party that was in office when the Depression hit, regardless of their ideology. They also look at the provincial government of Alberta in Canada, where voters frustrated with the Depression voted in the Social Credit Party, best known for its significantly outside-the-mainstream monetary policies. 
• There’s a nifty analysis of how self-identified Republicans’ views on abortion changed in the 1970s and 1980s; as the party shifted from being neutral on the issue to becoming explicitly pro-life, the party members’ views also shifted. And this was true of men much more than women, as you would expect if you assume women feel more personally invested in the issue. 
• At the close, the authors list some genuine benefits of democratic elections that they believe do indeed stand up to scrutiny. Even when controversial, the results are widely seen as legitimate. (No one died in violence associated with the 2000 recount in Florida. In some countries, that would be miraculous.) There is reason to tolerate a vigorous opposition party, and politicians seeking reelection have every incentive to avoid violating ethical norms, knowing that their opponents might be in power in the future. Finally, democratic elections promote civic engagement.

Taiwan: A Political History

Taiwan: A Political History

by Denny Roy

I'm trying to read more books about Taiwan, alternating between fiction and non-fiction. Denny Roy’s history is the latest one I've completed.

I’ve lived in Taiwan for a decade. I already knew the broad outlines of this land’s history. But this was the first time I read a survey of Taiwan’s post-1945 political history. I figured it was time I learned more, and indeed I did learn a lot from Roy’s book. Now, the book is not for the novice with no preexisting knowledge of Taiwanese history. Denny Roy tends to move back and forth through the decades, expecting his reader to already know the political progression from the elder Chiang to the younger Chiang to Lee to Chen. But if you’re moderately familiar with the basics, this is an informative look at Taiwanese politics from 1945 to 2003, when the book was published.

I write “from 1945 to 2003” even though the book is billed as covering the full scope of Taiwanese history. In reality, everything prior to 1895 is covered in twenty pages. The fifty years of Japanese rule, 1895 to 1945, receive another twenty-two pages. The remainder of the book’s 246 pages are devoted to the ROC era. This is fine -- there is certainly a lot to say about Taiwan under the ROC, and the starting chapters do provide necessary historical context for what comes after -- but the reader should be aware that this is not a comprehensive source of material about Taiwan before 1945.

In fact, I was a bit frustrated with the coverage of early Taiwanese history. On page 21, Roy writes of “a total of 159 sizable rebellions during the period of Qing rule, including three particularly large ‘Great Rebellions’ in 1714, 1787, and 1833”. He then goes on to describe an uprising in 1721 in which rebels seized control of a large portion of Taiwan, forcing the government to flee to mainland China. If this doesn’t qualify as a ‘Great Rebellion’, some truly epic uprisings must have been cut for space! On page 22 two rebellions are briefly described as taking place in 1786 and 1832; Roy never mentions one that happens anytime close to 1714.

Fortunately, Roy’s coverage of the 1945 to 2003 era is interesting and informative, and filled in several gaps in my knowledge of Taiwanese political history, about which I do not claim to be an expert.

To take one example, I noted a recurring theme where the ROC’s stubbornness decades ago contributed to the country’s present-day international status. It was the ROC that took Taiwan out of the United Nations: even when Chiang Kai-shek came to accept a PRC presence in the UN, he couldn’t bear the indignity of the PRC taking his place on the Security Council, and so Taiwan quit in a huff when the PRC was admitted in 1971. (p. 134-135) Similarly, there was a time when Beijing would enter into full diplomatic relations with countries that recognized Taipei, without demanding that these nations break relations with them. They didn’t need to -- Taipei would be so angered at the perceived disrespect that they would be the ones to sever ties with one more diplomatic ally. (p. 130) Well done, ROC -- that’s worked out well for you, hasn’t it? I can only conclude that ROC leaders must have been perpetually convinced that the PRC was on the brink of implosion -- not an entirely illogical belief, when you consider what the PRC must have looked like to them for the first quarter-century of its existence, staggering from one massive self-inflicted crisis to another.

To take another example, I knew Lee Teng-hui primarily for his more recent role as an elder statesman and a pro-independence figure who has decisively burned his ties with the KMT, so reading about how he was perceived when he was actually the head of the KMT was fascinating. In contrast to the impression I had of Lee in his retirement, Roy paints quite a different portrait of Lee as cunning politician - summarized on page 181 that “Lee’s desire to consolidate his power took precedence over his ideological commitment to political liberalization”. The book’s 2003 publication date means that there’s a time capsule-like quality to how certain figures are portrayed, notably the well-known anti-corruption crusader Ma Ying-jeou. Even Tsai Ing-wen makes a cameo on page 237 where she pops up in the year 2000 to clarify that Taiwan doesn’t accept Beijing’s One-China Principle.

Overall, as a relatively brief overview of Taiwanese history, Roy’s book gave me what I was looking for: I learned a lot, and several shameful gaps in my knowledge were plugged. There are still several books on Taiwanese politics sitting unread on my bookshelf, which I can read now with a better knowledge base to build on.

History of Rome Volume I

History of Rome Volume I: The Republic

by Mike Duncan

For me, this book was a review of material already covered. Practically all the important stuff i know about Ancient Rome, I learned through podcast. My education took me through only the barest details of Roman history -- togas, Caesar, Vesuvius -- and the classes I took as a history major in college covered far later eras. The first time anything stuck was when I discovered Dan Carlin’s podcasts on the Punic Wars and on the fall of the Roman Republic. Carlin has a knack for making things memorable, giving me a mental framework on which I could hang additional information.

At that time Mike Duncan was diligently working away on his History of Rome podcasts, but I didn’t know about him yet; I only discovered him in 2013, when he’d finished with Rome and was starting his Revolutions podcast. Revolutions was (still is) a brilliant cast for anyone interested in political history, and I was sucked in by its first season, which covers the utterly fascinating (and bloody) events in the British Isles between 1640 and 1660. (Apparently Britain wasn’t just ahead of the rest of the world when it came to industrialization; they also had one or two modern military coups in the mid-1600s as well!)

I started listening to The History of Rome very soon after. I came to admire Duncan’s ability to tease apart very complex (and potentially very dry) history and make it interesting and comprehensible without simplifying or dumbing it down.

So when Duncan edited the transcripts of the first quarter of his old podcast’s run into book form, from Rome’s founding to Julius Caesar’s assassination, I decided to spring for the Kindle edition immediately. For one thing, even though I’d heard it all already, it couldn’t hurt to consolidate it all. Besides, I figured it was about time I spend real money on something Duncan put together.

I enjoyed reading what I had listened to back in 2013-14. The editing is good enough that it doesn’t generally seem like a written record of spoken English (though there are more than a few comma splices and spellcheck-invisible typos) and although I’d forgotten a whole lot of the details of 700 years of ancient history, I did smile with recognition when I came across a witty aside that I remembered Duncan making in the podcast.

So, how about the content?

In the first half of the book, we read about Rome’s mythological founding, and then follow the city as it establishes itself as a force to be reckoned with in Italy, suffers growing pains (sacked by Gauls), recovers, becomes the master of all Italy (Samnite Wars), branches out and establishes colonies, and then becomes the master of the western Mediterranean Sea (first two Punic Wars). All interesting enough, but mostly because the stage is being set for what’s going to happen later on.

I feel like things change with the Third Punic War. I hate the Third Punic War. Rome is the bad guy. I can’t think of any way Rome isn’t the bad guy. And Rome wins, because in this era, Rome always wins.

But in the aftermath of the Third Punic War, things become very interesting for their own sake, as Roman politics become the center of the narrative. This isn’t Game of Thrones-style medieval politics where the only question is which ruler gets to rule; no, this politics seems weirdly modern, with ideological factions and competing interest groups. The modern history geek looks at the Optimares and Populares of ancient Rome and thinks holy crap, they kinda had right-wingers and left-wingers back then. And then, after a few decades, the Republic fell apart, the Empire rose, and and the era of politics that looks so oddly familiar to us was over.

In the end, the basic impression I am left with (and this is not something I specifically remember Mike Duncan or anyone else specifically saying) is that throughout the era of the Republic, Rome never really stopped being a city-state. Even as Rome took over the Italian peninsula, Sicily, Spain, and much of northern Africa, it wasn’t so much a large country with Rome as its capital, but rather a powerful super-city with lots of colonies and vassal states. If you weren’t in Rome, you were ruled by Rome. The political issues of the city of Rome were the issues of the country as a whole. This eventually changed, but only well after the Republic had been replaced by the Empire.

Welcome Home, Master

Welcome Home, Master: Covering East Asia in the Twilight of Old Media

By J. D. Adams

J. D. Adams’ memoir of his years as a Taiwan-based reporter actually opens with a reporting trip to Japan he took in 2010. He went there to do research for a weighty piece about how Japanese companies increasingly rely on temporary workers. These workers get far less job security (and kind of a raw deal overall) compared to standard employees.

While in Japan, he also does a puff piece on a local fertility festival that has become a kitschy celebration of the penis. One of these stories was far more click-worthy than the other -- anyone want to guess? Such is the life, it turns out, of the Old Media journalist nowadays.

Adams then takes us back to the dawn of the 21st century, when he started his career in Asia hanging out with old-school foreign correspondents in Hong Kong, most notably the venerable and legendary Clare Hollingworth. (Remarkably, as of 2016 Hollingworth is still living in Hong Kong, more venerable than ever as her age is now well into three-digit territory.)

Deciding this was the life for him, Adams eventually settled in Taipei, where he worked as a copy editor at the Taipei Times while also reporting as a stringer for Newsweek, which over the next decade would slide into irrelevance (good luck, Old Media). Taipei would become his primary home for the next several years, and so in Welcome Home, Master he goes into more detail about Taiwan than any other place.

If you’re already a Taiwan expert, you may not learn much new here, but newbies will gain a sense of the country’s politics (Adams arrived midway through the Chen Shui-bian presidency and stayed for much of the Ma Ying-jeou administration) and issues (apart from the usual cross-strait diplomacy, he does several stories dealing with traditional Taiwanese religion in its myriad eclectic forms, reports from the 2009 World Games in Kaohsiung and does a story on an Aboriginal village willing to take in nuclear waste in exchange for financial support).

Adams writes in a clear, compelling prose style which is about himself to exactly the right degree: he describes his accommodations in Taipei and his degree of fluency in Mandarin to add color to his writing, but he never lets the writing be about him. Until the final chapters, I didn’t know he had a significant other/girlfriend/wife.

The final Taiwan story Adams includes is the tale of the Hsichih Trio. In 1991, three teenagers were implicated in a brutal murder in the Taipei suburb of Hsichih (or Xizhi, in this country that confuses the hell out of foreigners by using multiple Romanization systems at the same time and sometimes follows none of them). The principal suspect in the case was convicted and executed, but the police were convinced that he had accomplices, and so the three young men were allegedly tortured into providing confessions. In 2010, Adams interviews the man he calls the most articulate of the three, who describes the mistreatment he suffered at the hands of the police and of the time he spent in prison wondering if he would be executed. By discussing the public controversy around the Hsichih Trio (who would be exonerated in 2012), Adams turns the focus on elements of the same politically-oriented civil society that J. Michael Cole has written about recently, as Taiwan transitions from the brutal state it once was to the more gentle society it is in the process of becoming.

While based in Taiwan, Adams wrote stories from neighboring countries as well. He describes reporting trips he made investigating the the tiger-parts trade in China, insurgencies in the southern Philippines, and the whale meat industry in Japan, to name just a few. (Also while in Japan, he writes another trendy ‘quirky Japan’ piece about a cafe where the clientele is waited on by girls dressed as maids acting all subservient -- the source of the book’s title, for those of you who have gotten this far in my review and are still scratching their heads at it.)

Throughout Welcome Home, Master, Adams provides a fascinating description of what it’s like to be a foreign correspondent for declining Old Media behemoths in the first decade of the 21st century. He ends his book getting out of the business completely in 2010, and while he clearly believes an end of the glamorous era of the foreign correspondent is at hand, he is not all doom and gloom: he is optimistic that low-paid part-time stringers, more versatile and with a deeper understanding of the place they are covering, can pick up the slack. I am not 100% convinced that this is desirable, either for the quality of international news reporting or the quality of life of these ‘stringers’, but it is true that decent reporting requires a deep understanding of the local situation -- perhaps deeper than a professional foreign correspondent who parachutes in is capable of providing.

Black Island

Black Island
By J. Michael Cole

Black Island describes how the pivotal years 2013 and 2014 exposed the pitiful inadequacies in both the two-party structure of Taiwanese politics and the narratives we use to talk about Taiwan. These were the years when a new set of groups rose to prominence, unaffiliated with any political party, in response to the failures of Ma Ying-jeou’s second term.

The first and final thirds of this book are a narrative made up of opinion pieces published by Cole during this period. This narrative tells the story of grass-roots protests against acts of high-level overreach: plans by Chinese-sympathetic corporate behemoths to acquire Taiwanese news media, and the land expropriation scandals at Huaguang Community in Taipei and Dapu Village in Miaoli in 2013. These protests represented a blossoming of Taiwanese civil society’s confidence to make its voice heard against government actions it saw as cold-hearted, greedy, and/or lacking in transparency.

Cole makes it very clear that these protests cannot be made to fit into the standard ‘blue vs. green’ dichotomy traditionally used to make sense of Taiwanese politics; in the Huaguang Community land expropriation case, for instance, young student protesters (traditionally ‘green’ voters) championed the cause of elderly residents who had been born in China (the most stereotypically ‘blue’ people one could imagine).

Cole also demolishes the idea that these protesters were agents of the DPP in a proxy battle against the KMT, a framework used by some hack journalists and pundits to explain the increasingly tumultuous events of 2013 and 2014. Not only have the protesters kept a careful distance between themselves and the DPP, but Cole does not hesitate to point out how DPP officials have been duplicitous and hypocritical while promising to help the ‘little guy’. Where DPP officials failed to lead, public protests rose up.

The second part of the book is quite different from the first and third sections, as it deals with the gay marriage battle here. Taiwan is on the whole one of the more progressive countries in the non-Western world when it comes to LGBT issues. Social issues have not been politicized to the extent that they have in the USA (they don’t fit neatly into Taiwan’s traditional Blue v. Green political polarization) and while many families are still run under traditional lines (anecdotally, I’ve heard many gay Taiwanese are ‘out’ to their peers but not to their parents), there is little anti-gay sentiment in society at large. It is easy to be optimistic that same-sex marriage will become a legal reality in Taiwan soon, as polls show a majority of people either actively support legalization of gay marriage or are indifferent to it.

In this section, Cole examines the gay-marriage fight in Taiwan and the segment of society that seems most opposed to it: Christian church groups. According to Wikipedia, less than 5% of Taiwan’s people are Christian. However, Christian churches have been able to mobilize to the point that they pull significantly above their weight on this issue, despite the fact that there’s not much traditional anti-gay bias in Taiwanese culture. (Or in the teachings of Jesus, for that matter. Sure, there is anti-gay stuff in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, but as everyone who’s actually read them knows, most bible-thumpers have to cherry-pick liberally from those books.)

As Cole delves into the background of the Christian churches leading these anti-gay movements, he uncovers connections to the creepier side of American evangelical Christianity. Many of these connections involve the Bread of Life Church, which sent all sorts of weird feelings up and down my spine because I’ve walked right past this church’s Taipei location on Heping East Road countless times over the years.

All in all, this is a subject Cole feels strongly about: a very close family member of his is gay and married, so it's easy to understand his righteous anger at homophobic church groups peddling anti-gay slander as religion (not that he needed an excuse of course). As the subject matter is quite distinct from the first and third chapters, Chapter 2 does fit slightly awkwardly into Black Island as a whole, but I suppose one could see it as a dark side of the Taiwanese civil society whose awakening Cole celebrated in Chapter 1.

The final section of Black Island opens on the eve of the Sunflower Movement’s occupation of the Legislative Yuan on March 19, 2014.

For me personally, though I lived in Taiwan for the entire period of time covered by Cole’s book, I never really paid enough attention to the events covered in Chapter 1 while they were ongoing to fit them into a larger mental framework. I saw stories in the news about anti-government protests and worries about Chinese influence in Taiwanese media, but seldom gave them more than a passing notice. The Legislative Yuan occupation was very different though -- a real ‘holy crap, is this actually happening?’ shock delivered straight to my brain.

Unlike certain people whom I am married to, I never actually ventured to the vicinity of the Legislative Yuan while the occupation was going on to hang with the protesters. That said, I did go to the mass protest of March 30. While I don’t have the expertise to estimate numbers, I can say it felt like the largest gathering of human beings that I have ever personally witnessed, and I am easily inclined to believe the higher estimates of how many people actually came out that day.

I’ll admit that when the occupation began, I was antsy and nervous -- dudes, is this really a good idea? Will it really help your cause? Think about the optics, people!

In retrospect, I was wrong. The images left in people’s brains are ones of overwhelming civility -- protesters being kind to police, and occupiers cleaning the Legislative Yuan to make it nice before vacating it. Whatever you may think of their politics or their methods, the Sunflowers won the optics.

The short-lived Executive Yuan occupation of March 23 left a very different impression. I remember sitting on the couch at home that night, nervously watching a livestream of the events, wondering just what the people involved could possibly be thinking. Every time I heard a siren in the distance I assumed it was headed toward the Executive Yuan (and as I live in central Taipei, there’s a good chance I was right at least some of the time). And when I went out the following day, after police violently evicted the protesters, I felt as if there was a noticeable sense of dazed glumness hanging over the city -- a sense of ‘geez, what is this country coming to?’ (With that said, I must point out that in a country just a few decades removed from tyrannical military rule, the biggest police crackdown of the pivotal year of 2014 produced zero fatalities. This is, by global standards, an extremely civilized country. May it always stay that way.)

I am absolutely not defending the violence of the police crackdown at the Executive Yuan, but I never really warmed up to the protesters’ actions when occupying it -- a bit too much like prodding the beast to get a reaction. Fortunately, the aforementioned mass protest of March 30 took place a few days later, and helped cleanse the EY occupation’s bad taste from my mouth.

And it does feel as if the country has been different, post-Sunflower. It’s not just the two devastating KMT electoral losses; there’s also been a blow struck against the condescending old “we know what’s best for you, so sush your mouth and let the adults run things” mentality of the past. There was more reason to feel optimistic about Taiwan’s future at the end of 2014 than when the year started, and in the time since, my optimism has only grown.

In conclusion, Black Island is a better read than Officially Unofficial, because Cole is reporting and opining on events rather than writing a memoir, which means he spends far less time explaining and defending his own actions and far more time describing the political situation in Taiwan, which is presumably what the reader is more interested in. The essays that make up the book all deal with Cole’s two main topics, which means the reader will have to look elsewhere to find coverage of other issues in Taiwanese politics during this time, such as President Ma Ying-jeou’s attempts to oust Speaker Wang Jin-pyng in the autumn of 2013.

The fact that the book is a collection of previously published essays means that the prose has a certain amount of repetition, and of course this is a collection of opinion pieces, not a magisterial work of history. I note that no publisher’s name graces this book; there are several typos and malformed sentences that likely would not have gotten past a professional editor. Also, twice in the book the reader is presented with a paragraph of Chinese text, for which no English translation or gloss is given, but the reader is still apparently expected to read and understand. (I choose to view this not as an oversight, but rather as a vote of confidence in my language ability.) If you’re on board with these issues, Black Island is an excellent look back at several interesting aspects of the last few years of Taiwanese political history.

My own views don’t always match up exactly with Cole’s. I think I am more of a free-speech absolutist than he is. In the Chapter 2, when Cole spoke of anti-gay groups that defended themselves by saying they had freedom of speech to speak their mind, I wish he had pointed out yes, these groups do indeed have a right to free speech, but asserting it’s not illegal to state your opinion is literally the weakest possible argument in favor of your opinion that you can make. Also, Cole’s tendency toward pomposity, while less pronounced here as in Officially Unofficial, still pops up from time to time; see the occasional overblown metaphor and his silly cliched rant about smartphones at the opening of Chapter 3.

In the end, the lessons learned from Black Island can be applied beyond the shores of Taiwan. Of course in many ways Taiwan is unique -- most countries do not have an enormous neighbor threatening annexation or war. But Taiwan is not the only country with an ostensibly democratic government that acts like an authoritarian regime when convenient. Cole describes how Taiwanese civil society is capable of spawning groups that can exert pressure on governments, independent of established political actors. This lesson applies outside Taiwan, and it will keep governments around the world on their toes in the coming years.