WARS, GUNS, AND VOTES: Democracy in Dangerous Places
By Paul Collier
255 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers

Reviewd by Kenneth Roth

These days no self-respecting government wants to present itself on the world stage without the legitimacy of a democratic mantle. Elections are now de rigueur, even if many a despot rejects the idea of actually abiding by voter preferences. The result is an embrace of “democracy” by such authoritarian leaders as Vladimir Putin of Russia, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, Umaru Yar’Adua of Nigeria and Mwai Kibaki of Kenya. They all have used some combination of violence, fraud and repression to ensure that elections do not threaten their grasp on power.

They get away with this charade in part because the Western democracies that might be expected to demand the real thing have economic and strategic incentives to settle for farce. Rather than insist on the elements of democracy that make it meaningful — a free press, a vigorous civil society, the rule of law, a fair and transparent process for counting ballots — they close their eyes to electoral travesty.

It has long been an article of faith that these pseudodemocracies are inherently unstable. When citizens have no real opportunity to select their leaders, grievances fester, and violence may be close behind. But it is one thing to know of this phenomenon, quite another to prove it. In “Wars, Guns, and Votes,” Paul Collier has set out to bring empirical rigor to our intuitions.

A professor of economics at Oxford, Collier examines the governments of what, in an earlier book, he called the “bottom billion” — the world’s 58 most impoverished countries. He undertakes this daunting task by summarizing an array of sophisticated economic and social science research, all in a folksy, accessible style. For those who want statistical chapter and verse, he refers readers to his Web site.

Collier’s primary conclusion: democracy, in the superficial, election-focused form that tends to prevail in these countries, “has increased political violence instead of reducing it.” Without rules, traditions, and checks and balances to protect minorities, distribute resources fairly and subject officials to the law, these governments lack the accountability and legitimacy to discourage rebellion. The quest for power becomes a “life-and-death struggle” in which “the contestants are driven to extremes.”

Collier’s data show that before an election, warring parties may channel their antagonisms into politics, but that violence tends to flare up once the voting is over. What’s more, when elections are won by threats, bribery, fraud and bloodshed, such so-called democracies tend to promote bad governance, since the policies needed to retain power are quite different from those needed to serve the common good.

Ethnic identification in the multiethnic societies that predominate among the bottom billion is a particular impediment. Leaders have no incentive to perform well, Collier explains, if voters cast ballots according to ethnic loyalty rather than governmental competence. Nor should we be fooled into thinking that democracy is working just because voters turn out in large numbers. Where identity politics prevail, “voting is likely to be primarily expressive,” like “wearing a football scarf.” It doesn’t mean voters have faith that their ballots will lead to more effective government. Besides, because news organizations in these countries are weak and objective information scarce, citizens probably don’t even know how well or how badly their leaders are performing.

To flourish among the bottom billion, Collier says, democracy must “gradually erode ethnic identities and replace them with a national identity.” Economic development helps, but in societies riven by ethnic divisions, it can simply increase the stakes to be parceled out among the different groups. According to Collier, what is essentially needed are visionary leaders who can build identification with the nation as a whole.

The West’s mistaken fixation with elections, according to Collier, has mainly to do with lingering cold war habits. The Soviet dread of the ballot, he writes, “confused us into thinking that achieving a competitive election is in itself the key triumph. The reality is that rigging elections is not daunting: only the truly paranoid dictators avoid them.”

Still, electoral shortcomings in these countries do not mean we should give up on democracy altogether. It’s the cheap imitation that should give us pause. As Collier explains, “democracy is a force for good” as long as it is more than a ­“facade.”

Collier’s analysis is filled with interesting statistical tidbits. For example, coups tend to cost a country 7 percent of a year’s income — “not a cheap way of replacing a government,” he notes. And international aid, by sweetening the honey pot, increases the risk of a coup — by roughly a third when aid amounts to 4 percent of the gross domestic product of a recipient nation. Leakage from international development assistance finances some 40 percent of military budgets, yet military spending doesn’t necessarily bring peace. Quite the opposite. It can jeopardize peace by signaling to potential rebels that the government “is planning to turn nasty.”

But Collier’s news is not all bad. If democracy (in its limited form) tends to increase political violence in the poorest countries, the opposite occurs once per capita income reaches about $2,700. These wealthier voters apparently expect more responsive governments, and are prone to revolt if their expectations are dashed. Since China recently passed this income threshold, the statistics suggest that it risks increasing political violence unless it democratizes.

The weakest part of “War, Guns, and Votes” occurs when Collier turns prescriptive. At the most general level, his recommendations are unexceptionable: because electoral competition promotes antidemocratic practices if there is no other accountability, the governments of the bottom billion need help to be made more accountable. Yet Collier’s solution is questionable. He proposes that Western governments declare they will accept military coups if elections are not fair. This, he argues, would provide a powerful incentive for leaders to allow meaningful balloting. But legitimizing coups in this way also risks substantial bloodshed.

By contrast, if an elected leader follows agreed-upon rules, Collier wants the West to guarantee his government against overthrow. It should be pointed out that Collier does not support military interventions to stop mass atrocities — the killing in Darfur, for example — which he somewhat callously dismisses as “distracting fantasies.” But his suggestion that Western militaries might roam the world putting down coups, even if only against genuinely democratic leaders, seems dangerous and naïve. Collier suggests that interventions in small, less-developed countries would be relatively easy for a military trained for such exercises — “not another Iraq.” Recent experience would lead us to think otherwise.

Collier is better at responding to the objection that he is advocating interference in other nations’ internal affairs. Many of the governments of the bottom billion, made sensitive by their colonial heritages, reject any international pressure as an affront to their sovereignty. But as Collier points out, these governments typically do not really have national sovereignty, since they have yet to develop a national identity or national institutions. They have only “presidential sovereignty” — hardly the same thing, and hardly worth defending.

Whatever one’s feelings about Collier’s recommendations, there is no denying that he has made a substantial contribution to current discussions. His evidence-based approach is a worthwhile corrective to the assumptions about democracy that too often tend to dominate when Western policy makers talk about the bottom billion.

(Kenneth Roth is the executive director of Human Rights Watch.)