DPI 101C: Political Institutions and Public Policy

Tarek Masoud, Associate Professor of Public Policy Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:10 11:30 am, L280 Faculty Assistant: Mary Anne Baumgartner Ash Center 124 Mt. Auburn St., Suite 200N, 217F Maryanne_Baumgartner@harvard.edu 617.496.7466 Instructors office hours: Tuesdays, 1:00 3:00 pm. Ash Center, Room 236 This is a course about political institutions: where they come from, how they change, and how they shape the actions of political leaders. This iteration of DPI-101 is particularly well-suited to students enrolled in the International and Global Affairs concentration. It was designed to supplement the IGA curriculums focus on the interactions between countries with an attention to the domestic factors that help shape those interactions. Thus, the course is intended to help you understand the incentives and constraints faced by political leaders acting on the world stage. It will also provide you a firm grounding in the analysis of political systems, which will be useful for those wishing to specialize in particular geographic regions. It also contains material that will be useful to those wishing to focus the specific policy domains of democratization, human rights, and development. Students interested in democratization and human rights will gain from this course a deeper understanding of the domestic processes that make regimes more respectful of the personal freedom and physical integrity of their citizens. Similarly, those interested in pursuing careers in international development will benefit from the courses exploration of the interplay between political institutions and citizens welfare. An important additional aim of this course is to help you hone your analytical skills and presentational abilities. In your professional lives, you will often be required to explain complex policy choices with verbal economy and analytical precision. Though it takes an entire career to master these skills, the exercises in this class are designed to help you on your journey. They will also help to prepare you for Spring Exercise, the policy simulation that is the capstone of the first year of the Master in Public Policy program. This class combines lectures, discussions (both of specific cases and of conceptual issues suggested by the readings), and in-class exercises. Your full participation in class discussions in essential to making this course work. It is important that you complete the readings and come to class ready to participate, ask questions, debate with your colleagues, and contribute to our collective enterprise. Attendance is mandatory, and 15% of your grade will be based on class participation. I will do my best to make it possible for everyone in this class to participate to their full potential. Assignments: The bulk of your grade will be based on three written assignments, a group assignment (that includes both an oral and written component), and an in-class final exam. Due Course Assistants: Gregory Pavone MPP 2014 (Gregory_Pavone@hks14.harvard.edu) Moses Esema MPP/MBA 2014 (Moses_Esema@hks14.harvard.edu)

Course Description

Expectations, Assignments, Grading, and Other Matters

dates and the relative share of each assignment in your overall grade are below: Assignment 750 word op-ed 1,000 word memo (1) 1,000 word memo (2) Group assignment Final exam Date distributed Date due 1/30/2014 2/6/2014 2/18/2014 3/4/2014 3/6/2014 3/25/2014 Week of April 1, 2014 April 17, 2014 Share of grade (%) 10 15 20 20 20

Grading: Each assignment will be scored along the six point performance index used in Spring Exercise: 6 = Distinction even by the standards expected of a professional practitioner 5 = Fully meets the standards expected of a professional practitioner 4 = Distinction by the standards expected of a professional school graduate student 3 = Average by the standards expected of a professional school graduate student 2 = Below average by the standards expected of a professional school graduate student 1 = Unacceptable by the standards expected of a professional school graduate student A copy of the standard assessment sheet that I will use for each assignment is appended to this document. I use this system instead of assigning letter grades because it gives you the clearest possible sense of how your performance would be evaluated in the real world, against an absolute standard of professionalism. It is a very high standard: past experience in this and other sections of DPI-101 has been that scores of 6 and 5 are rarely, if ever, awarded. Please note that your final grade for the course will not be based on your absolute score on any of the graded exercises, but rather on how well you performed relative to other students in the class. The Kennedy Schools grading curve is as follows: the top 10 to 15% of the class will receive a grade of A; the next 20 to 25% will receive a grade of A-; the next 30 to 40% will receive a grade of B+; the next 20 to 25% will receive a grade of B; and the lowest 5 to 10% will receive a grade of B- or lower. Academic Honesty: It is important that you adhere to the Kennedy Schools policies regarding proper academic practice. The academic code can be found here. Please pay particular attention to the section on plagiarism, which is the appropriation of others words and ideas without proper attribution. The disciplinary consequences of this violation are dire, so please take care to quote and cite your sources. I will discuss strategies for avoiding plagiarism throughout the course, but it is your responsibility to make sure that the words and ideas that appear in your work are your own, and that you give credit where credit is due. Policy on laptops, tablets, and smart-phones: Tablets and phones must be shut off during class, and the use of laptops is strongly discouraged. Recent research has shown that laptop use is detrimental to learningnot just to the learning of the students using the laptops, but also of those seated near those students. If youve ever been seated next to someone who is checking their email, browsing Facebook, tweeting their professors witty remarks, or surfing the web during lecture (due, presumably, to an absence of witty remarks), you know how distracting this can be. If you must use a laptop to take notes in my class, you may do so only if you are willing to do three things: First, to install a privacy filter on your screen, so that students seated to either side of you cannot see what you are doing. One such product is made by 3M, and can be found here: http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/3MScreens_NA/Protectors/Shop_Products/

Product_Catalog/~?N=5019651&rt=c3. Second, to sit in the back row, so that no one is seated directly behind you who could see (and thus be driven to distraction by) what you are doing on your machine. And three, to type as quietly as possible. The clacking of keyboards is terribly distracting not just to your colleagues, but to your easily distracted instructor. You are encouraged to buy a laptop keyboard cover, such as the following: http://www.amazon.com/Universal-LaptopKeyboard-Cover/dp/B003C2QNEK. I dont absolutely require this because Im not sure how well they muffle sound, but I hope some of you will try it.

In order to demonstrate that this policy is not just an exercise in the capriciousness for which I am occasionally known, Id encourage you to read the study on which it is based: http://www.yorku.ca/ncepeda/laptopFAQ.html. If you are too busy to read the study, you can read nice summaries of the findings here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/laptop-use-lowersstudent-grades-experiment-shows-1.1401860 and here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/08/20/how-distracting-arelaptops-in-class/. I need, and am grateful for, your cooperation in fostering an atmosphere conducive to deep thought and concentration. Readings: You are required to purchase two books for this class: Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance, Cambridge University Press, 1990 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State, Yale University Press, 1997 All other materials are available on the course web page. A few more things: Depending on class size, there may be assigned seating. Please schedule a meeting with me in my office hours during the first three weeks of class. A signup sheet is available outside my Ash Center office. Lecture slides will be uploaded to the course page every two weeks or so. They are intended to serve as study guides, but they are not substitutes for doing the readings. You are strongly encouraged to attend the Ash Centers seminars on democracy, the schedule of which can be found here: http://ash.harvard.edu/Home/NewsEvents/Events/Democracy- Seminar.

Schedule of meetings and readings

Tuesday, January 28: Introduction In this session, we will explain the main aims of the course, introduce some key terms, and discuss course assignments and expectations. We will emerge from this session with a roadmap of what were trying to achieve and how we will achieve it. Before coming to class, you are asked to do two things: 1. Familiarize yourself with the syllabus. 2. Compose a 200 word description of yourself that includes your interests, education, work experience, ambitions, and which tells me at least one thing about you that is not on your rsum. (Since some of you who attend the first lecture may choose not to take this section of the course, you can have until January 30 to submit this.)

Thursday, January 30: The Demand Side In this class, we begin our inquiry into the sources of public policies by investigating the hypothesis that policies are purely the result of demand by organized groups. Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies, University of California Press, 1984. Chapter 5, The Market as Political Arena and the Limits of Voluntarism, pp. 81-95 Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Harvard University Press, 1975 Chapter 1: A Theory of Groups and Organizations, pp. 5-52 Albert O. Hirschmann, Exit, Voice, Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, Harvard University Press, 1970. pp. 1-43 Tuesday, February 4: Political Institutions The common rejoinder to the view that policies are functions of demand is that institutions matter. What does this mean? Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance, Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. 3 to 72 (all of Part I). Recommended Adam Przeworski, Institutions Matter? Government and Opposition, Autumn 2004, 39(4):527-540. Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science, Chapter 6, Legislative Behavior and the Paradox of Voting, pp. 98-146, Yale University Press, 1996 PART I: POLITICAL REGIMES The vast range of political regimes can be boiled down to two: those in which citizens select their leaders, and those in which they dont. In this part of the course, we explore whether policymakers in authoritarian and democratic systems experience different political pressures and whether these differences generate distinctive policies. Thursday, February 6: Regime types In this class, we define our terms. How do we know a democracy or a dictatorship when we see it? Miriam Kornbluth and Vinay Jawahar, Elections versus Democracy, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 16, No. 1, January 2005, pp. 124-137 Iranian Constitution, Chapter I, Articles 1 to 14. International Constitutional Law Project, University of Bern, Switzerland. Available at: http://www.servat.unibe.ch/icl/ir00000_.html Recommended Adam Przeworski, Minimalist Conception of Democracy: A Defense, in The Democracy Sourcebook, 2003, MIT Press, pp. 12-17 Robert Dahl, Polyarchy, 1971, Yale University Press, pp. 1-16

If democratically-elected leaders are more accountable to their people than autocrats are, one might reasonably expect them to be more responsive to their needs. What is the empirical evidence for this proposition?
Mulligan, Casey B., Richard Gil, and Xavier Sala-i-Martin, 2004, Do democracies have different public policies than non-democracies? Journal of

Tuesday, February 11: Regime Type and Social Policy

Economic Perspectives no. 18 (1), pp. 51-74. David Lake and Matthew Baum, 2004, The Invisible Hand of Democracy: Political Control and the Provision of Public Services, Comparative Political Studies, 34, pp. 587-621. Recommended Simon Wigley and Arzu Akkoyunlu-Wigley, 2011, The Impact of Regime Type on Health: Does Redistribution Explain Everything? World Politics, 63(4):647-677

Thursday, February 13: Regime Type and Economic Development Observers of the spectacular rise of East Asian economiesparticularly that of China have asked whether dictatorships are better at promoting economic development. Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work, The New York Times, January 12, 2012. Karl De Schweinitz, excerpt from Industrialization and Democracy: Economic Necessities and Political Possibilities 1964, reprinted in Shapiro and Cheibub, eds, The Democracy Sourcebook, MIT Press, 2003, pp. 421-426 Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Chapter 3, The Making of Prosperity and Poverty, pp. 70-95 Recommended S. Yusuf, The East Asian Miracle at the Millennium, in J. Stiglitz and S. Yusuf (eds.), Rethinking the East Asian Miracle (World Bank: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 1-39 Mancur Olson, 1993, Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development, American Political Science Review, 87 (3), pp. 567-576. Tuesday, February 18: The Puzzle of Democracy and Inequality We might expect political equality to produce economic equality. It doesnt. Leaving aside whether this is a good or bad thing, its worth asking why it doesnt. Frank I. Luntz, Words that Work: Its Not What You Say, Its What People Hear, Hyperion, 2007, pp. 279-289 Ian Shapiro, Why the Poor Dont Soak the Rich, Daedalus, Vol. 131, No. 1, Winter 2002, pp. 118-128 John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley, University of Illinois Press, 1982. pp. 1-46 Recommended Pepper Culpepper, 2010, Quiet Politics, Cambridge University Press, pp. 177-198 Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, 2010, Winner-Take-All Politics: Public Policy, Political Organization, and the Precipitous Rise of Top Incomes in the United States, Politics and Society, 38(2), pp. 152-204. PART II: REGIME CHANGE By this point, maybe youve been convinced that regime type matters, maybe you have not. Regardless, anyone paying attention to the politics of developing world particularly countries seized by moments of revolutioncannot help but conclude that millions of people think regime type matters. Given the ongoing struggle of countless people around the world to change the regimes that dominate them, its worth directing our analytical lens at their efforts. How do countries move from one type of political regime to another? And how do they make the change stick?

Thursday, February 20: The Art of Resistance How do authoritarian regimes fall? What role does popular protest play in democratization? Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation, 4th Edition, Albert Einstein Institution, 2010. Chapter Four, Dictatorships Have Weaknesses, pp. 25-28, Chapter Five, pp. 29-38, Appendix One, The Methods of Nonviolent Action, pp. 79-86 (available at: http://www.cfic.org.uk/media/From%20dictatorship%20to%20democracy.pdf) Dobson, William J, The Dictators Learning Curve, Chapter 7, The Professionals, Doubleday, 2012, pp. 224-252 Tuesday, February 25: Democracy without Preconditions? In this class, and the two that follow, we explore the causes of democratic consolidation. Once an autocrat has fallen, what determines whether democracy will take root? Can any authoritarian regime become a democracy? Dankwart Rustow, 1970, Transitions to democracy: Toward a dynamic model, Comparative Politics 2(3):337-363 Terry Lynn Karl, "Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America," Comparative Politics 23 (October 1990) Thomas Carothers, 2002, The End of the Transition Paradigm, Journal of Democracy 13(1)5-21 Thursday, February 27: Structural Preconditions of Democracy I: Economic development Earlier, we asked if democracy generates economic development. In this class, we ask the inverse: does economic development produce democracy? Country Report on Mali, Freedom in the World, 2012 edition, Freedom House. Available at http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2012/mali Oumou Sall Seck, Save Mali Before Its Too Late, The New York Times, December 28, 2012. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/29/opinion/save-mali-before-its-toolate.html?_r=0 Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, 1997, Modernization: Theories and Facts, World Politics, 49(2):155-183. Charles Boix and Suzan Stokes, 2003, Endogenous Democratization, World Politics, 55:517-49. Tuesday, March 4: Structural Preconditions of Democracy II: Culture? The idea that some cultures are not inconducive to democracy has fallen out of favor in the academy. Is it time to bring culture back in? James Fallows, A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines? The Atlantic Monthly, November 1, 1987. Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/1987/11/a-damaged-culture-anew-philippines/7414/# Robert Putnam, Chapter 4, Explaining Institutional Performance, Making Democracy Work, Princeton University Press, 1994. Recommended Benedict Anderson, Cacique Democracy in the Philippines: Origins and Dreams, New Left Review, May/June 1988. Available at: http://newleftreview.org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/I/169/benedict-anderson-

cacique-democracy-and-the-philippines-origins-and-dreams Jim Granato, Ronald Inglehart, David Leblang, The Effect of Cultural Values on Economic Development: Theory, Hypotheses, and Some Empirical Tests, American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 601-31

Thursday, March 6: Case study: The Arab Spring The protests and uprisings that began in the Arab World in the winter of 2010 have produced a range of outcomes. What explains the success of revolution in some places and its failure in others? Brownlee, Masoud, and Reynolds, 2013, Tracking the Arab Spring: Why the Modest Harvest? Journal of Democracy, 24(4):29-44 Larry Diamond, 2010, Why are there no Arab Democracies, Journal of Democracy, 21(1):93-104 Lisa Anderson, 2001, Arab Democracy: Dismal Prospects, World Policy Journal, 18(3):53-60 PART III: VARIETIES OF DEMOCRACY In this section of the course, we explore whether particular institutions impact democracys quality, its policy outputs, and its very survival. Tuesday, March 11: Power Sharing and Political Opposition Is democracy more durable when competing interests are given a seat at the table? What is to prevent such arrangements from devolving into collusion and domination? Arend Lijphart, 1969, Consociational Democracy, World Politics, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 207-225 Courtney Jung and Ian Shapiro, South Africas Negotiated Transition: Democracy, Opposition, and the New Constitutional Order, Politics and Society, Vol. 23, No. 3, 1995, pp. 269-308 Thomas Koelble and Andrew Reynolds, Power-Sharing Democracy in the New South Africa, Politics and Society, Vol. 24, No.3, 1996, pp.221-236. Recommended Donald L. Horowitz, Constitution-Making: A Process Filled with Constraint, Review of Constitutional Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2006 Thursday, March 13: Electoral Systems Does how you get elected determine who gets elected? Given the myriad ways of organizing elections, are some systems better than others in producing governments that are accountable and responsive, or in muting otherwise destructive political and social cleavages? Donald Horowitz, 2003. Electoral Systems: A Primer for Decision Makers, Journal of Democracy, 14:4, pp. 1115-127. (Project Muse Online) Pippa Norris, 1997, Choosing Electoral Systems: Proportional, Majoritarian, and Mixed Systems, International Political Science Review, 18 (3) March 17-21, Spring Recess Tuesday, March 25: Legislatures and Executives Does the structure of government influence prospects for democratic survival? Arturo Valenzuela, Latin American Presidencies Interrupted, Journal of Democracy, vol. 15, no. 4, October 2004

http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/gratis/Valenzuela-15-4.pdf Scott Mainwaring and Matthew Shugart, 1997, Juan Linz, Presidentialism, and Democracy: A Critical Appraisal, Comparative Politics 29(4), pp. 449-471. Recommended Juan Linz, The Perils of Presidentialism, Journal of Democracy, vol. 1, no. 1, 1990, pp. 51-69

Thursday, March 27: Case Study: Indonesia, the worlds unlikeliest democracy? Recent scholarship has shown that poverty, the proportion of the population that is Muslim, and ethnic diversity are all correlated with autocracy. And yet Indonesia, which is poor, majority-Muslim, and ethnically diverse has managed to hang onto democracy for almost 15 years. What explains the Indonesian exception? Does the answer lie in institutions? Or is Indonesia not really an exception at all? Daniel Slater, Indonesias Accountability Trap: Party Cartels and Presidential Power After Democratic Transition, Indonesia, 78 (October 2004): 61-92 Edward Aspinall, 2010, Indonesia: The Irony of Success, Journal of Democracy, 21(2):20-34 PART IV: GOVERNANCE CHALLENGES Tuesday, April 1: Group Briefings (Scheduled in and out of class) Thursday, April 3: The Welfare State States vary greatly in terms of how they conceive the rights of citizenship. In some polities, for example, the state is merely an insurer of last resort. In others, it is responsible for providing citizens with the capacity for self-actualization. What explains these differences? Esping-Andersen, 2007, Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, in Christopher Pierson and Francis Castles, eds., The Welfare State Reader, Polity Press, pp. 160-174. Melani Cammett and Sukriti Issar, 2010, Bricks and Mortar Clientelism: Sectarianism and the Logics of Welfare Allocation in Lebanon, World Politics, 62(3), pp. 381-421. Nita Rudra, 2002, Globalization and the Decline of the Welfare State in Less Developed Countries, International Organization 56:2, pp. 411-445 Recommended Jacob Hacker, 2002, The Divided Welfare State, Cambridge University Press, Chapter 1, pp. 5-27. Siaroff, Alan. "Corporatism in 24 industrial democracies: Meaning and measurement." European Journal of Political Research 36.2 (1999): 175-205. Tuesday, April 8: Strong and Weak States Ultimately, the decisions policymakers make are carried out by this thing called the state. What, precisely, is it? What determines a states capacity for governing? James Scott, Seeing Like a State, Chapter 7, pp. 223-262. Jeffrey Herbst, War and the State in Africa, International Security, Vol. 14, No. 4, Spring 1990, pp. 117-39

Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, Yale University Press, 1968, pp. 1-11 Recommended Francis Fukuyama, The Imperative of State-Building, Journal of Democracy, Vol.15, No.2, April 2004, pp. 17-31 Susan Rice and Stewart Patrick, Index of State Weakness in the Developing World, Brookings Institution, 2008. Available at: http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2008/2/weak%20st ates%20index/02_weak_states_index

Thursday, April 10: Case Study: The Politics of the Eurozone What are the causes of the crisis? Andmost importantly for the purposes of our coursewhat accounts for variation in European states ability to confront it? Dante Roscini and Jonathan Schlefer, Can the Eurozone survive? Harvard Business School Case Study No. 9-713-034, December 3, 2012 Erik Jones, 2012, Getting to Greece: Uncertainty, Misfortune, and the Origins of Political Disorder, European Political Science, 12:294-304 Tuesday, April 15: Concluding lecture In which we recapitulate the themes and lessons of the course. Scott, Seeing Like a State, Chapter 9 Robert K. Merton, 1936, The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action, American Sociological Review, 1(6):894-904 Thursday, April 17: Final Examination (In class).