Monthly Archives: November 2021

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

25 Thursday Nov 2021

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, Writing

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

So you’ve got an Evil Overlord ruling over the peasants. The Evil Overlord raises taxes. What do the peasants do?

The answer depends on a whole host of factors, depending on your setting. But a nice, simple model for thinking about it was developed in 1970 by economist Albert O. Hirschman. He was initially thinking about how consumers respond when a product they use (a brand of car, for example) gets worse, but quickly realized that the same basic model applies in a multitude of settings—politics included. The model (and Hirshman’s book describing it) is called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.

Back to our Evil Overlord. The peasants obey partly out of rational calculation (they don’t want the Brute Squad sent after them), but partly out of loyalty: a non-rational sense that the peasants want to, or ought to, obey the Overlord. Loyalty might reflect a long history of good experiences, and the expectation that good experiences will return in the future even with the momentary troubles. It might reflect irrational beliefs, such as official ideology or superstition. But in any event, loyalty gives the Evil Overlord a buffer so that the peasants continue to obey even after they “rationally” would decide not to.

Loyalty is incredibly valuable, and not just to the Overlord. If his regime is essentially “good enough” for the most part, and the current bout of tax-raising is to meet an immediate crisis, the peasants’ loyalty is what keeps them from demolishing the system right away. It gives the Overlord the chance to improve things, if he wants to. And if he does, then everyone benefits without the need for a destructive rebellion. Loyal obedience, in this case, was the right move.

But even the most loyal peasant will eventually lose patience. Things are bad, they’re not getting better, and something must be done. Hirschman writes that our peasant has two choices: exit, and voice.

Exit is straightforward: the peasants stop cooperating. That could either mean literally fleeing the country, or it could mean hiding your money and entering the black market, or it could mean launching a rebellion. The details will differ based on your setting; but fundamentally, if you choose Exit, you believe that there is nothing you can gain by acting within the system. All you can do is escape.

Voice, on the other hand, is action within the system. If the Overlord is doing poorly, the peasant using Voice literally speaks up to tell him what is wrong. In other settings, using Voice could mean answering customer surveys, or voting in an election, or submitting bug reports to a software developer. Voice becomes attractive if you are loyal, if you believe that the system can be improved, that those in charge will listen to what you say and act on it, that you yourself won’t be harmed for using Voice.

If you are the Overlord, or a corporation, or the leader of a nonprofit, you want to make it attractive for your “peasants” to use Voice, for two reasons. First, obviously, it makes it less likely for them to Exit, costing you money or power. Second, you gain more information about what is going wrong and how to fix it. But if your peasants don’t feel safe using Voice, they will simply Exit instead and the Overlord has a bigger problem.

As I said, this is only a starting point. But it’s a tremendously flexible one, and can clarify your thinking about many different issues. When writing your story, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty reminds you that your peasants have choices; it gets you thinking about which choice is most attractive, and why.

Dimensions of Tyranny

23 Tuesday Nov 2021

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, Writing

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

If you’ve read Beyond Kings and Princesses, you would know that I appreciate the power of a good simplifying model for worldbuilding. When we authors create a new setting, we are faced with infinite possibilities for how to structure things—but as a result, we often become paralyzed with indecision, or we simply default to some standard trope. On the other hand, having a simple model, presenting clear choices between paths, can sometimes help us narrow in on the truly bold choices we want to make in our writing.

For example, let’s say you wanted to have a tyrannical regime in your story. Excellent; but tyrannical in what way? Hitler was different from Pinochet was different from Hugo Chavez. Should your country be a military dictatorship? Should it have an official Party? Should it be prone to massive societal upheavals like the Cultural Revolution? The answer will depend on what story you want to tell; but already the range of possibilities seems overwhelming. Is there any way to simplify the problem?

What we could use is a nice juicy typology of tyrannies. Happily, political scientists have come up with a few good ones, and my personal favorite comes from Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, by Juan Linz. It has a few moving parts, but we can focus in on two main variables: pluralism/centralization, and mobilization/demobilization.

Pluralism/centralization refers to the state’s relations with civil society. It describes the degree to which the regime has to negotiate with other powerful actors in society, such as unions, business federations, religious organizations, or universities; or, conversely, the degree to which all actors in society have been forced under the control of the state. Not all regimes aspire to totalitarian control of their societies; many are content to let sleeping dogs lie, allowing other powerful actors like the Catholic Church or trade unions to have certain privileges as long as they behave themselves. Totalitarian regimes such as Nazism or Communism, on the other hand, deliberately destroyed existing social institutions and replaced them with state-controlled caricatures.

Mobilization/demobilization, on the other hand, refers to the state’s relations with the citizens. Essentially, it asks whether the regime wants citizens to be active participants in the political system—in ways that amplify state power, but do not truly threaten state control—or to be passive observers. Party-based systems such as Nazism or Communism relied on the active involvement of the populace; the Party was the true locus of power, and often displaced official state organizations. Persian-Gulf despots or military juntas, meanwhile, often get itchy when the people become politically active; they would rather the people mind their own business and stay out of politics, so they buy off the populace with lavish subsidies on the one hand, and threaten them with violence on the other.

So, a two-by-two matrix with four possibilities: pluralist-mobilized, pluralist-demobilized (a common pattern), centralized-mobilized (often found in Party systems), and centralized-demobilized. These provide a powerful starting point when you are developing your own tyrannical setting.

War as Negotiation

21 Sunday Nov 2021

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, War, Writing

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. I am now moving my attention to the planned second and third books in this series; the subject matter of this post fits into the third book, working title War for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Suppose that Country A and Country B are having some sort of crisis, and Country A threatens to invade unless it gets its way. (A common occurrence, sadly.) But wars are costly, even if you win. Mobilizing your army diverts resources away from other critical activities, such as harvesting crops for the year. Battle casualties represent huge losses of human talent and labor. And every time you fight a war, you run the risk of losing. That all being the case, why would anyone decide to fight a war? And when?

That is, we have to explain four things: the choice of Country A to threaten war, the choice of Country B not to submit, the choice of either country to actually start the war, and the choice of the other country not to simply surrender and save itself the trouble of fighting.

There are many ways of explaining this sequence. But one powerful model to use, because it is so flexible and easily covers a whole range of situations, is the bargaining model of war developed by James Fearon and others in that vein.

The key variables of this model are:

  • The cost of fighting, for each side;
  • The total potential benefits of winning; and
  • The likelihood of each side winning.

Essentially, if you know for a fact that you are likely to win, and that the benefits of winning exceed the cost of fighting, you are very likely to fight—and the other side is very likely to back down.

For example, suppose that you lead a company of 100 mercenaries, and you have the chance to attack a gold mine held by 30 opposing mercenaries. If you do, you expect to lose 15 of your troops, but you would gain the lucrative gold mine and you would very likely be able to keep it. Given that, chances are you’re going to attack the gold mine, even at the cost of some of your troops. And knowing this, the 30 mercenaries are likely to retreat or surrender before you attack, because it is pointless to fight and die when they know they would lose.

On the other hand, the losing mercenaries know that they could kill 15 of your troops if they do fight, and they know that you know it too. So they could negotiate with you for a settlement where they are allowed to take some amount of gold with them as they go—say, the equivalent of 10 mercenaries. So even though they would lose, the weaker side has an incentive to push for some share of the loot before they capitulate.

War thus becomes a bargaining process, where the two sides are essentially negotiating over how to split up the stakes of a war.

If so, why do people fight wars at all? Why not tally up opposing forces, figure out who would win and how much the net profit would be, negotiate some sort of settlement where the stronger party gets the same or greater profit and the weaker party is left with something, and avoid all the messy killing and burning and looting?

The most common reason is uncertainty. In the real world, it is often difficult to know who would win a war. It is also difficult to know how costly a war would be, and even what the benefits would be of winning. As a result, says the theory, any factor that increases uncertainty would tend to make war more likely, because each side hopes that it will end up being worth it to fight. And even if one side knows it would lose, the other side might be so overconfident that it asks for far too much of the “loot”; the weaker party may then decide to fight anyway, in hopes of keeping at least some of what it has.

And any factor that increases certainty would tend to discourage war. If the costs and benefits of war are better known, both parties will recognize when a war would be wasteful—or when the benefits of fighting are so obvious that the winning side cannot be deterred. And of course, if it is obvious who would win a war, the weaker side is likely to capitulate to save itself greater loss; the stronger side, too, is unlikely to demand too much, since it knows the point at which the other side would fight regardless. So, many conflicts would be avoided because the game is not worth the candle, and many others would end with the sides negotiating some sort of settlement, without fighting.

A second reason for war is if the “loot” cannot be split up between the sides. For example, in a war of extermination, there is simply no option of a settlement; you win, or you die. Less drastically, if two countries are fighting over control of a strategic mountain pass, there is no way to share the pass; one side is going to end up in control, and the other side will be shut out. So the stakes are higher, and there is less opportunity to negotiate a settlement.

Finally, what if you should be able to negotiate a settlement, but you don’t trust the other side to keep it? Or you can’t convince the other side that you can be trusted? Then it becomes much harder to negotiate an end to the crisis, and much easier (so to speak) to go to war instead. For example, rebel forces negotiating with a government have a very hard time coming to an agreement. Each side fears that any concessions will simply make the other side stronger; and often, the rebel forces are being supported by a rival country, which will sometimes pressure the rebels to keep fighting even when they want to stop (or vice versa).

That’s the basic model. It can be elaborated on in many ways, such as adding concerns about reputation or honor in a repeated game. (If you surrender once, maybe countries can bully you into submission over and over again in the future. So the long-term costs of surrender may end up being much higher that the immediate costs of fighting, all things considered, even if you know you will lose.)

So in your fiction, if you want to set up the conditions for a jolly old war, these are the key points to adjust: the cost of fighting, the prize for winning and whether it can be shared, the relative strength of the sides, the ability of each side to commit to a settlement, and the uncertainty of each side about any of the foregoing. A relatively simple model, and quite powerful—my favorite kind of writing tool!