Tag Archives: politics

Writing Exercises for Stories where a Religious Organization Rules Society

09 Thursday May 2019

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(A message from our sponsors: pre-order your copy of The Wand that Rocks the Cradle: Magical Stories of Family now, and get special Kickstarter-exclusive bonuses! A collection of fantasy short stories that range from tender, to grim, to poignant, to breathtaking, The Wand that Rocks the Cradle is a Lagrange Books anthology you don’t want to miss!)

This writing exercise is meant to accompany this post about the Clergy “polity,” in which power is held (at least in part) by a religious leader or organization. If you like this exercise, read the above-linked post and then come back.

  1. What religious/spiritual beliefs do the Clergy have in your society? How do they justify its political power?
  2. Is the Clergy the sole ruler? Or does it provide legitimacy for another ruler, like a king with divine right? What kind of legitimacy?
  3. Does the Clergy make political demands on other powerful figures, or society in general? How are these enforced? Does the Clergy have an army, or magical power? Or do people obey because of its moral authority?
  4. What sacrifices must the Clergy make to demonstrate its religious piety? What sacrifices does it demand of others?
  5. Does the Clergy observe its own rules? Does it have the respect of the people? Of the elites?
  6. How can members of the Clergy exploit their positions for personal gain? How often do they do so?
  7. What happens if a member of the Clergy has a crisis of faith? What about someone not in the Clergy?
  8. What would happen in a religious schism? Or a sudden outbreak of unbelief?
  9. Looking over all the potential conflict points you’ve noted, which have the most resonance for your story?

Writing Exercises for Stories with Popular Sovereignty

09 Thursday May 2019

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(A message from our sponsors: pre-order your copy of The Wand that Rocks the Cradle: Magical Stories of Family now, and get special Kickstarter-exclusive bonuses! A collection of fantasy short stories that range from tender, to grim, to poignant, to breathtaking, The Wand that Rocks the Cradle is a Lagrange Books anthology you don’t want to miss!)

This writing exercise is meant to accompany this post about the Forum “polity,” in which power is held by at least some of the populace and exercised collectively through open debate and shared government. If you like this exercise, read the above-linked post and then come back.

  1. What gives the people real power against a would-be ruler or oligarch? Is it military weaponry? Broad wealth? Magic?
  2. What institution translates people’s individual wishes into a unified policy? Is it an elected legislature? A popular debate followed by a vote? Discussion and consensus by tribal elders? A shared religious law that dictates behavior?
  3. Who has the right to participate in the above institutions, or to choose representatives? In other words, who is enfranchised? (Remember that the famed Athenian democracy, for example, included only about ten percent of the city’s males.)
  4. Are decisions made effectively, especially in crisis moments? Is the process too slow? Does it have a tendency toward alarmism? Can voters be bought off or intimidated?
  5. Are there groups of people who are specifically excluded, like slaves or women, or elves, or biological humans in a cybernetic society?
  6. If the populace makes a decision, who carries it out? In other words, who is the executive or executor? Are they selected, or elected, or hereditary, or something else?
  7. How might the executive actor gain power over time? How might it gain power suddenly? How might it lose power, and/or legitimacy?
  8. What changes in society might undermine the basis for the Forum polity? List at least five.
  9. What ideology justifies the Forum, instead of a monarchy or other non-participatory form of government? How might that ideology be challenged? Does the ideology threaten any neighbors?
  10. Looking back at your potential points of conflict, which have the most resonance for your story?

Writing exercises for regime types: the Palace

22 Monday Apr 2019

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

This series of exercises refers back to this post on “The Palace,” a regime type where power is centralized in a single autocratic figure like a dictator, a powerful king, or other ruler. If you like these exercises, first go back to the above-linked post and read it, then come back and work on the exercises.

  1. Thinking about your ruler, what is the source of his/her power?
  2. What claim justifies the ruler’s legitimacy? Why do the ruler’s followers obey? (Examples: is the ruler thought to be a god? Or anointed by God? Is the ruler part of a special bloodline? Or the victor in a ritual combat over the succession? Does the ruler have the most stock shares in the corporation? Is the ruler simply the richest or most powerful figure?) How does that claim to legitimacy exclude the possibility of popular sovereignty or other forms of rule?
  3. Does the specific form of legitimacy claimed by the ruler imply certain restraints on the ruler’s behavior? Must the ruler spend time propitiating the ancestral spirits, or delivering shareholder reports, or meditating and generating magical power?
  4. Who are the members of Palace “court”? How might their power or influence be dependent on the Palace? What privileges do “courtiers” have because of their proximity to the Palace?
  5. How might the Palace prevent the growth of independent powerful figures (“nobles”)?
  6. How can the courtiers influence the ruler?
  7. If the ruler is feckless or incapacitated, which courtiers might usurp effective (but not de jure) power?
  8. How might the ruler be overthrown? Is such an overthrow consistent with the existing ruling ideology, or would it need to put forward a new ideology?
  9. Looking back over all the ideas you’ve written down, which have the most resonance for your story?

Writing Exercises on “Keeping Power”

18 Thursday Apr 2019

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

This exercise is meant to apply to concepts of this post, which discusses a flexible model for quickly sketching out the key political conflicts in your setting—focusing on who the ruler must keep happy in order to stay in power. If you like the exercises below and want to use them, first read the linked post and then come back.

  1. Spend five minutes thinking about your setting, then list all the kinds of people who have any influence at all on who the leader is. Are they powerful generals? Wealthy merchants? Priests? Voters in a democracy? Voters in an oligarchy or stratified society? Nobles? Regional governors? Board directors or shareholders of a corporation? This is the selectorate.
  2. Of all those people, what is the minimum level of support a leader would need to stay in power? How many different ways are there to put together such a support coalition?
  3. What could a leader offer his/her coalition members to keep them loyal? How could the leader threaten them?
  4. If a coalition member is disloyal, how easily could the member be replaced by the leader with another member of the selectorate?
  1. If the selectorate is unhappy with the leader, how easily could a new support coalition be built behind someone else?
  2. How might policies that favor the support coalition harm people outside of it? (For example, taxing the populace and giving a subsidy to coalition members.) How might potential policies to benefit outsiders harm members of the coalition, and thus be rejected? (For example, building a port that would make grain cheaper, when your supporters are rich landowners who sell grain.)
  3. How could new classes of people join the selectorate? (For example, women gaining the right to vote.) Who would benefit from such a change?
  4. How could existing classes of people lose their place in the selectorate? (For example, a democracy becoming a dictatorship; or powerful religious leaders being displaced by a religious purge.) Who would benefit from such a change?
  5. What might change to allow the leader to need fewer supporters, or to force the leader to seek more supporters?
  6. Looking at all the possibilities for conflict that you listed above, which has the most resonance for the story you want to tell?

Writing Exercises for Social Orders

07 Thursday Mar 2019

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This exercise is meant to apply the concepts from this post, which discusses the tensions between wealth and power and how they end up shaping the entire structure of society. If you like the exercises below and want to use them, read the linked post first and then come back.

  1. Spend five minutes and list all the forms of power—loosely defined, for our purposes, as both the ability to harm people and break things, and the ability to force other people to do what you want—in your setting. Fighting ability, magical power, or command over a band of robbers count; what else?
  2. Spend five minutes and list all desirable goods in your setting. Money or valuables count, but so would fame, social status, immortality, attractive romantic partners, et cetera.
  3. For our purposes, let’s define all of the above as “wealth.” For each relevant type of wealth, how might someone use different forms of power to get more wealth? List as many possibilities as you can.
  4. Likewise, for each type of power, how might someone translate different forms of wealth into more power?
  5. Now, imagine that centuries pass in which powerful people try to gain wealth, and wealthy people try to gain power. List at least five scenarios for how the society might end up looking. If a given group of people became stronger over time, who else would be threatened? How might they react? Who would win? Imagine as many possible social conflicts that you can, vary the outcomes, and list them all.
  6. Of all the ideas you’ve listed, which have the most resonance for the story you want to tell?

Conflict in Politics and Fiction

18 Monday Feb 2019

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

What is politics? And why does it matter for fiction?

If you were to google “politics definition,” many of the dictionary entries focus on the mechanics of running a government or a society; these are not wrong exactly, but are not terribly useful. When we say “office politics,” for example, what we mean is often the exact opposite of a smooth-running office!

Early political scientists, when they were in a pedantic mood, might have used a definition like this: “The authoritative allocation of scarce goods.” This is not very good either, but it does focus our attention on a few points:

  • “Scarce goods” implies that some people will get less than they want, or do without entirely. By definition, some people will be unhappy with the “authoritative allocation,” and want it to change.
  • “Authoritative” highlights the importance of authority, the sense that some people or some commands ought to be followed. In other words, a key part of politics is about leadership and obedience, and how that comes about.

But this definition seems sterile. We are given an image of some central bureaucrat sitting in an office and punching numbers into a calculator, thusly to apportion out the chocolate ration. Yet politics is about more than material goods (or even status, which is also a “scarce good” of a sort; but see below). So the definition is often modified to include “The authoritative determination of values.” Here we get into more interesting ground:

  • Rather than focusing on what we want, “values” instruct us in what we should want.
  • Often, this gets to the core of our identities as people. The stakes are thus very high.
  • When two different people disagree on values—say, whether cocaine use is a personal matter or a harmful vice—often they are proceeding from very different principles, which prevent agreement altogether.
  • Without a way to authoritatively settle the question, such disagreements are thus likely to persist for a long time.

Still, this definition assumes that there is a way to authoritatively determine values, and have them stick. Sometimes it can happen, for example in a unified theocracy; but very often, people who disagree with the authority’s values will deny that the authority even has the right to impose them. Religious wars are but a single example; the conflict between Capitalism and Communism would be another.

Notice that both examples also involve “the allocation of scarce goods”; and in many cases, one’s choice of values is heavily influenced by whether you will benefit from them. Of course peasants will want redistribution of capital, and of course industrialists will want state protection of property—whether or not either side could defend its position on moral grounds (and perhaps they can). As they say, “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” Values direct behavior, but they also justify behavior.

Which brings us to Lenin’s Trotsky’s cynical definition of politics: as “the question of who and whom.”

In other words, politics is about which actor or group of actors can enforce its will on another group. This needn’t even be about who gets more “scarce goods,” though that often plays a role. Rather, it’s about power—in the worst case (as Orwell so bleakly depicted in 1984), power for its own sake. Policy analysis, discussion of values, appeals to shared humanity or morality or whatever, all of these things are mere rationalizations for the will to power.

This also brings the role of conflict to the fore. Conflict was implied in the other two definitions, as we saw; but Lenin gives it center stage. Politics, for Lenin, is unending conflict.

A full definition of “politics” involves aspects of all three, but conflict remains at the heart. And that is why stories involving politics can be so powerful in fiction.

Authors are constantly admonished that stories must be about a conflict; the protagonist wants or needs something, and must struggle to get it. Political conflicts thus make for a compelling setting for stories, by definition. And each dimension of politics can add another delicious layer to the story. Conflict over possessions, or conflict over status, or right and wrong, or personal beliefs, or even about sheer will to power—as Milton’s rendition of Satan put it, it’s better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven—all of these things can interact and build off each other.

A clear understanding of politics can provide another tool to creating strong stories. And perhaps, with luck, truly insightful stories can improve our politics in real life as well.

Who Rules? Part Three—The Forum

03 Tuesday Jul 2018

Posted by in History, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

Some time ago, we mentioned the four potential ruling groups laid out by Samuel Finer, and discussed the Palace Polity; in the second post in this set, we discussed the Nobility and our first hybrid polity, Palace/Nobility. Now, let’s add the Forum into the mix, along with the Palace/Forum.

While in the Palace it is the autocrat who rules, and in the Nobility autonomous aristocrats hold power and scheme jealously against each other, in the Forum, power is vested in the people. In earlier posts, we have briefly noted egalitarian societies in which no true state exists, in which the people of the society share a voice in the major decisions of that society. In the Forum, the rule of the people is explicit and formalized. State institutions exist to carry out the needs of society, but they are subject to the people and depend on it for their orders. Formal mechanisms such as voting, written law and public law courts, and public debate translate the opinions of individuals into a collective imperative, that is sovereign over the government administrators.

Forums can take several forms, of which democracy is only one—and they need not include everyone in the population. In Greek democracy, for example, the vote was restricted to free males who were heads of their households, and often who met certain criteria of wealth. Most of the time, fewer than 10% of the residents of ancient Athens were eligible to vote. But for Finer, that is sufficient, because the franchise was broad enough to go beyond a narrow aristocracy or oligarchy, broad enough to include significant parts of the people itself in its self-rule.

Ancient Israel, which Finer believes was the very first Forum state in history, was not a democracy; but it was a tribal society in which decisions were made by a consensus of elders, until the rise of the monarchy—and even then, the kings had to be careful not to ignore public opinion or the tribal leadership, as could be seen by Ahab’s hesitance to simply confiscate the land of Naboth, or the secession of the northern tribes from the obnoxious rule of Rehovoam, successor to King Solomon.

In both cases, and in pretty much every durable Forum, the political power of the people rested on a foundation of popular military participation. Usually, a Forum was made up of a nation in arms. One of Finer’s main arguments is that political power tends to correspond to the distribution of military force. In early pre-state societies, all able-bodied men (and occasionally women) were considered warriors. Weapons tended to be simple and were widely available, so that the distribution of power between people was fairly even. This is one of the factors sustaining an egalitarian social structure. (By contrast, one of the key processes involved in the emergence of Danish chiefs, over a society that had previously been egalitarian, was the chiefs’ strategic control over the new technology of iron swords, and their careful distribution of swords to their favored supporters.)

Popular military power was true of the Greek polis, where to be qualified for citizenship you had to be able to serve as a hoplite, a spearman in the famous Greek phalanxes. But it was also true of the tribal confederation of ancient Israel. In its earliest, pre-kingly phase, the Israelites served in the popular militias, largely on foot and without heavy armor. (Thus, in the Biblical account of Deborah’s war against the Canaanite general Sisera, the Canaanites possess heavy chariots which the Israelites could not match. They therefore forced battle in the hill country, where the light infantry of the Israelite militia could negate the Canaanites’ advantage.)

The power of the popular militia restrained the growth of centralized political structures in Israel, for a time. Later, the arrival of heavy armor, chariots, cavalry, and foreign mercenaries provided increased military power to those wealthy enough to afford them, creating the basis for a ruling class; the first monarchy emerged shortly after. (I discuss the social effects of weapons technology in a bit more detail here.) But even during the time of the monarchy, Israel was unique among any polity for over a thousand years in that the Forum remained important. The king was the first limited monarch in history; he was subject to the Divine law, and was not its author or above it in any way.

More recently, the Forum polity of the United States was founded on the colonists’ successful rebellion against the British, made possible by the widespread ownership of firearms; the French Revolution, too, was sustained by the invention of the “citizen’s army,” which resisted the combined invasions of the other major powers of Europe. But wait—the French Revolution was hardly a Forum, you may say. It was a cruel totalitarian regime, soon overthrown by self-styled “Emperor” Napoleon! So why include it here?

The French Revolution may not have been a pure Forum, but it was a classic example of a very important hybrid type: the Palace/Forum. In this regime, though most power resides in the Palace, the legitimating ideology is very different. While a pure Palace draws legitimacy from itself or from the gods, the Palace/Forum claims the right to rule on behalf of the people. In principle, the autocrat is simply a trustee of the people, rather than its master. In practice, this might even be true; the modern United States is effectively a Palace/Forum that, even though imperfect, is far better at actual representation (for now) than are other Palace/Forums such as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or any one of a dozen caudillo rulers in South America. But as my examples make clear, even nominally democratic Palace/Forums need not remain so for long, if too much power accretes in the hands of the Palace. As long as the Palace claims legitimacy as a trustee of the Forum, its behavior will be markedly different from a pure Palace. (But not necessarily better.)

(On a related note, popular legislatures today are a poor protector of the rights of the Forum. In the early history of legislatures, the rulers had to pay attention to them because it was the legislatures who collected taxes. Ignore the legislature, and the ruler went broke. But ever since rulers have been able to build their own tax-collection machinery, the “power of the purse” in legislatures has become more and more attenuated.)

Who Rules? Part One—The Palace

14 Monday May 2018

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Uncategorized, Writing

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

Up to now, we have spent a lot of time discussing the constraints that any political regime has to deal with—the problem of legitimacy, taxation and legibility, power projection, and so forth. There are still more areas to discuss, such as the strategic problem of having a standing army (which can pose a threat to its own political leadership, and often does); but for now, let’s switch gears and discuss the differences between regimes, starting with a fundamental question: which elites rule?

Rather than exhaustively catalogue the relatively minor differences between presidential democracies and parliamentary democracies, or sultanist dictatorships and technocratic dictatorships, here we will follow the work of the eminent political scientist Samuel Finer. In his model, there are four possible groups of political elites who could claim the right to rule a regime (or polity, as he terms it): the Palace, the Nobility, the Church, and the Forum. Pure types exist, or you can have hybrids such as Palace/Nobility or Palace/Church; but per Finer, these four contenders for power are it. (This is convenient for worldbuilders, because we can figure out the broad type of our regime without being excessively constrained in the details that we love to invent and tinker with.)

Before examining each, we have to ask: what about the military, or the bureaucracy? Both of these group can hold tremendous power in a regime, and indeed become the de facto rulers. Yet to Finer, neither of these groups is capable of ruling legitimately, because the justification for their power derives from one of the four groups: a military junta may claim to rule on behalf of the people, or a labyrinthine bureaucracy can claim to represent the Emperor. The military and bureaucracy in themselves lack a legitimating ideology, which is what the four main elite groups sometimes possess. Additionally, as Peter Feaver notes, if a general overthrows the dictator, he ceases to be a mere general because he is now responsible for the entire regime, not just the interests of the military, and the problem of civil-military relations begins anew (even if his fellow officers may trust him more, initially). In effect, he himself becomes a Palace autarch.

(I wonder, however, if we are not in our lifetime seeing the rise of an ideology justifying the rule of expert bureaucrats, on the grounds that the people are too stupid to rule. At the moment, though, this ideology has little purchase in the broad society—which is why the rulers of the European Union, for example, pay lip service to democratic ideals even as they cheerfully ignore the will of the people as a matter of course.)

With that, let us begin by looking at our first pure type, the Palace polity:

In the Palace there is only a single controlling will—that of the ruler, the center of the Palace, the nexus from which all decisions flow. The ruler could be called king, emperor, dictator, president, or any number of possible titles. He may preside over a nobility or other sorts of important people, but what distinguishes the pure Palace polity from the Nobility polity (to be discussed soon) is that nobles are totally dependent on the ruler—they do not have autonomous power, and their privileges depend entirely on carrying out his will. Within the state, the ruler has ultimate, arbitrary power, without procedural constraints of the sort we expect in a liberal democracy. The power of all others depends entirely on their proximity to, privileges from, and influence over the ruler.

In the Palace polity, Finer notes, legitimacy always derives from some form of charisma or tradition. Charisma could be “routinized” and shade into tradition, as when the hereditary ruler claims to be a god or otherwise supernatural. Rulers could also claim the divine right of kings, or the Mandate of Heaven, or some other transcendent blessing justifying his rule. But whatever the exact form of legitimacy, the ruler is ultimately responsible only to the power or beliefs grounding his rule: the gods, or God, or the harmony of the universe. This might require that the ruler spend much of his time in rituals and ceremonies befitting his cosmic role, especially if he is seen as the intermediary between Earth and Heaven. (The Chinese emperors were so perceived, for example, as were many rulers of the Ancient Near East.)

But the ruler is not required to justify himself to anyone else—especially not the people. Finer states that all of the types of legitimacy claimed by a [pure] Palace polity are, “without exception, authoritarian. There is no question of popular sovereignty. The monarch’s authority descends on him from a Higher Power and sets him above the people.” This is definitionally true; if the ruler does claim to represent the people, or actually is elected by them, he would no longer rule a pure Palace polity. Instead, this would be a Palace/Forum polity, a tremendously important type which we will discuss later.

Again, within the broad category of “Palace” the details of two different regimes could vary considerably; the Han Empire’s regime is quite different from ancient Persia, for example. But as you craft your setting, Finer’s typology can keep you grounded in the essential features of your regime.

******

(And don’t forget, I’m accepting submissions to a fantasy anthology, Ye Olde Magick Shoppe. Check out the announcement and start writing!

Plus, the associated Kickstarter project is now live! We’ve got a fancy video and everything…)

Power and Legitimacy

08 Tuesday May 2018

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

Why do people follow kings? Or presidents, or dictators?

The ruler of a state is a single man (or occasionally, a single woman). He is surrounded by people with guns, any one of whom could easily shoot him. But instead, they follow his orders and shoot other people, or sometimes don’t need to shoot anyone at all—because everyone else is following the ruler’s orders too. But why?

Remember from our discussion of selectorate theory that the ruler needs to have a support coalition on which to anchor his rule. The simplest way to maintain your coalition is by providing benefits to its members—either explicit payments, or privileges, or public goods such as peace and commerce. Perhaps, then, your coalition will follow you instead of another ruler because they believe that you are better at providing benefits than others would be, or that the disruption involved in overthrowing you is not worth the potential gain.

This can be enough, if you have particular administrative or political skill. But it is a relatively fragile basis for your rule; at any time, a competitor might arise who promises to rule more effectively. More seriously, each official has opportunities to ignore your commands if it would benefit him—by receiving bribes, for example. If his only reason for following you is the benefits you provide, he will be much more likely to take bribes or exploit his position in other ways when the opportunity arises. Over time, this kind of venality can totally undermine your rule.

Another common method is to rule by fear—provide benefits to your military enforcers, and use them to cow the rest. This reduces the likelihood of venality, because the official must weigh the potential benefit against the danger of being caught. And realistically, most regimes use a combination of benefits and fear, as they are more effective in combination. (Even in “nice” societies, we rely on the police to deter official corruption—which raises a problem when it is the police who are corrupt. But I digress…) Still, relying on fear is also a fragile strategy—if you ever grow weaker and lose your ability to punish defectors, your entire regime may crumble overnight.

Both providing benefits and threatening punishment lead to a mindset of constant calculation of one’s odds. Better for the regime if it could appeal to a reason why obeying it is the right thing to do, even aside from personal benefit. Such a sense that you ought to obey and that the ruler is entitled to rule is called legitimacy.

Max Weber, that towering genius of sociology, identified three kinds of legitimacy (there are more, but he was focused on the contrast between ancient religious societies and the modern state, his personal enthusiasm): charismatic legitimacy, traditional legitimacy, and rational-legal legitimacy. All three can coexist, and often do, but as pure types they look like this:

Traditional legitimacy is where we follow a given regime because that is what we have always done. The prince succeeds the dying king because no one imagines doing anything different; the peasants pay the tax-collectors (as little as possible) because that’s what their fathers did, and their grandfathers, and everyone they can remember. This does not necessarily imply unthinking obedience; routine behavior can often become its own justification, because changing behaviors can introduce disruption, uncertainty, even chaos and suffering. But traditional legitimacy appeals to history, and one’s obedience to historical norms, as the main justification for continued cooperation with the regime.

All this is thrown into upheaval by the charismatic leader, who appeals not to history, but to his or her own remarkable personal qualities. Often, the charismatic leader claims to be a prophet, either of a god or gods, or of inevitable historical forces, or of a radical new ideology. The charismatic leader challenges the way things have always been done, and gathers followers by force of personality and the momentum of his achievements. Examples would include Martin Luther King, Joan of Arc, George Washington, Julius Caesar, Benito Mussolini, or Adolph Hitler. Clearly, charisma can be used for good or ill.

Ironically, however, a successful charismatic leader cannot sustain a regime by charisma alone. Taxes need to be collected, laws enforced, and supporters rewarded; charisma is a poor means of doing that over long periods, and even if it were, what happens when the charismatic leader dies? The wise charismatic leader will take steps to institutionalize his rule, by building a bureaucracy or a durable support coalition. And certainly once the original leader dies, his successors will tend to justify their rule by appealing to his memory. Thus, Weber notes, the initial charismatic revolution becomes transformed into a traditional regime of its own—or, in more modern times, a rational-legal one.

Weber’s description of rational-legal legitimacy was highly colored by the Germany of his day (the early 1900s), in which the ideal of a disinterested bureaucratic technocracy was supplanting the rule of the old German aristocrats. Thus, he describes a rational-legal regime as based on a bureaucratic class that operated according to laws and regulations, without a hint of self-interest, justifying their activity with the sacred power of the law. The law becomes self-justifying, as an expression of the will of the state. The self-interested rule of traditional aristocrats and the disruptive power of charisma become replaced by the impersonal wisdom of statecraft, executed by a professionalized bureaucracy.

In truth, as I mentioned, most regimes have elements of all three forms of legitimacy (and really, I am tempted to include ideology as a fourth type, since it has its own unique characteristics and doesn’t fit neatly into Weber’s schema). Any dictator worth his salt will try to create a cult of personality; hence, Kim Jong Il claiming to be a champion archer and athlete. Similarly, in the United States, much of the populace reveres the Founders as a sort of secular pantheon. And bureaucracy was known as far back as ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, though it was not professionalized as Weber would like.

More importantly, any form of legitimacy imposes constraints. The ruler must act, at least in public and at least most of the time, in ways that are consistent with the claimed basis of the regime’s legitimacy. Otherwise, the manifest hypocrisy will erode the feeling of obligation among the citizens that legitimacy is meant to create. The fall of the Soviet Union is perhaps the most spectacular example of recent times, coming as it did after the people had grown cynical of a ruling class that mouthed the platitudes of Communism without providing social equality or development.

Speaking of which, even well-entrenched legitimacy will only take you so far. If a legitimate king puts his support coalition at risk with reckless policies or defeat in war, they will only stick with him for so long before inventing a pretext to replace him, crown or no crown. Similarly, if the laws are not being enforced and no one fears the regime, it will be only a matter of time before petty opportunism snowballs into something more serious.

Still, legitimacy is supremely important. It is the glue that holds societies together. It allows regimes to rule effectively without imposing a costly police state, as most of the people will respond with quasi-voluntary compliance, in the phrase of Margaret Levi.

For writers, legitimacy can be a powerful theme. Does the regime have the support of the people? On what basis does it claim the right to rule? Do your protagonists live under a legitimate but feckless ruler, such that they must choose between respecting their traditions and physical survival? How might a regime seek to generate more legitimacy? Does a ruler behave as he should in public, but violate his claimed principles in private? How might an external enemy, or a rebel group, or a treacherous nobleman, attack a regime’s legitimacy?

******

(And don’t forget, I’m accepting submissions to a fantasy anthology, Ye Olde Magick Shoppe. Check out the announcement and start writing!

Plus, the associated Kickstarter project is now live! We’ve got a fancy video and everything…)

Keeping Power

20 Friday Apr 2018

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

Fiction writers often create elaborate imaginary kingdoms or galactic empires, ruled by iron-fisted dictators or feckless legislatures or councils of wise elders. Often, however, the politics of such regimes often falls flat. Powerful figures line up for or against the protagonists seemingly at random, or “because the author says so.” While this can be fine, depending on the main emphasis of your story, it would be better to understand the dynamics of political conflict in your imaginary regime, so that you can use it as a basis for creating a compelling story.

But there are many different kinds of regimes: democracies, dictatorships, aristocracies, each of which has innumerable flavors and nuances in their structures. Does an author need to become an expert in all of them to write good political conflict?

Not necessarily. A good starting point would be a general theory of how regime leaders stay in power or get overthrown—simple enough to be easily applied to your story, flexible enough to be relevant to ancient kingdoms, modern democracies, and everything in between. Fortunately, there is such a theory, developed by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and his collaborators, and known in comparative politics as selectorate theory. It goes like this:

Imagine a Kingdom of Crelia. Its king, Rothgar the VIII, rules over a strong aristocracy headed by nine barons, not all of whom like him very much, and a much larger pool of powerless peasants who pretty much have to suffer whatever comes. Rothgar doesn’t have to worry much about what the peasants think; but he must pay attention to the barons, because if enough of them turned against him, Rothgar could be overthrown and beheaded. Fortunately, he doesn’t have to keep all of them happy all the time—just a fraction of them, let’s say four. Their strength, plus his own, are enough to keep the other five barons in check.

To keep his supporters happy, therefore, King Rothgar keeps their taxes somewhat lower than the other five barons, gives them more privileges at court, and sets royal policy to favor their interests over those of the five other barons, to some degree. (The peasants, needless to say, get milked for all that Rothgar and the barons can get.)

In terms of selectorate theory, the peasants (Residents) have no role in choosing the king. The nine barons, on the other hand, make up the Selectorate—the group of people with the right, or the power, to influence the selection of king. The selectorate is the outer circle; the inner circle, on the other hand, is the Winning Coalition, the four barons who make up Rothgar’s chief supporters.

Rothgar’s survival depends on maintaining his winning coalition. But he need not keep it as the same four barons; indeed, his main leverage over them is the threat of replacing a pushy baron with one of the other five barons in the selectorate. That threat allows him to keep the expense of maintaining his allies down to a reasonable level, so he can keep more taxes to himself.

His threat would be even more effective if he could expand the size of the selectorate, by appointing five or six peasants to the nobility. Now, there are fifteen barons total, and the king still needs only four of them as his supporters. With so many more options to choose from, Rothgar need pay a much lower price to secure his base of support. Any baron that tries to hold out will quickly be replaced by a more cooperative rival.

However, suppose that there are not nine total barons but only six. Then, each of the four supporter barons is in a powerful position; the king will have a much harder time replacing them individually, and has no way to replace them all. They can then extort a heavy price for their support, perhaps so heavy that the king’s own revenue is squeezed and he loses power over time. The same would be true if the king suddenly needed seven barons out of nine, instead of just four. (The country, needless to say, will suffer as spending on public goods drops off a cliff.)

As a rule, if the winning coalition is large relative to the size of the selectorate, it can extort a high price. If it is small relative to the selectorate, the ruler can keep more revenue for himself. At the limit, if you make the entire populace part of the selectorate while only requiring a tiny winning coalition (for example, with a strict meritocracy or an authoritarian party-based regime), then your supporters will have to make do with meager benefits indeed.

In general, therefore, the ruler has an interest in expanding the selectorate to cover a larger part of the population, and the selectorate members have an interest in restricting its size. Likewise, the ruler has an interest in reducing the necessary size of the winning coalition, and the selectorate would want to increase the size of the winning coalition.

You can see these dynamics play out in the political struggles over extending the right to vote. In the United States, for example, it was originally the case that only property-owning freemen could vote, about 6% of the population. Government policy thus tended to favor the landowning class. Over time, the right to vote was slowly extended to most white men, then most men, then most adults. At each step, some who already had the vote feared that their interests would be harmed by the new voters, and fought bitterly against their inclusion. And at each step, the size of the winning coalition grew along with that of the selectorate, and government policy thus changed to benefit larger portions of the total populace.

This brings up an important point. When the winning coalition is small, it can be bought off with policies that benefit itself, even if those policies harm the populace at large (as they often do; it is easy to tax the populace and enrich a handful of supporters). But as the winning coalition grows, relative to the populace as a whole, it becomes more likely that policies benefiting the winning coalition will also benefit the populace in general.

This, argues selectorate theory, is the main reason that democracies tend to be better run (on average) than dictatorships—the ruler must set policies that benefit 50% of active voters at a minimum, instead of a small handful of powerful nobles, generals, or businessmen.

The model can fit any regime you imagine. Communism? The Communist Party membership was quite large, compared to the size of the Politburo; regime figures could be replaced easily, and often were. Banana republic? The key figures are the generals and the main business leaders, who are hard to replace and thus demand a high price for their support. (For more, read The Dictator’s Handbook.)

How can you use this in your fiction? Selectorate theory gives you several points of conflict to focus on: expanding or shrinking the winning coalition, or the selectorate; exactly who gets to be in the winning coalition; policies that benefit the winning coalition and harm the rest of the country, or an effort to change such policies as winning coalitions shift; a ruler who allows his winning coalition to fall apart, so a challenger can assemble such a coalition of her own. You can tune the details to fit your particular setting; but selectorate theory gives you a strong foundation on which to build the political conflict in your story.

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(And don’t forget, I’m accepting submissions to a fantasy anthology, Ye Olde Magick Shoppe. Check out the announcement and start writing!)