CHAPTER 8 DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS Experiments and Culture We examined how culture might affect democracy using survey evidence and statistical analyses We not look at some experimental results o Ultimatum and dictatorship games Ultimatum Game The Set up o Players there is a proposer and a responder o The proposer is given a divisible pie money o Subjects play anonymously The Procedure responder The Outcome o Step 1 The proposer offers some of the pie to the o Step 2 The responder knowing the offer and size of the pie has to accept or reject the offer o If the responder accepts she gets to keep the offer and the proposer keeps the rest o If the responder rejects then neither player receives anything Dictator Game The dictator game is exactly the same as the ultimatum game except that the responder is not given an opportunity to accept or reject the offer o The proposer dictator merely dictates the division o Test of fairness as opposed to the ultimatum game o Anonymity means no chance of social repercussions Ultimatum Game If the players are self interested we would expect the proposer to offer where is close to zero and keep the rest 1 for himself o Because E is better than nothing Otherwise you know you will get nothing Dictator Game If the players are self interested we would expect the proposer to offer zero and keep everything for himself o Because nothing will happen These games have been played in numerous experimental settings using students in virtually all of the industrialized democracies of the world Proposers nearly always make positive offers Responders reject a lot of positive offers especially if they are low 20 Players seem to care about fairness Several scholars wondered whether these deviations from the theoretical predictions were evidence of a pattern of human behavior or whether the deviations varied with an individual s economic and cultural setting Fifteen small scale societies o Twelve countries on five continents Three foraging societies Six slash and burn horticulture societies Four nomadic herding groups Two sedentary small scale agriculture societies o These societies exhibited a wide range of cultural and economic environments o All groups had mean offers of at least 25 o Huge variation in offers means range from 26 58 o Rates of rejection varied too o What explains the variance across cultures Why might some societies differ in their norms of sharing or allocation o 50 of offers in Tsimane and Machiguena were below 30 o Tsimane and Machiguenga rarely work together and are almost entirely economically independent at the family level o The mean offer for the Lamelara is close to 60 o The Lamalera are Indonesian whale hunters and must collaborate to survive o Au and Gnau in PNG rejected both unfair and hyper fair offers Some groups rejected high offers o Reflects culture of gift giving in these societies Accepting gifts commits one to reciprocate at some future time to be determined by the giver Thus excessively large gifts likely to be rejected o Ache do not reject low offers but still make offers greater than 40 percent So they make generous offers despite no threat of punishment o Ache hunters often leave their kill at the edge of village and will say that their hunt was fruitless They let others find the food and get first go at it How might we explain these results o What about social institutions or cultural norms of fairness Payoffs to cooperation how important and how large is a group s payoff from cooperation in economic production with non immediate kin Market integration how much do people rely on market exchange in their everyday lives Payoffs to cooperation o Machiguenga and Tsimane were lowest horticulturalist family farming o Lamelara were ranked highest whale hunters Market integration integration o Hadza were ranked lowest foraging society no market o Orma were ranked highest buy and sell livestock Higher market integration and payoffs to cooperation led to higher mean offers o Account for 66 of variance Explanation o When faced with novel situation they look for analogs in their daily experience saying what familiar situation is this like and then they act in a way appropriate for analogous situation o Culture is perhaps a shared way of playing games Life is made up of lots of strategic situations and our culture affects how we play in these games We can think of a democracy as a game that individuals must play Some countries will find it easier to support democracy than others because the individuals in those countries will have analogous games in their everyday lives that make it beneficial and easier for them to play the democracy game In other words culture a shared way of playing games may well affect the emergence and survival of democracy We need more research on this question we just don t know at the moment Chapter 8 Democratic Transitions Despite the consensus that now exists in favor of democracy it is only since 1992 that the number of democracies worldwide has actually been greater than the number of dictatorships The mid 1970s though ushered in an era of democratization that Samuel Huntington has called the third wave of democratization o Third wave of democratization refers to the surge in democratic transitions that have occurred around the world since 1974 o Samuel Huntington has argued that the spread of democracy around the world has come in waves where a wave is a group of transitions from non democratic to democratic regimes that occur within a specified period of time and that significantly outnumber transitions in the opposite direction during that time period o Three waves of democracy First wave of democratization 1828 1926 First reverse wave 1922 1942 Second wave of democratization 1943 1962 Second reverse wave 1958 1975 Third wave of democratization 1974 present Bottom up Democratic Transition Bottom up democratic transition one in which the people rise up to overthrow an authoritarian regime in a popular revolution East Germany 1989 o East Germany in November 1989 when protests on the streets of Leipzig and Berlin forced the Communist East German government to open up the Berlin Wall and allow free multiparty elections o The end result was the emergence of a democratic East Germany and Eastern Europe more generally seems inevitable from our vantage point it came as a complete surprise to most observers at the time o Of all the governments in the Eastern bloc in 1989 the one in East Germany was arguably the
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