Economist Dani Rodrik found his father-in-law on trial in Turkey on trumped-up charges of leading a coup, and the trial led him to re-examine what makes “real” democracy possible:
When do democracies generate not just electoral majorities but also protection of rights for minorities, equality before the law — the kinds of things that were missing in the Sledgehammer affair?
By some measures, democracy has never been healthier. Electoral democracies account for more than 60 percent of the world’s nations, up from roughly 40 percent in the late 1980s. In practice, though, most of those democracies “fail to provide equal protection under the law,” according to a recent essay that Rodrik published with another economist, Sharun Mukand. To understand why, they examine three kinds of rights. Political rights rest on the strength of numbers. Property rights have the wealth of elites behind them. But civil rights typically benefit a relatively powerless minority, who lack wealth or numbers. For that reason, “a truly functioning liberal democracy that provides civil rights is going to be a very, very rare phenomenon,” Rodrik says. The question isn’t why democracies slide into illiberalism. That’s what you should expect. The interesting question — and one of the key puzzles that his new work tries to solve — is why some democracies manage to remain liberal. What makes the emergence of civil rights possible in societies where, on the face of it, those rights don’t have a strong constituency?
Rodrik’s new scholarship also tackles a second, related puzzle: one about narratives. His foray into Turkish politics pushed him to reconsider a deeply established tradition in economics, one that views policy outcomes in terms of vested interests. These are the powerful groups, like companies or trade unions, that advance their agendas through the political sphere. Rodrik realized there was something missing from scholars’ models of political and economic life: ideas.
Take the liberal intellectuals in Turkey. Their interests and Rodrik’s were the same: a more democratic country. But they bought into a different narrative, he says, one that made them “tools” of the government. They legitimized Sledgehammer for middle-class Turks and the West. It’s not an outcome that vested interests can explain.
“My argument here is not to deny that there are organized groups that have disproportionate power in the policy-making process,” Rodrik says, “but to make the argument that the manner in which these groups define what is in fact in their interest depends on all sorts of things having to do with their ideas, with the stories they’ve constructed, and with how they view their own identity.”
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On a less abstract level, Sledgehammer changed another aspect of Rodrik’s thinking. He no longer trusts much of what he reads in the newspaper. The professor had long been skeptical of economics stories. He now feels similarly wary about coverage of political developments in foreign countries. The reason: If you hadn’t known the reality in Turkey, he says, it was simple to accept the usual liberal explanations of what was happening.
“It’s very easy to read these stories, and they resonate with your own worldview as a liberal,” Rodrik says. “And you’re likely to believe it. I wouldn’t say that it turned me into a conservative. But it made me much more skeptical and much more cautious about what one might say is the standard Northeastern-Ivy League-elite-liberal-establishment narrative about how the world works. It’s made me extremely skeptical of what I read in The New York Times, and The New York Times’s take on what’s happening in different countries. In a way, I should have known.”