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Will there be a fourth democratic wave?

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This article was originally posted on DemWorks.org.

As the Cold War came to a close, renowned political scientist, professor and author, Francis Fukuyama, proclaimed the end of history. He said humankind had reached the endpoint of its “ideological evolution,” and Western liberal democracy had won out as the “final form of human government.” At around the same time, another influential political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington wrote that the world was in the middle of a “third wave” of democratic expansion. But 23 years later, the third democratic wave has hit a wall. According to Larry Diamond, founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, the rapid democratic expansion, which began in the 1970s and continued until 2005, is now in recession.

A number of theories have been put forth to explain this democratic stagnation.

Diamond points to “bad governance” as the most influential factor that has led to an authoritarian resurgence and the retreat of Western democracy. Underdeveloped democratic institutions were ill-equipped to handle abuses of power, which were exacerbated by the global economic crisis and increasing inequality. Western democracy suffered a blow to its reputation, resulting from a perceived “decline of democratic efficacy, energy and self-confidence,” says Diamond. The United States has not been immune, suffering repeated bouts of political gridlock and economic turmoil.

Pat Merloe, NDI’s senior associate and director of electoral programs, contends that the struggle against authoritarianism and the deficiencies of established Western democracies are long-term challenges that require resolve. Factors like rapid authoritarian learning and the spread of new forms of terrorism complicate democratic development and must be met with effective democratic learning and innovation to create a “democratic stimulus” and avoid a “democratic depression.”

Democracy Works – a project by the Legatum Institute and the Center for Development and Enterprise, which coincidentally shares a title with NDI’s recently launched blog – says that the resurgent appeal of authoritarianism is also driven by economics.

China’s rapid economic rise accounted for 76.09 percent of global poverty reduction between 1990–2005, and was a primary reason that the world was able to halve global poverty five years ahead of the Millenium Development Goal target.

The Democracy Works project argues that China’s hybrid model – which employs market mechanisms alongside a command economy – has demonstrated an “attractive alternative to Western-style democratic capitalism.” But the Chinese model does not have a monopoly on delivering inclusive economic growth. The project points to three developing societies that are delivering economic growth, along with the other trappings of democratic society: stability, accountability, liberty and human rights. Three fifths of the BRICS – India, Brazil and South Africa – represent an often-overlooked democratic alternative from the South.

Warning that the third democratic wave would not last forever, Huntington’s 1991 article predicted a fourth democratic wave occurring sometime in the 21st century. He wrote: “The two most decisive factors affecting the future consolidation and expansion of democracy will be economic development and political leadership. Economic development makes democracy possible; political leadership makes it real.”

Will there be a fourth democratic wave? It will take democratic stimulus, political leadership and economic development.

Tracking South Africa’s Democracy In Real Time

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This article was originally posted on the World Policy Journal and Council on Foreign Relations blogs.

By Le Chen, Janice Dean, Jesper Frant, and Rachana Kumar

We arrived in Johannesburg after 17 hours in the air, with a short, hurried stopover in London. As the airplane doors opened, the scorching 80 degree weather of South Africa’s Highveld greeted us, melting the sub-zero temperatures from recent New York winter memory. The change in weather was cheerful but, as graduate students from Columbia University’s School of International Affairs, we were more interested in the changing climate of South African democracy.

We arrived at a crucial and transitional moment in South Africa’s history, beginning on what we hope to be an important project on the country’s democratic future. Following Nelson Mandela’s death in 2013, the May 2014 elections will be a bellwether for the future of democracy in South Africa. Whether this election will lead to a more representative and responsive government or increased political divisiveness and turmoil remains an unanswered question.

Our project, the South Africa Service Delivery Protest Tracker, will stand as a resource used to provide information for gauging the strength of South African democracy. To do so, we are focusing in on the country’s service delivery protests. These protests, a legacy of the apartheid era, are organic uprisings that occur with regularity across South Africa when a community feels its right to basic services – sanitation, water, housing, electricity, etc. – are not being met by the government.

The protest tracker is part of a student consulting practicum with John Campbell, former Ambassador of United States to Nigeria and Africa Fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations. His work and the work of many experts inform our new tech-driven project.

For many analysts, service delivery protests are an indicator of the strength, or weakness, of South African democracy. In “Pathways to Freedom,” a book co-authored by Ambassador Campbell, the authors write that civic organizations in South Africa  “now play an important role in agitating for better service delivery, more accountable governance, and policies to address poverty, inequality, and high unemployment.” Protest, a legacy of the fight against apartheid, remains one of the primary tools wielded by these civil society organizations. However, little is known about the character and scale of these protests in aggregate.

The protest tracker will aggregate news articles and other online media sources and subsequently visualize mentions of service delivery protests both geographically and over time. Building upon the methodology the Council on Foreign Relations used to build the Nigeria Security Tracker, we plan to develop an online platform that automates the process of tracking and aggregating data on these protests. The hope is that this tool will be a source of real-time data on protests that will be useful for policy makers, think tanks, journalists, academics as well as the general public.

A search of FACTIVA’s database revealed preliminary evidence that reporting on service delivery protests has been increasing since the early 2000s, with a sharp downturn in 2013. However, this data is limited by internal factors such as FACTIVA’s addition of new sources and external factors like the media’s use of the term “service delivery protest.”
Source: FACTIVA

Our field research in Johannesburg, which included interviews with key stakeholders and visits to townships, brought a better understanding of the current media and political environment in South Africa. This new information triggered debate among our team members on some of our project’s underlying assumptions and intended direction

The first aspect we debated was where to get our data. For example, we explored using FACTIVA, a service that aggregates articles from top South African media outlets, web media, trade and consumer publications. This dataset would be used as our baseline – a point of comparison to judge the reliability of the data we collect via the protest tracker.  Through our interviews in South Africa – covering academia, newspapers, non-profit organizations – we realized that FACTIVA’s data may be insufficient as a baseline for our project.

FACTIVA, although covering 28 languages over 35 years, excludes the dominating local languages in South Africa like Afrikaans and Zulu. More importantly, FACTIVA’s data is unreliable when looking for trends over time due to changing reporting patterns and shifting data sources. Relatively little reporting on service delivery protests in prior to 2004 (see graph) may not necessarily indicate fewer service delivery protests during that time because journalists may not have used the term “service delivery protest” as a description.


Moreover, the increasing number of articles mentioning service delivery protests may have more to do with FACTIVA’s addition of new sources than with the country’s political situation. While selection bias may be unavoidable with a methodology that involves aggregating news sources, the effect can be minimized by creating as comprehensive a list of sources as possible, favoring local newspapers, and designing search terms that accurately reflect the most commonly used lexicon in reporting about service delivery protests.

We then were forced to re-consider what exactly our project sought to contribute. We quickly learned of a number of research projects on service delivery protests, involving separate groups which employ similar methodologies: Service Delivery Protest Barometer, ISS Crime Hub, MunicipalIQ, Mail &Guardian, the University of Johannesburg, and Rhodes University. How was ours different?

Soon it became clear that, while these groups tend to be better at recording individual protests, few are open source and most leave the data sources disconnected from the final visualizations. Graphs and visualizations, although comprehensive and full of information, tend to be static snapshots of the data. Our project aims to fill in these gaps by creating an interactive online dashboard that empowers users to look beyond numbers and explore the context behind each data point.

As we begin to develop this platform, many questions remain unanswered. How can we make this project sustainable so that it will live on beyond our semester-long practicum? Can an automated methodology fully capture the complexity of service delivery protests and distribute valuable data? These questions, in addition to concerns over time-constraints and technological solutions, remain unanswered.

This is the first of three dispatches from South Africa covering our work. Follow along as we design a platform to track service delivery protests and report on South African democracy in the lead up to the imminent elections.

*****

Le Chen, Janice Dean, Jesper Frant, and Rachana Kumar are Master of Public Administration students at Columbia University’s School of International Public Affairs. They are working with Ambassador John Campbell. The project was made possible by faculty advisor Professor Anne Nelson.

mDATA: New Media Taskforce app competition submission

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I, along with two of my colleagues at SIPA (Ashish and Swami), submitted the following application to the New Media Taskforce’s first mobile app competition. Today, we had the chance to present our idea in front of an expert panel. There was some stiff competition and, unfortunately, we did not make the top three, but I’m encouraged by the positive feedback that we got…If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Feel free to take a look at our submission and let me know what you think in the comments section below. Also, check out the blog post I wrote (and didn’t immediately publish) that was the genesis of this idea.

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I won the lottery

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Last week I won the lottery. No, I’m not a multi-million dollar Powerball winner. I won the opportunity to see former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan speak at Columbia University.

Secretary General Kofi Annan at SIPA

Secretary General Kofi Annan Speaks at Columbia’s School of International Public Affairs

The discussion ranged from the UN’s failure to prevent the Rwandan genocide – which Secretary Annan blamed on a lack of international political will following the “Blackhawk Down” incident in Somalia – to the current crisis in Syria.

Annan briefly touched on his resignation as UN special peace envoy to Syria, blaming UN’s failure to broker peace on the international community’s failure to close ranks against the Assad regime (specifically blaming China and Russia’s intransigence). Annan mentioned his successful mission to Kenya as an example of what the international community can accomplish when it speaks with one voice. As chief negotiator in 2008, he successfully brokered a deal between President Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga to form a coalition government. Still, I can’t help but wonder if Annan was the best choice in Syria given the context. Simply put, Annan is not a muslim and does not carry the same authority in the Middle East as he does in Africa.

What are your thoughts on this? Let me know in the comments section below.

Participating in this event was an amazing opportunity that I doubt I would have had at any other school. That said, I was so drained from my statistics midterm the day before that Annan’s quiet and monotonous voice nearly put me to sleep during his opening remarks. Note to self: drink more coffee.

The president deserves four more years

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I hope everyone’s registered. The deadline is almost here. Also, if you voted in 2008 and you plan to sit this one out, you need to start paying attention…the stakes are higher than ever. Let’s not turn our backs on the president that kept the U.S. from falling into another Great Depression right as the economy shows signs of recovery. He deserves four more years to make good on his promises. The opposition is just peddling snake oil (i.e. budget cuts w/out increased revenue to close the deficit and grow the economy).

Can’t kick the political bug

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Last night was the first presidential debate of the 2012 election. Being the resident politico in my program, I felt obligated to organize a group viewing of the debate. Half-way through the debate in a crowded bar surrounded by my peers, a pang of nostalgia flooded my consciousness. Olivia, a classmate and one of my closest new friends, commented on the fact that the debate was happening at the University of Denver. I responded that had I not decided to change career paths and pursue a master’s degree at Columbia I might have been in audience in Denver (alright, yes, probably just the over-flow room), not a bar in NYC. I still think I made the right decision by coming moving to NYC, but there are many things I miss about working for Senator Udall. This is just one small example.

Speeding through Yonkers with Columbia Cycling

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The Columbia Cycling Team has been holding no-drop group rides every weekend to encourage new-commers to join the team. Today, I took advantage of that opportunity and went out on my first long ride in NYC: across the Washington Bridge and all the way up to Nyack, an over 50 mile roundtrip. Check out my route. It was nice to learn a new ride…one can only go around Central Park so many times.

My legs felt good most of the way, but things got tougher on the way back when the the group split up and I joined the faster pack. We screamed down Hillside Drive in a drafting echelon. I pedaled furiously at the back of the draft-line, letting others take charge of pulling at the front. Then, toward the end of the ride, I decided to take my turn at the front…bad idea. After only 15 seconds of effort, I was spent and the team dropped me. Luckily they slowed down and I was able to catch up.

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Canvassing for development

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The New Media Taskforce here at SIPA is holding an “Innovating Mobile Tech for Development Competition,” where students are given the chance to pitch their idea for innovative mobile applications that seek to address specific political, economic, or social needs in international development to a panel of industry judges. Here is the idea that I may submit:

Village Well, Jombo village, Malawi

Village Well, Jombo village, Malawi by Flickr user Bread for the World

One of the major failures of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is a lack of timeliness and completeness of data measuring progress towards achieving the goals. Dr. Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Lancet:

One of the biggest drawbacks of the MDGs is that the data are often years out of date. Accurate published information from the past 12 months is still not available for most low-income countries. This timelag was inevitable when data were obtained by hand in household surveys, but in the age of the mobile phone, wireless broadband, and remote sensing, data collection should be vastly quicker.

Dr. Sachs is spot-on in suggesting that mobile technology will make data collection more rapid, but I would also contend that mobile-technology-enabled crowdsourcing will increasingly make traditional statistical surveys irrelevant. This is already happening in the arena of American politics. President Obama’s canvassing app enables citizens to volunteer their time to help register voters, build a massive database of registered voters, and ultimately organize voters out to the polls on election day. The app uses information about your location to suggest nearby households that you should visit and questions you should ask when you get there. I believe same model can be applied to the realm of international development.

Let’s say you have a database of 1,000 water projects spread across Malawi. You know the location of the water projects but do not have the resources to send an employee to monitor them on a regular basis. Water For People has built a platform called FLOW that enables field workers monitor water projects using a mobile app. While replacing pen and paper with a smartphone and Internet connection is a significant step forward, I believe that FLOW still doesn’t take the concept far enough because its capacity limited by its reliance on paid professionals to conduct the surveys.

The next-best thing to a trained monitoring professional would be a citizen armed with a smartphone. Bringing up the app, the citizen would be given a map of water projects in their immediate vicinity. They would then “check-in” at the water project and complete a simple survey about the state of the project. If the idea is expanded even further, this app could potentially supplement or replace the statistical surveys currently used to track progress toward achieving the MDG. And because the data would have no time lag it could be used to identify regions that require intervention in real-time, such as a village with an abnormally high maternal mortality rate.

Effectively, crowdsourced development data could turn the MDGs from an out-of-date snapshot of past development status into a tool for development practitioners and governments to detect issues with development while they are still relevant and actionable.

Fretting about electives

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Orientation week #2 has been quite a different experience from last week. The 400+ other SIPA students have made the International Affairs Building a much busier place, and orientation sessions have been much more geared toward learning the ins and outs of academic life on campus.

[polldaddy poll=6500288 align=right]When not drinking calculus through a water hose at the daily “math camp,” I spent my time fretting about the elective classes I want to take my first semester. Luckily, I was (mistakenly?) given a registration date that was earlier than many of the other first-year SIPA students. Not-so-luckily, my registration dates (Tuesday and Wednesday) were before the advising session that was supposed to equip me with an understanding of how to register. With the help of Corey (a student advisor for my program) and after staying up until 1am on Monday night to parse out my preferred electives, I managed to register without much trouble.

I’m only planning to take only one elective course this semester (and the “Earth Institute Practicum” – pass/fail), but I’ve registered for three: New Media for Development Communication, Non-Profit Financial Management (may require accounting as a pre-req), and Microfinance and the Developing World. I’m already leaning heavily in favor of one of these courses, but please help me select the elective I should take by voting in this poll.

Also, check out my draft schedule below. I will have Mondays off!

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My fellow development practitioners

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I am truly honored to be among the 50 amazing people – each more impressive than the next – that I had the pleasure of meeting this past week during the MPA-DP orientation.

SMS-Enabled Live Data for Water ProjectsThe MPA-DP Class of 2014 is composed of talented, diverse and compassionate future development practitioners. I am looking forward to getting to know and work with them all over the next two years.

We all had to submit bios and photos so I expect they will be posted to our program’s website in the near future. Until then, suffice it to say that they are all extremely impressive.

Next week (orientation week #2), I will get to meet the rest of the SIPA Class of 2014. There will be about 450 students total in my class, including MPA and MIA students.

On another note, here is a conversation I had on Twitter with some amazing people at the cutting-edge of fighting water poverty. We discussed how to use mobile technology to improve reporting on water projects in developing countries, which could be a game-changer for the sector’s monitoring and evaluation capability.

Two observations: (1) this was the first time I have ever had a legitimate conversation on Twitter, (2) it’s cool to be treated like an equal by real development practitioners. I’m looking forward to many more conversations like this one when classes start. I hope that my program will equip me with the skills I will need to turn Twitter discussions into reality.

P.S. I’ve been bad about taking photos. I will post some good ones next week.