Food riots?

Douglas Kell, head of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), called this spring for an increase of £100 million a year to be spent on food research in the UK alone. While it’s not surprising that the head of a research council would call for more funding, the rationale for said call is a little more exciting: the potentially destabilizing effect of food riots. Demonstrations and riots related to food prices took place in over thirty developing countries in 2007-8. Even North Korea experienced a protest by market women over a ban in food trade.

In a working paper with Steph Haggard at UCSD and Beatriz Magaloni at Stanford, we set out to see whether world food prices could be linked emprirically to patterns of protest in Africa and Asia: the two regions of the world with the most food-insecure inhabitants.

With respect to food prices, our paper has makes two points. First, price changes from year to year matter, but not in the straightforward, Neo-Malthusian way in which the media clamor over the subject would suggest. Large annual price increases and decreases (measured in percentage changes in overall prices from the previous year) are associated with more protests and riots. Put differently, protests are more likely when prices are rising are falling rapidly. The effect is stronger for price decreases, however: a relatively modest decrease in food prices predicts about the same incidence of protest as a comparatively large (i.e., 50% or greater) increase.

This finding seems puzzling until one considers the fact that while food prices eat up a significant portion of the incomes of the urban poor, they constitute the entirety of the incomes of food producers–still a relatively large proportion of the population in Africa and Asia. Falling prices hit them squarely in the wallet, just as rising prices hit consumers.

Second, the effect of food price changes is only evident in hybrid regimes: those political systems that aren’t quite full, consolidated democracies but aren’t fully repressive autocracies either. This category includes two very different regime types: failed states with little or no centralized political authority, such as Somalia, formerly one-party systems in which there are now multiparty elections, but the largest party still holds undue sway over democratic processes and the government’s repressive apparatus, such as Tanzania or Zimbabwe. Strong democracies and strong autocracies seem immune to the protest-forming effects of food prices.

Why, especially considering that the study already accounts for the differences in wealth between different regimes? My guess, and this is pure, unadulterated, untested conjecture at this point, is that democracies do a better job of addressing consumer and producer concerns by intervening in markets in order to shield voters from what economists call “price shocks”. Mexican president Felipe Calderon did just that in 2008, brokering a deal with Mexican food producers to cap prices on over 150 staples until the end of that year. In strong autocracies, however, the penalties for publicly demonstrated against the regime may be too high for even hungry citizens to bear.

Measuring state capacity

This past week I finished up some revisions to a paper that compares 15 different ways that the concept of state capacity has been operationalized in studies of civil conflict. These 15 measures fit into three broad theoretical categories: military capacity, bureaucratic/administrative capacity, and finally political insitutional coherence and quality. Basically, is state capacity the ability to put boots into the field? The ability to keep records and thus keep track of your citizens? Or is it the degree to which your political institutions reinforce one another (i.e., you’re either a consolidated, participatory democracy or a draconian, North Korea-style police state–but not in between)?

The paper will be posted soon, but here are the quick hits–some of which won’t be surprising, some of which might be:

1. Principal factor analysis (and oldie but a goodie) demonstrates the underlying dimensionality of state capacity is low, with three latent factors explaining over 90 percent of the variance in the 15 measures.

2. The dimensions do not map neatly on to the theoretical groupings: while the first factor, rational legality, captures bureaucratic and administrative capacity, the second, rentier-autocraticness, and third, neopatrimoniality, capture aspects of state capacity that cut across the theoretical categories. Rentier-autocraticness captures reliance on primary commodity exports, high state capture of economic resources (as proxied by taxation and total revenue), and low levels of democracy: this is your classic oil-rich, authoritarian state. Neopatrimoniality combines low extractive capacity with reliance on primary commodities and higher military expenditures–oil rich principalities and resource-rich tinpot dictators.

3. The first two dimensions do a better job of “sorting” the world into groups of states that have experienced civil conflict during the period of study (1984-1999) and those that haven’t. Here is a table from the paper in which I list the top five and bottom five countries, using their average scores for the panel. The countries in italics experienced a civil war/conflict in those years, the others did not:

4. The first dimension gives us a grouping we are pretty familiar with: the typical low-development, low-bureaucratic quality countries we all recognize as weak states. The second dimension gives us a slightly less intuitive (though consistent with Paul Collier’s recent book), nevertheless important grouping: low-revenue democracies.