Political Contingency: Studying the Unexpected, the Accidental, and the Unforeseen

8. Modeling Contingency

Chapter 8 Modeling Contingency Elisabeth Jean Wood Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please. —Karl Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Political assassinations are the quintessential examples of contingent events, events that could well have not occurred yet may have significant causal effects.1 The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the outbreak of World War I is the canonical example. Similarly, many think the Oslo peace process would have gone forward toward a negotiated settlement between the Israelis and Palestinians had Yitzhak Rabin not been assassinated. Wilhelm De Klerk, who as president of South Africa released Nelson Mandela and oversaw the negotiations that culminated in a transition to democracy, believes that had he been assassinated before the referendum of white voters in 1992, the democratization process would not have continued.2 In contrast, had it occurred after the referendum, he thinks the process would have gone forward. And had the charismatic Chris Hani, the most popular of the African National Congress leadership after Nelson Mandela, not been assassinated in 1993, collective action by leftist youth and trade unionists might have led to different post-election ANC policies; indeed the party might conceivably have split. Thus contingent events such as political assassinations may prevent a transition to a new set of institutions or they may ignite a chain of events with profound institutional consequences. Contingent events may also spark a transforming mobilization of actors , as in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. When I investigated patterns 222 Shapiro_pp203-278 7/17/07 3:14 PM Page 222 of insurgent collective action during El Salvador’s civil war, I found to my surprise that those patterns were not well predicted by agrarian structures such as land tenure, poverty, or rural employment. Rather, patterns of mobilization were shaped by much more contingent factors, particularly the trajectory of indiscriminate violence by state actors across the countryside.3 Yet despite the transforming consequences of some contingent events, on a closer look some appear less causally effective than others. Given the political rivalry between the European powers at the time, World War I would most probably have occurred had the assassination in Sarajevo not occurred. There may have been a large number of improbable events, any one of which would have triggered the cataclysm; the probability that at least one of these events would occur may have been quite high. In this spirit Friedrich Engels took the view that great political leadership is not necessary for history to take its course: That such and such a man and precisely that man arises at that particular time in that given country is of course pure accident. But cut him out and there will be a demand for a substitute, and this substitute will be found, good or bad, but in the long run he will be found. That Napoleon, just that particular Corsican, should have been the military dictator whom the French Republic, exhausted by its own war, had rendered necessary, was an accident; but that, if a Napoleon had been lacking, another would have filled the place . . .4 One need not agree with the sweeping scope of Engels’ claim to recognize that some leaders to whom exceptional political leadership is popularly attributed happened to have exerted their efforts toward a very probable, if not foreseen, outcome. In modeling contingency, we should thus like to illuminate why similar contingent events have causal force in some circumstances and not others . We should like to characterize some settings as susceptible to largescale change (often signaled by rhetorical gestures such as “we are at the brink,” or “we are at the crossroads”) that could be triggered by a wide range of contingent events, whereas other settings appear immune to any number of such events. We should like to analyze the interaction of contingent events and underlying causes (the social analogues of gravity in physical models), a desiderata identified by David Mayhew.5 And we should like to account for the frequently observed rapidity of large-scale Modeling Contingency 223 Shapiro_pp203-278 7/17/07 3:14 PM Page 223 change followed by long-term persistence of the new, sometimes termed “punctuated equilibria.” In this chapter I present models that may help us formalize our speculative claims about the robustness of some institutions or political processes relative to contingent events, on the one hand, and the vulnerability of...