Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places (review)

Groundbreaking and provocative, Wars, Guns, and Votes presents Paul Collier's efforts to bring empirical rigor to an examination of the role of democracy in the world's most impoverished nations. Governments in these countries of "the bottom billion," as Collier termed them in an earlier book, need to become more accountable, as electoral competition promotes anti-democratic practices in the absence of adequate accountability measures. Lacking the elements that make democracy meaningful—the rule of law, a fair and transparent electoral process, a free press, a dynamic civil society—pseudo-democratic countries remain inherently unstable. As Collier explains, while "democracy is a force for good," (p. 11) the West has "promoted the wrong features of democracy: the façade rather than the essential infrastructure" (p. 8).

Collier is particularly withering about African elections. The strategies needed to acquire and retain power in countries where elections are won by repression, violence, bribery, and fraud are quite different from the policies required to serve the common good. Under these conditions, farcical electoral democracy has led to widespread corruption and economic underperformance, and "has increased political violence" (p. 22) instead of reducing it. Therefore, Collier concludes, the much touted spread of democracy after the end of the Cold War has not actually made the world a safer place–an evidence-based corrective to the assumptions about democracy that too often tend to dominate Western attitudes about countries in the Global South.

A former World Bank economist, Paul Collier is currently the director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University. Drawing on the kind of painstaking quantitative research and statistical analysis for which he is well known, Collier examines the role of ethnic politics in the multiethnic societies that predominate among the bottom billion. Ethnicity, not citizenship in a nation-state, is the basic identity marker in African nations, Collier concludes. However, ethnic loyalty often serves as a disincentive to governmental competence–elections become little more than exercises in census-taking when voters cast their ballots to elect candidates from their same ethnic group regardless of their performance or political views. It follows that nations where ethnic identity outweighs or supersedes a sense of national identity are likely to suffer from governments that, lacking political legitimacy, are unable or unwilling to deliver adequate public goods. Thus, Collier proposes, what is needed are visionary leaders who can establish national institutions and promote their citizens' national identification with the nation as a whole without suppressing ethnic diversity in the process. Nation building is, however, an impossible enterprise when what masquerades as national sovereignty is, in reality, what Collier calls "presidential sovereignty"-a professed right to oppress and exploit one's own people.

In War, Guns, and Votes, Paul Collier manages to offer a hard quantitative view of political violence while addressing the reader in a discursive conversational tone expressed in a folksy, accessible language. In particular, he examines the effect of civil wars, coups, and rebellions on the burgeoning democracies of the poorest counties of the world. Sophisticated statistical and socio-economic research allows him to establish a predictable link between electoral behavior and patterns of violence: while warring parties may channel their rivalries into politics before an election, violence is likely to flare up again once the voting is over. The vicious cycle of electoral farce, violence, and destruction is thus perpetuated. One of Collier's assertions is that "armed struggle is development in reverse." When hostilities cease, he urges, the international community must assist postconflict nations on their transition towards recovery. Nevertheless, Collier warns us against what he calls the "headless heart" syndrome, referring to the tendency of people in the Global North to approach Africa's problems with more emotion than empirical evidence.

While most of Collier's broader recommendations are insightful and unexceptionable, his analysis dims when it deviates from the data and enters more theoretical territory. War, Guns, and Votes is at its weakest when Collier turns prescriptive...