Diagnosing the Health of the Global Political System

---

Today we do not know how healthy our global political system is, whether it is getting better or worse, whether the rate of change is increasing or decreasing, what the causal variables are, or how they are related. We have neither a good vocabulary for discussing these issues nor the methods to study them. In a word, we need a new science - a science for diagnosing the health of the global political system.

A first step in this direction is to define a set of criteria, analogous to blood pressure and cholesterol for diagnosing the health of an individual. For the global or any other political system, the following criteria are proposed: functionality, budget, reserves, defense, growth, feedback, learning, leadership cohesiveness, mass solidarity, vision, and strategy.

A slideshow that was presented at the March 2005 International Studies Association annual convention summarizes this research. [Please let me know if the slideshow does not run in your browser.]

An updated version of the slideshow adding new historical and contemporary cases was prepared Sep 2005.

For more details on diagnosing the health of international political systems to supplement the highlights provided on this page, see "Diagnosing Ancient Political Systems", presented at the 2005 International Studies Association international conference in Honolulu.

For the original theoretical work on comparative systems in general that served as the foundation for this discussion comparing political systems, see "Forests or Trees: Clear Thinking about Social Science Systems."

Criteria for Diagnosing Political System Health

Criteria......................................Definition
Functionality	Level of security, political participation, access to justice
Budget	Balance of input and output of resources
Reserves	Emergency budgetary quantities
Defense	System's ability to continue functioning
Growth	Direction, rate of growth
Feedback	Acquisition of information
Learning	Modification of behavior as the result of the new information
Leadership cohesiveness	Ability of leadership to work together
Mass solidarity	Unity of the population
Vision	Concept of where one wants to go
Strategy	Plan to implement the vision

The next step is to operationalize the above criteria, i.e., to apply them specifically to the global political system in precise ways that can be measured. "Budget," for example, is operationalized as "economic," "patriotism," "participation," and "legitimacy;" "leadership cohesiveness" is operationalized as "attitude toward skeptics," "attitude toward new data," "lessons learned," "attitude toward colleagues," and "attitude toward tradition."


Functionality. Having defined the criteria with precision, one can start developing analytical methods, of which several are presented in the slideshow. For example, functionality can be studied by means of two continua (or axes), one going from individual to cultural and the other going from low status to high status. The result will be a grid with four quadrants in which behavior of any actor in a system can be located. The arrow going from Quadrant A to Quadrant D shows roughly the degree of danger of the action to the system, with the greatest danger being in Quadrant D. That is, the higher the status and the more accepted by the whole culture the aberrant behavior is, the more dangerous it is to the survival of the system. Examples of such behavior include biased reporting by high presige media organs, corporate crime that is excused by the regime, and violence committed by paramilitaries sanctioned by the regime.





One purpose of the functionality grid is to measure the degree to which aberrant behavior threatens the system. This threat is a function of the rank of the violator and the degree to which the violation is accepted by the culture. From the perspective of the victim, a violation may be a violation, but from the perspective of the system, the higher the rank of the violator, the more serious the matter. If the analytical question concerns the quality of life at a given moment, then the quadrant in which immoral behavior falls may make little difference: muggers, rebels, secret police, evil advisers, and paramilitary gangs are all lethal.  But from the perspective of the system, the nature of immoral behavior matters a great deal, and the arrow represents increasing threat to the system:  the larger the percentage of the population involved and the higher the rank or the more official, the greater the threat to the system. So human rights violations by paramilitaries that support a regime are more indicative of pathology in the system than violations by rebels because the regime is implicated in the former. Violations directly by the regime are more serious yet. And to the degree that those regime violations are excused or ignored by civil society's institutions (e.g., learned opinion, a free press), it is indicative of true breakdown in the system's moral code.

Metrics for Diagnosing Moral Dysfunctionality

Metric......................................Example
Murder of Leaders	Whether state heads or leaders of insurgent groups
Attacks on Noncombattants	Attacking civilian areas to kill enemy combattants
Military Aid for Self-Defense	Use of the aid by ally to colonize neighboring regions or commit human rights violations against its own people; failure of donor to stop the misuse of aid
Environmental Treaties	Canceling such treaties
Resource Exploitation	If done by displacing peasants who live in regions to be exploited
Crime	Misbehavior by a ruling group more serious than street crime
Media Honesty	Bias in reporting by high-prestige media organs more serious than bias by minor media outlets
Terrorism	Officially sponsored acts of terrorism such as destroying agriculture in regions being invaded more serious than unofficial terrorism

Another purpose of the functionality grid is to suggest the appropriate type of response. For example, if behavior occurs in Quadrant A (see slideshow), it is a police matter, while if in Quadrant C, it will require measures to change perceptions. In the latter case, simply responding with force would not be appropriate. Misconstruing a Quadrant C situation as a problem amenable to a military solution can backfire with increasingly uncontrollable long-term consequences in a cycle of mutual violence radicalizing both sides.

The aberrant behavior being measured by the functionality grid may come in many guises. For example, the grid could be used to focus on media functionality by replacing the Status Axis (high to low status) with an axis showing the status of biased media organs (national media to fringe media) and by replacing the Level Axis (individual to the whole culture) with an axis going from a single media organ to all media. On this slightly modified grid, a single media organ that has the bias of labeling freedom fights "terrorists" and ignoring casualties of violence when they are suffered by specific ethnic groups about which the media organ is unconcerned can now be placed in Quadrant A (single media organ x biased fringe media). A situation in which all a country's media organs demonstrate the same bias would go in Quadrant D (biased national media x SOP for all media). Although the media error is the same in each case, the placement (Quadrant A being the least dangerous to the system and Quadrant D the most dangerous) clarifies the significance of the behavior. Media bias that fits in Quadrant D is the most dangerous because such sharing of bias by all the media results in an uninformed public that can neither identify solutions to problems nor judge their leaders' performance.


Budget. "Budget" is the sum total of income minus expenditures - not only of the obvious economic criteria but also of any other acts that raise (income) or lower (expenditures) the system's resources that are in active use (as opposed to reserves). In addition to economic criteria, then, budget may be broken down into "patriotism," "participation," and "legitimacy."





The budget of the global or another political system can then be evaluated by considering the balance between income and expenditure in terms of each of these criteria. Examples of patriotic income would be setting high standards for one's own system (country) as an example for others and then upholding one's domestic standards when dealing with other entities (countries, colonies, etc.). Conversely, an example of patriotic expenditures would be failing to uphold one's domestic standards when dealing with weaker neighbors, such as violating strictures against torture. Similarly, inviting the alienated to join the political process would exemplify participatory "income," while electing a leader under a cloud of suspicion of electoral fraud would be an example of expenditure of legitimacy.


Defense. Any system must be able to defend itself.

* The critical issue is in identifying the tipping point where defensive measures begin to undermine the system more than preserve it.

* Such may be the case even for completely legal defensive forces allowed to overreach a reasonable level of authority.

To the degree that a regime's security services or paramilitary organizations threaten the people they claim to be protecting, the system becomes endangered over the long-term. To the extent that such behavior is either increasing or becoming increasingly accepted as legitimate behavior on the part of a regime, a colonial power, or an invading force, the system is becoming more dysfunctional. Simply put, a larger proportion of people are experiencing degraded living conditions.

Activities Undermining System Viability
Secret Informers
Personal Armies
Lynch Mobs
Paramilitaries
Mercenaries
Midnight Visits by Police
Assassination of Activists
Displacement of Populations
Collusion of Military & Violent Groups

The diagram below displays a method of analyzing the quality of the defensive measures employed by a generic political system based on two variables: 1) Severity (mild to severe) and 2) Targets (individual to group or targetted to indiscriminate).



Since all of the above measures are justified by those who advocate them as measures to enhance the ability of the system to defend itself, why should they be considered indicators of system pathology?

1. Misuse of these purportedly defensive steps for ulterior purposes:

The danger is that a regime will take advantage of its legitimate right to defend the system to eliminate political opponents. Measures that circumvent standard legal protections put in place precisely for the purpose of preventing abuse of power, such as indefinite detention without trial or closed trials by military court, are indicators that such intentional abuse is occurring with "defense" as the excuse.

2. Timeframe:

A genuine threat may be met, just as a person with a severed artery can survive by using a tourniquet. But what is the subsequent quality of system performance? If the tourniquet is not removed within a few minutes, the patient may die of gangrene. Similarly, emergency measures lacking clearly defined temporal and procedural limits would be indicators of system pathology.

The impact of time delays is fundamental because the short-term and long-term impacts of an action may be opposite (exactly the reverse of the typical assumption that if X is good, then more X will be better). Actions have effects, possibly including the desired on but almost certainly including a number of others that will be surprises, some nasty, but all equally the result of the action. A tourniquet has two effects: it stops the bleeding, and it rots the limb. It is not legitimate to brag about stopping the bleeding and then to blame "bad luck" for rotting the limb.

"There are no side effects, there are just effects. When we take action, there are various effects. The effects we thought of in advance, or were beneficial, we call the main, or intended effects. The effects we didn't anticipate, the effects which fed back to undercut our policy, the effects which harmed the system--these are the ones we claim to be side effects. Side effects are not a feature of reality but a sign that our understanding of the system is narrow and flawed. Unanticipated side effects arise because we too often act as if cause and effect were always closely linked in time and space."--John Sterman, Business Dynamics (Boston: Irwin McGraw-Hill, 2000), 11.

The diagram below adds a third variable to the method of analyzing the quality of a system's defense. In addition to Severity and Targets, this 3-D version adds Persistence (temporary to persistent).




Vision. If system behavior is motivated by a vision according to which short-term behavior undermines realization of that vision over the long-term, the system is in trouble. The impact on system behavior of the nature of the system's vision seems very important but generally ignored. It may help to understand the nature of a given political system's vision if it is broken down into "coherence," "clarity," "acceptance," and "sustainability," as shown in the figure below.



To recap, the steps so far have been to define generic criteria for comparing social systems, to operationalize them specifically for the global political system and its subunits (e.g., countries), and to define analytical tools to help us study how each of these operationalized criteria operate in the global (or other) political system. This foundation still falls far short of enabling a realistic analysis to be done, however, because of its essentially reductionist nature. Ensuing steps will have to deal with such issues as interactions among the criteria; identifying positive and negative feedback loops and deetermining the conditions under which one or the other becomes dominant; and addressing the range of issues, such as emergent behavior, encompassed by the concept of complexity. All of these issues go well beyond the scope of either the slideshow or the "Diagnosing Ancient Political Systems" article on which the slideshow is based. The slideshow itself barely hints at this more sophisticated level of analysis with the simple example below.

The figure below is designed to make the point that feedback loops can lead to highly counterintuitive and unintended consequences. In this example, having a short-term vision leads to an overemphasis on defense. An overemphasis on defense leads to both constraints on feedback (because arguing with the boss is generally not career-enhancing when the boss is in fear of losing his life so people will tend to self-censor, depriving the boss of needed information) and resistance to learning (because threat arguably makes humans closed-minded so the leader may well ignore even such information as gets his or her attention). Constraints on feedback and resistance to learning are likely to make the vision even more short-sighted. Even worse, according to the graphic, constraints on feedback and resistance to learning each directly enhance the impact of the other, accelerating the trend toward ever more shortsighted vision. Regardless of how accurate this graphic may be in its details, it is clear that calculating the impact of these various interactions will be a real challenge.

The next step in developing a science for diagnosing the health of the international political system would be to apply the concepts of complexity science: only by viewing a political system as a complex system of interacting parts that contribute to a whole that is potentially greater than the sum of those parts can we hope to gain a realistic understanding of system health. It is to be hoped that the development and application of the methods outlined here to diagnose the health of the global political system will lay the foundation for a more scientific study of the topic than is currently feasible.

---

Home
Publications on Research Methodology