Predictions on Arab!

Here?s a prediction on what the Arab world will be like in five years time, writes Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta.

What about the wonderful world of humanity, where life will be just tickety boo; and where there will be liberal democracies infesting the world; and where everybody will learn to play cricket and life will be a capitalist paradise? No? Too much? Here’s something else for you guys to chew on. Here’s a prediction on what the Arab world will be like in five years time, so let us see if you agree with me or not, and if you don’t, watch this space in five years time.

So, off I toddled to the website of the League of Arab States found at: www.arableagueonline.org to get the list of Arab states and immediately started off with a chuckle. They had spelling mistakes on the names of some the countries. Syria and Sudan were noted as “Rebuplic”. Still, I am sure spell checkers in Sudan and Syria would hiccup over words like republic and democracy anyway, Plato would be rolling in his grave or whatever. Some of the names relate more to hope than experience. For example, the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria is neither democratic nor popular and the people are definitely nowhere near the rulers in Libya.

Before we start, we need to define what are we checking. If I rely on Freedom House’s (www.freedomhouse.org) methodology, we will be looking at political rights and civil liberties only. I quote, “Political rights enable people to participate freely in the political process, including through the right to vote, compete for public office, and elect representatives who have a decisive impact on public policies and are accountable to the electorate. Civil liberties allow for the freedoms of expression and belief, associational and organizational rights, rule of law, and personal autonomy without interference from the state…. Basic standards that are derived in large measure from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”

There goes my irreverent look at the future of these countries. Freedom House has been maintaining records since 1972. I took the liberty to download all the data in a spreadsheet format and then ran some statistical analysis on it. Then I realized something, the data is strange or unlike any time series that I am familiar with. Usually in economics and finance, one observes trends. The whole idea is to model the trend and then use statistical and mathematical techniques to capture the deviations from the trend. Just like the better mousetrap analogy, the better one can capture the deviations, the more money one makes.

Unfortunately, I see some broad based results emerging. Unusually, trends are very difficult to determine in this data set. In other words, over a period of almost 33 years, the factors for political rights (PR) and civil liberties (CL) change very little. For example, for the United Kingdom, the combined average between PR and CL has been 1 between 1972 and 1990. Then CL worsened to 2 and stayed at 2 till 2001 when it improved to 1 again. For India, CL was constant till 1974, worsened by 1 over 1975 and 1976, improved dramatically by 2 from 1977 onwards, worsened by 1 in 1981 till 1993, worsened by 1 more in 1994 (and PR worse by 1), improved in 1998 and is constant since then at CL of 3 and PR of 2. What all this blather tells us is that it is difficult to utilize these figures to make cross comparisons in a statistical manner and the data set has far too much “noise” to draw structured and statistically rigorous conclusions.

So what do we do? We move up a gear and use the very scientific Mark 1 Eyeball test to look at the data to see what jumps out. Well, first the PR business. As a generic rule, the PR business moves much less over the years, but is far more abrupt in its changes. On the other hand, the CL is more volatile over the entire 30 odd year period, which made me scratch my head for a bit. Then I sort of figured out why this would happen. Political Rights are driven by structural reasons, while civil liberties are driven more by legislative or by fiat. Very simply speaking, events which give more political rights, such as having a better constitution, or embedding multi-party democracy or getting rid of a despot, are considerably rarer and far more bloody than civil liberties. Civil Liberties on the other hand are much more easily addressed. For example, making the press a bit more free, or reducing the sentencing for sedition, are much easier addressed by releasing a notification or by parliamentary law.

So why am I banging on about the above? It is because if one wants to make the Arab nations more free, then we have to understand the limitations and constraints. One can be considerably free from the civil liberties side, while not have that much of political rights though the other way around usually doesn’t work. If one has political rights, then the civil rights usually are high as well. There are two factors to be considered when we talk about Arab World democracy. Firstly is that it’s much easier to go after civil liberties than political rights. Secondly is that the lesser the PR and CL, the more bloody it will be. So where are the Arab countries now?