Agricultural Policies and Development in the Sahel

Few populations in the world are so dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods as much as those in the Sahel—and this remains the case, despite rapid urbanization and environmental change. Agricultural policies that help the agricultural sector become more sustainable, more productive, and more attractive to youth are widely regarded as an essential precondition for spurring rural development and improving food security and nutrition. The challenges are multiple though, and far beyond the technical, as the realm of agricultural sector interventions is characterized by opposing priorities, historical inertia due to colonial and postcolonial legacies, and powerful interest groups. The chapter illustrates the interplay between these complex factors with specific examples on the cotton, rice, and dairy sub-sectors in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Senegal. It concludes with some reflections on the influence of donors, regional organizations, and security crises on the prospect for agricultural development and food security in the region.

Strategic State Capacity: How States Counter Opposition to Climate Policy

When can states implement policies against the opposition from powerful interest groups? Research on state capacity has examined bureaucratic sources of capacity, leaving unexplained why countries with similar levels of bureaucratic capacity vary in goal attainment. We introduce the notion of strategic state capacity to explain this puzzle. It refers to the ability of the state to mobilize or demobilize interest groups in pursuit of policy goals. We identify four general types of strategies states use to counter opposition: recruiting allies, aligning interests, limiting access, and quieting interests. We examine these in cases on climate and clean energy policymaking in California, France, Germany, and the United States. Climate politics is an increasingly important field of distributive politics with powerful opposition from interest groups. The concept of strategic state capacity complements bureaucratic notions of capacity to show how the state actively organizes its relations with interest groups to advance policy goals.

Firepower

The National Rifle Association (NRA) is one of the most powerful interest groups in America, and has consistently managed to defeat or weaken proposed gun regulations — even despite widespread public support for stricter laws and the prevalence of mass shootings and gun-related deaths. This book provides an unprecedented look at how this controversial organization built its political power and deploys it on behalf of its pro-gun agenda. Taking readers from the 1930s to the age of Donald Trump, the book traces how the NRA's immense influence on national politics arises from its ability to shape the political outlooks and actions of its followers. The book draws on nearly a century of archival records and surveys to show how the organization has fashioned a distinct worldview around gun ownership and has used it to mobilize its supporters. It reveals how the NRA's cultivation of a large, unified, and active base has enabled it to build a resilient alliance with the Republican Party, and examines why the NRA and its members formed an important constituency that helped fuel Trump's unlikely political rise. The book sheds vital new light on how the NRA has grown powerful by mobilizing average Americans, and how it uses its GOP alliance to advance its objectives and shape the national agenda.

“His Terrible Swift Sword”

The Civil War resulted from a division that existed since the nation’s founding. As Abraham Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address, “slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.” This division pitted those who believed slavery to be a biblical institution—and compatible with the ideals of the nation—against those who believed slavery violated both scripture and the nation’s founding ideals. This chapter narrates the Bible’s use to support and to attack slavery in the decades leading up to the Civil War, focusing especially on uses of scripture to support violence.

Predicting United States Policy Outcomes with Random Forests

Two decades of U.S. government legislative outcomes, as well as the policy preferences of high-income people, the general population, and diverse interest groups, were captured in a detailed dataset curated and analyzed by Gilens, Page et al. (2014). They found that the preferences of high-income earners correlated strongly with policy outcomes, while the preferences of the general population did not, except via a linkage with the preferences of high earners. Their analysis applied the tools of classical statistical inference, in particular logistic regression. In this paper we analyze the Gilens dataset using the complementary tools of Random Forest classifiers (RFs), from Machine Learning. We present two primary findings, concerning respectively prediction and inference: (i) Holdout test sets can be predicted with approximately 70% balanced accuracy by models that consult only the preferences of those in the 90th income percentile and a small number of powerful interest groups, as well as policy area labels. These results include retrodiction, where models trained on pre-1997 cases predicted “future” (post-1997) cases. The 20% gain in accuracy over baseline (chance), in this detailed but noisy dataset, indicates the high importance of a few distinct players in U.S. policy outcomes, and aligns with a body of research indicating that the U.S. government has significant plutocratic tendencies. (ii) The feature selection methods of RF models identify especially salient subsets of interest groups (economic players). These can be used to further investigate the dynamics of governmental policy making, and also offer an example of the potential value of RF feature selection methods for inference on datasets such as this one.

Identity: The demand for dignity and the politics of resentment

Identity is an urgent and necessary book―a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict. In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to “the people,” who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole.Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious “identity liberalism” of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy.

Migritude’s Progress

Novelist Fatou Diome, Senegalese migrant to France, in 2019 reached the twenty-fifth year in her adopted country. Silver-anniversary motives encouraged the author to chart the quarter century of progress of this “megaphone of migritude,” as Lila Azam Zanganeh notably called her. Moving from the rich exegeses of the liminal, haunted, frequently abjected, migritude conditions of her fictional—and often autobiographical—heroines, Diome has now arrived inside the Hexagon, where her words harmonize with a sizable chorus of interior-left establishment voices. However, she has not abandoned her powerful interest in the complexities of migritude’s pains and difficult opportunities. On the contrary, in Marianne porte plainte! Identité nationale: Des passerelles, pas des barrières! (Marianne Complains! National Identity: Gangways, Not Barriers!) (2017), Diome takes up the many threads of the migritude tapestry so fully depicted in her novels and reweaves them into a portrait of an ideal new multicultural French identity.

Are There Lessons for Us to Learn?

This chapter draws eight conclusions from previous chapters for contemporary use. The first is that a kind of “blockage” has occurred, whereby powerful interest groups grow stronger and defend their wealth and privileges by blocking essential change and innovation. The second conclusion points out that it is possible to overcome a crisis if there are strong institutions that can be used by a self-aware political elite capable of understanding that change is necessary. The third is that moderate liberals usually emerge in the early stages of revolution, but are apt to be marginalized later on. The fourth adds that people from other political alignments also fall into the same trap. The fifth argues that wars invariably enhance the power of the radicals. The sixth reminds us that we all need to pay attention to what political leaders write and say, and never assume that what sounds like extremism is just opportunistic exaggeration. The seventh remarks on how ideas were also shaped by cultural and intellectual elites who were not identical to political ones. Finally, the eight: if you want a revolution, beware of how it might turn out.

The Case against Neutrality

In this chapter I consider and reject various leading arguments for liberal neutrality. I show that the extent of so called ‘reasonable’ disagreement about the good is much less than is often supposed. Much of the disagreement about ethics exist because of the human tendency to adopt the beliefs of one’s community. This tendency, rather than the limits of reason, better explains why many views continue to be widely held. Since children have a powerful interest in holding an epistemically reasonable conception of the good, they have an interest in being raised with a sound view of the good. I argue against the view that equal respect requires state neutrality, since respect for children requires giving them a good upbringing. Finally, I show why perfectionism for children need not be illegitimate.