Thursday, 29 October 2009

Things I will believe are true when they happen

Agence France-Presse reports that the sorta-kinda-coup leader in Honduras, Roberto Micheletti, has accepted a deal that will return sorta-kinda-ex president Manuel Zelaya to the presidency, although the deal still has to be approved by the Honduran Congress; however, the BBC‘s reporting suggests things are not quite so definite as AFP would have us believe.

Sunday, 26 July 2009

Rule of thumb: 10% of the public will believe anything

Greg Weeks is somewhat surprised by some of the numbers that Gallup found in a survey of Latin Americans in 2008 regarding the likelihood of their country experiencing a military coup:

Honduras had the second highest percentage of people (29%) who agreed that the country was moving toward a coup (behind Bolivia at 36%).

Those countries are not surprising. But 11% of Chileans? And 14% of Colombians? And then 11% in Costa Rica, where the military was abolished before most of its citizens were even born?

I’m not particularly surprised by these numbers. Not so much because the region is inherently unstable, or even because media coverage of events elsewhere perhaps has had a fear-inducing effect, much as the media hysteria surrounding the disappearances of random white teenage girls or the omnipresence of Chris Hansen has fed public fears well out of proportion to the actual threats to children and young adults.

Instead, because an appreciable percentage of the public falls into one of the following categories: having difficulty understanding the questions being posed; really, really wanting the interviewer to shut up and leave them alone; or genuinely holding rather crazy beliefs. To identify one example, approximately 6% of Americans believe the Apollo moon landings were staged, an idea far more preposterous (to my mind at least) than the idea that Colombia might experience a coup in the not-so-distant future.

It’s also possible there were some contextual effects in the survey that aren’t clear from Gallup’s description of it. It seems likely the question was posed in the same survey reported here on self-perceptions as “socialist” or “capitalist,” which may have had the effect of priming the responses of the interviewees—to say nothing of whether or not the typical democratic citizen understands the labels “capitalist” or “socialist” in any meaningful way. By emphasizing this area of conflict the survey may have led respondents to believe left-right conflict in their nations is more salient than it really was, and thus that military intervention might happen.

And, finally, while Costa Rica lacks formal armed forces, the country’s Fuerza Pública and separate special forces detachment sound a lot like military forces to me—and certainly could function sufficiently like one to toss Oscar Arias on a plane headed elsewhere if they were so inclined.

So to my mind it really isn’t overly surprising that a sizable percentage of average Chileans, Costa Ricans, and Colombians—particularly those who are disengaged from politics—would reportedly be willing to agree with the proposition their country is headed towards a coup.

(Updated to clarify that Costa Rica’s Fuerza Pública and special forces are separate from each other.)

Saturday, 25 July 2009

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

So it turns out that the Head Ball Coach was, after all, the man responsible for exercising independent judgment depriving Tim Tebow of his presumed rightful place as a unanimous first-team all-SEC selection. Now, on the world’s hierarchy of snubs, this may rank slightly behind the Honduran army’s failure to care very much that their de facto ex-president Manuel Zelaya is playing hokey-pokey with their border, but we can rest assured that ESPN was on the case with intrepid reporting not seen since BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan’s exploits in foiling the Iraqi information ministry.

And ESPN remains on the case today, with columnist Pat Forde brazenly calling for coaches to fill out their own ballots or Let Someone Else Vote rather than spend their valuable time doing things that are more useful to society. We all know that voters in the other college football polls are devoted full-time scholars of the game, watching all 60 minutes of all 120 (and counting!) I-A (sorry, FBS) teams in action every week before painstakingly filling out their ballots without consulting anyone else or, heaven forbid, just recycling their ballots from the previous week with a few “bumps” based on watching the 5–10 minutes of highlights from an entire day that ESPN chooses to show on College Football Final between Lou Holtz’s bouts of senility and live shots of the GameDay crew in a pitch-dark stadium parking lot surrounded by drunk, screaming teenagers. And if the college coaches can’t uphold these fine traditions, well dammit, let’s find someone who can.

Tuesday, 14 July 2009

Collapsing the probability function

I think we can now reasonably call the Zelaya kerfuffle a coup d’état, if only for the simple reason that once men with guns start showing up at broadcasters getting them to shut off their signals, that’s a pretty good sign that you’re up to something beyond the realm of ordinary democratic politics.

Of course, that also means that Hugo Chávez’s concerted efforts to marginalize the private, pro-opposition broadcast and print media in Venezuela would be evidence in favor of his having pulled an autogolpe, albeit one with a hamfisted assist from the opposition’s ill-advised election boycott a few years back.

Regardless I am less inclined to read the tea leaves as saying that Chávez has lost interest in Zelaya’s cause as others, although I suspect by the time the whole business is settled (probably with an agreement to hold a referendum on a constituent assembly explicitly excluding the possibility of an amendment to allow presidential reelection) Zelaya’s term of office will have come to an end. At this point Zelaya can probably derive more value down the road in continuing to garner sympathy in continued exile through the election than in returning to Honduras’ presidency as a lame duck with virtually no support from Congress, the military, or the courts.

Update: Greg Weeks also points out that Chávez too probably “wins” more from Zelaya not returning to power, which would dovetail nicely with others’ observations that he is throwing Zelaya under the bus.

Tuesday, 7 July 2009

The Zelaya Threshold

One of the things I’m having difficulty wrapping my head around in the Great Was-It-A-Coup?-Debate of 2009 is where the line between “legitimate transfer of power” and “coup” in this case lies. I’m willing accept the judgment by Latin Americanists of better repute than I (which would be all of them, since I really am not a Latin Americanist even though I live closer to Latin America than most it seems) that whatever happened is on the “coup” side of that line, but I wonder where the line itself was exactly. A few brief stabs at the threshold:

  1. Using the military. If the Supreme Court had ordered the civilian police to arrest and deport Zelaya, rather than the armed forces, and they had done so, would the events have still constituted a coup?
  2. The exile. Had the Supreme Court ordered the military to arrest and detain Zelaya, but not ship him off to Costa Rica, would the events have still been a coup?
  3. The combination of using the military and the exile.
  4. The lack of explicit text regarding how to deal with presidents exceeding constitutional authority. Had the Honduran Constitution stated who was responsible for removing politicians from office who supported a constitutional amendment (and who got to decide what proposals constituted such violations) that might lead to alterations of term limits on the presidency, would the events that transpired have still been a coup?

And a few brief stabs at what seem not to be the thresholds:

  1. Illegal actions by the president. Pretty much everyone except Zelaya seems to agree that his efforts to hold a referendum on constitutional change were not permissible under Honduran law; this is reinforced by the fact that another branch of government (the Congress) does have the power to propose such a referendum but chose not to. (One could make an argument that if no branch of government was assigned a legitimate governmental power not enumerated in the constitution, the executive might inherently have that power—but that clearly is not the case in this circumstance.)
  2. Support by other, accountable, civilian branches of government. Both the elected Congress and the Supreme Court have endorsed the transfer of power, apparently without any coercion by the military.
  3. Overwhelming popular opposition to the move. At best, the Honduran population seems fairly divided over whether or not Zelaya’s removal was legitimate.

In related news, Costa Rican president Óscar Arias has agreed to mediate the crisis with the consent of both Zelaya and the interim Honduran government.

Wednesday, 1 July 2009

Blogging beyond my comparative advantage

I really don’t have any particular insight to add to others’ discussion of the sorta-kinda-maybe coup d’état in Honduras, but Steven Taylor (both here and here) and Greg Weeks have had some fairly insightful posts on the matter.

While I’d probably say that many Hondurans’ fears that maybe-ex-President Zelaya was plotting in some way to perpetuate his own rule at the expense of democratic accountability—as both Hugo Chávez and Álvaro Uribe have recently done in the broader region—were possibly justified, employing the military to raid his house and toss him on an airplane in the middle of the night doesn’t exactly strike me as the most measured response by the other branches of government. On the other hand I’ll gladly concede that the Honduran constitution appears to be a giant mess of epic proportions (amendment by decree and the lack of an impeachment mechanism being among its defects) that didn’t exactly help in avoiding an escalation of the situation to the use of extralegal means.

Elsewhere: John Carey (via John Sides) presents some data on extraordinary Latin American presidential replacements since 1990. It almost, but not quite, tempts me to dust off my old paper on stability and presidential government and add some new data, but I think it’s best for all involved if it just stays in Ukrainian, at least until I can find a sucker graduate student interested in collecting the data to update the damn thing to the present.