Seymour Martin Lipset famously claimed that the more well-to-do a nation is, the greater the chance that it will sustain democracy.  This "law" fits the experience of several countries in Northeast and Southeast Asia.  Formerly authoritarian South Korea and Taiwan grew rich and became stable democracies with active civil societies, as Lipset would have expected.  His "law" fits the Philippines and Thailand as well- -poor countries with tenuous holds on democracy where uncivil societies have mobilized to defend elite hegemony against mass-based electoral challenges.

The case of Indonesia, in contrast, limits Lipset's Law.  Poor yet stably democratic, Indonesia is free of regime-threatening social conflicts.  Arguably, despite its poverty, its democracy is already consolidated.  India's record of sustaining democracy is another case in point.  These poor yet successfully democratic polities amount to large stakes in the heart of modernization theory.

Prof. Thompson will contend that Indonesia's democracy is neither middle-class-based nor dominated by big business, but is instead still characterized by traditional cross-cutting ethno-religious cleavages that limit the impact of money politics, reduce the risk of populism, foster elite consensus, and thereby encourage democratic stability. He will link his argument not only to Lipset's Law but to the intellectual legacies of Alexis de Tocqueville, Antonio Gramsci, and Barrington Moore among other students of democracy and modernity.

Mark R. Thompson is a professor of political science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.  A Chicago native, he took his first degree in religious studies at Brown University followed by postgraduate work at Cambridge University and the University of the Philippines.  Fascinated by Philippine people power, he wrote his dissertation at Yale University on the anti-Marcos struggle (Yale University Press, 1996).  After moving to Germany, he witnessed popular uprisings in East Germany and Eastern Europe, inspiring him to conceptualize democratic revolutions in essays later published as a book (Routledge, 2004).  He is in residence at Stanford from February through April 2009.

Nathan Nunn is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Professor Nunn was born in Canada, where he received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2005. Professor Nunn’s primary research interests are in international trade, economic development, and economic history. He is an Associate editor of the Journal of International Economics and an NBER Faculty Research Fellow.

One stream of Nunn’s research focuses on the relationship between historic events and current economic performance within Africa. In “Historical Legacies: A Model Linking Africa’s Past to its Current Underdevelopment”, published in the Journal of Development Economics in 2007, Nunn develops a game-theoretic model showing how the slave trade and colonial rule could have had permanent long-term effects on economic performance. In “The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2008), Nunn documents the long-term adverse economic effects of Africa’s slave trades.

A second stream of Professor Nunn’s research focuses on the importance of hold-up and incomplete contracting in international trade. He has published research showing that a country’s ability to enforce written contracts is a key determinant of comparative advantage (“Relationship-Specificity, Incomplete Contracts and the Pattern of Trade”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2007).

Summary of talk:

In his presentation "The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa", Nathan Nunn offers an empirical investigation into the relationship between Africa's Slave Trade (1400 to 1900) and its culture of mistrust today. The project is an individual-level analysis of whether members of heavily enslaved ethnic groups in Africa display lower levels of trust today. The underlying argument posits that the slave trade created a culture of "enslave or be enslaved", where a non-trivial proportion of slaves were actually tricked and sold off into slavery by their own friends or family members. These conditions left a legacy of mistrust that has persisted to this day.

The empirical analysis relies on estimates of slave flows and records of slaves' ethnic membership. It also relies on 2003 Afrobarometer survey data to measure individual attitudes of trust toward neighbors, family members, local councilmen and co-ethnics in 17 sub-Saharan African countries. The results indicate a negative effect of Africa's slave trade on individual levels of trust: ethnic groups most affected by the slave trade are most likely to be distrusting today. The results further show that this occurs not through the effect the slave trade had on the locality in which the individual currently resides, but rather through the effect the slave trade had on that individual's ethnic ancestors.

» Paper: "The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa" (pdf)