Abstract
A Granger-causality test is used to examine whether social mobilization causes political instability. This test allows serious problems encountered in correlation-based analyses to be overcome. Time-series data from seven African countries are used. The empirical results (which vary by country) generally suggest that there is usually a feedback relationship between social mobilization and political instability.
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Notes
For details, see Donald G. Morrison and Hugh M. Stevenson, “Cultural Pluralism, Modernization, and Conflict: An Empirical Analysis of Sources of Political Instability in African Nations,”Canadian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 5 (1972), pp. 82–103.
It should be pointed out that the terms “social mobilization” and “modernization” are used synonymously in the social mobilization/modernization-instability literature. See, for instance, Robert Jackman’s work, “The Predictability of Coups d’état: A Model with Africa,”American Political Science Review, Vol. 72 (1978), p. 1262. This should not constitute a big surprise given the definitions of the two concepts. For Deutsch, social mobilization is what “happens to a substantial part of the population in countries which are moving from traditional to modern ways of life.” See Karl Deutsch, “Social Mobilization and Political Development,”American Political Science Review, Vol. 55 (1961), p. 493. Hence, social mobilization is what happens to a society in the process of modernization. Similarly, Huntington defines modernization primarily in terms of social mobilization. See Samuel Huntington,Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 33. Consistent with this definition, the indicators of social mobilization (as suggested by Deutsch) are used in Morrison and Stevenson’s work as the measures of modernization. See, Morrison and Stevenson, “Cultural Pluralism…,” p. 95.
See Raymond Duvall and Mary Welfling, “Social Mobilization, Political Institutionalization, and Conflict in Black Africa: A Simple Dynamic Model,”Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 17 (1973), pp. 673–702.
Ibid., p. 691.
John M. Mbaku, “Political Instability and Economic Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Some Recent Evidence,”Review of Black Political Economy, Vol. 17 (1988), pp. 89–111.
See Jackman, “The Predictability…”
John Ravenhill, “Comparing Regime Performance in Africa: The Limitations of Cross-National Aggregate Analysis,”The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 18 (1980), pp. 99–126.
Samuel Huntington, “Political Development and Political Decay,”World Politics, Vol. 18 (1965), pp. 378–414; Samuel Huntington, “Postindustrial Politics: How Benign Will it Be?”Comparative Politics, Vol. 6 (1974), pp. 163–192.
C.W. Granger, “Investigating Causal Relations by Econometric Models and Cross-Spectral Methods,”Econometrica, Vol. 37 (1969), pp. 424–438; C.W. Granger, “Testing for Causality,”Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Vol. 2 (1980), pp. 329–352; C.W. Granger and P. Newbold, “Spurious Regressions in Econometrics,”Journal of Econometrics, Vol. 2 (1974), pp. 111–120.
Given the serious nature of too many missing time-series observations on social mobilization in many African nations, these seven countries are selected. Although the sample is small, the nations selected are among the modernizing nations of Africa where the rate of social mobilization is high. In addition, they illustrate the point (as noted in the results) that the process of social mobilization affects nations differently, thus demonstrating one of the limitations of the cross-national aggregate study. The period 1960-1982 was chosen because it contains the most recent available data on the dependent and independent variables.
See Deutsch, “Social Mobilization…” p. 494.
Ibid.
Lucian Pye,Politics, Personality, and Nation Building: Burma’s Search for Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962); S.E. Eisenstadt, “Modernity and Conditions of Sustained Growth,”World Politics, Vol. 16 (1964), pp. 584-594; David Apter,The Politics of Modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); Cyril Black,Dynamics of Modernization: A Study of Comparative History (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); Huntington, “Political Development and Political Decay,” pp. 378–414; Huntington,Political Order; D. Morrison, R. C. Mitchell, J. Paden, and H. M. Stevenson,Black Africa: A Comparative Handbook (New York: Free Press, 1972); James Bill and Carl Leiden,The Politics of The Middle East (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979).
Huntington,Political Order, p. 57.
Huntington,Political Order, p. 47. Note that while Deutsch, “Social Mobilization and Political Development,” includes economic development as a part of social mobilization, Huntington,Political Order, keeps the two analytically separate. Following Huntington (1968), economic development is kept analytically distinct from social mobilization in this work. Thus, as social mobilization increases the aspirations and expectations of a nation, economic development should satisfy those aspirations. Hence, there is a direct negative relationship between economic development and political instability.
Huntington,Political Order, pp. 380–383; John Kautsky,The Political Consequences of Modernization (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1972).
For details, see Huntington,Political Order.
See Huntington,Political Order, pp. 55–56. Mark Ruhl, “Social Mobilization and Political Instability in Latin America: A Test of Huntington’s Theory,”Inter-American Economic Affairs, Vol. 29 (1975), p. 5.
Patrick McGowan and Thomas Johnson, “African Military Coups d’état and Underdevelopment: A Quantitative Historical Analysis,”The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 22 (1984), pp. 633–666.
For details, see Mancur Olson, “Rapid Growth as a Destabilizing Force,”Journal of Economic History, Vol. 23 (1963), pp. 529–544. It should be noted that Huntington is equally aware of this destabilizing impact of rapid growth (see,Political Order, p. 57). However, that impact is not accounted for in the gap hypothesis.
Ruhl, pp. 15-16.
It is equally possible that social mobilization or political participation and political instability may exhibit a feedback causality.
Huntington, “Political Development and Political Decay,” pp. 378–414.
The Granger tests also reveal whether the relationship involves feedback or independent causality. Feedback occurs if variable A causes variable B, and B causes A; A and B can be statistically independent.
Seymour Lipset,Political Man: The Social Basis of Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960); J. Blondel, “Party System and Patterns of Government in Western Democracies,”Canadian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 1 (1968), pp. 180–203.
See Claude Ake, “Modernization and Political Instability: A Theoretical Exploration,”World Politics, Vol. 26 (1974), p. 589.
, p. 590.
D. G. Morrison and R. C. Mitchell, “Integration and Instability: Patterns of African Political Development,”American Political Science Review, Vol. 66 (1972), p. 908.
Deaths from domestic political violence (DPV) as a measure of instability has been employed elsewhere. In a recent paper, “Political Violence and Leadership Lifetime Cycles,” presented at the 1993 Midwest Political Science Association’s Annual Meetings in Chicago, by Guy Whitten and Henry Bienen, DPV was used as a measure of political violence. As in this work, Whitten and Bienen data are taken from Charles Taylor and David Jodice,World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators: Political Protests and Government Change (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). Besides, DPV is one of the various measures of communal instability. See, for instance, David Sanders,Patterns of Political Instability (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981), p. 62; and Mbaku, p. 91, for a discussion of various dimensions of political instability.
Charles Taylor and David Jodice,World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators: Political Protests and Government Change (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 43.
Ibid.
Deutsch, pp. 494-495.
I have added together each country’s (standardized) scores on the percentage of the labor force in agriculture (AGRIC%) and the percentage of the enrollment ratio in secondary school (SCHL%). A similar index construction device has been used elsewhere (see, for instance, Morrison and Stevenson, 1972; Ruhl, 1975). The standardized additive method entails the transformation of the data on separate variables into standardized scores, Z-scores, which are in turn added to give the index. The index is created as an unweighted average of the standardized scores of the variables composing it. (The unweighted average is employed here because there is no compelling theoretical basis for using any weighting scheme.) According to the social mobilization-instability thesis, AGRIC% and SCHL% are expected to display negative and positive relationships, respectively with political instability. As such, AGRIC% was multiplied by -1 before the index was constructed for it to be properly directed. That not all indicators measuring social mobilization are utilized should not constitute a major problem in this study. As demonstrated by Eckstein, “If the relationship between variables is strong, mere differences in preferred measures ought not to produce widely divergent findings.” For details, see Harry Eckstein, “Theoretical Approaches to Explaining Collective Political Violence,”Handbook of Political Conflict, ed. Ted Robert Gurr (New York: The Free Press, 1980), p. 156. Besides, Putnam has shown that the various measures of social mobilization are highly correlated. See Robert Putnam, “Toward Explaining Military Intervention in Latin American Politics,”World Politics, Vol. 20 (1967), p. 93.
Deutsch, (1961); Huntington,Political Order, (1968).
Berry Janda et al.The Challenge of Democracy: Government in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), pp. 225–227.
Ruhl pp. 3-21.
The political participation index (PP) is constructed in the same way as the social mobilization index discussed previously.
Taylor and Jodice,World Handbook.
David Pierce, “Relationship—and the Lack Thereof—Between Economic Time Series, with Special Reference to Money and Interest Rates,”Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 72 (1977), pp. 11–22.
A. Brillembourg and M. Khan, “The Relationship Between Money, Income, and Prices: Has Money Mattered Historically?,”Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Vol. 11 (1979), p. 360.
Ali Darrat, “Have Large Budget Deficits Caused Rising Trade Deficits?”Southern Economic Journal, Vol. 54 (1988), pp. 879–887.
Jan Kmenta,Elements of Econometrics (New York: Macmillan, 1971); Henry Cassidy,Using Econometrics (Reston, VA: Reston Publishing Co., 1981).
Hizotogu Akaike, “Statistical Prediction Identification,”Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Vol. 21 (1969a), pp. 203–217; Hizotogu Akaike, “Fitting Autoregressions for Prediction,”Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Vol. 21 (1969b), pp. 243–247; Cheng Hsiao, “Autoregressive Modelling and Money-Income Causality Detection,”Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 8 (1981), pp. 85–106.
Jonathan Jones, “A Comparison of Lag-Length Selection Techniques in Tests of Granger Causality Between Money Growth and Inflation: Evidence from the U.S., 1959-86,”Applied Economics, Vol. 21 (1989), pp. 809–822.
The FPE criterion imposes no restrictions on the model and allows for different lag lengths for each variable in the equation. The FPE criterion allows more lags of a variable in the specification of an equation only if, after imposing a penalty for more regressors, the sum of the squared residuals for the equation is reduced. For details see Akaike (1969a and 1969b) and Hsiao (1981).
The two-year lag length on the dependent variable was found to produce white noise errors across all equations. Given the size of our sample (23), and to avoid running short of degrees of freedom, the unrestricted equations were estimated with one through seven past values of the independent variable.
Huntington, “Political Development and Political Decay,” and “Postindustrial Politics: How Benign Will it Be?’
The results reported here demonstrate the suitability of this choice of the variables.
For a thorough discussion on the impacts of political instability on economic development of African nations, see Mbaku, (1988); Augustin K. Fosu, “Political Instability and Economic Growth: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa,”Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. 40 (1992), pp. 829–841.
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Umez, B.N. Has social mobilization caused political instability in Africa? A granger-causality test. The Review of Black Political Economy 22, 33–54 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02689919
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02689919