Reading the news means you’re bombarded with information. Most of the time, we use whatever cognitive schemas or theoretical frameworks we have available, but those can be either unclear, fuzzy, mixed, or not self aware. This is why having clear and coherent general frameworks help understand the world.
Having this as a motivation to read about broad political theories, I invite y’all to take a look at Welzel’s Freedom Rising. It has been incredibly useful to understand my personal context and the news I read about.
It stands along with Acemoglu and Robinson’s *Why Nations Fail *and North, Barry, and Weingast’s Violence and Social Order as general frameworks to understand the world (not to mention classical grand narratives like Marx’s). But even those texts are tackled head on by Welzel’s text. For example, Marx claims material conditions and social relations determine social values/ideologies. While this held true in the past, Welzel claims, it does so less and less because of globalization and the internet. Similarly, it is values that determine institutional arrangements, and not vice-versa, tackling head on the claim that it is institutions that matter most for freedom and prosperity.
I am quite aware of the dangers of getting married to a framework, but so far I think the way I’ve used it has been valid, and it could do the same wonders for you.
Similarly, it is values that determine institutional arrangements, and not vice-versa, tackling head on the claim that it is institutions that matter most for freedom and prosperity.
Not having read the text, I find this highly dubious. Could you explain a bit better how Welzel justifies this stance?
I think instituations are historically grown and thus might reflect some long running historical values, but mainly they are a product of practical day to day considerations solidified into a haphazard framework. And this framework then, mostly unintentionally, shapes present day values.
Sure. I see how you can think institutions are “solidified into a haphazard framework”. That’s also how Acemoglu and Robinson view institutional change: it happens through ‘mutations’ that are many times contingent on how the power relations of a society end up manifesting in that particular moment. While this may suggest an orderly process, it really isn’t. If you read their ‘exhibits’ of evidence, it’s almost a miracle that true democracies (or “inclusive institutions”) have come to fruition. It really is a haphazard framework!
But then there’s Welzel. He suggests there is the “sequence thesis”, which has three steps: (1) utilities, (2) values, and (3) guarantees. Utilities refer to the realization that freedoms are useful in particular contexts. When are freedoms useful? When existential pressures are small enough. These pressures were reduced historically through technology, which increased productivity and also forced select labor costs up. In these places, humans noticed the utility of caring about freedom, given that they had more “action resources” to realize it. Accordingly, humans started valuing freedom. An important point here is that humans generally care about “joint utility”, which means our striving for freedom is usually broader than the self-centered “only I matter” Ayn Rand individualism. This “joint utility” has implications for the theory of institutional change that we will see in a second. But within the sequence thesis, you finally arrive at freedom guarantees codified into the norms/institutions of a society.
This sequence thesis is part of a broader loop that either keeps societies not free or makes them freer and freer. The loop happens because those action resources are either small or large enough to make people value and therefore take action upon their freedoms. In a society that has (1) enough action resources to act upon freedom as well as (2) freedom valuation, people will take action to assert their freedoms. Finally, they will also feel good about it. Since exercising freedom is by itself pleasurable (apart from possible), people mobilize to end up with more action resources, which reinforces the loop.
This is the broader framework of Freedom Rising, but to answer your question directly, Welzel finds that temporally, values change before institutions do. Notice how, in the following image, action resource expansion generally precedes freedom valuation, but more to the point, emancipative values change before civic entitlements through rights. This suggests values change before institutions.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean that humans who value freedom are the ones who “codify” those freedoms into institutions. That’s why Welzel goes on to evaluate the relationship between mobilize collectively to ascertain freedoms whenever they value freedom more. The result is changes in institutions.
These results can also be seen if you look at two moments in time. Welzel compared values and citizen rights, to find that, over time, these two become related. But that’s not enough to suggest causality. To address that, he finds that the change in citizen rights is larger than the change in values. The implication is that “rights moved more toward congruence with values than values moved toward congruence with rights”.
He also does “A Reciprocal System of Dynamic Relationships”, where he finds that changes in values affect changes in institutions. The relationship shows that changes in values result in 0.82 fraction changes in institutions (I’m omitting units, but the point still holds), while changes in institutions only resulted in 0.08 changes in values. He repeats this procedure controlling for GDP, global linkages, and finds that it is still values that affect institutions the most.
Thanks for the detailed response!
While I can see where Welzel wants to go with this I think he has a strange understanding of institutions (something that licenses rights or so), which results in him going off tangent into trying to find a causation of what is largely non-sensical to me.
Institutions IMHO are nearly always created by the powerful to protect privileges. They do this by co-opting a minority of “managers” that as a side effect also benefit from said privileges to a lesser extend. Over time and mostly due to economic development this class of managers grows and often do values of society change together with that, but that seems like a mostly unrelated development. At some point all involved realize that the previous privilege has been diluted to a point where it doesn’t make much difference if it is extended to an even larger percentage of the population and it becomes something you might call a right. But note that even “universal human rights” are in reality still the privilege of a (global) few.
Edit: I think one of the reasons I disagree with this idea, is that I do not think true inclusive institutions even exists today, so what you call a “miracle” is in fact no such thing ;) What exists is a front put up by the powerful to pacify the masses and to hide their mutated privileges.
I can see how his understanding of institutions can seem reductive: he’s using right guarantees as a proxy for institutional enabling of freedom. If you understand institutions as organisms, then of course the “causation” that he’s seeking is “largely non-sensical”!
It’s important to note that the way Welzel is talking about institutions is probably making reference to a social relation, a set of social norms (as in Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail), and not to the organisms of the State. For example, it’s different to say “the institution of marriage” than “the organism of Congress”. So when Welzel speaks of institutions, he’s referring to a type of social relations where most people agree and police the enforcement of freedom guarantees. These become the evidence for institutional support of freedom.
As to the history of institutions, the Marxist in me agrees with you: institutions were the result of a deliberate design largely to protect the interests of the more powerful bourgeois. However, within that part of me, I don’t find that rights extend themselves with an ever-growing class of managers and eventually the whole population. Rather, there are either mystified rights or social demands. Mystified rights can be exemplified with how gig work like Uber can sound free and enticing, but is really a way of reducing costs for employers. So a mystified right would be establishing the legal category of gig work. On the other hand, social demands are the genuine class-aware demands that somehow make it into the State, protecting workers a bit from their hardships. A welfare state is an example of this.
This all sounds coherent, but we have to remember that this is the Marxist perspective. Many other theoretical perspectives propose their own method of analysis, their own causality and therefore their own history and predictions. And so, while —again— there is a Marxist in me, there is also a ‘Northian’, an ‘Acemoglu and Robinsonian’, a ‘Welzelian’, etc., and those promote views that are much brighter than the Marxist one. An exception could be the Acemoglu and Robinson one, because of how haphazard their view of causality is.
But besides that exception, societies can guarantee the rule of law; violence can be prevented and reduced through impartial judges and, when someone is found guilty, swift and assured punishment; medical systems can expand quickly and effectively to guarantee the right of quality primary medicine; primary education has been largely guaranteed as a right around the world in the last decades. However, you are onto something: rights aren’t uniform in the same way that citizenship is not the same for everyone (even though the legal categories may be the same for you or your neighbor). This is a reality that, depending on the framework that you use, will make an assessment and perhaps a recommendation.
I am inclined towards using institutions (as social arrangements) to reinforce the guarantees and protections that rights afford us. In other words, I would like to see a world where we all strive to protect each other. If it so happens to be through communes, I’m down. I’m also down if it so happens to be done through the organisms of the State, which is in fact how the right guarantees of health, education, and life (to name a few tangible rights) have historically been massively expanded. I do not doubt at all that someone would be able to cite examples of States that go against these guarantees, but historically those rights have been guaranteed through capable States.
I’m sorry if this is all a bit rambly; It’s 1am and here I am typing away. I need some sleep 😅. Thanks for your response and your thoughts! It was interesting to think about this.