To me, it seems pretty contrary to historical evidence to think that the best way to prevent the populace from revolting is with good conditions rather than, say, with secret police or with eternal war or pseudo-war (the health of the state).
The idea that policies that promote short-term economic performance promote well-being in the long term is also rather odd.
Where is the line between a dictatorship and a single party regime? Between representative democracy and single party? How do you evaluate Japan, China (under Mao and today), and other interesting test cases?
What does your model predict about anarchy? About many-layered representative democracy? About federalism vs. centralization?
I don’t see how your hints follow from your model. What’s ‘well-being’ anyway, and why can’t elites simply respond to demands for easily falsified signals like ideology and let it wash out? Doesn’t this select against non-pragmatic elites?
Historical evidence seems to be that there were very few successful revolts in spite of thousands of years of people living in near-Malthusian conditions.
The model suggests that in multi-layer democracy the layer considered by voters to have the most influence will counts and spill to lower and higher layers. I predict that in Europe swings in subnational and European Parliament elections both largely depend on who’s in power nationally, not on candidates’ platforms specific to those layers. This seems to be the case. I also predict that swings in American subnational elections will follow national swings too.
According to the model well-being is primarily economical, difficult to falsify, and people don’t care about ideology much. In countries where they would, selection for better elites would be weaker.
There’s no strict line between dictatorship and single party regime—it depends on to what degree elites that are setting the policy can lose based on their economic performance. In some single party regimes dissatisfaction by party members could remove and replace the leaders, in others party members other than leadership don’t have much power.
To me, it seems pretty contrary to historical evidence to think that the best way to prevent the populace from revolting is with good conditions rather than, say, with secret police or with eternal war or pseudo-war (the health of the state).
The idea that policies that promote short-term economic performance promote well-being in the long term is also rather odd.
Where is the line between a dictatorship and a single party regime? Between representative democracy and single party? How do you evaluate Japan, China (under Mao and today), and other interesting test cases?
What does your model predict about anarchy? About many-layered representative democracy? About federalism vs. centralization?
I don’t see how your hints follow from your model. What’s ‘well-being’ anyway, and why can’t elites simply respond to demands for easily falsified signals like ideology and let it wash out? Doesn’t this select against non-pragmatic elites?
Historical evidence seems to be that there were very few successful revolts in spite of thousands of years of people living in near-Malthusian conditions.
The model suggests that in multi-layer democracy the layer considered by voters to have the most influence will counts and spill to lower and higher layers. I predict that in Europe swings in subnational and European Parliament elections both largely depend on who’s in power nationally, not on candidates’ platforms specific to those layers. This seems to be the case. I also predict that swings in American subnational elections will follow national swings too.
According to the model well-being is primarily economical, difficult to falsify, and people don’t care about ideology much. In countries where they would, selection for better elites would be weaker.
There’s no strict line between dictatorship and single party regime—it depends on to what degree elites that are setting the policy can lose based on their economic performance. In some single party regimes dissatisfaction by party members could remove and replace the leaders, in others party members other than leadership don’t have much power.