So… it’s possible that there is something about Middle Eastern politics that I don’t understand, and it would be cool if you could clarify. If I understand you correctly, you write that farms in the South are owned by rich people. At the same time, you write that farms in the North are somehow connected to the ruling coalition, and because of this the government had to signal loyalty to them.
I was under the impression that in monarchic/autocratic countries it was near-impossible to be rich while not being connected to the ruling group (= not being the kind of agent the ruling group would need to signal loyalty to). The farmers in the South contradict that. How does this work?
I’m probably missing something obvious, but I don’t trivially see how this
follows from this
Could you please elaborate?
Also, I have an outsider’s view of American (or, indeed, Western in general) politics, so I can be wrong, but I think an argument from empirics could be made against this:
At least in the two most recent American elections (2016 and then the 2018 midterms) it seems like it was very much not the case of people racing for the most focused benefits and most diffuse cost, but rather for the most efficient way to galvanize their voters, cost be damned. Think of the wall on the Mexican border—it would probably be exorbitantly expensive, including to those that voted for it, but it was a very powerful symbol that people who felt strongly about the issue could rally behind.
538 here do a kind of literature review—and find, amongst other things, that
Unless I misunderstand the idea, I don’t think issues of race have a narrow focused scope of benefits and costs diffuse enough not to be noticed by other voters.
I also think this point
makes an assumption of voters being more-or-less perfectly informed about what the Schelling point (policies and laws) actually is. What if a leader could get elected by pre-commiting to certain policies, but then actually not act on them, while managing to convince the voters that they, in fact, are doing their best to implement these policies, but are failing to for a certain (probably not a very falsifiable) reason? Or does the model already support this in a way that I don’t notice?