Assassination as Politics: Worse than the Disease?
Filed under: Philosphy
We welcome submissions from readers and are happy to grant anonymity upon request. An anonymous contributor who would like to be known as Diplomacy Dan submits the following commentary to Publius Pundit:
In August 2006 Publius Pundit posted about world crazies or "leaders" who should be eliminated because they are so dangerous. It quoted the late Jean Francois Revel's How Democracies Perish on two observations: First, that "democracy is zealous is devising arguments to prove the justice of its adversary's case and to lengthen the already overwhelming list of its own inadequacies" and, second, that "it is a mistake to ascribe democratic logic to a totalitarian system." The West often does exactly what Revel describes: it proves the justice of the adversary's case (think, for example, Guantanamo) and ascribe democratic logic to totalitarian systems (Iran, Russia, Cuba, as a start).
Unfortunately none of the people nominated has been removed, several are even worse than before and only one "resigned." But now we have the contribution of two young economists to suggest that assassination of tyrants does help. Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken studied the effects of assassinations and, in a May 2007 paper, found:
Assassinations of autocrats produce substantial changes in the country's institutions, while assassinations of democrats do not. In particular, transitions to democracy, as measured using the Polity IV dataset (Marshall and Jaggers 2004), are 13 percentage points more likely following the assassination of an autocrat than following a failed attempt on an autocrat. Similarly, using data on leadership transitions from the Archigos dataset (Goemans et al., 2006), we find that the probability that subsequent leadership transitions occur through institutional means is 19 percentage points higher following the assassination of an autocrat than following the failed assassination of an autocrat. The effects on institutions extend over significant periods, with evidence that the impacts are sustained at least 10 years later.
Read the paper to get the details, including that, unfortunately, seventy-five percent of assassination attempts fail!
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