People have studied authoritarianism and made lists of steps towards it.

[ml@ecoevo.social]

People have studied authoritarianism and made lists of steps towards it. But I still haven't run across academics who've studied how just order comes out of chaos - what are the necessaries that make more just democracies arise and stick around, replacing authoritarianism, oligarchies, etc?

#PoliticalScience #Sociology #History #AcademicChatter

[hweimer@fediscience.org]

@ml

I think "Why Nations Fail" by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson is a good starting point. Despite the doomscrolling title, it also discusses the conditions for positive developments. Usually, it involves a set of competing factions that settle for cooperation because they can't hope to subdue the others by force.

[ml@ecoevo.social]

@hweimer Thank you.

[makary@app.wafrn.net]

Do we have enough real life data to describe it tho?

[ml@ecoevo.social]

@makary I think the historians will have a better handle on it than people who only work quantitatively. And when it comes to that sort of data, we should have good data going back at least to the 19th century and probably further back.

[ben@social.ben.ie]

@ml is that because history was even less reliably recorded?

[yala@degrowth.social]

@ml

Bernhard Stiegler worked in this direction and coined the term Negentropy for it.

via @kevinrns

[clew@ecoevo.social]

I read a political science paper ?a decade ago? ?two? that had a hypothesis and some data... it compared the political health of many countries in Africa, post-WWII.

If I'm remembering correctly, the "trick" was to have enough resources to not be stuck in subsistence agriculture, BUT the resources had to be... not easily centralizable? Because if they are you get warlords and then oligarchs.