With the encouragement of the Journal of Public Health Policy and Springer Nature, I’m posting a pre-print of a forthcoming JPHP article entitled “Why Protect Civil Liberties during a Pandemic?“

The abstract:

During a public health emergency, a government must balance public welfare, equity, individual rights, and democratic processes and norms. These goods may conflict. Although science has a role in informing wise policy, no empirical evidence or algorithm can determine how to balance competing goods under conditions of uncertainty. Especially in a crisis, it is crucial to have a broad and free conversation about public policy. Many countries are moving in the opposite direction. Sixty-one percent of governments have imposed at least some problematic restrictions on individual rights or democratic processes during the COVID-19 pandemic, and 17 have made substantial negative changes. The policies of Poland and Hungary reflect these global trends and continue these countries’ recent histories of democratic erosion. The expertise of public health should be deployed in defense of civil liberties.

I’ll also quote a passage here:

Imagine a government that is legitimate (having an unquestioned right to make laws and regulations within its territory) and benignly motivated. A pandemic such as COVID-19 will force this government to make difficult decisions. It should strive to maximize public welfare, which can be measured on the dimensions of health, economic prosperity, security, and environmental sustainability, among others. The government should strive for equity, meaning that the costs and harms (as well as any benefits) are distributed fairly. It should attend to individual rights, which can be understood as “trumps” that people may play against policies that benefit the general welfare [2]. For example, an individual may claim a right to move freely when subjected to a quarantine; that claim presents a tradeoff that the government must resolve. Finally, the government should protect political processes and norms, such as a free and vibrant debate and fair elections.

These goods may conflict. Closing businesses has health benefits but also economic costs and may restrain individual economic rights. Allowing a mass protest enhances democratic debate but can allow a virus to spread. The relevant goods are incommensurable—not measurable on a single scale. And governments must weigh and balance them under conditions of uncertainty, not knowing for sure whether closing businesses will help control the epidemic or whether allowing a protest will spread the infection.

Now imagine that a government is neither legitimate nor benign. Perhaps a dictator has seized power in a coup. He, too, will face difficult choices during a pandemic, but there is no reason to expect him to weigh the costs and goods in an impartial fashion. More likely, he will see the pandemic as an opportunity to consolidate power, eliminate threats, and profit economically. …

I’ll be presenting at these two events, which are open and online:

Finding Belonging Amidst Neighborhood Development: A Case for the Arts in Boston’s Chinatown: “The Pao Arts Center uses arts, culture, and creativity to promote social cohesion and community well-being in an ethnic enclave, Boston’s Chinatown. In the same neighborhood, luxury development may be disrupting the community’s close-knit social fabric and sense of a coherent cultural identity. A team comprised of Tufts University researchers, Pao Arts center staff, and community residents investigated whether the Pao Arts Center remedies the effects of this displacement. Preliminary findings from the research will be presented.” Wednesday, October 7, 2020, noon-1:00PM. Register here.

The Impact of Political Polarization on Teaching: “The combination of remote learning blurring the lines between classroom and home, and the hyperpolarized political climate are raising more and more concerns for classroom teachers as they navigate relevant, timely and often controversial topics with their students. Come join a group of civic scholars and educators as they engage in conversation around some of the issues pressing on teachers this school year.” October 8 at 7:00 – 8:00pm ET. Register here.

I also recommend this event, which is public but face-to-face:

Central Square Theater (Cambridge, MA): Women’s Vote Centennial: Voter (Dis)Enfranchisement Today, Thursday, October 8, 2020, 8:30 PM 9:00 PM. More here. (I am listed as a speaker and cannot actually make it, but the real presenters are great.)

Human beings have latent characteristics, factors that we cannot directly observe or ask individuals to report but must infer from many observations. For example, you cannot reliably assess students’ knowledge of American history by asking them one question or by inviting them to say how much they know about the topic. The standard method is to ask them many questions about varied topics in US history and derive one or more scores from all this data. Similarly, we typically ask many questions or use many observations to assess a person’s extraversion, racial bias, performance on the job, or even likelihood of voting next November.

One common method for inferring the latent variables from many direct observations is factor analysis, invented by Charles Spearman in 1904 and prevalent in psychology since then (Fabrigar et al., 1999).

In the study of politics, factor analysis is often used to infer latent variables from people’s opinions about political issues and about related topics, such as morality, economics or social identities. This method yields genuine insights. However, to the degree that it explains the phenomena of public opinion and political behavior, it has three troubling implications.

First, some people may have anti-democratic traits that emerge as latent variables, whether or not they would admit to opposing democracy. That was a finding of the classic 1950 work, The Authoritarian Personality by Adorno, Frenkel-Brenswik, Levinson, & Sanford. Given a long questionnaire about a wide variety of topics, some people scored high on an F-scale (“f” for fascism), meaning that they were latently authoritarian, although most would have denied it.

A comparable finding emerged from John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse’s Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs about How Government Should Work (2002). Many Americans apparently believed that political disagreement was a sign of corruption and would prefer government by disinterested elites.

And the currently very influential Moral Foundations theory of Jonathan Haidt finds that many people display a latent variable of Authority, which sounds at least potentially undemocratic, especially if it is a predominant factor for an individual.

Second, if people have latent stances about ordinary political matters, but those stances vary, we are likely to polarize and not to be able to resolve our disagreements, which lie below the surface and may be difficult to shift. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse write, “Deliberation will not work in the real world of politics where people are different and where tough, zero-sum decisions must be made. … Given the predilections of the people, real deliberation is likely to make them hopping mad or encourage them to suffer silently because of a reluctance to to voice their own opinions in the discussion” (207).

Similarly, Haidt writes, “I began to see that many moral matrices coexist within each nation. Each matrix provides a complete, unified, and emotionally compelling worldview, easily justified by observable evidence and nearly impregnable to arguments from outsiders” (Haidt, p. 125). (Here he uses the metaphor of a matrix from the 1999 movie of that name, but factor analysis is his main method.)

Third, if we have latent characteristics that explain our concrete ideas and beliefs, we are not the self-conscious, self-critical learners and participants in self-governance that we might imagine ourselves to be. Haidt and team say, “Individuals are often unable to access the causes of their moral judgments” (Graham et al, 2011, p. 368).

I think that latent psychological characteristics exist, and the search for political ones has yielded insights. However, we should be alert to the implications of this method and careful about overstating its significance.

Given a set of data on a roughly related topic, you are going to be able to find factors. You can’t know a priori how much of the variance the factors will explain, but they will explain some of it. This method may help you to understand your dataset, but it does not reveal that people actually possess latent characteristics. That is a presumption of the method, not a finding of it. [NB: This paragraph applies to exploratory factor analysis, not to confirmatory factor analysis. The latter, when conducted appropriately, tests a hypothesis that has been generated for other reasons.]

Further, the statistical output does not demonstrate that the factors you found are foundations, causes, explanations, or reasons for the directly-observed data. All you have found is that you can model each measured variable as a function of the other variables and an unobserved variable, with some error. The interpretation of that finding requires some other basis, such as a substantive theory of human psychology.

Finally, the whole approach of deriving factors from a questionnaire or an observational checklist (or “big data”) is only one way to study human beings. It should be compared to other methods, including the sensitive interpretation of their explicit speech and their intentional actions and interactions. Such comparisons are especially important if we are trying to draw broad, meta-conclusions about whether people are capable of deliberative self-governance.

All of these issues arose in The Authoritarian Personality, which combined factor analysis of questionnaire data with the psychoanalysis of selected subjects. Although the investigators came either from quantitative, largely Anglophone, positivist research or from Continental critical theory, they shared a premise: people may not know what they really want or believe, but we can find out by digging into their unconscious. In this study, extensive interviews, in what the authors describe as “clinical” settings, were used to suggest survey questions and then helped to interpret the output of factor analysis.

On the team was Theodor Adorno, the great Frankfurt School theorist. Almost forty years later, his colleague R. Nevitt Sanford recalled that “Adorno was a most stimulating intellectual companion. He had what seemed to us a profound grasp of psychoanalytic theory, complete familiarity with the ins and outs of German fascism and, not least, a boundless supply of off-color jokes” (quoted in Gordon, p. 39). I find Adorno’s critical reflections on the study even more timely and interesting than his jokes.

In The Authoritarian Personality, the authors make their theory vivid and concrete by presenting portraits of two pseudonymous subjects, both Republican-voting, college-educated, white men in their twenties. Larry is reluctant to categorize people into groups or make assumptions about individuals based on their demographic characteristics. He is interested in a wide variety of people, is self-critical, and overtly opposes discrimination. In contrast, Mack quickly categorizes people into groups he sees as homogeneous, he views their underlying traits as inescapable, and he assumes that the groups to which he belongs are in zero-sum conflict with the others. He is “pre-fascist” or susceptible to authoritarian politics.

Now consider the behavioral scientists who categorize individuals like Mack and Larry as “highs” or “lows” on measures like the f-scale, and who trace such differences to “deep-lying trends in [the] personality”–trends of which the individuals are unaware (Chapter 1). These scientists sound much more like Mack than Larry.

This similarity raises at least two possibilities:

1. Mack is right. People do fall into discrete, homogeneous, and contending groups that are determined by underlying, unchosen factors. Mack is wise to categorize people and to assess whole groups critically. It’s just that the category of people we should be concerned with are the authoritarians (including Mack), not the groups that Mack dislikes, such as Jews.
2. The Authoritarian Personality reflects some of the same problematic social conditions that gave rise to Mack. Authoritarians and scholars of authoritarianism manifest the same tendencies because they are both influenced by the same circumstances.

I think Adorno makes the second argument. Under his own name, he contributes a chapter of “Remarks” to The Authoritarian Personality. Here he describes a shift from the “free competition and market economy” of the late 1800s, which prized and actually enhanced individuality, to the “mass society” of the mid-1900s (Kindle loc. 1417, 1453). “It is not accidental that Freud’s theory was conceived during the second part of the nineteenth century, when individuality as a social category was at its height” (1420). In keeping with his time, Freud emphasized the importance of the individual’s family, biography, and inner life for explaining idiosyncratic outcomes. But now “our society is … on its way to become one and whole, leaving less and less [sic] loopholes for the individual and tolerating less and less nonsocial, individual realms of existence” (1448). “The overwhelming machinery of propaganda and cultural industry” make individuality impossible and mold us into groups” (1463). Or again:

The whole pattern of present-day culture is molded in such a way that it takes care of the masses by ‘integrating’ them into standardized forms of life which are built after the model of industrialized mass production, and by actually or vicariously satisfying their wants and needs. … Populations are treated en masse because they are no longer “masses” in the old sense of the term. They are manipulated as objects of all kinds of social organization, including their own … [1455-6]

In private notes not included in The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno elaborated:

Our high-scoring subjects do not seem to behave as autonomous units whose decisions are important for their own fate as well as that of society, but rather as submissive centers of reactions, looking for the conventional “thing to do,” and riding what they consider “the wave of the future.” This observation seems to fall in line with the economic tendency towards gradual disappearance of the free market and the adaptation of man to the slowly emerging new condition. Research following the conventional patterns of investigation into public opinion may easily reach the point where the orthodox concept of what people feel, want, and do proves to be obsolete (quoted in Gordon, pp. 44-5).

Adorno implies that factor analysis works–it explains our world–because the social and political system has destroyed the autonomous, self-critical individual. People like Larry, who still try to think freely and treat others as free individuals, are naive about their real conditions. “Modern society is a mass society” (1453).

The co-authors of the book advocate “increasing the kind of self-awareness and self-determination that makes any kind of manipulation impossible.” They advocate a true education in the Kantian sense: Bildung. Its ideal is “the rational system of an objective and thoughtful man”–becoming at least as emancipated as Larry, and much more so than Mack.

I assume that Adorno signed on to this chapter because he shared his colleagues’ ideal. Note that despite Adorno’s left-radical roots, this ideal (like Adorno’s lament for the “decay of individuality brought about by the decline of free competition and the market economy” [1417]) makes him sound like a classical liberal in the tradition of de Tocqueville and Mill. The difference, I think, is his profound pessimism about returning to a liberal society under modern conditions.

In any case, this is the main point I want to draw out: To infer unobserved characteristics from human beings’ concrete statements about morality and politics can yield insights, but it also implies a view of people as incapable of self-governance. It thus aligns the researcher with anti-democratic or illiberal research subjects. This is a matter of degree, and cautious use of factor analysis is often helpful. Maybe we can even emancipate people by revealing what they latently believe so that they can criticize those beliefs. But if you think that factor analysis will yield truly definitive insights about public opinion, then your view of the world is akin to Mack’s. Adorno would say you are simply a realist. I think you might be overestimating the power of the method.

See also: who wants to deliberate?; Moral Foundations theory and political processes; structured moral pluralism (a proposal); and Habermas and critical theory (a primer). Citations: Fabrigar, L. R., Wegener, D. T., MacCallum, R. C., & Strahan, E. J. (1999). Evaluating the use of exploratory factor analysis in psychological research. Psychological methods, 4(3), 272.Graham, Jesse, Nosek, Brian A., Haidt, Jonathan, Iyer, Ravi, Koleva. Spassena, & Ditto, Peter H. 2011. Mapping the Moral Domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101:2; Haidt, Jonathan. 2012. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion; Gordon, Peter E. “The authoritarian personality revisited: Reading Adorno in the age of Trump.” Boundary 2 44, no. 2 (2017): 31-56.

[Given today at Governing the Commons: 30 Years Later, a Virtual Symposium hosted by The Ostrom Workshop.]

We are having a national debate about defunding the police or otherwise deeply restructuring criminal justice. The reasons are Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor, and all the other unarmed African American civilians who have been killed by police. Their homicides are symptoms of broader injustice. For example, I find that being Black raises one’s chance of being treated in a discriminatory way by the police almost five-fold, and that 42% of African Americans have been mistreated by the police at some point in their lives.

Elinor Ostrom did not contribute to analyzing the roots of racial injustice. She didn’t focus, in general, on differences of identity. I would not recommend her as a source on those topics, although they are integral to any discussion of police reform.

She did, however, conduct pioneering empirical research on policing in America, focusing specifically on disparate results by race. Her findings and her broader theoretical framework offer valuable insights–less about the roots of structural racism than about possible solutions.

Concretely, she and colleagues found that police served all citizens, and especially Black citizens, best when police departments were small, when their jurisdictions overlapped, and when various aspects of law enforcement were disaggregated and assigned to distinct agencies in a polycentric manner. She opposed the powerful trend to centralize and consolidate bureaucracies and to apply crude outcome measures, such as numbers of arrests.

More broadly, Ostrom understood public safety as a common pool resource in a polycentric world. Public safety is a common pool resource because it is subtractable (individuals can undermine public safety) but non-excludable (individuals cannot be prevented from benefitting from the resource). She argued that common-pool resources are challenging but not impossible to create and preserve. They are not doomed to the tragedy of the commons. Moreover, both of the dominant modern ways of preventing tragedies of the commons–states and markets–are frequently flawed and do not exhaust our options.

The police epitomize a state solution to crime. The government requires citizens to contribute taxes to pay for a distinct and specialized service-provider that has the capacity to enforce laws, including the requirement to pay taxes. This is a stable institution. The overall problem is trustworthiness: why should we trust the police to act in everyone’s interests?

Market solutions include private security services, walls and locks, and insurance against kidnapping, among many other tools. The drawbacks include inequitable outcomes and a tendency to shift danger from one household to others.

But we can generate public safety in other ways. For instance, the voluntary associations that people create and run reduce crime in their communities. Sharkey, Torrats-Espinosa, and Takyar find that “every 10 additional organizations focusing on crime and community life in a city with 100,000 residents leads to a 9 percent reduction in the murder rate, a 6 percent reduction in the violent crime rate, and a 4 percent reduction in the property crime rate.” That finding fits very nicely with the Ostroms’ theory. Vincent Ostrom told Paul Aligica:

We do not think of ‘government’ or ‘governance’ as something provided by states alone. Families, voluntary associations, villages, and other forms of human association all involve some form of self-government. Rather than looking only to states, we need to give much more attention to building the kinds of basic institutional structures that enable people to find ways of relating constructively to one another and of resolving problems in their daily lives.

The Ostroms’ ideas are congruent with some current reform proposals. For instance, Black Lives Matter says:

We demand a world where those most impacted in our communities control the laws, institutions, and policies that are meant to serve us – from our schools to our local budgets, economies, police departments, and our land …. This includes: Direct democratic community control of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, ensuring that communities most harmed by destructive policing have the power to hire and fire officers, determine disciplinary action, control budgets and policies, and subpoena relevant agency information.

This past summer, predominantly nonviolent mass protests, forced police reform onto the policy agenda. The momentum is palpably fading. Astead W. Herndon reports in the New York Times:

Over three months ago, a majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledged to defund the city’s police department, making a powerful statement that reverberated across the country. It shook up Capitol Hill and the presidential race, shocked residents, delighted activists and changed the trajectory of efforts to overhaul the police during a crucial window of tumult and political opportunity.

Now some council members would like a do-over.

Councilor Andrew Johnson, one of the nine members who supported the pledge in June, said in an interview that he meant the words “in spirit,” not by the letter. … Lisa Bender, the council president, paused for 16 seconds when asked if the council’s statement had led to uncertainty at a pivotal moment for the city.

“I think our pledge created confusion in the community and in our wards,” she said.

The regrets formalize a retreat that has quietly played out in Minneapolis in the months since George Floyd was killed by the police

You could explain this retreat as ordinary politics: mass protests pushed the pendulum one way; now it is swinging back, and politicians are just riding along. But I would add another explanation. I think that only relatively small and specialized circles–including people inspired by Elinor Ostrom as well as some left-radicals–have seriously considered concrete ideas for providing public safety with much less reliance on police. The public as a whole is not aware of these alternatives. That is a reason to continue to apply and to publicize the work of Elinor Ostrom and the Workshop.

I also believe that the Ostrom tradition should pay more attention to issues of difference and exclusion that relate directly to Lin Ostrom’s model. One of her design principles for managing a common pool resource is to establish clear boundaries around the community that owns the resource. In the case of policing, geographical boundaries can help. But another boundary is available: race.

Although public safety is non-excludable, in the sense that an individual cannot easily be excluded from its benefits, whole groups can be excluded from the boundaries of a community. When being Black raises your odds of being mistreated by the police five-fold, it appears that a salient boundary is race. A majority-white jurisdiction can provide public safety for white people but not for others. In fact, the police not only serve and protect those inside the boundary but also play a major role in maintaining the color line.

It’s obviously not enough to say that clear borders are assets for communities, although they are. We must also distinguish between good, bad, and evil borders. At this point, I think we need resources other than those provided by Lin Ostrom’s own work, although I suspect she would agree with that point.

Sources: Patrick Sharkey, Gerard Torrats-Espinosa, Delaram Takyar, “Community and the Crime Decline: The Causal Effect of Local Nonprofits on Violent Crime,” American Sociological Review, vol. 82 issue 6, pp. 1214-1240; V. Ostrom to P. Aligica, 2003, in Tarko, Elinor Ostrom: An Intellectual Biography, p. 49. See also: insights on police reform from Elinor Ostrom and social choice theory; police discrimination, race, and community poverty; police discrimination, race, and community poverty; more data on police interactions by race; on the phrase: Abolish the police!