Today, when we are living through renewed democratic anxieties around the globe, is a perfect moment for revisiting and rethinking historical experiences of democratic crisis and breakdown. Combining diffusion theory with cognitive psychology, Kurt Weyland’s Revolution and Reaction offers a fresh look at the serial breakdown of Latin American democracies in the wake of the 1959 Cuban Revolution.
The basic story is well known: the Cuban Revolution gave way to a twin process of diffusion and “counterdiffusion.” It sparked a wave of imitative guerrilla movements that were extinguished through brutal repression, and it provoked a dramatic radicalization of left-wing politics that was suffocated by ruthless military regimes.
At the macrolevel, the self-reinforcing dynamic of political polarization that led to democratic breakdown is well understood. In the face of revolutionary threats, conservatives unleashed counterrevolutionary repression. However, as Weyland contends, the microfoundations of these democratic tragedies remain puzzling. Conservative threat perceptions were exaggerated, he argues, and their repressive responses excessive. Deviating from “standard rationality,” both were manifestations of “bounded rationality.” To explain these deviations, Weyland relies on insights from cognitive psychology. Overestimations of threat, he suggests, arose from informational shortcuts (the heuristics of availability and representativeness), and repressive overreactions from human risk sensitivity (asymmetric loss aversion). Transferring the findings of experimental psychology to the comparative study of political history bears great promise, yet also raises numerous questions. Here I address three of them.
First, what do we know about actors’ actual threat estimates? As Weyland insists, “the unlikely success of the Cuban Revolution” induced both revolutionaries and reactionaries to “overestimate the likelihood” (p. 245) of its replication elsewhere. The “hope on the left” was “exorbitant” (p. 11), “unfounded” (40), and “illusionary” (p. 82), whereas the “perplexity and fear on the right” (p. 11) were “excessive” (p. 5), “unrealistic” (p. 126), and “disproportionate, sometimes bordering on paranoia” (p. 38). The book, however, does not offer a systematic analysis of “objective” threats (as the baseline of realism). And from its thin documentation of primary and secondary sources on threat perceptions (especially pp. 77–88 and 126–27), it is not clear whether actors actually assigned “a high likelihood” (p. 245) of success to radical left-wing politics. It is clear, however, that they saw “the possibility” (p. 117) of success. The “stunning power grab by a minority of radical revolutionaries” (p. 244) in Cuba had redefined the parameters of the possible. In the eyes of revolutionaries, “a new society was possible” (p. 11). For reactionaries, it enlarged the set of “worst-case scenarios” (p. 115). Both sides could have discounted the “infinitesimal chances of success” (p. 87) of radical mobilization but apparently fell prey to another form of bounded rationality: the “possibility effect” that leads actors to either ignore or overweight improbable outcomes (see Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, chap. 29, 2011).
Second, assuming we know political actors’ probability judgments, how do we know whether they represent “distortions arising from inferential heuristics” (p. 78) or inferences arising from intellectual distortions? Inferential heuristics steer our judgments in unconscious, unthinking ways. Judgmental mistakes, however, may well arise from certain ways of thinking. For instance, how do we know whether “exaggerated perceptions of similarities” between Cuba and the rest of Latin America indeed “derived from the representativeness heuristic” (p. 80)? In cognitive psychology, this heuristic leads people to form judgments about the probable behavior of “representative” individuals on the basis of simple stereotypes about the social group to which they belong (see Kahneman, chap. 15).
If the “heuristic of representativeness” indeed shaped actor perceptions of the Cuban Revolution, it did so in a twisted way. Rather than observing a typical group member and expecting stereotypical behavior from her, actors observed atypical behavior (revolution) by one member (Cuba) and attributed the same potential deviance to all others. Indeed, the possible replicability of the Cuban Revolution derived from the island’s regional “representativeness.” Yet, did its perceived similarity to other Latin American countries stem from irreflexive inferences based on “apparent, superficial similarities” (p. 47) or from reasoned inferences based on genuine, deep similarities?
In general, when assessing political threats, actors seek to respond to this question: How likely are our adversaries to harm us? The answer depends on both their adversaries’ willingness and their capacities to do harm. It involves complex predictive inferences under troubling uncertainties (to which the author, unfortunately, pays little attention). In drawing their lessons from Cuba, did left-wing and right-wing radicals misjudge their respective intentions and capabilities? Most likely so. However, their central, shared misjudgment concerned the willingness of ordinary citizens to support revolutionary movements, which both sides generously overestimated.
As Kurt Weyland himself asserts, “according to rationalist accounts, Latin America’s stark social inequality would have predicted overwhelming support for bold redistributive change” (p. 245) by the majority of poor citizens. This prediction, shared by both revolutionaries and reactionaries, turned out to be wrong. While shedding doubt on the rationality of citizens, it suggests that both revolutionaries and reactionaries were entirely rational, albeit guided by mistaken political theories. They acted on the theoretical assumption that grievances cause rebellions. We know today that they do not. So, radicals on both sides appear to have been bad political scientists, but does that reveal them as passive victims of inferential biases?
Third, how do varying threat expectations translate into political action? In Weyland’s account, all actors embraced exaggerated expectations of revolutionary success. In addition, conservatives responded in exaggerated ways to these expectations. Combating “the specter of communist revolution [they] employed full, often excessive force.” They “overreacted and committed unspeakable atrocities” (p. 71), enacting “clearly disproportionate” “large-scale repression” (p. 154). Weyland explains their “unscrupulous determination to employ brutal force” (p. 115) by a simple cognitive mechanism: asymmetric loss aversion (see pp. 48–50).
Because “individuals subjectively weight losses much more heavily than gains of equal objective magnitude” (p. 246), the author posits that conservatives valued their prospective losses much more than either revolutionaries or poor citizens valued the prospective gains of radical politics. In his account, these variations in the intensity of actor preferences explain both the repressive excesses of the conservative coalition and their ultimate victory (see pp. 245–46). Except for the scant plausibility of a pure preference-based account of regime outcomes, this argument omits plausible alternative explanations for “excessive” repression, such as deterrence, preemption, vengeance, and ideological intolerance. Too, the idea of asymmetric loss aversion offers an implausible account of left-wing preferences. Revolutionaries did not play lotteries but faced “mixed” choices in which both victory and defeat were on the table. Why did conservatives respond with “striking brutality and unnecessary overkill” to the risks of losing their property while “radicals were eager to risk their lives” (p. 84) in the pursuit of collective benefits?
Overall, Kurt Weyland’s innovative enterprise of understanding the cognitive psychology of political threat perceptions pushes the comparative study of democratic crises in a fruitful direction: the micrological study of escalating threats and threat perceptions between political actors. Of course, the research path his work opens up is long and winding. We still have a fair way to travel if we wish to develop both a full theory of political threat perceptions and systematic methodologies for studying them.
