Affirmative action in Brazil: the challenges of racial classification

It’s old news that Brazil is enacting social quotas – both socioeconomic and racial – for public higher education. In my earlier post, I detailed the impact this sort of policy could have on the quality of higher education.  However, before I had the chance to write a follow-up to that post, a new piece of legislation began being drafted to introduce affirmative action to the civil service.

This is not the first policy of its kind in Brazil. Yet, it is too soon to discuss the implications and effects of this law. Regardless of the final shape the bill takes, any affirmative action will have to grapple with the basic issue of identification of the beneficiaries.

In Brazil, racial classification has always been a contentious topic. For many decades, the government refused to even collect racial information, arguing that race was not a salient issue on this side of the Americas.  However, even if one agrees that there is racial discrimination in Brazil, and that part of the country’s huge inequality hinges upon race and not only class and education, the issue of racial classification is not something to be quickly dismissed. A recent New York Times  forum, for instance, shows very different perspectives.

On the one hand, Peter Fry, a leading anthropologist, argues: “[…], unlike the U.S., the majority of Brazilians do not classify themselves neatly into blacks and whites. In Brazil, therefore, eligibility for racial quotas is always a problem.”

On the other hand, Antonio Sergio Guimarães, a leading sociologist fights back:

Perhaps the biggest challenge in Brazil is the temptation to introduce a systematic verification of self-declared color or race to prevent fraud in affirmative action programs. Race and color are social constructs. It is impossible to define their borders scientifically. Passing is something inherent to this kind of classification. It can be motivated by selfish economic protection or by political altruistic reasons. The fear of fraud must be restrained to give a chance to these programs to flourish.

Ultimately, these scholars seem to be discussing an empirical and methodological issue of racial classification with wide implications for redistribution. Despite the known complexities of racial classification, much analysis relies on a single self-classification based on fixed, mutually exclusive, choices.

Bailey, Loveman and Muniz (2012) present an interesting analysis of Brazil’s racial make-up and racial inequality, taking different racial classification schemes into consideration:

They demonstrate that very different pictures of Brazil’s racial make-up are created depending on which scheme is followed. Comparing the most extreme cases, Brazil could be either 70.4% or 40.7% White. Beneficiaries of affirmative action could either comprise 29.6% or 59.3% of the population. These are hugely different percentages.

Furthermore, these different measurements are not necessarily robust.  Even if more than one measure is used, there is still a lot of incongruence.

In their paper, they go on to convincingly show that different measures also imply different mappings of income inequality between those groups. Their findings do not necessarily challenge the finding that Blacks are, on average, worse off than Whites, but they do bring more precise, rigorous, and contextual evidence to support that claim. In any case, these findings do not mean that race should be disregarded and that it does not influence social interactions in Brazil. They argue that these different measures provide more evidence that race is a multi-dimensional social construct and should be analyzed as such – there is no “true race” to be measured.

But, what do these findings tell us when discussing redistributive policies based on race? Do these inconsistencies hinder any systematic implementation of affirmative action? Or are inconsistencies (and, to some extent, fraud) a “lesser-evil”, with affirmative action a good idea despite these issues? The recent policies seem to have embraced affirmative action despite these problematic measurement issues. The consequences of these choices are still to be fully understood.

Dommage for Catalonia: Identity and Economic Crisis

Since the beginning of the Euro crisis, there has been a substantial amount of analysis, and more than a bit of hand-wringing, over the (arguably counterproductive) resurgence of nationalism among the European Union’s constituent states. Nicholas Sambanis’s New York Times op-ed from a few weeks ago is representative: he suggests that the crisis has refocused the European populace on their parochial national identities at the expense of their (potentially) continental one, and that such socio-psychological (re)orientation is preventing concerted action to solve the problem:

As Europe’s status declines, the already shaky European identity will weaken further and the citizens of the richer European nations will be more likely to identify nationally — as Germans or French — rather than as Europeans. This will increase their reluctance to use their taxes for bailouts of the ethnically different Southern Europeans, especially the culturally distant Greeks; and it will diminish any prospect of fiscal integration that could help save the euro.
The result is a vicious circle: as ethnic identities return, ethnic differences become more pronounced, and all sides fall back on stereotypes and the stigmatization of the adversary through language or actions intended to dehumanize, thereby justifying hostile actions. This is a common pattern in ethnic conflicts around the world, and it is also evident in Europe today.

Indeed, the economic malaise plaguing Europe provides some interesting evidence for the interaction between crises, insecurity, institutions, elite behavior, and political identity. It has certainly provided a clarifying moment for those who argue that European identity is sufficiently well-developed to have coherent political meaning. The importance of identity is difficult to observe when peoples’ various subject positions (religion, regional identity, nationality, etc.) coexist in harmony. It is when identities are brought into conflict—via social unrest, economic crisis, political competition or war—that they become the most salient. Events of recent years have not boded well for the European project, and have arguably reaffirmed the primacy of the nation-state as the locus of mass political allegiance.

Recent days have added another wrinkle to this narrative. Underreported in the American press, September 11^th saw a colossal Catalan nationalist rally in Barcelona. Local police reported 1.5 million attendees. To put this into perspective, that’s nearly as many people as live in the city, and more than 20 percent of the total population of Catalonia. September 11^th is Catalonia’s “national day,” commemorating the 1714 Siege of Barcelona that, according to the relevant national mythos, marked the end of Catalan independence. The holiday often draws a decent-sized crowd. This week’s demonstration, though, was orders of magnitude larger than usual. Reports indicate that protesters expressed grievances over their homeland’s disproportionate tax burden within the Spanish state, itself cash-strapped as it struggles with a balance-of-payments crisis originating in Brussels and Berlin.

There are a few points to be made here. The first is to reiterate that for European elites who profess such dedication to their continent-wide project of neoliberal cosmopolitan governance, austerity policies have been highly counterproductive. By requiring Europe’s periphery to deflate its way to renewed growth, Brussels (read: Berlin) is imposing scarcity and economic misery on the very populations it seeks to bind into a unified community of fate. Competition for a shrinking resource base is a poor breeding ground for mutual identification and positive fellow-feeling, yet rather than play savior by easing the damage done to places like Catalonia by international capital markets, institutional Europe has only exacerbated their ill effects.

The second is to note that the last few years provide a measure of support for the account of modern nationalism advanced by Karl Polanyi more than a half-century ago. For Polanyi, the overly-intensive identification with volk and fatherland that plagued midcentury Europe had roots in the collapse of the nineteenth century economic order and the incapacity of extant institutions to assert control over the fates of their societies. The renewed intensity of Catalan nationalism suggests that it continues to function as a kind of psycho-social defense mechanism through which people search for communities of fate with the capacity to control their own destinies. Madrid lies at the mercy of international creditors and lacks the institutional capability to address Spanish problems with any kind of decisiveness. In some ways it’s not surprising that the citizens of Catalonia search for other notions of community with the potential to do better.

Affirmative Action in Brazil: The Country of Racial Inequality Battles the Country of Racial Democracy

On August 29^th, President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil signed into law a policy that would require public federal universities to reserve at least half of their admission spots for students who had attended public high schools. The law also dictates that there should be quotas based on the racial composition of the state in which the university is located; that is, the number of students admitted should mirror the racial composition of the state.

This law has generated a lot of debate, with the introduction of the racial quota proving particularly controversial. While the debate isn’t new, this latest development marks a major milestone. Last April, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of racial quotes at University of Brasília (UnB), finally burying the much-used argument that racial quotas were unconstitutional, in turn paving the way for this law.

Most students in public federal universities, which are usually of better quality than private universities, come from private elementary and high schools. In four years, Brazilian federal universities will be very different in terms of the demographics of their students, particularly in comparison to the situation prior to 2003, before the first experiment with affirmative action and the expansion of federal universities through a policy of restructuring of higher public education (REUNI).

Now that the social quotas have been enacted by law, universities have four years to adapt to the changes. The effect of the law will certainly vary depending on the field of study – medicine, law and engineering are usually more competitive than other undergraduate majors. But what can we generally expect as a result of this development? In particular, will quotas “lower the quality” of teaching and research in public universities?

There are as many ways to answer this question as there are ways to measure the “quality” of schools and students. Based on the experience of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBa), Antonio Sergio Guimarães et al. collected data and provided analysis on three measures: absolute performance, relative performance, and dropout rates (if you’re interested, there are many others that you can find mentioned here).

Absolute performance is a standardized measure based on coursework grades. Relative performance assesses the development of the students: do students improve their relative positions from entrance admission scores to coursework scores? In other words, are students climbing up the “educational ladder” while in college, are the entrance positions relatively stable over time, or are students’ performances exacerbating the entrance score differences?

Based on these measures, Guimarães et al. compare three types of students: non-beneficiaries (students that did not fill quotas requirements), non-effective beneficiaries (students that, even though they fulfilled the quota requirements, would have been admitted without quotas), and effective beneficiaries (students that were admitted because of the quotas).

They show that, as expected, effective beneficiaries indeed are in much worse socioeconomic positions than the other types of students. Also, effective beneficiaries have, on average, worse absolute performance, as the graph below shows (vertical axis gives the absolute performance, blue and green ticks present the estimate for non-beneficiaries and non-effective beneficiaries, and yellow ticks are for effective beneficiaries):

In terms of relative performance, the authors find that effective beneficiaries perform, on average, similar to other types of students. And, based on a few measures of relative performance, they clearly outperform both the non-beneficiaries and the non-effective beneficiaries.

This point deserves greater attention. It could be argued that effective beneficiaries outperform other students in terms of relative performance because they have more room for improvement given their lower entrance exam scores. The authors acknowledge this point and, based on a series of analyses, attempt to measure the degree to which effective beneficiaries were able to rise to the challenge and keep up with other types of students, accounting for this initial improvement. Their analysis shows that 50% of effective beneficiaries, on average, improved their performance in college (compared to the entrance scores) and rose to the same level as other types of students. In low demand majors, this percentage is as high as 75% and in high demand majors, the percentage is about 40%.

Furthermore, even though it takes longer for effective beneficiaries to graduate (many of them have to work while attending school), they dropout at lower rates than other types of students. This is demonstrated in the graph below (colors are the same as above, blue for non-beneficiaries, green for non-effective beneficiaries, and yellow for effective beneficiaries):

The answer, then, to the fear that social and racial quotas will lower the “quality” of public universities is a cautious “no”. There are many threats to the future of public higher education in Brazil, but, based on the pieces of evidence we have, social quotas do not seem to be a particularly threatening one.

Paul Ryan Doesn’t Want to Cut Medicare (Yet)

In the often-maligned new Aaron Sorkin TV show, The Newsroom, news anchor Will McAvoy, played by Jeff Daniels, takes it upon himself to deliver objective news with Murrow-like commentary as a public service to his viewing audience. While it remains unclear what effect this show has had on real-life news anchors, Wolf Blitzer ostensibly heeded McAvoy’s call earlier this week. Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz appeared on Blitzer’s usually liberal-friendly The Situation Room to attack Paul Ryan’s budget plan, the Path to Prosperity, and more specifically, its consequences for Medicare. Wolf Blitzer questions her on some of the details of the plan and her critique and Wasserman Schultz fails to provide satisfactory answers:

While conservative blogs are already hailing Blitzer for his “take-down” or “destruction” of Wasserman Schultz, such language is missing the positively McAvoyian (Sorkian?) aspect of Blitzer’s interview. He deserves credit not for “destroying” a guest on his show but, rather, for increasing public awareness about a subject of critical importance to our democracy. In this coming election, Americans are effectively choosing between two radically different approaches to government. Although the final budget proposals will probably look slightly different than what we have already seen from either side, we do have an idea of the rough outlines of the debate. This is especially true in the case of specific policy areas (health care) or sub-areas (Medicare).

With that in mind, it is worth examining in greater detail the specific debate between Blitzer and Wasserman Schultz (I consider it beyond the scope of this post to consider the full health care debate). First and foremost, as Blitzer mentions and Wasserman Schultz presses, the Ryan plan (PDF/bullet-points) aims to combat the rising costs of Medicare by essentially replacing Medicare with a voucher program that allows citizens to purchase a “Medicare certified plan” on a private market place. Though vague on specifics, this voucher would begin at $11,000, adjust to inflation and rising Medicare costs, and be skewed toward those with lower incomes. However, as Blitzer emphasizes repeatedly, the plan does not affect anyone 55 or over. In other words, seniors remain unaffected by the policy.

The unfortunate truth about the current state of Medicare is that its costs are spiraling out of control. Reform is needed. Ryan’s plan provides one way; the Affordable Care Act, in effect, provides another. These are differences in ideological preference for reform, not in substantive efficacy of policy proposals. Democrats are not giving Ryan and the voting public enough credit by deriding his ideas for Medicare reform as overly radical. Matt Miller put it well in a Sunday op-ed in the Washington Post:

Ryan deserves credit [on Medicare]. Ryan leaves Medicare on its current outsized trajectory for the next decade, as spending soars from $560 billion to $950 billion. Because of our uniquely inefficient health-care sector, which leaves us spending twice per capita what other wealthy nations spend, the voucher he calls for thereafter would suffice to buy seniors terrific care everywhere but here. Even if his approach is imperfect, Ryan is right to challenge our Medical Industrial Complex to change.

To be perfectly clear, I don’t mean this post as an endorsement of the Ryan plan or even this small part of the plan. Indeed, there are many parts of the plan that I would question both ideologically as well as substantively. I am merely suggesting that we should debate Paul Ryan’s plan on the actual merits of its ideas, not on vague conceptions of what the plan does or does not do. My endorsement is of Wolf Blitzer and his contribution to the marketplace of ideas–keeping it honest and making sure we pay attention to the ideas our policymakers present.

For more of his thoughts on the Presidential race, follow William on Twitter.

Discrimination despite Development: Women’s Position in India

Although the causes remain unclear, India, considered by most a progressive and tolerant nation, is witnessing a sudden spate of violent crimes against women. Earlier in June, a survey of 370 gender specialists found India to be the worst place to be a woman among all the G-20 countries (a list that also includes Saudi Arabia). Just last week, an 18-year-old in Assam, a state in northeastern India, was molested by a mob of 20 men. While people standing around clearly had enough time to record a video, no one bothered to call the police. Public apathy notwithstanding, official inaction has also contributed to a steadily deteriorating situation. A few months back, police in Gurgaon advised women against venturing out after 8 pm. In February, the government of West Bengal reacted to the gang-rape of a young woman by accusing the victim of having ‘loose morals’ and being part of a conspiracy that would discredit the Chief Minister of the state.

It is not only violent crimes that are commonplace, other kinds of (non-violent) crimes—commonly referred to as “eve-teasing”—are a part of many women’s daily existence while out at work or on public transport, and include being subjected to sexually suggestive remarks and unwanted physical contact. The expression of discomfort by many women led the Delhi Metro to designate separate, women-only carriages on the train. However, as many have rightly claimed, separation of the sexes is not something that increases tolerance. An anonymous blog post by a woman highlights how her ride in the Delhi metro turned nasty when she did not board the ladies’ carriage of the train and instead traveled in the general compartment.

Indeed, it does seem that crimes against women are on the increase: according to the National Crime Records Bureau in India, there was a 7.1% hike in recorded crimes against women between 2010 and 2011. The biggest leaps occurred in cases under “the dowry prohibition act,” which classifies the act of giving or take dowry, as well as violent acts towards a woman after marriage in order to demand material goods from her family as a criminal act (up 27.7%), of kidnapping and abduction (up 19.4% year on year), and of rape (up 9.2%).

These disturbing trends raise the question of why crime against women has being rising in India. This is all the more puzzling given the overall decrease in other kinds of crime (see figure).

Yale-Singapore, Conflicting Values, and Cultural Relativism

Both inside and outside of the Yale community, there has been lively debate about the decision to extend–for the first time–the Yale brand past the borders of picturesque New Haven. In cooperation with the National University of Singapore, Yale University will establish a satellite campus in Singapore. There will be residential colleges, dining halls, and Yale professors. But there will not be political protests or partisan political groups.

To be completely honest, my own opinion on this is not yet fully formed. On one hand, I support fully the administration’s attempt to extend Yale’s liberal arts education to other parts of the world, especially outside of the West. Although I am not naive enough to presume that this extension is unrelated to financial concerns, I do think that this is a worthwhile endeavor. In particular, I find the proposed East-West curriculum blend very intriguing. Moreover, I am unpersuaded by arguments that this campus will somehow tarnish the Yale brand. If anything, NYU-Abu Dhabi and other similar institutions notwithstanding, I think Yale is breaking new and unique ground with the Singapore campus.

On the other hand, as a staunch supporter of the liberal democratic principles upon which Yale and the United States were founded (lux et veritas, right?), I must admit that I find this latest bit of news quite disconcerting. The idea that Yale students, many of them political science majors, will be unable to express themselves freely in a political manner does not accord with these principles. And so, as a Yale University political scientist, I find myself conflicted.

In addition, I think another element of the debate merits mention. In many ways, the conversation about Yale’s Singapore campus mirrors the moral absolutism/cultural relativism debate at the core of modern liberal democracy. Consider the words of Professor Pericles Lewis, the president of the Singapore campus:

Yale-NUS students will be critical thinkers, yet remain respectful of Singapore’s cultural and societal norms. We hope [the college] will becoming the nexus of intellectual discussions in Singapore.

Professor Lewis concedes, implicitly, that some liberal values may be violated yet justifies such transgressions in the name of respect for Singapore’s “cultural and societal norms.” Opponents of the Singapore campus have been taking the moral absolutist stance, stating that the endeavor runs counter to the liberal democratic principles at the core of the Yale mission. Whatever the result of the debate–and it seems as if progress on the campus is all but unstoppable at this point–it is worthwhile to consider it within this broader context.

For more of his brave yet flawed attempts at political theory, follow William on Twitter.

The Affordable Care Act and the Identity Crisis of “New Liberals”

The Supreme Court decision to uphold the constitutionality of the principal components of the Affordable Care Act provided President Barack Obama a tremendous political victory. This much is obvious. After all, the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” had become the signature piece of legislation of the Obama era. However, the magnitude of the decision’s impact will be felt primarily not by the Obama administration itself but rather by its liberal supporters.

American liberals of my generation – “new liberals” – came of age during the post-9/11 Bush years. In contrast to generations before us, we crafted a political identity entirely in opposition to a very divisive and partisan presidency. This has been both good and bad for liberals. On the one hand, new liberals have not been ideologically constrained by any single policy platform. That is, as long as we opposed President Bush, it did not matter what our political stance actually was. We were all “liberals.” On the other hand, as liberals would soon discover, little consensus existed on positive policy-making. As a result, though liberals managed to forge an individual political identity—and a collective ideological identity in opposition—this same group of people had not created an exclusive party (i.e. Democratic) identity. Riding on that wave of resistance liberalism, we felt that we willed Democrats to electoral victory in 2006 and 2008. But, not identifying purely as Democrats, we remained cautious with our support.

Barack Obama, more than any figure, came to symbolize the rise to prominence of this new generation. To us, he wasn’t a Democrat, he was a liberal. When Obama came to power in 2009, we all expected him to advance all of the policies we wanted. However, in domestic as well as international politics, liberals quickly became aware of the difficulties of governance. The Obama administration, cognizant of these challenges, chose to moderate its policies to a significant degree. It dragged its feet on gay rights, immigration, the environment, Guantanamo and personal liberty, and, most critically, health care reform. Many new liberals, dismayed, felt—and still feel—that Obama should have pushed a more liberal agenda. For these supporters, eight years in opposition had been a long time to wait for ultimately uninspiring policies.

Social identity theory, often imported by political scientists from social psychology to explain political behavior, can help explain how the nature of Obama’s policies may influence new liberal support in the fall election. The logic of this theory argues that when individuals make political decisions, they adopt the social identity that affords them the greatest tangible or intangible benefits. In a good example of this logic, a recent paper in the American Political Science Review by Moses Shayo argues that the lack of support among poorer Americans for redistributive policies in the United States stems from the intangible benefits brought about by identifying as American (i.e. patriotism) rather than as part of the lower class. In most European countries, by contrast, individuals support redistributive policies because of the benefits from identifying more closely with their social class.

On the eve of Obama’s bid for re-election, new liberals are being told to follow the party line in opposition to the Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney. For many of us, however, this is proving rather difficult. Though it provides little in terms of tangible benefits, the liberal identity, forged in opposition, gives an ideological freedom that liberals cherish. The Democratic identity, by contrast, affords less ideological freedom but greater benefits in terms of actual accomplishments. Thus, the desirability of the Democrat party identity vis-à-vis the liberal ideological identity depends entirely on the value of the accomplishments of the party in power. This is why the Affordable Care Act matters immensely for Obama’s erstwhile supporters.

While they may still vote for Obama, new liberals may not provide him the critical grassroots support afforded in the 2008 election. In that election, because Obama was not burdened with a substantial policy record, new liberals did not have to choose between their political identities. In the past few years, the presidency of Barack Obama has inextricably tied him to the more moderate policies of the Democratic Party, not liberals per se, forcing new liberals to decide between two competing political identities in the fall election. For this reason, the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of the Affordable Care Act, a fundamentally liberal policy, will prove critical to Obama’s efforts to retain the support of new liberals. Now, identifying as a Democrat has suddenly become much more attractive. As a result, new liberals will find it much easier to forego their ideological identification in favor of the party identification that support for Barack Obama in 2012 necessitates.

When Abortion Leads to the Decline of Nations

Across the Atlantic from the abortion debates in Arizona, Virginia, Philadelphia, and most recently, Michigan, a very similar discussion can be found in Turkey. A few weeks ago, Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that he considered abortion to be murder. The statement was strongly endorsed by the head of the Parliament’s Human Rights Commission and the Family and Social Policies Minister – both women.

However, unlike their fellow conservatives stateside, this debate is ostensibly not just based on pro-life or religious reasons. According to Erdoğan, keeping abortion legal is “a sly plan to wipe this nation off the global stage.” Such statements are not all that surprising, given that last year Erdoğan expressed concern about a declining Turkish population. He went on to urge Turkish families to have at least three kids, claiming that those who did would receive a ‘prize’.

Though a majority of Turkish citizens are in opposition to a draft bill which would make abortion illegal (abortion is currently legal in Turkey during the first 10 weeks of the pregnancy), the nature of the debate highlights two rather disturbing trends. First, it points to the over-extension of the state into highly private matters. The ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party) has tried to adopt similar extensions into people’s private lives in the past – in 2004, they tried to criminalize adultery, but the proposal was dropped in the face of criticism both from within Turkey and from Europe.

Secondly, and more alarmingly, it showcases a nationalistic fear – of being wiped off the map and of diluting ‘Turkish-ness’. Such an understanding also naturally lends itself to giving no room for the assimilation of minorities or immigrants. In fact, some analysts have argued this decision may have political rather than religious motives behind it as it aims to counter the high birth rates among the Kurdish population of the country. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute, in Southeast Anatolia and Central Anatolia, where a majority of the Kurdish population in Turkey resides, the birth rate is 27.3 per 1000 people and 22.9 per 1000 people respectively. This is much higher than the rest of the regions where most of the population is ethnically Turkish, and birth rates are below 19 per 1,000 people, with as low as 11 per 1,000 in some parts of the country (numbers reflect data from August 2011).

A counter-argument might be that the higher birthrates among the Kurds are just caused by a lack of basic services – such as education, provision of health service and birth control, and should therefore, not be linked to some sort of conspiracy by the Kurds to outnumber the Turks. Some have even claimed that the debate over abortion was started by the Prime Minister just to divert the public’s attention from the Uludere incident – where 34 civilians near the Iraqi border were killed in a strike by the Turkish military. However, some analysts have commented that organizations can use ‘ethnic reproduction’ as political tools to reach their goals. Indeed, after looking at Erdoğan’s past statements and his concern about a declining Turkish population, one cannot say with so much certainty that the debate on abortion was initiated just to divert the public’s attention.

While controversial policies geared toward ethnic minorities are nothing new for Turkey, using social policy in this manner is. Moreover, Turkish women’s groups now have to focus on getting the state to offer better alternatives to rape victims, and those women, who out of fear of giving birth to another female child in a highly patriarchal society, will take recourse to illegal and more dangerous options to terminate their girl child. In the longer term however, one must cautiously watch the nature of AKP’s policies, and how they might have troubling consequences for the mindset of Turkish society.