How do you measure political will?

How do you measure political will? The most familiar way is to simply take a public opinion poll. But how do you measure political will in a crisis zone? That's what the US department of defence is trying to determine and it's soliciting proposals from contractors interested in taking on that challenge on its behalf.

OSD07-T002 TITLE: Measuring and Mapping Political Will

TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Human Systems

OBJECTIVE: Design, develop and test a dynamic analytical tool for determining the presence, absence and/or degree of political will for reform and collaboration with the USG in democratization, counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism efforts within governments and/or leadership elites of crisis prone states. Develop a web-enabled/deployable training methodology and product to be used by USG policy-makers and DoD operational field leaders to learn how to apply the dynamic analytical tool in specific countries.

DESCRIPTION: In environments that are unstable, the DoD is often at the forefront of USG efforts to stabilize local and regional populations. Operational and tactical military leaders may find themselves to be the primary interface with a country’s political leaders. Gauging willingness of those political leaders to collaborate with the USG on counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism and stabilization operations/objectives is critical to U.S. success in these programs. This willingness to collaborate with the USG, specifically in efforts to reform the politico/economic environment, is what is referred to as political will.

The literatures of democratization, counter-insurgency, and counter-terrorism are replete with the centrality of political will to successfully accomplishing our national objectives. It is identified as a threshold variable in determining the relationship between the USG and foreign government counterparts. Political will is derived from the support of the people, and is vital to successful accomplishment of USG objectives and therefore of vital interest to strategic and operational leaders. Moreover, current planning efforts within both the civilian and military agencies of the USG depend on the presence of political will for establishing strategies for dealing with insurgency, terrorism and democratization. For example, current efforts of the OSD (“Ungoverned Areas”) and the National Security Council (“Safe Havens Strategy”) begin with an initial threshold question, “Does the state have political will?”

Political will is often posed in this way – i.e. as a binary variable; counterpart governments in subject states are assumed to either have, or not have it. It is typically discussed as though the government, or leadership, of the subject state is monolithic. Analyses of political will generally seem to assume that once a determination is made, it can be treated as a constant. However, this over-simplification creates a number of extreme vulnerabilities, and leads to the likelihood of miscalculation in determining the appropriate relationship with a host-government counterpart. The miscalculation of such a key variable can easily result in significant waste of resources, effort and time, and even counterproductive outcomes.

Military and other planners traditionally make instinctive assumptions about the presence or absence of political will based on a variety of subjective factors. Until now no objective framework for determination has been developed or applied. The result is that major decisions regarding collaboration, information sharing, funding and planning are based almost exclusively on individual idiosyncracy, without taking into account historical or collective experience.
[...]
This research project will de-construct and unpack the concept of political will into its constituent elements. The reduction of political will to a binary variable misses the tremendous array of intermediary positions between the poles of presence or absence. The project will establish a full spectrum of gradients between the two extremes based on the level of intensity of political will. This will enable policy-makers and field leaders to gauge just how much political will their counterparts possess.

That's quite the task and it appears to be a very sterile way to attempt to measure human behaviour that can obviously be impacted by many different variables at many junctions. In that atmosphere, is it really possible to measure political will in an objective way that provides a constant?

Crisis zones are just that: they are in a state of crisis. Trying to determine who might do what by this type of suggested modeling is bound to be rife with dynamic factors that influence how those the US government is dealing with might, in fact, react to its policies, coercions or trade offs.

Can a measuring stick based on the gradients suggested really overcome those realities?

One of the major mistakes made in past policy decisions was the lack of human intel - input from those on the ground who can get as close to the situation as possible. There's no substitute for that. Viewing these things from a distance is not enough when it comes to deciding how to proceed.

The DoD is also calling for submissions for "Training Soldiers to Decode Nonverbal Cues in Cross-Cultural Interactions".

The training goal is to prepare Soldiers to interpret and predict behavior more accurately in cross-cultural environments. Training should address the role of culture in nonverbal communication, identifying aspects of nonverbal communication that are universal, such as expression of emotion (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002b), and aspects of NVC that are culture-specific, such as display rules, emblems, illustrators, and regulators (Ekman & Friesen, 1969).

That's exactly what would be missing in the DoD's political will scale - the human and cultural factors. They obviously realize the importance of considering face to face behaviour. Beyond that, societies in crisis can change almost in an instant. Take the example of the bombing of the Samarra mosque in Iraq in early 2006 which set off a firestorm of civil sectarian strife - civil war. In situations like that, those the US government may have been negotiating with to end the war - who had the political will at the time to do so - could suddenly become the enemy, literally overnight. We've also seen the problems the US administration has had in handling al-Maliki who at times has been cooperative while at other times has acted in outright defiance of US influence. On the proposed scale of gradients of political will he's been all over the map, so what use would such a scale be in that type of situation?

Obviously, if the US government has been measuring political will as an all or nothing phenomenon, ("Political will is often posed in this way – i.e. as a binary variable; counterpart governments in subject states are assumed to either have, or not have it."), it's been wildly off the mark. I'd like to think that sort of judgment is not what's been guiding America's foreign policy. If it is, no wonder there have been so many problems. Offering a sort of political will sliding scale though doesn't appear to be a very effective solution to gauging such fluid problems.

I guess we'll have to wait and see who this contract is awarded to and what they do to meet this challenge. In the meantime, it seems that the US government obviously needs more flexibility when it comes to understanding the political will of others. In the end, maybe they should just hire a polling company to ask the necessary questions week after week, add the results to their subjective analyses, and simply go from there.

h/t to the Infowarrior mailing list for finding this DoD contract solicitation.