Steve L. Monroe's "Mirages of Reform"

Steve L. Monroe is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He is a scholar of development, with a primary focus on the Arab world. His scholarship examines two of the region's most pressing developmental challenges: limited economic integration, and gender inequality.

Monroe applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Mirages of Reform: The Politics of Elite Protectionism in the Arab World, and shared the following:

Page 99 defends how this chapter in Mirages of Reform measures the strength of Jordanian industries’ social connections to the state. This measure relies on data from publicly traded firms. It gauges industries’ social-connections strength as the share of chairmen and board members (CBMs) of publicly traded firms in an industry who belong to Jordan’s historically favored ancestral group – Jordanians of East Bank descent.

The first half of page 99 presents the pros and cons of this measure. On the plus side, data from publicly traded firms is publicly available. This helps me identify socially connected CBMs based on whether they have an “East Bank” last name, and cull information on their firms’ size and profits. On the downside, this measure assumes that industries without publicly traded firms have weak social connections to the state.

The second half of page 99 tries to validate this assumption. Compared to industries with publicly traded firms, Jordanian industries without publicly traded firms have on average smaller firms, lower tariffs and are devoid of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) – all signs of weak social connections. I then argue that if industries without publicly traded firms did in fact have strong social connections to the state, this measure would be a “hard” test of the argument as it would overestimate the social connections strength of weakly connected industries; differences in tariff cuts and profits between industries with strong and weak social connections would be even greater if I had a more accurate measure of industries’ social connections. Page 99’s last paragraph presents qualitative evidence from different industries that substantiates the chapter’s measure of social-connections strength.

The Page 99 Test on Mirages of Reform passes in spirit but not in substance. Page 99 gives the browser a whiff of the book’s essence – its challenges, assumptions, methodological orientations. Defining and measuring social connections was one of the hardest parts of this book project. Page 99 exhibits one of the book’s tactics in measuring social connections. I like how the page begins by acknowledging this measure’s limitations, then segues into an empirical and theoretical defense of the measure, before validating the measure with secondary sources and case expertise. I hope that a browser reading page 99 would infer that I understand the empirical challenges of studying state – society relations, and have made a good faith effort to overcome these challenges.

Nevertheless, page 99 does not reveal the book’s argument: industries with stronger social connections undergo more extensive but deceptive levels of trade policy reform when their state has greater support from the US and the EU. The Page 99 Test also excises the previous chapters’ lengthy explanation and definition of social-connections strength. I conceptualize the strength of industrialists’ social connections to the state as a function of the quality and frequency of their interactions with state officials. By this logic, the economic elite who belong to politically favored social groups have the strongest social connections to their regime – hence page 99’s focus on CBMs of East Bank descent. This information is key to assessing the social connections measure’s validity.

Lastly, in shrinking Mirages of Reform’s measure of social connections to CBMs from politically favored groups, the Page 99 Test excludes the multiple approaches this book uses to assess social connections across time and place. Instead, the page 99 reader might mistakenly conclude that this book restricts its measures of social connections to what is static and quantifiable. For a more complete yet condensed understanding of Mirages of Reform, I encourage the casual browser to skim the introduction.

Visit Steve L. Monroe's website.

--Marshal Zeringue