The Terms and Principles of Analytical Activism
For the purpose of helping to solve the democratic backsliding problem
Our About pages begins with “Democracy faces an unprecedented threat from an authoritarian movement built on lies and contempt for the rule of law.” This is commonly known as the democratic backsliding problem. Helping activists solve that problem is the goal of The Analytical Activist. In pursuit of that goal, below are the key terms we use and the key principles we follow to make the discoveries necessary to solve the problem.
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Terms of Analytical Activism
Analytical activism
This is the use of analysis instead of intuition and trial and error to solve difficult activist problems. Getting a little more formal, analytical activism is the use of the analytical method to achieve activist objectives. The best practices of analytical activism are:
A true analysis of the problem is performed.
The scientific method is used to prove all key assumptions.
A formal process that fits the problem is used.
Learning from past mistakes and successes is maximized.
These best practices work together to give analytical activism the strong foundation it needs to solve difficult social problems.
Analytical activist
This is someone who practices analytical activism in a serious manner and is always learning how to do it better. For more, see this section on the About page: What is an analytical activist?
Analytical method
This is a generic process combining the power of the scientific method with the use of formal process to solve any type of problem. It has these nine steps:
Identify the problem to solve.
Choose an appropriate process. (THE KEY STEP)
- Use the process to hypothesize analysis or solution elements.
- Design an experiment(s) to test the hypothesis.
- Perform the experiment(s).
- Accept, reject, or modify the hypothesis.
- Repeat steps 3, 4, 5, and 6 until the hypothesis is accepted.
Implement the solution.
Continuously improve the process as opportunities arise.
Steps 1 to 6 are the same as the scientific method, where step 2 always chooses the scientific method. However, that method by itself is not enough for most problems.
Change resistance
As defined in this paper, “change resistance is the tendency for a system to continue its current behavior, despite the application of force to change that behavior.” There are two forms: individual and systemic change resistance.
Individual change resistance is the refusal of a social agent (a single person, organization, corporation, etc) to fully support or adopt new behavior. Systemic change resistance is the tendency for a system as a whole to reject an attempted change, even if that change is promoted over a long period of time by a substantial fraction of the population. This creates a Wall of Systemic Change Resistance, which blocks most proposed solutions from adoption.
Due to systemic change resistance, portions of a system will resist adopting proposed solutions. For example, a commonly proposed solution to the democratic backsliding problem is to lower the amount of disinformation on social media. But platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Snapchat, Twitter (X), and YouTube have resisted attempts to force them to manage the truthfulness of their content. In January 2025 Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, ended its longstanding fact-checking program.
All difficult social problems, those that have resisted solution for a generation or more, have a change resistance subproblem. Otherwise the problem would have already been solved. The change resistance problem MUST be solved first, before the system will accept solutions to the original problem.
Analytical activists thus have two problems to solve: how to overcome change resistance and then how to solve the democratic backsliding problem itself. The second is easy to solve once the first is solved.
In fact, once systemic change is overcome, the system will now “want” to solve the problem as strongly as it resisted solving it before. For example, before 1776 most Americans supported the King of England, despite some flaws of that system, and were proud and thankful to be his subjects. But after Thomas Paine’s publication of Common Sense in January 1776 reframed the debate, a reviewer in Connecticut noted “We were blind, but on reading these enlightening words the scales have fallen from our eyes.” Systemic change resistance vanished overnight and the American colonies pursued independence. Their original problem, the biggest one at the time, was: Should the colonies break away from England or not?
Classic activism
This is the use of the four steps of The Process of Classic Activism to solve all types of activist problems, as described and modeled in this paper. Classic activism revolves around getting the proper practices (solutions) needed to solve the problem adopted. A proper practice is a behavior that if followed, would directly help to solve the problem. Examples of the proper practices needed to solve the democratic backsliding problem are:
Proposed solutions like Democrats need to frame their messages better.
Fact-checking to provide citizens with the truth so they don’t get fooled into voting for populist authoritarians.
More news stories about the horrors of authoritarianism and the benefits of democracy.
The general goal of journalism: speaking truth to power. Or as The Washington Post’s byline says, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
How the process works is shown below. It’s basically a “more of the truth” process: Find the truth, promote the truth, and magnify the truth.
Let's walk the diagram. Step 1 identifies the problem in terms of problem symptoms. These are always caused by proper practices not being followed. If the proper practices are not yet known, then step 2 is needed to find the proper practices. Then if people don't know about the proper practices or why they should practice them, step 3 is needed. This attempts to tell people the truth about the problem and the proper practices. If that's not enough to solve the problem, and it usually isn't, step 4 is needed. This tries to exhort, inspire, and bargain with people to get them to support the proper practices.
If step 4 doesn't work, what does a classic activist do? The only thing they can do: repeat the steps and somehow do them better. Since that doesn't involve any root cause analysis or treatment of change resistance as a separate problem to solve, it cannot work on difficult problems. What’s missing from classic activism is Step 1.5. Find the root causes and their high leverage points. This would include treating change resistance as a separate problem to solve, in addition to the original problem.
The current practice of journalism is a form of classic activism. Kovach and Rosenstiel, writing in The Elements of Journalism, go to great length to establish that: “The primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing.” (p7) Implicit in the definition is that information must be true:
This new vision of a new journalism depends on the networked media culture committing itself, as the old system did, to establishing verified and truthful information and building out from that foundation of facts toward meaning. The driving force of the Age of Enlightenment, out of which grew the notion of individual worth and a public press, was the search for truthful information. This information freed the public from the control of centralized dictatorial or dogmatic power. (p25)
We humbly suggest that journalists working on the backsliding beat need to become analytical activists or work closely with them, and that journalism needs to become synonymous with analytical activism where necessary, if democracy is to survive.
Democratic backsliding problem
Democratic backsliding occurs when a government backslides from democracy to autocracy (aka authoritarianism). One formal definition is “Democratic backsliding is the incremental erosion of institutions, rules, and norms that results from the actions of duly elected governments.” Another is democratic backsliding is “the state-led debilitation or elimination of any of the political institutions that sustain an existing democracy.”
The problem began in 1920 and has occurred in three waves as shown below. We are now in the third wave of autocratization. The graph gives a clear hint of how complex the problem is and how difficult it will be to solve.
Process
A process is a reusable series of steps and related practices to achieve a goal. Here are some examples:
The process of long division by hand let's you solve the problem of division.
Doctors follow a standard procedure for diagnosing many types of illnesses, starting with the symptoms.
A nation's constitution specifies the process of how a country manages itself, in order to optimize the common good of its people.
Robert’s Rules of Order specify the rules of parliamentary procedure and debate, to achieve the goal of high quality decision making.
All of these are a much better way of achieving a goal than no process or the wrong process.
Root cause analysis (RCA)
RCA is the systematic practice of finding, resolving, and preventing recurrence of the root causes of causal problems. A causal problem occurs when problem symptoms have causes, such as illness or a car that won’t start. Examples of non-causal problems are information search problems, math problems, scientific discovery problems, and puzzle solving. The golden rule of RCA is: All causal problems arise from their root causes.
RCA works by starting at problem symptoms and asking “WHY does this occur?” until the root causes are found. A root cause is the deepest cause of problem symptoms in a causal chain (or the most basic cause in a feedback loop structure) that can be resolved with practical solutions, without side effects that create other equal or bigger problems. Resolved means the problem will probably not recur due to that root cause.
The basic RCA process is generic and must be wrapped in a process suitable for a particular class of problems. Examples of widely used wrapper processes for high complexity problems are:
Six Sigma for process control.
Lean for manufacturing.
Fault tree analysis for system failure incidents.
MECE issue trees, the core tool used by the world’s top three business management consultancies (McKinsey, Bain, and BCG) for the world’s toughest business management problems.
Industrial RCA-based processes have proven so effective that Six Sigma is used by 100% of aerospace, motor vehicle, electronics, and pharmaceutical companies in the Fortune 500 and 82% of all companies in the Fortune 100. Lean is the global best practice for large-scale manufacturing.
RCA is civilization’s core problem solving tool for causal problems. The process is iterative and has four main steps:
Define the problem in terms of its symptoms.
Diagnose the problem by finding its root cause(s).
Develop solutions for resolving the root cause(s).
Implement the solutions.
Every time a doctor diagnoses and then treats a patient, they run through these steps. Every time you solve a causal problem, such as why won’t my car start or how can we end this recession, you are using RCA whether you use RCA terminology or not. The key is to get the root cause right because everything that follows depends on that.
No RCA-based method suitable for the democratic backsliding problem was found, so we were compelled to develop one, a common occurrence on novel problem types. The result was social force diagrams.
Scientific method
The scientific method is a rigorous, time tested process for determining the probable truth of any cause-and-effect hypothesis. The method of testing is measurement and/or experimentation. The process has these five iterative steps:
Observe a phenomenon needing a causal explanation or a better one.
Create a hypothesis (or hypothesis set) that explains the phenomenon.
Design a test(s) to test the hypothesis.
Perform the test(s).
Accept, reject, or modify the hypothesis.
The Scientific Method's great claim to fame is it is the only known method for producing reliable new cause-and-effect knowledge. It thus forms the entire foundation of science and all that depends on science, which for modern civilization is all major scientific and technological advances since the Scientific Revolution begin in 1543.
Social force diagrams
A social force diagram is a cause-and-effect template diagram that guides root cause analysis (RCA). It shows the key social forces causing a social problem from an RCA point of view.
Social Force Diagrams reduce confusing complexity to clear simplicity by organizing the key forces causing a social problem into a standard diagram format, using a standard vocabulary of terms. This standardization makes it much easier to find a difficult problem's causal structure. The standard diagram format is shown below.
Social force diagrams are organized into two main layers: (1) The superficial layer of the problem, where intermediate causes are so easy to see they are erroneously assumed to be root causes, and (2) The deeper fundamental layer, where by understanding the problem’s deeper structure its well-hidden root causes may be found. Without analysis of the fundamental layer, difficult problems tend to stay stuck in the superficial layer for a long time, as has the democratic backsliding problem.
On the diagram, “S < R” indicates how superficial solutions (force S) cannot work, because root cause forces (force R) are stronger than superficial forces. “F > R” indicates how fundamental solutions (force F) can succeed because if the solutions are properly designed (especially their impact on feedback loop structure), force F can exceed force R and initiate the mode change, leading to new R which locks the system into the desired mode. Social forces S, F, R, and new R are the conceptual paradigm of social force diagrams. A complete theory must explain all four forces.
If analysis shows no F > R exists (no resolvable root cause is found), the problem is unsolvable as defined. In this case problem definition can sometimes be relaxed to make the problem solvable, such as raising the maximum allowable global temperature rise for the climate change problem to make that problem solvable.
The two layers allow avoidance of the Superficial Solution Trap. The trap occurs when problem solvers unknowingly assume intermediate causes are root causes, and then develop solutions based on that (false) assumption. This leads to solutions directed toward intermediate rather than root causes. Superficial solutions can never resolve root causes, because root cause forces exert a greater force on intermediate causes than superficial solution ever can, no matter how well funded, managed, or promoted. All present solutions to the democratic backsliding problem have fallen into the trap. Otherwise the problem would be solved.
To illustrate how social force diagrams work, consider one of history’s most intractable problems: autocratic rule by countless warlords, dictators, and kings (upper diagram below). The chief symptom of the Autocratic Ruler Problem was low median quality of life while rulers are much better off. WHY did that occur? Because of mostly bad rulers, who concentrated income, wealth, and power over others into the ruling elite.
The historic leverage point was forced replacement of a bad ruler with a good one, using solutions like revolution, uprising, assassination, coup, etc. While these solutions offered short-term gains, they failed to result in permanent long-term change since new bad rulers appeared. This repeated solution failure indicates mostly bad rulers was an intermediate cause. If the problem is solvable, there must be a deeper cause.
After thousands of years and much painful trial and error, problem solvers intuitively found the deeper root cause. It was no easy way to replace a bad ruler with a good one. What would be the justification for an easy form of replacement? It was the concept that people have rights, and therefore must have power over their rulers. This, in the hands of the writers of the Magna Carta and much later the US and French constitutions, crystalized the solution of modern democracy, whose essence is the Voter Feedback Loop. Once the first few countries adopted the solution, the benefits were so attractive that a feedback-loop-driven systemic mode change occurred and democracy swept much of the world.
The lower diagram works in a similar manner. The fundamental solution succeeded in Western Europe, but has recently failed in Eastern Europe with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022, due to Russia not being in the EU.
Principles of Analytical Activism
There’s not many of these, but each is crucial for success.
All causal problems arise from their root causes.
This is the golden rule of root cause analysis. It follows from the definition of a root cause: A root cause is the deepest cause of problem symptoms in a causal chain (or the most basic cause in a feedback loop structure) that can be resolved with practical solutions, without side effects that create other equal or bigger problems.
The only known way to reliably and efficiently solve difficult causal problems is root cause analysis.
This is analogous to what science has concluded about the scientific method: It is the only known method for producing reliable new cause-and-effect knowledge.
Recall that a root cause is the deepest cause of problem symptoms in a causal chain (or the most basic cause in a feedback loop structure) that can be resolved with practical solutions, without side effects that create other equal or bigger problems. RCA is the systematic practice of finding, resolving, and preventing recurrence of the root causes of causal problems. Thus, by definition (and practice) RCA is the only known way to reliably and efficiently solve difficult causal problems. RCA is practiced daily by hundreds of millions of managers, employees, analysts, engineers, and scientists. None have come up with a better alternative, because RCA is generic. It applies to ALL causal problems.
The process must fit the problem.
Without a process that fits the problem, a problem solver working on a difficult problem faces near certain failure.
Presently most public interest activists follow the process of classic activism. While this works for easy problems where change resistance is low, it fails for difficult problems where change resistance is high. In that case, activists must use analytical activism.