Communism in The Hunger Games
From The Hunger Games (2012)
Categories:
Run time: 1:24
Clip Description: Panem’s districts each produce one thing and see almost none of it. The Capitol consumes what the districts make, and the arrangement is presented as natural rather than extractive.
Comparative Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This clip is useful for command economies and for the distinction between a planned economy and an extractive one – Panem is often read as communist by students, but the pattern of a core consuming what a periphery produces fits models of internal colonialism and extractive institutions better. It connects to work on why some institutions generate growth and others generate only transfer, and to the relationship between economic structure and political control.
Possible Uses in Classroom: Use this early in a political economy unit, precisely because students arrive wanting to label it communism. The productive move is to ask what would actually have to be true for that label to fit, and then to discover that the ownership structure and the direction of the transfers point somewhere else.
Discussion Questions
- Students reliably call Panem communist, and the districts’ single-crop specialisation with no local consumption is why. But a command economy plans production for the whole; Panem plans production for the Capitol. Acemoglu and Robinson’s term for that arrangement is extractive institutions. What would have to be true of Panem’s economy for “communist” to be the right word, and is any of it in evidence?
- Each district makes one thing and is forbidden to make others. That is not efficiency — a district that fed itself would be cheaper to govern and far harder to starve into compliance. So what is the Capitol buying with the inefficiency, and what does the purchase tell you about the relationship between economic structure and political control?
- Internal colonialism — Michael Hechter’s term for a core extracting from a periphery inside a single state’s borders — fits Panem better than communism does, but it was built to describe the Celtic fringe of Britain, not a fictional dictatorship. Name two features of Panem the model captures well and one it handles badly.
Assignment
Pick a real country whose exports are dominated by one or two commodities; the World Bank’s WITS database will show you the concentration in about five minutes, and the Observatory of Economic Complexity draws it as a picture. Then pull two things for that country: its economic complexity ranking from OEC, and its V-Dem electoral democracy index over the same years (V-Dem is free, and its online graphing tool will save you the download). In roughly three pages, take a position on the direction of the arrow. The resource-curse literature holds that narrow export bases make authoritarian rule easier to finance and harder to dislodge; the institutionalist reply, which is Acemoglu and Robinson’s, is that causation runs the other way — extractive politics produce narrow economies rather than the reverse. Your single case will not settle this, and you should not pretend it does. What it can show is which story better fits the sequence: did the economy narrow first, or did the politics close first? Say which, say how confident you are, and name the one piece of evidence that would most change your mind.
Clip hosted on Critical Commons.
For AP Students
AP Comparative Government and Politics
Unit 5: Political and Economic Changes and Development
Topics: 5.4 Policies and Economic Liberalization; 5.7 Impact of Industrialization and Economic Development; 5.9 Impact of Natural Resources
Skill: Data Analysis
Big idea: Legitimacy and Stability
Course countries: Nigeria, Russia, Iran
Each district produces one thing and sees almost none of it, and the arrangement is presented as the natural order rather than as extraction. That is a resource economy described from the inside, and it maps directly onto what the course teaches about single-commodity dependence and about who captures the revenue when a country has one thing to sell.
Discussion questions
- Each district makes one thing. Name two risks a country runs when its economy depends on a single commodity.
- Nigeria’s oil sits in the Niger Delta and the revenue goes to the federal government. Explain what that arrangement does to the relationship between the region and the capital.
- The Capitol presents the arrangement as natural rather than as extraction. Name one thing a government says to make an arrangement like that look legitimate, and one thing that can break the story.
Short activity
One chart, three questions (15 minutes). Give students a chart of a resource-dependent country’s export composition and government revenue across ten years. They describe what the chart shows in one sentence, identify the year in which the two lines move together most closely, and then explain in two sentences what a fall in the commodity price would do both to the government’s budget and to its ability to buy off opposition. Describing the data before explaining it is the habit the quantitative question rewards and the step students skip.