“Political Order and Political Decay” by Francis Fukuyama is a comprehensive exploration of the development and evolution of political institutions throughout human history, focusing on the factors that contribute to the rise and decline of political order. Fukuyama examines the interplay between political institutions, state capacity, and governance, drawing on a wide range of historical examples and case studies to analyze the dynamics of political development.
Fukuyama begins by examining the origins of political order, tracing the development of early state-building efforts in ancient civilizations such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and India. He explores how early states evolved to centralize power, establish bureaucratic structures, and develop legal and administrative systems to govern increasingly complex societies.
The author discusses the role of political institutions in shaping political order, highlighting the importance of institutions such as the rule of law, accountability, and checks and balances in fostering stability and promoting good governance. He examines how different forms of political institutions, from autocratic regimes to democratic systems, influence the quality of political order and the effectiveness of governance.
Fukuyama explores the concept of state capacity and its role in sustaining political order, emphasizing the importance of state institutions, infrastructure, and public administration in delivering essential services, maintaining law and order, and responding to crises. He examines how variations in state capacity contribute to differences in political development and governance outcomes across countries.
The author discusses the challenges of building and sustaining political order in the modern world, highlighting the tensions between state-building, nation-building, and democracy promotion in diverse societies. He examines the role of institutions, leadership, and political culture in shaping the stability and effectiveness of modern political systems.
Fukuyama examines the concept of political decay and its impact on political order, highlighting the factors that contribute to the decline of political institutions and the erosion of state capacity. He explores how corruption, rent-seeking, clientelism, and institutional sclerosis can undermine the effectiveness of governance and lead to political instability.
The author discusses the role of democracy in promoting political order and accountability, highlighting the importance of democratic institutions, electoral competition, and civil liberties in fostering responsive and accountable governance. He examines the challenges of democratic consolidation and the risks of democratic backsliding in countries with weak institutions and entrenched elites.
Fukuyama explores the impact of globalization and technological change on political order, highlighting the challenges posed by economic interdependence, transnational threats, and the erosion of national sovereignty. He examines how global trends such as migration, information technology, and climate change are reshaping the dynamics of political power and governance in the 21st century.
The author examines the role of leadership and decision-making in shaping political order, emphasizing the importance of effective leadership, institutional reform, and strategic vision in addressing governance challenges and promoting political development. He explores the qualities of effective leaders and the strategies they employ to navigate the complexities of political change.
In conclusion, “Political Order and Political Decay” offers a comprehensive analysis of the factors that contribute to the rise and decline of political order, highlighting the importance of institutions, state capacity, and leadership in shaping the quality of governance and the stability of political systems. Fukuyama’s insights into the dynamics of political development provide valuable perspectives on the challenges facing countries striving to build and sustain effective political institutions in the modern world.
Capacity and autonomy interact with one another. One can control the behavior of an agent through either formal rules and incentives or informal norms and habits. Of the two, the latter involves substantially lower transaction costs. Many highly skilled professionals are basically self-regulating, due to the fact that it is hard for people outside their profession to judge the quality of their work. The higher the capacity of a bureaucracy, then, the more autonomy one would want to grant it. In judging the quality of government, therefore, we want to know about both the capacity and the autonomy of the bureaucrats.
Autonomy is even higher in firms that rely on highly educated professionals. Law firms, architectural firms, research labs, software companies, universities, and similar organizations cannot possibly be organized along Taloyrite lines. In such organizations, the managers who exercise nominal authority over their highly educated “workers” actually know less about the work being done than do those at the bottom of the hierarchy. In such flat organizations, authority does not flow only from principals to agents; the agents themselves are often involved in goal setting and use their expertise to control the principals. These organizations, needless to say, require substantially higher level of trust than the old Taylorite ones.
Building technocratic capacity in government is not just a matter of sending bureaucrats to a few weekend executive training sessions. It requires huge investments in higher educational systems. The Stein-Hardenberg reforms in Prussia could not have had the positive effect they did without the simultaneous creation of new universities by reformers like Humboldt, who established the new University of Berlin, while the reforms in Britain were accompanied by Oxford and Cambridge. One of the most impressive accomplishments of the Meiji oligarchs in the late 19th century was their creation of a network of modern universities in Japan, whose graduates went on to staff the new bureaucracies in Tokyo.
While bureaucratic capacity is built on the human capital of individual bureaucrats, the performance of actual government agencies is critically dependent on the kind of organization culture, or social capital, they possess. The two organizations with identical staffing and resources will perform at vastly different levels depending on the degree of internal cohesion they enjoy. Part of the reason that the German Wehrmacht proved to be such a formidable fighting machine in WW2 was that it was able to foster enormous unit cohesion through the leadership of its noncommissioned officers. German regiments were recruited from the same region, trained, fought, and died together, and when exhausted were withdrawn in groups. This produced strong unit identification and substantially higher fighting power than the American system that continually formed and re-formed units, and replaced casualties on an individual basis.
Finally, state capacity is a function of resources. The best-trained and most enthusiastic officials will not remain committed if they are not paid adequately, or if they find themselves lacking the tools for doing their jobs. This is one of the reasons that poor countries have poorly functioning governments. While a rich country like the US spends approximately $17,000 per year per capita on government services of all sorts, the government of Afghanistan spend only $17 when foreign donor contributions are excluded. Much of the money it does collect is wasted through corruption and fraud. It is therefore not surprising that the central Afghan government is barely sovereign throughout much of its territory.
The most salient argument against interest group pluralism has to do with distorted representation. Schattschneider argued that the actual practice of democracy in America had nothing to do with its popular image as government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” He noted that political outcomes seldom correspond with popular preferences, that there is a very low level of participation and political awareness, and that real decisions are taken by much smaller groups of organized interests. Not all groups are equally capable of organizing for collective action. It is much more difficult to organize large group as opposed to small groups, since large groups that provide benefits to all their members invite free riding. In a democratic context, the whole body of citizens may share a long-term interest in, for example, a fiscally responsible budget, but any one American feels this much less powerfully than any interest group that would get its subsidy or tax break cut as the result of a budget consolidation. The interest groups that contend for the attention of Congress are therefore not collectively representative of the whole American people. They are representative of the best-organized and (what often amounts to the same thing) richly endowed parts of American society. This bias is not a random one but tends to work against the interests of the unorganized, who are often poor, poorly educated, or otherwise marginalized.
American “political class” is far more polarized than the American people themselves. He presents a wide variety of data showing that on many supposedly contentious issues, from abortion to deficits to school prayer to gay marriage, poll data show that majorities of the American public support compromise positions. Party activists are invariably more ideological and take more extreme positions than the rank-and-file party voters. But the majorities supporting middle-of-the-road positions do not feel very passionately about them, and they are largely unorganized. This means that politics is defined by well-organized activists, whether in the parties and Congress, the media, or lobbying and interest groups. The sum of these activist groups does not yield a compromise position; it leads to polarization and deadlocked politics.
Finally, liberal democracy is almost universally associated with a market economy, which tends to produce winners and losers and amplifies what James Madison termed the “different and unequal faculties of acquiring property.” This type of economic inequality is not in itself a bad thing, insofar as it stimulates innovation and growth, and when it occurs under conditions of equal access to the economic system. It becomes highly problematic politically, however, when economic winners seek to convert their wealth into unequal political influence. They can do this on a transactional basis by, for example, bribing a legislator or bureaucrat, or more damagingly by changing the institutional rules to favor themselves - by, say, closing off competition in markets they already dominate. Countries from Japan to Brazil to the US have used environmental or safety concerns to in effect protect domestic producers. The level playing field becomes progressively tilted in their direction.
The decay of American political institutions is not the same thing as the phenomenon of societal or civilization decline, which has become a highly politicized topic in the discourse about America. America’s greatest strength have never been the quality of its government; the private sector has from the start always been more innovative and vital. Even as government quality deteriorates, new opportunities open up in sectors like shale gas or biotechnology that lay the basis for future economic growth. Political decay in this instance simply means that many specific American political institutions have become dysfunctional, and that a combination of intellectual rigidity and the power of entrenched political actors, growing over time, is preventing the country from reforming them. Institutional reform is an extremely difficult thing to bring about, and there is no guarantee that it will be accomplished without a major disruption of the political order.
The future of democracy in developed countries will depend on their ability to deal with the problem of a disappearing middle class. In the wake of the financial crisis there has been a rise of new populist groups from the Tea Party in the US to various anti-EU, anti-immigrant parties in Europe. What unites all of them is the belief that elites in their countries have betrayed them. And in many ways they are correct: the elites who set the intellectual and cultural climate in the developed world have been largely buffered from the effects of middle-class decline. There has been a vacuum in new approaches to the problem, approaches that don’t involve simply returning to the welfare state solution of the past.
The proper approach to the problem of middle-class decline is not necessarily the present German system or any other specific set of measures. The only real long-term solution would be an educational system that succeeded in pushing the vast majority of citizens into higher levels of education and skills. The ability to help citizens flexibly adjust to the changing conditions of work requires state and private institutions that are similarly flexible. Yet one of the characteristics of modern developed democracies is that they have accumulated many rigidities over time that make institutional adaption increasingly difficult. In fact, all political systems - past and present - are liable to decay. The fact that a system once was a successful and stable liberal democracy does not mean that it will remain one in perpetuity.
In all developed countries, the costs of end-of-life care have accelerated faster than the overall rate of economic growth, and they are on their way to becoming the single largest component of government spending. Death and generational turnover are classic cases of outcomes that are bad for individuals but good for society as a whole. There are many reasons to think that societies will be worse off in the aggregate if life spans are extended another ten or twenty years on average, beginning with the fact that generational turnover is critical to social change and adaption, both of which will occur at a slower pace as average life expectancies increase.
There is no way of predicting the nature of future technological change - either its overall rate, its effects on middle-class employment, or its other social consequences. However, if technological change fails to produce broadly shared economic benefits, or if its overall rate slows, modern societies risked being cast back into a Malthusian world that will have big implications for the viability of democracy. In a shared-growth world, the inevitable inequalities that accompany capitalism are politically tolerable because everyone is ultimately benefiting. In a Malthusian world, individuals are in a zero-sum relationship - one person’s gain inevitably means another person’s loss. Under these circumstances, predation becomes as viable a strategy for self-enrichment as investment in productive economic activities - the situation that human societies were in for most of their history prior to the Industrial Revolution.
The Thai and Chinese cases, as well as the 19th-century European ones, suggest that the size of the middle class relative to the rest of the society is one important variable in determining how it will behave politically. When the middle class constitutes only 20-30 percent of the population, it may side with antidemocratic forces because it fears the intentions of the large mass of poor people below it and the populist policies they may pursue. But when the middle class becomes the largest group in the society, the danger is reduced. Indeed, the middle class may at that point be able to vote itself various welfare-state benefits and profit from democracy. This may help to explain why democracy become more stable at higher levels of per capita income, since the size of the middle class relative to the poor usually increases with greater wealth. Middle-class societies, as opposed to societies with a middle class, are the bedrock of democracy.
Whether political Islam will remain a permanent obstacle preventing the emergence of liberal democracy in Muslim majority countries is not so obvious, any more than an assertion that nationalism makes democracy impossible in Europe. Political Islam has waxed and waned over the decades, and in the 20th century it often took a backseat to other movements based on secular nationalism or liberal authoritarianism. All large, complex cultural systems can be and have been interpreted in a variety of ways over time. Although there is an egalitarian doctrine at the heart of Christianity (and there is in Islam), Christian churches aligned themselves with authoritarian rulers and justified illiberal orders over the centuries. Part of the story of the Third Wave of democratizations in Europe and Latin America has to do with the reinterpretation of Catholic doctrine after Vatican II in the 1960s to make it compatible with modern democracy.
So too with radical Islam. It seems likely that its current expansion is due more to the social conditions on contemporary Middle Eastern societies than to the intrinsic nature of the religion. Indeed, the spread of political Islam can be seen as a form of identity politics very comparable to its nationalist variant in Europe.
The Third Wave transitions in Eastern Europe and Latin America are thus misleading precedents for the Arab Spring. It is really Europe’s long and tortured journey from autocracy through nationalism to democracy that provides the better model. This line of analysis does not offer comfort to those hoping for the emergence of liberal democracy anytime soon in the Arab world. We can only hope that such a transition, if it eventually occurs, will not take anywhere as long as it did in Europe. Europe in the 19th century had no prior experience of democracy and therefore no clear institutional models to follow. The same is not the case in the contemporary Middle East. Regimes that balance strong states with legal and democratic constraints on power have become a normative standard around the world. Getting there, however, depends on the creation of a complex set of interlocking institutions, which in turn are facilitated by changes in the nature of underlying economic and social conditions. The social basis for stable democracy did not exist in the Europe of 1848, and it may not yet exist in many parts of the Middle East today.
Both classical Marxists and contemporary economists have reduced the struggle for democracy to a fight between the rich and the poor, in which the poor organize and threaten the rich with the objective of redistributing wealth and income to themselves. Democracy emerged when the threat is severe enough that the rich make concessions with regard to political rights and outright redistribution. The middle class can make alliances in either direction, but more often than not they are bought off by the rich to support at most very limited democracy. Any arguments regarding justice or legitimacy are merely “superstructure” masking hard economic self-interests. In the Marxist version of this story, the rich never concede enough to bring about true democracy; this happens only after a violent seizure of power by the poor. A statistical study by Adam Przeworski shows that most franchise extensions were in fact undertaken in response to popular mobilizations, and that democracy was therefore conquered rather than granted.
Very few contemporary politicians would dare to make overt arguments in favors of franchise restrictions, or for qualifying voters on the basis of education or income. This is particularly true in a country like the US where franchise restrictions have corresponded to racial hierarchy.
But echoes of virtually all of these 19th-century conservative arguments remain in contemporary political discourse. It is common, for example, for elites to complain about democratic voters choosing “populist” policies. From their perspective, democratic electorates do not always choose well: they may choose short-term demands over long-term sustainability; they often vote on the basis of personality rather than policies; they sometimes vote for clientelistic reasons; they may want to redistribute income in ways that will kill incentives and growth. In the end, these fears do not amount to a convincing argument fo systematic franchise restriction. As in the 19th century, elites are often good at dressing up their own narrow self-interest as universal truths.
But voters in democracies don’t get thing right all the time either, especially in the short term. Moreover, it is not clear that the solution to contemporary governance problems lies in ever-higher levels of popular participation. As political scientist Bruce Cain argues, most voters simply do not have the time, energy, or expertise to devote to the careful study of complex public policy issues. When higher levels of democratic participation are encouraged by putting more issues before voters through mechanisms like public referenda, the result is often not the accurate representation of popular will but the domination of the public space by the best-organized and most richly resourced interest group. The creation of merit-based bureaucracies, ultimately accountable to the public but protected in many ways from the vagaries of democratic politics, is one expression of the concerns raised in these now-forgotten arguments against the spread of democracy.
A different sort of argument was made against democracy by a series of conservative Italian thinkers, who asserted that it was pointless to open up the franchise since true democracy was impossible to achieve. This view was first articulated by Gaetano Mosca, who stated that the different regime types - monarchy, aristocracy, democracy - made little difference to actual life because all were in the end controlled by elites. The “political class” maintains itself in power under a wide variety of institutions and will simply use democratic ones to do the same. Even “Communist and collectivist societies would beyond any doubt be managed by officials.” The economist Vilfredo Pareto made a similar case for continuing elite domination regardless of the type of regime. Based on his statistical studies of income distribution, he formulated a “Pareto’s law,” which argued that 80 percent of wealth was held by 20 percent of the population across time and space. Since this was akin to a natural law, efforts to remedy it through political measures like expansion of the franchise or income redistribution were pointless.
These conservative Italian thinkers were making a variant of the argument put forward by Marx himself, namely, that the advent of formal democracy and an expanded franchise would not improve the lives of the mass of the population but would simply preserve elite dominance in a different form. Mosca and Pareto believed that different institutions would not change this situation, and therefore they argued in favor of a continuation of the status quo. Marx believed, of course, that a solution existed in the form of a proletarian revolution. His followers would go on to try to engineer a truly egalitarian society following the Bolshevik and other Communist Revolutions of the 20th century. In one sense. the Italians were proved right: communism did not eliminate the distinction between rulers and ruled, or end oppression by elites; it merely changed the identity of those in charge.
Mill made several arguments against a universal and equal franchise. He began with the classic Whig argument that “the assembly which votes the taxes, either general or local, should be elected exclusively by those who pay something towards the taxes imposed.” The idea that only taxpayers should vote was the flip side of the principle “no taxation without representation” that was the motto of both the English and American Revolutions. Mill therefore believed it was better to impose direct rather than indirect taxes, since that would remind citizens of their obligations to be vigilant about how the government spent their money. This implied further that the “receipt of parish relief should be a peremptory disqualification for the franchise.” In other words, people on welfare should not have the right to vote, since they were essentially freeloading off of taxpayers.
Mill’s second argument against an equal franchise had to do with the qualifications and sense of responsibility of voters. He did not contest the principle of universal franchise, since “the possession and the exercise of political, and among others of electoral, rights, is one of the chief instruments both of moral and of intellectual training for the popular mind.” He did, however, contest one man, one vote. In an argument that sounds particularly foreign to contemporary ears, he noted that “If it is asserted that all persons ought to be equal in every description of right recognised by society, I answer, not until all are equal in worth as human beings.” This led to a conclusion that different classes of people should have different numbers of votes based on their level of education: an unskilled laborer, one vote; a foreman, three; and a lawyer, physician, or clergyman, five or six. He noted that Louis Napoleon had just been elected president of France by millions of “peasants who could neither read nor write, and whose knowledge of public men, even by name, was limited to oral tradition.”
Useful as it is, one of the weaknesses of Marx’s analytical framework is his use of “class” as a key determining variable. Marx sometimes talks as if social classes - the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, feudalists - were clearly defined political actors capable of purposive rational decision making. In reality, social classes are intellectual abstractions, useful analytically but incapable of producing political action unless they are embodied in specific organizations. Newly mobilized social groups can participate politically in a wide variety of ways: through strikes and demonstrations, by use of the media, or today, through channels like Facebook and Twitter. Citizens can organize civil society groups to press for particular causes, or for mutual support. But if participation is to be enduring, it needs to be institutionalized, which for the past two centuries has meant the formation of political parties.
A central problem with any simple class-based analysis of democratization is that there were a number of cross-cutting issues that united people across class lines and blurred the class profiles of political parties. Among the most important were ethnicity, religion, and foreign policy. Thus the Germain Reichstag in the late 19th century contained parties representing the Polish minorities, as well as the Centre Party, which stood for Catholic interests and was itself divided into left and right wings. Issues like imperial policy and the building of a navy were conservative causes that drew working-class support. In Britain, there were sharp divisions over Irish Home Rule and empire that were often as important as class considerations in determining election outcomes. In the contemporary Middle East, Islamic parties tend to have a social base in the lower classes and in rural areas, but their overt message is based on religion rather than class.
Thus, while political parties may try to represent the interests of particular social classes, they are very often also autonomous political actors that can get power by mobilizing voters from different classes by shifting their agendas from economic ones to identify politics, religion, or foreign policy. They do not actually have to represent the true interests of the social classes that support them. At one extreme, the Communist Parties in Russia and China ended up being among the greatest oppressors of workers and peasants in human history. In the US, the Republican Party, traditionally the bastion of business interests, gets substantial support form working-class voters who support it on cultural rather than economic grounds.
The key insight is that democracy is desired most strongly by one specific social group in society: the middle class. If we are to understand the likelihood of democracy emerging, we need to evaluate the strength of the middle class relative to other social groups that prefer other forms of government, such as the old landed oligarchy who are inclined to support authoritarian systems, or radicalized groups of peasants or urban poor who are focused on economic redistribution. Modern democracy has a social basis, and if we don’t pay attention to it, we will not be able to properly evaluate the prospects of democratic transitions.
Marx’s framework can be summarized as follows. Out of the old feudal order, the first new social class to be mobilized is the bourgeoise, townsmen who were regarded contemptuously by the old landowners but who accumulated capital and used new technologies to bring about the Industrial Revolution. This revolution in turn mobilized a second new class, the proletariat, whose surplus labor the bourgeoisie unjustly appropriated. Each of these three classes wanted a different political outcome: the traditional landowning class wanted to preserve the old authoritarian order; the bourgeoisie wanted a liberal (i.e., rule of law) regime protecting their property rights that might or might not include formal electoral democracy (they were always more interested in the rule of law than in democracy); and the proletariat, once it achieved consciousness of itself as a class, wanted a dictatorship of the proletariat, which would in turn socialize the means of production, abolishing private property, and redistribute wealth. The working class might support electoral democracy in the form of universal suffrage, but this was a means to the end of control over the means of production, not an end in itself.
An authoritarian system can move much more quickly and decisively than a democratic one, but its success is ultimately dependent on having a continuing supply of good leaders - good not just in a technocratic sense but in their commitment to shared public goals rather than self-enrichment or personal power. Dynastic China addressed this problem through a sophisticated bureaucratic structure that limited the actual powers of the sovereign, as well as an elaborate system for educating rulers that encased them in oppressive ritual. Even so, this system was not sufficient to prevent the emergence of periodic bad emperors who were alternatively despotic, lazy, incompetent, or corrupt.
One of the fundamental tenets of Western public administration is that public-sector agencies are not allowed to retain earnings and thus have no incentive to control costs or perform efficiently. This explains why there is a big effort to push money out the door whenever an agency ends the fiscal year with a surplus.
The Chinese party-state upended this verity by in effect permitting local government to keep surplus revenues and use them for their own purposes. Localities were put under a hard budget constraint, given the authority to extract certain types of taxes, and allowed to start profit-making business to supplement their tax revenues.
One of the first problems that any centralized bureaucracy faces is that of delegation. Dynastic China was nominally ruled by a bureaucracy in the capital, but the difficulties in managing so large and populous a country in an age of poor communications technology meant that authority had to be delegated to subordinate units at a province or county level. Oftentimes the central government in Chang’an, Luoyang, Kaifeng, or Beijing had no idea what was going on in other parts of the country and would issue orders only to find months or years later that they had not been implemented. The post-Mao leadership early on recognized the importance of delegation. While China remains a unitary rather than federal state, provinces and cities have been delegated substantial powers to implement directives from the center in ways that they see fit. Thus there is considerable variation in policies across China’s different regions. Southern provinces like Guangdong and cities like Shenzhen are far more market-friendly than is, say, Beijing. Shenzhen has, for example, privatized much of its municipal water supply to some 26 companies, while municipal water in Beijing is still controlled by a single state-owned company.
The CCP has seen fit to protect most property rights because it recognizes that it has a self-interest in doing so. But the party faces no legal constraints other than its own internal political controls if it decides to violate property rights. Many peasants find their land coveted by municipal authorities and developers who want to turn it into commercial real estate, high-density housing, shopping centers, and the like, or else into public infrastructure like roads, dams, or government offices. There are large incentives for developers to work together with corrupt local officials to illegally take land away from peasants or urban homeowners, and such takings have been perhaps the largest single source of social discontent in contemporary China.
Apart from property rights and contracts, a critical area in which rules have spread concerns term limits, retirement, and procedures for leadership recruitment and promotion. One of the biggest liabilities of authoritarian governments in other parts of the world is the unwillingness of leaders to step down after a decent interval, and the lack of an institutionalized system for deciding on succession.
One of the factors contributing to the stability and legitimacy of authoritarian rule in China is the fact that the CCP has put such rules in place. The Chinese constitution specifies that senior leaders will serve maximum terms of ten years. There are other less formal rules as well, such as one specifying that no one can be a candidate for the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party past the age of 67. Mandatory retirement rules have also been set more broadly for lower levels of the party. While the actual politics of leadership succession at the highest levels remain completely obscure, there is at least an institutionalized process for leadership turnover.
These rules are the direct result of the experience of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. As in the Soviet Union under Stalin, it was the senior ranks of the party itself that suffered directly from the unchecked personal dictatorship of a charismatic leader. Many of the rules they subsequently put in place were therefore designed to prevent another such leader from emerging. One of the speculations concerning the sacking of Chongqing party leader Bo Xilai in 2012 was that he was building precisely such a charismatic political base, making use of both populist appeals and Maoist-era nostalgia in a bid to become a member of the Politburo’s Standing Committee.
Among the things inherited from the continental civil law tradition by the Chinese is the right of private citizens to sue the government in administrative courts for illegal behavior. The party saw this as a useful way of disciplining lower levels of the government, and the number of such suits has risen steadily in the decades since the adaption of the GPCL. There are, however, strict limits to the usefulness of such litigation. One study from the 1990s showed that the likelihood of a plaintiff winning an judgment against the government is only about 16 percent in the most progressive provinces. Moreover, it is only the government and not the party that can be sued in this fashion.
The GPCL in effect abolished natural personhood by replacing it with the concept of citizenship. This seemingly minor point is in fact important in distinguishing Chinese and Western legal concepts: the latter see natural persons as bearers of rights and duties independent of any action of the state, whereas in China citizenship is something conferred on individuals by the state. Contemporary Chinese law thus continues the traditional Qing practice of not recognizing a separate sphere of individual right bearers, and of seeing property rights as something benevolently granted to individuals by the state. In practice, the state could at any moment legally take that property for its own purposes.
Nearly after 40 years after Mao’s death, China has become a far more law-governed and traditionally bureaucratic society. It has not, however, become a society governed by the rule of law. Even though the leaders at the top levels of the CCP have agreed on rules to manage their relationships with one another, they have nonetheless never acknowledged the supremacy of law itself over the party.
Virtually all Communist countries followed the lead of the former Soviet Union in adopting formal constitutions that were essentially worthless pieces of paper in terms of any real constraints on political power.
These constitutional provisions, however, were more declarations of new policy initiatives decided on by the party than serious legal instruments that would govern the party’s own behavior. The contemporary Chinese constitution is built around two potentially contradictory principles.
One the one hand, Deng Xiaoping asserted in 1978 that “democracy has to be institutionalized and written into law, so as to make sure that institutions and laws do not change whenever the leadership changes, or whenever the leaders change their views.” The Chinese constitution provides for an elected National People’s Congress (NPC), which is held to be the “supreme organ of state power,” along with the people’s congresses at lower levels of government. The constitution further states that the CCP must operate under its provisions and the law.
On the other hand, the Four Fundamental Principles with which the constitution begins enshrine the domination of the political system by the Communist Party, which in practice exercises strict control over the government and legislature. No one has authority to modify the constitution other than the party, and all existing constitutional documents were rubber-stamped by NPCs with little discussion. The party clearly operates above and not under the law. As in dynastic China, law remains an instrument of rule, and not an intrinsic source of legitimacy.
In China, by contrast, there was never a transcendental religion, and there was never a pretense that law had a divine origin. Law was seen as a rational human instrument by which the state exercised its authority and maintained public order. This meant that, as in Japan, China had rule by law rather than rule of law. The law did not limit or bind the sovereign himself, who was the ultimate source of law. While the law could be administered impartially, this was not due to any inherent rights possessed by citizens. Rights were rather the gift of a benevolent ruler. Impartiality was simply a condition for good public order. It was for this reason that property rights and private law - contracts, torts, and other issues arising between individuals and not involving the state - were given very little emphasis. This stood in sharp contrast to both the Common Law and the Roman Civil Law traditions in the West.
There was in fact an active hostility to the very idea of law embedded in traditional Chinese culture. The Confucians believed that human life should be regulated not by formal, written laws, but by morality. This revolved around the cultivation of li, or correct moral conduct, through education and correct upbringing. The Confucians argued that reliance on written law, of fa, was detrimental because formal rules were too broad and general to produce good outcomes in specific cases. Confucian ethics is highly situational or context dependent: the right outcome depends heavily on the relationship and status of the parties involved, the specific facts of the case, and conditions that cannot be known or specified in advance. Good outcomes are produced not by the impersonal application of rules but by a sage or superior man who can weigh local context. Having a good emperor at the top of the system is a condition for its proper functioning.
The Meiji leaders believed first of all in a benevolent elitism which stemmed from the acceptance of a natural hierarchy based on ability … Like good Confucians, the Meiji leaders were fully aware that only a thin line divided enlightened from despotic elites … If the sovereign and the governed were expected to exert efforts for the common goods, the implication is that the masses could be educated and trained to rise up to the point where they could meaningfully participate in the government.
The Meiji oligarchs were arrogant, disdained the rights of ordinary citizens, and hungered for power. But compared to authoritarian leaders in other parts of the world, they had a keen sense of themselves as servants of a higher public interest. The Meiji oligarchs were so self-effacing that hardly anyone today who is not a careful student of Japanese history even knows their name. They were also extremely competent in building on tradition while simultaneously moving the country forward toward development goals for which there was no historical precedent.
CDD projects run into two distinct problems, however. The first is knowing what the real views of the community are. Like communities everywhere, villages are dominated by local elites, often older men who claimed to speak on behalf of the group as a whole. It is very hard to now whether a particular community spokesperson is really reflecting general interests or is a locally powerful person who simply wants the latrine built near his house. In order to get problems like this, the outside donors force the community to include women, minorities, or other marginalized people, in accord not with local but with Western standards of fairness. This leads to a situation where the outsider either is forced to leave things up to local elites, or else tries to engage in a very intrusive form of social engineering. Few donors have enough local knowledge to understand what they are actually accomplishing. This dilemma would have been familiar to district officers in colonial times trying to implement indirect rule, with the difference that most of them had much longer tenures and thus better local knowledge than the aid officials administering CDD programs today. Although such projects have proliferated around the world, their total impact on development is at this point quite uncertain.
We should be wary of foreigner bearing gifts of institutions. Foreigners seldom have enough local knowledge to understand how to construct durable states. When their efforts at institution building are halfhearted and underresourced, they often do more damage than good. This is not to say that Western models of development don’t work, or don’t have some degree of universal validity. But each society must adapt them to its own conditions and build on indigenous traditions.
Institutions are best created by indigenous social actors who can borrow from foreign practices but also are aware of the constraints and opportunities presented by their own history and traditions.
To succeed, institutions need to accord with local customs and traditions: for example, law codes imported from abroad wholesale often don’t win acceptance because they don’t reflect local values. Institutions are often complementary: you can’t build a steel plant in a country in which there is no market for steel, no supply of competent managers or workers, no infrastructure to move product to market, and no legal system to protect the rights of the plant’s investors. Strategies seeking to prioritize some goals over others require intimate understanding of the nature of local institutions. Moreover, institutions evolve based on the interests and ideas of local elites and power holders. Outsiders often don’t understand who these elites are, how they interpret their interests, and therefore what resistance they will pose to well-meaning plans for reform or change.
Custom belongs to the community itself, but to remove from the community the right of interpretation and of transformation is an act of violence more serious, though less visible, than the confiscation of arable land or of forest.
It might seem contradictory to say that a state can be brutal and weak at the same time. Don’t strong states kill, jail, and torture their opponents? But the two in fact go together. All states concentrate and use power - that is, the ability to violently coerce people - but successful states rely more heavily on authority, that is, voluntary compliance with the state’s wishes based on a broad beliefs in the government’s legitimacy. In peaceful liberal democracies, the fist is usually hidden behind layered gloves of law, custom, and norms. States that make heavy use of overt coercion and brutality often do so because they cannot exercise proper authority. They have what Michael Mann labels “despotic power” but not “infrastructural power” to penetrate and shape society. This was true of both the colonial African state and the independent countries that emerged after the end of colonial rule.
The surest test for the soundness of measures for the improvement of an uncivilized people is that they should be self-sufficient.
If Latin America’s problem was that early Spanish and Portuguese institutions left a legacy of authoritarian government, inequality, and class polarization, African’s problem was that the colonial authorities wanted to exercise dominion on the cheap and failed to leave behind much of an institutional legacy at all. If states in Latin America were weak and failed to evolve into modern Weberian bureaucracies, in sub-Saharan Africa states were often missing altogether.
Argentina and Brazil fought a series of conflicts over control of the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, which eventually led to the creation of the independent buffer state of Uruguay in 1828. The two countries continued to contest for influence over Uruguay; this eventually triggered intervention by Britain and France, which sought to protect their commercial interests in the region. Brazil and Argentina were also involved in the War of the Triple Alliance, a bizarre conflict that pitted these two large countries against impoverished Paraguay. This was an utter disaster for Paraguay, which was thereafter “removed … from the geopolitical map.”
The failure to create modern states was marked first and foremost by the inability of Latin American states to extract significant levels of taxation from their own populations. As a result, governments met fiscal deficits as old regime Spain did, by inflating the money supply. Inflation is a backdoor form of taxation that has many distorting and unfair consequences for the populations that have to endure it. More than any other region, inflation became the hallmark of 19th- and 20th-century Latin America.
Put a man into a close, warm place, and … he will feel a great faintness. If under this circumstance you propose a bold enterprise to him, I believe you will find him very little disposed towards it; his present weakness will throw him into despondency; he will be afraid of everything, being in a state of total incapacity. The inhabitants of warm countries are, like old men, timorous … the people in cold countries are, like young men, brave.
In cold countries they have very little sensibility for pleasure; in temperate countries, they have more; in warm countries, their sensibility is exquisite.
I defined clientelism as the trading of votes and political support for individual benefits rather than programmatic policies, and distinguished it from elite patronage systems in which the scope of clientelist recruitment is far more limited and less well organized. Clientelism appears when democracy arrives before a modern state has had time to consolidate into an autonomous institution with its own supporting political coalition. Clientelism is an efficient form of political mobilization in societies with low level of income and education, and is therefore best understood as an early form of democracy. In the US, Greece, and Italy, the franchise was expanded prior to the creation of a modern state. Political parties in all three countries used their public bureaucracies as sources of benefits to political clients, with predictably disastrous consequences for states capacity. The principle of effective government is meritocracy; the principle of democracy is popular participation. These two principles can be made to work together, but there is always an underlying tension between them.
Renan speaks of a historical amnesia that accompanied the process of nation building. According to him, “Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is essential to the creation of a nation, which is why the advance of historical study often poses a threat to nationality. Historical inquiry, in effect, brings to light the violent events that are at the source of all political formations, even those whose consequences have been beneficial.”
All just enterprises originate in a crime.
Nationalism is one specific form of identity politics that found its first major expression in the French Revolution. It is based on the view that the political boundaries of the state ought to correspond to a cultural boundary, one defined primarily by shared language and culture.
Key to the idea of identity is the notion that there can be a disjunction between one’s inner, authentic self and the social norms or practices that are sanctioned by the surrounding society. That inner self can be based on nation, ethnicity, race, culture, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or any characteristic that binds human communities together. Struggles over identity are inherently political because they involve demands for recognition. Human beings are not satisfied, pace the economists, by material resources alone. They demand as well that their authentic selves be publicly recognized - granted dignity and equal status - by other people. This is why for nationalists the symbols of recognition - a flag, a seat in the UN, or legal status as a member of the community of nations - are of critical importance. Social mobilization, one of the six dimensions of development, is a by-product of the emergence of new identities as people become aware of shared experiences and values.
Two major theorists of nationalism link the emergence of nationalism to modernization, though their emphasis differs in certain key respects. Identity does not really exist as a problem in premodern societies. In either a hunter-gatherer or an agrarian economy, there is a differentiation of social identities - between hunters than gatherers, men an women, peasants, priests, warriors, and bureaucrats - but there is so little social mobility and such a restricted division of labor that one does not face much choice in one’s associations. Individuals consequently did not spend a lot of time sitting around asking themselves, “Who am I, really?”
Critical to the success of state building is a parallel process of nation building, an often violent and coercive process that took place in all the countries under discussion under Part 1.
State building refers to the creation of tangible institutions - armies, police, bureaucracies, ministries, and the likes. It is accomplished by hiring staff, training officials, giving them offices, providing them with budgets, and passing laws and directives. Nation building, by contrast, is the creation of a sense of national identity to which individuals will be loyal, an identity that will supersede their loyalty to tribes, villages, regions, or ethnic groups. Nation building in contrast to state building requires the creation of intangible things like national traditions, symbols, shared historical memories, and common cultural points of reference. National identities can be created by states through their policies on language, religion, and education. But they are just as often established from the bottom up by poets, philosophers, religious leaders, novelists, musicians, and other individuals with no direct access to political power.
Nation building is critical to the success of state building. This reaches to the core meaning of the state: as the organizer of legitimate violence, the state periodically calls upon its citizens to risk their lives on its behalf. They will never be willing to do so if they feel that the state as such is unworthy of ultimate sacrifice. But the impact of national identity on state strength is not limited to its coercive power. Much of what passes for corruption is not simply a matter of greed but rather the by-product of legislators or public officials who feel more obligated to family, tribe, region, or ethnic group than to the national community and therefore divert money in that direction. They are not necessarily immoral people, but their circle of moral obligation is smaller than that of the polity for which they work. Citizens, for their part, may rationally calculate how loyal to be based on whether the state has upheld its end of the social contract. Political stability is bolstered enormously, however, if they feel that the state is legitimate and experience the emotions associated with patriotism. The contemporary Chinese Communist Party earns legitimacy today due to its economic performance. But it also has an important extra margin of support as an embodiment of Chinese nationalism.
If a strong sense of national identity is a necessary component of state building, it is also for that reason dangerous. National identity is often built around principles of ethnicity, race, religion, or language, principles that necessarily include certain people and exclude others. National identity is frequently formed in deliberate opposition to other groups and therefore serves to perpetuate conflict even as it strengthens internal social cohesion. National cohesion may express itself as external aggression. Human beings cooperate in order to compete, and compete to cooperate.
State power over the economy is potentially dangerous because it risks being captured by one interest group or another at the expense of the general public. Moreover, all bureaucracies tend to become increasingly rule bound over time, particularly when they are driven by the political demands of legislators. It is very difficult to create a government agency subservient to democratic will but at the same time sufficiently autonomous and free from capture by powerful interest groups.
The American experience contains some important lessons for contemporary developing countries that want to reform clientelistic political systems and create modern, merit-based, technically competent government. The first is that reform is a profoundly political process, not a technical one. There are of course technical characteristics of a modern bureaucratic system such as job classifications, examination requirements, promotion ladders, and the like. But clientelistic systems do not exist because the officials staffing them, or the politicians who stand behind them, somehow don’t understand how to organize an efficient agency. Clientelism exists because incumbents benefit from the system, either as political bosses who get access to power and resources, or as their clients who get jobs and perks. Dislodging them requires more than the formal reorganization of the government. The experience of public-sector reform mandated by international aid agencies for developing countries at the turn of the 21st century demonstrates the futility of a purely technical approach.
As in ancient China and early modern Europe, war proved to be a spur for American state building. During the Civil War, the size of the Union Army went from fifteen thousand to well over a million and involved the creation of a gigantic bureaucratic system to supply and move such large numbers of men. The US Capital building was renovated and its huge dome completed in this period. The Civil War also precipitated a shift in they way Americans thought of themselves: before the war, they would say, “The US are,” reflecting the country’s federal origins, while after it, it became more common to say, “The US is,” signifying the union that Lincoln had gone to war to save.
While the Founding Fathers were remarkably prescient in their design of institutions needed to govern the new democracy, they failed to see the need for a mechanism to mobilize voters and manage mass political participation. Political parties perform a number of critical functions and are now recognized as indispensable to well-functioning democracies; they provide for collective action on the part of like-minded people, they aggregate disparate social interests around a common platform, they provide valuable information to voters by articulating positions and policies of common concern, and they create a stability of expectations in a way that contest between individual politicians cannot. Most important is the fact that they are the primary mechanism by which ordinary citizen are mobilized to participate in competitive democratic politics. Political parties thus emerged, unplanned, as a response to the requirements of a democratic political system with a rapidly expanding franchise.
One might also label it government by the friends of George Washington, since the republic’s first president chose men like himself who he felt had good qualifications and a dedication to public service. Under John Adams, 70 percent, and under Jefferson, 60 percent of high-ranking officials had fathers who came from the landed gentry, merchant, or professional classes. Many people today marvel at the quality of political leadership at the time of America’s founding, the sophistication of the discourse revealed in the Federalist Papers, and the ability to think about institutions in a long-term perspective. At least part of the reason for this strong leadership was that America at the time was not a full democracy but rather a highly elitist society, many of whose leaders were graduates of Harvard and Yale. Like the British elite, many of them knew each other personally from school and from their common participation in the revolution and drafting the Constitution.
England’s position as an island gave it considerable protection, and it never faced the existential threats that landlocked Prussia did. Thus while its Admiralty gained substantially in professionalism during the numerous wars it fought during the 18th and early 19th centuries, the rest of the civl service remained heavily patronage based. While the establishment of parliamentary accountability created pressures to rein in some of the worst abuses of public office, the elites were quite happy to use government services as a means of advancing their own interests and the interests of their relatives and supporters.
Living in a high-trust society has many advantages. Cooperation is possible in low-trust societies, but only through formal mechanisms. Business transactions require thick contracts, litigation, police, and legal enforcement because not all people can be relied upon to meet their commitment. If I live in a neighborhood with high rates of crime, I may have to walk around armed, or not go out at night, or put expensive locks and alarms on my door to supplement the private security guards I have to hire. In many poor countries, families have to leave a member at home all day to prevent the neighbors from stealing from their garden or dispossessing them of their house altogether. All of these constitute what economists call transaction costs, which can be saved if one lives in a high-trust society. Moreover, many low-trust societies never realize the benefit of cooperation at all: business don’t form, neighbors don’t help one another, and the like.
The same thing applies in citizen’s relationship to their government. People are much more likely to comply with a law if they see that other people around them are doing so as well. The vast majority of law-abiding behavior is based rather on the fact that people see other around them obeying the law and act in conformity to the perceived norm.
The quality of government thus depends critically on trust or social capital. If the government fails to perform certain critical functions - if it cannot, for example, be trusted to protect my property rights, of if it fails to defend my person against criminals or public hazards like toxic wastes - then I will take it into my own hands to secure my own interests. As we saw in the case of Sicily, the Mafia had its origins in the failure of the Bourbon and later the Italian state to do precisely this, which is why individuals began hiring “men of honor” to provide them with private protection. But since the mafiosi were not themselves trustworthy individuals, distrust of government metastasized into distrust of everyone.
Banfield posits the concept of “amoral familism,” whose code he describes as “Maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise.” Cooperation within the immediate family came at the expense of a broader capacity to trust strangers: “any advantage that may be given to another is necessarily at the expense of one’s own family. Therefore, one cannot afford the luxury of charity, which is giving others more than their due, or even of justice, which is giving them their due … Toward those who are not of the family the reasonable attitude is suspicion.”
The patronage-dispensing Big Man and his followers has never been fully displaced as a form of political organization up through the present. This is not just because it comes naturally to people, but also because it is often the most efficient route to political power. Today, authority is mostly exercised through control of formal organizations such as states, corporations, and non-governmental organizations. In their modern forms, they are structured to operate by impersonal and transparent rules. But these organizations are often rigid and hard to direct; leaders typically rely on smaller networks of supporters they have cultivated on their rise to the top. Joseph Stalin and Saddam Hussein based their power not just on their control of a state apparatus of army and police. They also commanded the loyalty of a much smaller group of followers. These patronage networks were in turn used to control the state itself.
Clientelism is a form of reciprocal altruism that is typically found in democratic political systems where leaders must contest elections to come to power. Compared to an elite patronage network, clientelistic networks need to be much larger because they are frequently used to get hundreds of thousands of voters to the polls. As a result, these networks dispense favors not based on a direct face-to-face relationship between the patron and his or her clients but rather through a series of intermediaries who are enlisted to recruit followers. It is these campaign workers - the ward heelers and precinct captains in traditional American municipal politics - who develop personal relationships with individual clients on behalf of the political boss.
In the end, there has to be a public sector, because there are certain services and functions - what economic label public goods - that only governments can provide. A public good is, technically, one where my enjoyment of it does not prevent you from enjoying it as well, and which cannot be privately appropriated and thereby depleted. Classic examples are clean air and national defense. They fit these categories because neither can be denied to specific individuals within a society, nor does their use by some diminish the total stock available to others. No private actors have an incentive to produce public goods because they cannot prevent everyone from using and benefiting from them, and therefore cannot appropriate any income arising from them. Hence even the most committed free-market economist would readily admit that governments have a role in providing pure public goods. Besides clean air and defense, public goods include public safety, a legal system, and the protection of public health.
In addition to pure public goods, many goods are produced for private consumption that entail what economists call externalities. An externality is a benefit or harm imposed on third parties, such as the benefit an employer get when I have paid for my own education, or the pollution that fouls the drinking water of a community downstream from a factory. In other cases, economic transactions may involve information asymmetries; for example, a drug maker may be aware of clinical studies that show its products are ineffective or even harmful, which are unavailable to potential patients. Governments have classically played a role in regulating externalities and information asymmetries. In the case of education and basic infrastructure such as roads, ports, and water, the positive externality associated with it is great enough that governments traditionally provide a basic level for citizens for free or else at highly subsidized prices. In such cases, however, the extent of necessary government subsidy or regulation is often debatable, since excessive state intervention can distort market signals or choke off private activity altogether.
In addition to providing public goods and regulating externalities, governments engage in greater or lesser degrees of social regulation. There are many forms that this can take. Governments want their citizens to be upstanding, law-abiding, educated, and patriotic. They may want to encourage home ownership, small businesses, gender equality, physical exercise, or discourage cigarette smoking, drug use, gangs, or abortion. Most governments, even ones committed ideologically to free markets, end up doing things they believe will encourage investment and economic growth beyond the bare provision of necessary public goods.
Finally, governments have a role to play in controlling the elites and engaging in a certain amount of redistribution. Redistribution is a basic function of all social orders: most premodern social systems revolved around the ability of the leader or Big Man in a group to redistribute goods to his followers, a practice that was much more common historically than market exchange. Many early governments, from the post-Norman Conquest kings of England to the Ottomans to any number of Chinese emperors, saw their function as the protection of ordinary citizens against the rapacity of oligarchic elites. They did this not, in all likelihood, out of a sense of fairness, and certainly not because they believed in democracy, but rather out of self-interest. If the state did not control the richest and most powerful elites in society, the latter would appropriate and misuse the political system at everyone else’s expense.
The most basic form of redistribution that a state engages in is equal application of the law. The rich and powerful always have ways of looking after themselves, and if left to their own devices will always get their way over nonelites. It is only the state, with its judicial and enforcement power, that can make elites conform to the same rules that everyone else is required to follow. In this respect, the state and the rule of law work together to produce something like the equality of justice, whether in the form of an English king’s court finding in favor of a vassal against his lord in a tenancy dispute, or the federal government intervening to protect black schoolchildren against a local mob, or the police protecting a community against a drug gang.
There are other more overtly economic forms of redistribution that modern governments practice, however. One of the most common is mandatory insurance pools, in which the government forces the community to contribute to insurance plans which, in the case of social security, redistribute income from young to old, and in the case of medical insurance, from the healthy to the sick.
India’s problem is not an absence of rule of law - indeed, many Indians would argue that the country has too much law. Its courts are clogged and slow, and plaintiffs often die before their cases come to trial. The Indian Supreme Court has a backlog of more than sixty thousand cases. The government often fails to invest in infrastructure because it, like the US, is hamstrung with lawsuits of various sorts.
Nor is India’s problem inadequate democracy. There is a free media that is perfectly happy to criticize the government for shortcomings in education, health, and other areas of public policy, and plenty of political competition to hold incumbents accountable for failure. In an area like education, there is no political conflict over the ends of public policy - everyone agrees that children should be educated and that teachers should show up for their jobs if they are to get paid. And yet, providing this basic service seems to be beyond the capacity of the Indian government.
The failure here is a failure of the state - specifically, the bureaucracies at local, state, and national levels that are tasked with providing basic education to children in rural India. Political order is not just about constraining abusive governments. It is more often about getting governments to actually do the things expected of them, like providing citizen security, protecting property rights, making available education and public health services, and building the infrastructure that is necessary for private economic activity to occur. Indeed, in very many countries democracy itself is threatened because the state is too corrupt or too incompetent to do these things. People begin to wish for a powerful authority - a dictator or savior - that will cut through the blather of politicians and actually make things work.
State. Law. Accountability.
I believe that development of these three sets of institutions becomes a universal requirement for all human societies over time. They do not simply represent the cultural preferences of Western societies or any particular cultural group. For better or worse, there is no alternative to a modern, impersonal states as guarantor of order and security, and as a source of necessary public goods. The rule of law is critical for economic development; without clear property rights and contract enforcement, it is difficult for businesses to break out of small circles of trust. Moreover, to the extent that the law enshrines the unalienable rights of individuals, it recognizes their dignity as human agents and thus has an intrinsic value. And finally, democratic participation is more than just a useful check on abusive, corrupt, or tyrannical government. Political agency is and end in itself, one of the basic dimensions of freedom that complete and enrich the life of an individual.
A liberal democracy combining these three institutions cannot be said to be humanly universal, since such regimes have existed for only the last two centuries in the history of a species that goes back tens of thousands of years. But development is a coherent process that produces general as well as specific evolution - that is, the convergence of institutions across culturally disparate societies over time.
If there is a single theme that underlines many of the chapters of this book, it is that there is a political deficit around the world, not of states but of modern states that are capable, impersonal, well organized, and autonomous. Many of the problems of developing countries are by-products of the fact that they have weak and ineffective states. Many appear to be strong in despotic power, the ability to suppress journalists, opposing politicians, or rival ethnic groups. But they are not strong in their ability to exercise infrastructural power, the ability to legitimately make and enforce rules, or to deliver necessary public goods like safety, health and education. Many of the failures attributed to democracy are in fact failures of state administrations that are unable to deliver on the promises made by newly elected democratic politicians to voters who want not just their political rights but good government as well.
Few countries can decide to turn themselves into Singapore; replacing a poorly administered democracy with an equally incompetent autocracy buys you nothing.
The spread of democracy depends on the legitimacy of the idea of democracy. For much of the 19th century, many educated and well-meaning people believed that the “masses” simply did not have the capacity to exercise the franchise responsibly. The rise of democracy thus had much to do with spreading views of human equality.
Natural human sociability is based on kin selection and reciprocal altruism - that is, the preference for family and friends. While modern political orders seek to promote impersonal rule, elites in most societies tend to fall back on networks of family and friends, both as an instrument for protecting their positions and as the beneficiaries of their efforts. When they succeed, elites are said to “capture” the state, which reduces the latter’s legitimacy and makes it less accountable to the population as a whole. Long periods of peace and prosperity often provide the conditions for spreading capture by elites, which can lead to political crisis if followed by an economic downturn or external political shock.
Natural human sociability is built around two phenomena: kin selection and reciprocal altruism. The first is a recurring pattern by which sexually reproducing animals behave altruistically toward one another in proportion to the number of genes they share; that is, they practice nepotism and favor genetic relatives. Reciprocal altruism involves an exchange of favors or resources between unrelated individuals of the same species, or sometimes between members of different species. Both behaviors are not learned but genetically coded and emerge spontaneously as individual interact.
Human beings, in other words, are social animals by nature. But their natural sociability takes the specific form of altruism toward family (genetic relatives) and friends (individuals with whom one has exchanged favors). This default form of human sociability is universal to all cultures and historical periods. Natural sociability can be overridden by the development of new institutions that provide incentives for other types of behavior (for example, favoring a qualified stranger over a genetic relative), but it constitutes a form of social relationship to which humans always revert when such alternative institutions break down.
Human being by nature are also norm-creating and norm-following creatures. They create rules for themselves that regulate social interactions and make possible the collective action of groups. Although these rules can be rationally designed or negotiated, norm-following behavior is usually grounded not in reason but in emotions like pride, guilt, anger, and shame. Norms are often given an intrinsic value and even worshipped, as in the religious laws of many different societies. Since an institution is nothing more than a rule that persists over time, human beings therefore have a natural tendency to institutionalized their behavior. Due to the intrinsic value with which they are typically endowed, institutions tend to be highly conservative, that is, resistant to change.
Both band- and tribal-level societies are rooted in kinship and hence human biology. But the shift to tribal organization required the emergence of a religious idea, belief in the ability of dead ancestors and unborn descendants to affect health and happiness in one’s current life. This is an early example of ideas playing a critical independent role in development.