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 an 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 evolutionâthat is, the convergence of institutions across culturally disparate societies over time.
If there is a single theme that underlies 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 what the sociologist Michael Mann labels despotic power, the ability to suppress journalists, opposition politicians, or rival ethnic groups. But they are not strong in their ability to exercise what Mann calls infrastructural power, the ability to legitimately make and enforce rules, or to deliver necessary public goods like safety, health, and education. 10 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.
But weak states are not merely the province of poor developing countries. Neither Greece nor Italy ever developed high-quality bureaucratic administrations; both remained mired in high degrees of clientelism and outright corruption. These problems have contributed directly to their woes in the current euro crisis. The United States, for its part, was one of the last developed countries to put in place a modern state administration, having been characterized as a nineteenth-century âstate of courts and partiesâ in which bureaucracy played a very minor role. Despite the growth in the twentieth century of an enormous administrative state, this characterization still remains true in many ways: courts and political parties continue to play outsized roles in American politics, roles that are performed by professional bureaucracies in other countries. Many of the inefficiencies of American government stem from this source.
Particularly over the past generation, thinking about states and the effective use of state power has not been a popular preoccupation. The experience of the twentieth century, with its history of maniacal totalitarian regimes from Stalinâs Russia to Hitlerâs Germany to Maoâs China, has understandably focused the attention of much of the world on the misuse of overweening state power. This is nowhere more true than in the United States, with its long history of distrust of government. That distrust has deepened since the 1980s, which began with Ronald Reaganâs assertion that âGovernment is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.â
The emphasis on effective states should in no way be construed as a preference on my part for authoritarian government, or particular sympathy with regimes like those of Singapore and China that have achieved seemingly miraculous economic results in the absence of democracy. I believe that a well-functioning and legitimate regime needs to achieve balance between government power and institutions that constrain the state. Things can become unbalanced in either direction, with insufficient checks on state power on the one hand, or excessive veto power
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 evolutionâthat is, the convergence of institutions across culturally disparate societies over time.
If there is a single theme that underlies 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 what the sociologist Michael Mann labels despotic power, the ability to suppress journalists, opposition politicians, or rival ethnic groups. But they are not strong in their ability to exercise what Mann calls infrastructural power, the ability to legitimately make and enforce rules, or to deliver necessary public goods like safety, health, and education. 10 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.
But weak states are not merely the province of poor developing countries. Neither Greece nor Italy ever developed high-quality bureaucratic administrations; both remained mired in high degrees of clientelism and outright corruption. These problems have contributed directly to their woes in the current euro crisis. The United States, for its part, was one of the last developed countries to put in place a modern state administration, having been characterized as a nineteenth-century âstate of courts and partiesâ in which bureaucracy played a very minor role. Despite the growth in the twentieth century of an enormous administrative state, this characterization still remains true in many ways: courts and political parties continue to play outsized roles in American politics, roles that are performed by professional bureaucracies in other countries. Many of the inefficiencies of American government stem from this source.
Particularly over the past generation, thinking about states and the effective use of state power has not been a popular preoccupation. The experience of the twentieth century, with its history of maniacal totalitarian regimes from Stalinâs Russia to Hitlerâs Germany to Maoâs China, has understandably focused the attention of much of the world on the misuse of overweening state power. This is nowhere more true than in the United States, with its long history of distrust of government. That distrust has deepened since the 1980s, which began with Ronald Reaganâs assertion that âGovernment is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.â
The emphasis on effective states should in no way be construed as a preference on my part for authoritarian government, or particular sympathy with regimes like those of Singapore and China that have achieved seemingly miraculous economic results in the absence of democracy. I believe that a well-functioning and legitimate regime needs to achieve balance between government power and institutions that constrain the state. Things can become unbalanced in either direction, with insufficient checks on state power on the one hand, or excessive veto power
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