Political Order and Political Decay (33 page)

ROUTES TO MODERN GOVERNMENT

How, then, did any society succeed in making the transition from a patrimonial to a modern state? The admittedly limited number of cases selected here suggests that there are at least two important routes.

The first comes by way of military competition. Ancient China, Prussia, and Japan all felt themselves engaged in prolonged struggles with their neighbors in which efficient government organization was critical to national survival. Military competition creates imperatives far more powerful than any economic incentive: nothing is worth very much, after all, if I and my entire family are likely to be slaughtered at the end of a war. The need to create an army puts a premium on meritocratic recruitment; it necessitates new taxes and revenue-raising capacity; it requires bureaucratic organization both to tax and to manage the fiscal and logistics chain that supplies the troops in the field; and it upsets interelite relationships by forcing the recruitment of nonelites to serve in and often lead the army.

To the extent that nation building has been critical to successful state building, war has also played a critical role. Once nationalism as a principle took hold at the time of the French Revolution, national identities were forged by adjusting political boundaries to correspond to existing cultural, ethnic, or linguistic communities. As we saw in the last chapter, this usually required the violent redrawing of borders, or the killing, moving, or forcible assimilation of populations living within them.

In Volume 1 we saw a number of examples of state modernization via war, particularly in the case of China, which I argued was the first society to set up a coherent, universal, and impersonal state. It was the Chinese who invented meritocracy and the civil examination in the third century
B.C.
, a practice that did not get widely implemented in Europe until the nineteenth century. Both the Mamluks and the Ottomans arrived at a reasonably modern form of public administration through what seems today like the bizarre institution of military slavery: young men were captured in foreign lands and taken from their families, to be raised to be soldiers and administrators.

Prussia, too, felt the pressure of military competition and gradually put into place the elements of modern autonomous bureaucracy that has survived into the present. This began with the Great Elector's decision in 1660 not to disband the army after the Peace of Oliva but rather to maintain a standing military whose revenue needs necessitated reorganization of the country's entire administrative structure. Prussia's defeat by Napoleon in 1806 forced the opening of the bureaucracy to the middle classes under the Stein-Hardenberg reforms. Establishment of an elite, merit-based bureaucracy created an absolutist political coalition in support of the continuing autonomy of the bureaucracy. Thereafter, any time a politician or political party tried to place political appointees in the bureaucracy, the latter's supporters would express great opposition, and the politician would be forced to back down. In Prussia this autonomy was carried too far, such that democratically elected leaders found it impossible to bring the military part of the bureaucracy to heel. Bismarck forged a modern German nation through war, and unleashed an aggressive nationalism that culminated in the two world wars. State modernity and national identity were therefore purchased at a terribly high price.

The second route to state modernization was via a process of peaceful political reform, based on the formation of a coalition of social groups interested in having an efficient, uncorrupt government. Underlying the formation of such a coalition is the process of socioeconomic modernization. As noted in the general framework of development presented in chapter 2, economic growth often drives social mobilization through an expanding division of labor. Industrialization leads to urbanization, requirements for higher levels of education, occupational specialization, and a host of other changes that produce new social actors not present in an agrarian society. These actors have no strong stake in the existing patrimonial system; they can either be co-opted by the system, or they can organize an external coalition to change the rules by which the system operates.

The latter scenario unfolded in Britain and the United States. Both countries were early industrializers, and the new middle-class groups formed thereby led a drive for civil service reform whose legislative expressions were the Northcote-Trevelyan reform and the Pendleton Act. The British reform process unfolded much more quickly than the American one for several reasons: first, the British elite was more compact and had considerable control over the reform process; second, the Westminster system posed many fewer obstacles to decisive political action than America's complex system of checks and balances. The courts, opposition on a state level, and the difficulty of achieving a clear legislative majority all slowed the American reform process but were unimportant in the British case. The most important difference, however, was the fact that clientelism had become deeply rooted in American politics prior to the onset of reform and hence was much harder to eradicate.

This brings us to the question of clientelism, and why it is so much more powerful and pervasive in some countries than others. Here the answer suggested by these cases is basically that of Martin Shefter: it is a question of the sequence by which modern institutions are introduced and, in particular, the stage at which the democratic franchise is first opened.
2
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 levels of income and education, and is therefore best understood as an early form of democracy. In the United States, Greece, and Italy, the franchise was expanded prior to the creation of a modern state: in the 1830s in the United States, from 1844 to 1864 in Greece, and in the period after 1946 in Italy. Political parties in all three countries used their public bureaucracies as sources of benefits to political clients, with predictably disastrous consequences for state 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.

*   *   *

The interactions between the different dimensions of development are of course considerably more complicated than this and can be illustrated in the figures below.

FIGURE 8.
The Prussian/German Development Path

Figure 8
illustrates the Prussian/German development path. Prussia began building a strong state for reasons that had nothing to do with economic development; rather, it was needed for national survival. (The dotted line linking state building and accountability indicates that the impact of the former on the latter was negative.) While state building occurred under absolutist governments, it did, as we have seen, have a positive impact on development of the rule of law. The bureaucracy ruled through law; while the state did not accept the principle of democratic accountability, its sovereignty was increasingly based on the notion that the bureaucracy was the guardian of the public interest.

The combination of a modern state and rule of law then set the stage for the takeoff in economic growth that began around the middle of the nineteenth century. Economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron noted that in late-developing Germany the state played a much larger role in promoting economic growth than it did in England, a state that had a high-capacity at the beginning of the industrialization process.
3
Economic growth then led to the emergence of a working class and its mobilization under the banner of German Social Democracy. The German road to liberal democracy went through war, revolution, and repression in the early twentieth century. The early development of a strong and autonomous state had a very negative impact on democratic accountability, helping to drive the country into World War I and then undermining Weimar democracy. A fully institutionalized liberal democracy emerged only with the birth of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949.

The United States took a very different path toward political modernization (see
Figure 9
). The United States inherited from Britain a strong rule of law in the form of the Common Law, an institution that was in place throughout the colonies well before the advent of democracy. The rule of law, with its strong protection of private property rights, laid the basis for rapid economic development in the nineteenth century. The early introduction of universal white male suffrage, however, had a decidedly negative impact on American state building by making clientelism pervasive throughout virtually all levels of government (the dotted line in Figure 9). Growth, however, created new social groups, mobilized through civil society and as new factions within the existing political parties. A reform coalition then led the drive to modernize the American state.

FIGURE 9.
The American Path

Finally,
Figure 10
illustrates the Greek/southern Italian path. The entry point for development was neither state building nor economic growth; rather, it was social mobilization (what was earlier described as modernization without development) and early democratization. The weakness and lack of opportunity in the capitalist economy made the state an early object of capture, first by elite social groups and then by mass political parties as democracy deepened. Extensive clientelism weakened state capacity, which then further constrained prospects for economic growth (the dotted lines).

FIGURE 10.
The Greek/Southern Italian Path

CORRUPTION AND THE MIDDLE CLASS

In Britain and America, economic modernization drove social mobilization, which in turn created the conditions for the elimination of patronage and clientelism. In both countries, it was new middle-class groups that sought an end to the patronage system. This might lead some to believe that socioeconomic modernization and the creation of a middle class will by themselves create modern government. But this view is belied by the Greek and Italian cases, societies that are wealthy and modern and yet continue to practice clientelism. There is no automatic mechanism that produces clean, modern government, because a host of other factors is necessary to explain outcomes.

One factor is the quality of economic growth. We saw that industrialization came late to both Greece and southern Italy, and that the process of urbanization had a very different character from what went on in Britain and the United States. In the latter countries, new occupational groups and social relationships were created by industrialization; in Greece and southern Italy, the population of the countryside simply moved into the cities, bringing with them rural habits and ways of life. In a thriving capitalist economy, one's self-interest is often best advanced through broad public policies, like lower tax rates, different forms of regulation, and consistent standards for internal and external trade. When Gemeinschaft is preserved intact by the ruralization of cities, by contrast, it is much easier to preserve clientelistic forms of social organization. The individual payoffs that are the essence of clientelism matter more than policies.
4