Political Order and Political Decay (6 page)

While Parts I and II deal with development of the state, Part III of this book will deal with an institution of constraint—democratic accountability. This part is considerably shorter than Parts I or II. This is not because I believe that democracy is less important than other aspects of political development. It reflects the fact that a great deal of attention has been paid over the past generation to democracy, democratic transitions, democratic breakdowns, and the quality of democracy. The Third Wave of democracy that began in the early 1970s saw the number of electoral democracies around the world go from 35 to 120 by 2013, and so it is very understandable that a huge amount of scholarly attention has been devoted to this phenomenon. Readers interested in learning about these more recent developments are referred to the many excellent books that have been written on the subject.
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Instead of focusing on the Third Wave, Part III will look more closely at the “First Wave,” the period of democratic expansion that occurred primarily in Europe in the wake of the American and French Revolutions. No country in Europe qualified as even an electoral democracy at the time of the Congress of Vienna in 1815 that brought to an end the Napoleonic Wars. The year 1848 saw the outbreak of revolutions in virtually every continental European country and has been compared to the 2011 Arab Spring. The European experience illustrates how difficult the road to real democracy is. Within less than a year of the revolutionary upsurge, the old authoritarian order had been restored virtually everywhere. The franchise was opened only very slowly over the following decades; in Britain, home to the oldest parliamentary tradition, full adult suffrage was not put in place until 1929.

The spread of democracy depends on the legitimacy of the idea of democracy. For much of the nineteenth 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.

But ideas do not exist in a vacuum. We live today in a world of globalized and expanding democracy due to the profound changes set in train by the Industrial Revolution. It set off explosive economic growth that dramatically changed the nature of societies by mobilizing new classes of people—the bourgeoisie or middle class, and the new industrial working class. As they became self-conscious as groups with common interests, they started to organize themselves politically and demanded the right to participate in the political system. Expansion of the franchise was usually a matter of grassroots mobilization of these newly emerging classes, which often led to violence. But in other cases it was the older elite groups that promoted democratic rights as a means of improving their own relative political fortunes. The timing of the spread of democracy in different countries therefore depended on the changing relative positions of the middle class, the working class, landowning elites, and the peasantry. Where the old agrarian order was built around large landowners dependent on servile labor, a peaceful transition to democracy became particularly difficult. But in almost all cases the rise and growth of middle-class groups was critical to the spread of democracy. Democracy in the developed world became secure and stable as industrialization produced middle-class societies, that is, societies in which a significant majority of the population thought of themselves as middle class.

Apart from economic growth, democracy worldwide has been facilitated by globalization itself, the reduction of barriers to the movement of ideas, goods, investment, and people across international boundaries. Institutions that took centuries to evolve in one part of the world could be imported or adapted to local conditions in a completely different region. This suggests that the evolution of institutions has sped up over time, and is likely to continue to do so.

Part III concludes with a view toward the future. If a broad middle class is indeed important to the survival of democracy, what will be the implication of the disappearance of middle-class jobs as a result of advancing technology and globalization?

The fourth and final part of the book will deal with the issue of political decay. All political systems are prone to decay over time. The fact that modern liberal democratic institutions supported by a market economy have been “consolidated” is no guarantee that they will persist forever. Institutional rigidity and repatrimonialization, the two forces contributing to decay in the cases detailed in Volume 1, are present in contemporary democracies.

Indeed, both of these processes are evident in the United States today. Institutional rigidity takes the form of a series of rules that lead to outcomes that are commonly acknowledged to be bad and yet are regarded as essentially unreformable. These include the electoral college, the primary system, various Senate rules, the system of campaign finance, and the entire legacy of a century of congressional mandates that collectively produce a sprawling government that nonetheless fails to perform many basic functions, and does others poorly. Many of the sources of these dysfunctions, I will argue in Part IV, are by-products of the American system of checks and balances itself, which tends to produce poorly drafted legislation (beginning with budgets) and ill-designed handoffs of authority between Congress and the executive branch. The deep American tradition of law moreover enables the courts to insert themselves into either policy making or routine administration in a manner that has few parallels in other developed democracies. It would be possible in theory to fix many of these problems, but most available solutions are not even on the table because they lie too far outside of American experience.

The second mechanism of political decay—repatrimonialization—is evident in the capture of large parts of the U.S. government by well-organized interest groups. The old nineteenth-century problem of clientelism (what was known as the patronage system), in which individual voters received benefits in return for votes, was largely eliminated as a result of reforms undertaken during the Progressive Era. But it has been replaced today by a system of legalized gift exchange, in which politicians respond to organized interest groups that are collectively unrepresentative of the public as a whole. Over the past two generations, wealth has become highly concentrated in the United States, and economic power has been able to buy influence in politics. The American system of checks and balances creates numerous points of access for powerful interest groups that are much less prominent in a European-style parliamentary system. Although there is a widespread perception that the system as a whole is corrupt and increasingly illegitimate, there is no straightforward reform agenda for fixing it within the parameters of the existing system.

A question for the future is whether these problems are characteristic of liberal democracies as a whole, or are unique to the United States.

I should note at the outset several topics that the present volume will not seek to address. It is not intended to be anything like a comprehensive history of the past two centuries. Anyone seeking to learn about the origins of the world wars or the cold war, the Bolshevik or Chinese Revolutions, the Holocaust, the gold standard, or the founding of the United Nations should look elsewhere. I have chosen instead certain topics within the broad field of political development that I feel have been relatively underemphasized or misunderstood.

This book focuses on the evolution of political institutions within individual societies, and not on international ones. It is clear that the current degree of globalization and interdependence among states means that national states are to a much lesser degree the monopoly providers of public services (if they ever were). Today there are a huge number of international bodies, nongovernmental organizations, multinational corporations, and informal networks that supply services traditionally associated with governments. For many observers, the word “governance” refers to government-like services provided by virtually anything other than a traditional government.
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It is also reasonably clear that the existing structure of international institutions is inadequate to provide sufficient levels of cooperation, on issues from the drug trade to financial regulation to climate change. All these are again very worthy topics, but ones that I do not discuss at any length in this book.
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This book is backward looking—it tries to explain how existing institutions arose and evolved over time. Although it points to any number of problems that beset modern political systems under the heading of political decay, I avoid overly specific recommendations for fixing them. While I have spent a lot of my life in a public policy world that seeks very specific solutions to policy problems, this book aims at a level of analysis pointing to their deeper systemic sources. Some of the issues we face today may not in fact have any particularly good policy solutions. In a similar vein, I do not spend any time speculating about the future of the different types of political institutions discussed here. My focus rather is on the question of how we got to the present.

THREE INSTITUTIONS

I believe that a political system resting on a balance among state, law, and accountability is both a practical and a moral necessity for all societies. All societies need states that can generate sufficient power to defend themselves externally and internally, and to enforce commonly agreed upon laws. All societies need to regularize the exercise of power through law, to make sure that the law applies impersonally to all citizens, and that there are no exemptions for a privileged few. And governments must be responsive not only to elites and to the needs of those running the government; the government should serve the interests of the broader community. There need to be peaceful mechanisms for resolving the inevitable conflicts that emerge in pluralistic societies.

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 state 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 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 evolution—that 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.
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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 “state of courts and parties” 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 Stalin's Russia to Hitler's Germany to Mao's 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 Reagan's assertion that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government
is
the problem.”

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 by different social groups on the other that prevent any sort of collective action. Few countries can decide to turn themselves into Singapore, moreover; replacing a poorly administered democracy with an equally incompetent autocracy buys you nothing.