But if the supply of high-quality democratic government is sometimes lacking, the demand for it is large and growing day by day. New social groups have been mobilized all over the world. We continue to see evidence of this in the mass protests that continue to erupt unexpectedly in places from Tunis to Kiev to Istanbul to São Paulo, where people want governments that recognize their equal dignity as human beings and perform as promised. It is evident also in the millions of poor people desperate to move from places like Guatemala City or Karachi to Los Angeles or London each year. These facts alone suggest that there is a clear directionality to the process of political development, and that accountable governments recognizing the equal dignity of their citizens have a universal appeal.
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NOTES
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INTRODUCTION
  1 . See for example Peter J. Wallison,Bad History, Worse Policy: How a False Narrative About the Financial Crisis Led to the Dodd-Frank Act (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 2013).
  2 . Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig,The Banker's New Clothes: What's Wrong with Banking and What to Do About It (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
  3 . For a broader account of how politics affected banking regulation after the financial crisis, see Simon Johnson and James Kwak,13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (New York: Pantheon, 2010).
  4 . This definition is taken from Samuel P. Huntington,Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 12.
  5 . In Britain, a similar long-term battle was fought out during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where class rather than race was the fundamental issue. Perhaps because the principle of equality was less clearly articulated (Britain has no equivalent of the Bill of Rights and remains a constitutional monarchy), it took far longer to achieve universal white male suffrage there than in the United States.
  6 . Edmund Burke,Reflections on the Revolution in France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Alexis de Tocqueville,The Old Regime and the Revolution, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); François Furet,Interpreting the French Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
  7 . For an overview of these events, see Georges Lefebvre,The Coming of the French Revolution, 1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947).
  8 . Napoleon himself had pushed for a new code in 1800 shortly after his takeover of the revolutionary government on 18 Brumaire, and he personally attended many sessions of the Conseil d'Ãtat, which oversaw its drafting. The code was finally promulgated in 1804. Carl J. Friedrich, “The Ideological and Philosophical Background,” in Bernard Schwartz, ed.,The Code Napoléon and the Common Law World (New York: New York University Press, 1956).
  9 . Martyn Lyons,Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 94â96.
10 . Jean Limpens, “Territorial Expansion of the Code,” in Schwartz,Code Napoléon.
11 . See Tocqueville,The Old Regime , pp. 118â24.
1: WHAT IS POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT?
  1 . For a survey of existing definitions, see Rachel Kleinfeld, “Competing Definitions of the Rule of Law,” in Thomas Carothers, ed.,Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad: In Search of Knowledge (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment, 2006).
  2 . S. N. Eisenstadt,Traditional Patrimonialism and Modern Neopatrimonialism (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1973).
  3 . Douglass C. North, John Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast,Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
  4 . Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson,Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown, 2012).
  5 . For definitions of these terms, see Huntington,Political Order in Changing Societies , pp. 12â24; also the discussion in Francis Fukuyama,The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), pp. 450â51.
  6 . The argument that democracies will self-correct when faced by elite challenges is made in Mancur Olson, “Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development,”American Political Science Review 87, no. 9 (1993): 567â76; North, Wallis, and Weingast,Violence and Social Orders ; and Acemoglu and Robinson,Why Nations Fail .
  7 . See for example Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds.,Democracy in Developing Countries (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1988); Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds.,Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Samuel P. Huntington,The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Juan J. Linz and Alfred C. Stepan, eds.,The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown and Reequilibration. An Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Larry Diamond,The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (New York: Times Books, 2008).
  8 . For a critique of contemporary definitions of “governance,” see Claus Offe, “Governance: An âEmpty Signifier'?”Constellations 16, no. 4 (2009): 550â62; and Marc F. Plattner, “Reflections on âGovernance,'”Journal of Democracy 24, no. 4 (2013): 17â28.
  9 . I express some views on a desirable structure of international institutions inAmerica at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), chap. 6.
10 . Michael Mann,The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1:A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
2: THE DIMENSIONS OF DEVELOPMENT
  1 . For an overview, see Eric Hobsbawm,The Age of Capital, 1848â1875 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), chap. 1.
  2 . Ferdinand Tönnies,Community and Association (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft) (London: Routledge, 1955).
  3 . Max Weber,Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Ãmile Durkheim,The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Macmillan, 1933); Henry Maine,Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).
  4 . See for example Joel Mokyr, ed.,The Economics of the Industrial Revolution (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985); Mokyr,The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999); Douglass C. North and Robert P. Thomas,The Rise of the Western World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell,How the West Grew Rich (New York: Basic Books, 1986); David S. Landes,The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: Norton, 1998).
  5 . For an overview, see Nils Gilman,Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
  6 . Huntington,Political Order in Changing Societies , pp. 32â92.
  7 . See for example James D. Fearon and David Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,”American Political Science Review 97 (2003): 75â90; Paul Collier,The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Collier,Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and Their Implications for Policy (Oxford: Oxford Economic Papers, 2006); Collier, Anke Hoeffler, and Dominic Rohner,Beyond Greed and Grievance: Feasibility and Civil War (Oxford: Oxford Economic Papers, 2007).
  8 . World Bank,World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security, and Development (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2011).
  9 . William R. Easterly, “Can Institutions Resolve Ethnic Conflict?”Economic Development and Cultural Change 49, no. 4 (2001); Fearon and Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War.”
10 . World Bank Development Indicators and Global Development Finance; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
11 . Figures are taken from Larry Diamond, “The Financial Crisis and the Democratic Recession,” in Nancy Birdsall and Francis Fukuyama, eds.,New Ideas in Development after the Financial Crisis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). See also Huntington,The Third Wave .
12 . See Alfred C. Stepan and Graeme B. Robertson, “An âArab' More Than a âMuslim' Electoral Gap,”Journal of Democracy 14, (no. 3) (2003): 30â44.
15 . On the impact of social media on the Arab Spring, see Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen,The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business (New York: Knopf, 2013).
3: BUREAUCRACY
  1 . This is described in Lant Pritchett, Michael Woolcock, and Matt Andrews,Capability Traps? The Mechanisms of Persistent Implementation Failure (Washington, D.C.: Center for Global Development Working Paper No. 234, 2010).
  3 . Karl Polanyi and C. W. Arensberg,Trade and Market in the Early Empires (New York: Free Press, 1957).
1. Bureaucrats are personally free and subject to authority only within a defined area.
2. They are organized into a clearly defined hierarchy of offices.
3. Each office has a defined sphere of competence.
4. Offices are filled by free contractual relationship.
5. Candidates are selected on the basis of technical qualifications.
6. Bureaucrats receive fixed salaries.
7. The office is treated as the sole occupation of the incumbent.
8. The office constitutes a career.
9. There is a separation between ownership and management.
10. Officials are subject to strict discipline and control.
Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1: 220â21.
  5 . Two of the few studies to try to quantify the Weberian characteristics of governments and to correlate them against outcomes are James E. Rauch and Peter B. Evans, “Bureaucratic Structure and Bureaucratic Performance in Less Developed Countries,”Journal of Public Economics 75 (2000): 45â71; and Rauch and Evans, “Bureaucracy and Growth: A Cross-National Analysis of the Effects of âWeberian' State Structures on Economic Growth,”American Sociological Review 64 (1999): 748â65.
  6 . Bo Rothstein,The Quality of Government: Corruption, Social Trust, and Inequality in International Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
  8 . Max Weber,The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner, 1930), p. 181.
  9 . Joel Migdal,Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 4.
10 . Pritchett, Woolcock, and Andrews,Capability Traps?
11 . James S. Coleman et al.,Equality of Educational Opportunity (Washington, D.C.: Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 1966).
12 . China's position well to the left of Russia is a bit misleading. China retains a large state-owned enterprise sector whose revenues are at the disposal of the state sector but don't necessarily show up as taxes.
