Political Order and Political Decay (4 page)

These two institutional innovations—introduction of a new legal code and creation of a modern administrative system—are not the same thing as democracy. But they nevertheless achieved certain egalitarian ends. The law no longer privileged certain classes who got to manipulate the system to their own advantage; it was now committed to the equal treatment of all individuals, in principle if not always in reality. Private property was no longer subject to feudal restrictions, and a new, much larger market economy could begin to flourish as a result. The law, moreover, could not be implemented without the newly reformed bureaucracy, which was freed of the corrupt baggage it had accumulated over the centuries. And both together—law and an administrative state—acted in many ways as a constraint on the arbitrariness of would-be absolutist rulers. The sovereign had theoretically unlimited powers, but he had to exercise them through a bureaucracy acting on the basis of law. This is something that the Germans would label the Rechtsstaat. It had a very different character from the totalitarian dictatorships that would arise in the twentieth century under Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, whose reality was a despotic state unconstrained by either law or democratic accountability.

LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS

The American Revolution institutionalized democracy and the principle of political equality. The French Revolution laid the basis for an impersonal modern state, much as the Qin unification had done in China. Both fortified and expanded the rule of law in its two sister versions, the Common Law and the Civil Code.

The first volume of this book concluded just at the historical moment when the foundations for the three sets of institutions had been put in place, but before any of them was fully developed into its modern form. In Europe and other parts of the world, law was the most developed institution. But as in the case of the Code Napoléon, a great deal of work had to be done to formalize, codify, reconcile, and update laws to make them truly neutral with respect to persons. The idea of a modern state had been germinating in Europe since the end of the sixteenth century, but no administration, including the new bureaucracy in Paris, was fully merit based. The vast majority of state administrations across the Continent remained patrimonial. And even though the idea of democracy had been implanted in England and particularly in its North American colonies, there was no society on earth in which a majority of the adult population could vote or participate in the political system.

Two monumental developments were unfolding at this moment of political upheaval. The first was the Industrial Revolution, in which per-person output moved to a much higher sustained level than in any previous period of human history. This had enormous consequences because economic growth began to change the underlying nature of societies.

The second great development was a second wave of colonialism, which was setting Europe on a collision course with the rest of the world. The first wave had begun with the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of the New World, followed a century later by British and French settlement of North America. The first colonial surge had exhausted itself by the late eighteenth century, and the British and Spanish empires were forced to retreat as a result of independence movements on the part of their New World colonies. But beginning with the Anglo-Burmese War of 1824, a new phase began that was to see virtually the entire rest of the world swallowed up into the colonial empires of the Western powers by the end of the century.

The present volume thus picks up the story from where the first one left off, giving an account of how state, law, and democracy developed over the last two centuries; how they interacted with one another and with the other economic and social dimensions of development; and, finally, how they have shown signs of decay in the United States and in other developed democracies.

 

PART ONE

The State

 

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WHAT IS POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT?

Political development and its three components: the state, rule of law, and accountability; why all societies are subject to political decay; the plan for the book; why it is good to have a balanced political system

Political development is change over time in political institutions. This is different from shifts in politics or policies: prime ministers, presidents, and legislators may come and go, laws may be modified, but it is the underlying rules by which societies organize themselves that define a political order.

In the first volume of this book, I argued that there were three basic categories of institutions that constituted a political order: the state, rule of law, and mechanisms of accountability. The state is a hierarchical, centralized organization that holds a monopoly on legitimate force over a defined territory. In addition to characteristics like complexity and adaptability, states can be more or less impersonal: early states were indistinguishable from the ruler's household and were described as “patrimonial” because they favored and worked through the ruler's family and friends. Modern, more highly developed states, by contrast, make a distinction between the private interest of the rulers and the public interest of the whole community. They strive to treat citizens on a more impersonal basis, applying laws, recruiting officials, and undertaking policies without favoritism.

The rule of law has many possible definitions, including simple law and order, property rights and contract enforcement, or the modern Western understanding of human rights, which includes equal rights for women and racial and ethnic minorities.
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The definition of the rule of law I am using in this book is not tied to a specific substantive understanding of law. Rather, I define it as a set of rules of behavior, reflecting a broad consensus within the society, that is binding on even the most powerful political actors in the society, whether kings, presidents, or prime ministers. If rulers can change the law to suit themselves, the rule of law does not exist, even if those laws are applied uniformly to the rest of society. To be effective, a rule of law usually has to be embodied in a separate judicial institution that can act autonomously from the executive. Rule of law by this definition is not associated with any particular substantive body of law, like those prevailing in the contemporary United States or Europe. Rule of law as a constraint on political power existed in ancient Israel, in India, in the Muslim world, as well as in the Christian West.

Rule of law should be distinguished from what is sometimes referred to as “rule by law.” In the latter case, law represents commands issued by the ruler but is not binding on the ruler himself. Rule by law as we will see sometimes becomes more institutionalized, regular, and transparent, under which conditions it begins to fulfill some of the functions of rule of law by reducing the ruler's discretionary authority.

Accountability means that the government is responsive to the interests of the whole society—what Aristotle called the common good—rather than to just its own narrow self-interest. Accountability today is understood most typically as procedural accountability, that is, periodic free and fair multiparty elections that allow citizens to choose and discipline their rulers. But accountability can also be substantive: rulers can respond to the interests of the broader society without necessarily being subject to procedural accountability. Unelected governments can differ greatly in their responsiveness to public needs, which is why Aristotle in the
Politics
distinguished between monarchy and tyranny. There is, however, typically a strong connection between procedural and substantive accountability because unconstrained rulers, even if responsive to the common good, usually cannot be trusted to remain that way forever. When we use the word “accountability,” we are mostly speaking of modern democracy defined in terms of procedures that make the governments responsive to their citizens. We need to bear in mind, however, that good procedures do not inevitably produce proper substantive results.

The institutions of the state concentrate power and allow the community to deploy that power to enforce laws, keep the peace, defend itself against outside enemies, and provide necessary public goods. The rule of law and mechanisms of accountability, by contrast, pull in the opposite direction: they constrain the state's power and ensure that it is used only in a controlled and consensual manner. The miracle of modern politics is that we can have political orders that are simultaneously strong and capable and yet constrained to act only within the parameters established by law and democratic choice.

These three categories of institutions may exist in different polities independently of one another, and in various combinations. Hence the People's Republic of China has a strong and well-developed state but a weak rule of law and no democracy. Singapore has a rule of law in addition to a state but very limited democracy. Russia has democratic elections, a state that is good at suppressing dissidence but not so good at delivering services, and a weak rule of law. In many failed states, like Somalia, Haiti, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the early twenty-first century, the state and rule of law are weak or nonexistent, though the latter two have held democratic elections. By contrast, a politically developed liberal democracy includes all three sets of institutions—the state, rule of law, and procedural accountability—in some kind of balance. A state that is powerful without serious checks is a dictatorship; one that is weak and checked by a multitude of subordinate political forces is ineffective and often unstable.

GETTING TO DENMARK

In the first volume, I suggested that contemporary developing countries and the international community seeking to help them face the problem of “getting to Denmark.” By this I mean less the actual country Denmark than an imagined society that is prosperous, democratic, secure, and well governed, and experiences low levels of corruption. “Denmark” would have all three sets of political institutions in perfect balance: a competent state, strong rule of law, and democratic accountability. The international community would like to turn Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, and Haiti into idealized places like “Denmark,” but it doesn't have the slightest idea of how to bring this about. As I argued earlier, part of the problem is that we don't understand how Denmark itself came to be Denmark and therefore don't comprehend the complexity and difficulty of political development.

Of Denmark's various positive qualities, the least studied and most poorly understood concerns how its political system made the transition from a patrimonial to a modern state. In the former, rulers are supported by networks of friends and family who receive material benefits in return for political loyalty; in the latter, government officials are supposed to be servants or custodians of a broader public interest and are legally prohibited from using their offices for private gain. How did Denmark come to be governed by bureaucracies that were characterized by strict subordination to public purposes, technical expertise, a functional division of labor, and recruitment on the basis of merit?

Today, not even the most corrupt dictators would argue, like some early kings or sultans, that they literally “owned” their countries and could do with them what they liked. Everyone pays lip service to the distinction between public and private interest. Hence patrimonialism has evolved into what is called “neopatrimonialism,” in which political leaders adopt the outward forms of modern states—with bureaucracies, legal systems, elections, and the like—and yet in reality rule for private gain. Public good may be invoked during election campaigns, but the state is not impersonal: favors are doled out to networks of political supporters in exchange for votes or attendance at rallies. This pattern of behavior is visible in countries from Nigeria to Mexico to Indonesia.
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Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast have an alternative label for neopatrimonialism, what they call a “limited access order,” in which a coalition of rent-seeking elites use their political power to prevent free competition in both the economy and the political system.
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Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson use the term “extractive” to describe the same phenomenon.
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At one stage in human history, all governments could be described as patrimonial, limited access, or extractive.

The question is, How did such political orders ever evolve into modern states? The authors cited above are better at describing the transition than providing a dynamic theory of change. As we will see, there are several forces promoting state modernization. An important one historically was military competition, which creates incentives much more powerful than economic self-interest in motivating political reform. A second driver of change was rooted in the social mobilization brought about by industrialization. Economic growth generates new social groups, which over time organize themselves for collective action and seek to participate in the political system. This process does not always lead to the creation of modern states, but under the right circumstances it can and has.

POLITICAL DECAY

Following Samuel Huntington's definition, political institutions develop by becoming more complex, adaptable, autonomous, and coherent.
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But he argues that they can also decay. Institutions are created to meet certain needs of societies, such as making war, dealing with economic conflicts, and regulating social behavior. But as recurring patterns of behavior, they can also grow rigid and fail to adapt when the circumstances that brought them into being in the first place themselves change. There is an inherent conservatism to human behavior that tends to invest institutions with emotional significance once they are put in place. Anyone who suggests abolishing the British Monarchy, or the American Constitution, or the Japanese emperor and replacing it with something newer and better, faces a huge uphill struggle.