Political Order and Political Decay (83 page)

FIGURE 27.
Autonomy and Capacity

FIGURE 28.
Pathways to Reform

This framework explains the conundrum of why some countries need to reduce discretion and impose more rules while others should seek to do the reverse. In
Controlling Corruption
, Robert Klitgaard coined the formula

Corruption
=
Discretion
−
Accountability.

International development agencies like the World Bank have consequently been pushing poor countries with low capacity to reduce discretion (that is, impose more rules on public officials) while improving the transparency of their operations and setting up mechanisms to increase democratic accountability. This advice is largely correct for poor, low-capacity countries. Greater media scrutiny and democratic elections may not be a panacea for corruption, but they at least provide some incentives for politicians and officials to improve their behavior. But it is not a universally valid rule that necessarily applies to richer countries with more state capacity. In many cases, government effectiveness is best secured by increasing discretion and relaxing rules.

The path, then, to improved performance by governments varies depending on the particular situation they find themselves in. Even within a single government, different parts may require different approaches: military procurement may need to be subject to less red tape, while the banks and special prosecutors may be dangerously unaccountable. Analyzing these problems requires knowledge of context; fixing them, even more so.

DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY

How do democratic electorates grant their governments an appropriate degree of discretion and yet remain in firm control of the policies and goals that bureaucracies are meant to serve? Whatever else it may imply, bureaucratic autonomy does not mean turning over the process of decision making to “experts” who somehow know better than the public at large what's best for them. The autonomous platoon leader, to return to the military example, does not weigh in on grand strategy; that's the appropriate function of generals. In a democracy, the people are ultimately the generals.

Democratic accountability is critical to the proper functioning of political systems because it is ultimately the basis for authority, that is, the legitimate exercise of power. Compliance with the state's wishes can be achieved coercively, and there have of course been many examples of this in history. But governments work much better when power is converted into authority, when citizens comply with laws and policies voluntarily because they believe in the system's basic legitimacy.

The importance of legitimacy was illustrated in Volume 1 by the contrast between England and France following the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689. England established the principle of “no taxation without representation,” meaning that the state had access only to revenues approved by Parliament, which at that moment consisted of the nation's wealthiest taxpayers. In the decades after 1689, both the percentage of taxes taken by the government, and the perceived security of English public debt, soared. France, by contrast, had a much more coercive tax system, where the wealthy could exempt themselves and the army was frequently called upon to extract taxes from unwilling peasants. French taxes as a percentage of GDP were a fraction of England's. As a consequence, French public finances crumbled in the eighteenth century. Britain, working off of a smaller resource base, was able to defeat France in a series of wars that stretched to the eve of the French Revolution.

Perceived legitimacy is important to government effectiveness because governments have always relied on nonstate actors to help execute public purposes. Many people believe that outsourcing, public-private partnerships, and state reliance on faith-based groups to deliver social services are innovations of the late twentieth century. But public-private collaborations have a long history. In Europe, social services from population registration to poor relief were traditionally delivered by churches; those functions were absorbed into the state only in the twentieth century. English and Dutch colonialism was carried out by semiprivate organizations like their East India Companies, which worked in parallel with the government. Stein Ringen points out that the military governments ruling South Korea after 1961 nonetheless relied heavily on a variety of private organizations to carry out their policies, not just giant corporations like Samsung and Hyundai, but a welter of private voluntary associations as well.
9

As populations become wealthier and better educated, and as technology provides them with more access to information, the difficulty of exercising authority increases. When people discover they can think for themselves, or know things that the government doesn't, they are much less willing to obey an edict simply because it was issued by an official. It is the broad social mobilization reflecting the rise of middle classes that has led to the spread of formal democracy around the world over the past four decades. But it constitutes a challenge for democratic systems as well, which are perceived as being out of touch and unresponsive to their citizens.

Formal procedures like regular free and fair elections were designed to achieve democratic accountability. But elections by themselves do not guarantee a substantive outcome of government truly responsive to popular wishes. Elections and electorates can be manipulated; entrenched parties may offer inadequate choices to voters; participation may be low. There is a large information problem: my casting a vote every few years may signal my general approval or disapproval of the policies of a party or administration, but what I am really concerned about is a particular regulation affecting my business, or the fact that my child doesn't have good teachers in her public school. There is theoretically a route of accountability that stretches from voter to government and back down to the citizen via a bureaucracy. But that route is extremely long, and in the process of communicating choices, the signal is often lost in a lot of noise.

There are a number of formal, procedural approaches designed to address these issues and make governments more responsive. The most obvious is to shorten the route of accountability by devolving power to the lowest possible level where it can be more directly responsive to popular will. Since the time of the American Founding Fathers, this has gone under the heading of federalism (it is called subsidiarity in Europe). Another approach is to balance the branches of government against one another, using the judiciary to force the executive to respond to public demands. In Europe's civil law systems, there has long been a hierarchy of administrative courts that allow citizens to sue the government. I have already discussed the way the American system gives legal standing to private citizens, allowing them to sue agencies to require them to enforce or to prevent them from enforcing laws. Finally, there are mechanisms like the landmark Administrative Procedure Act, passed in 1946, that forces federal agencies to publicly post rule changes and to solicit comment on them. Similar processes to increase democratic participation at a state and local level have proliferated across the world, such as participatory budgeting pioneered in Brazil.

Many of these approaches work as advertised and force governments to be more responsive. But all formal procedures have a tendency to multiply, and then to be gamed over time by powerful actors within the system. Federalism often duplicates levels of government rather than truly devolving powers; decentralization, especially in poor countries, simply hands over power to local elites. I have already noted the impact of adversarial legalism on the quality of public administration in the United States. The notice-and-comment provisions of the Administrative Procedure Act over the years have evolved into an often meaningless ritual, where well-paid lobbyists for powerful interest groups post predictable comments.

All of these formal procedures are designed to increase accountability and therefore the democratic legitimacy of decision making. But they also multiply rules, impose large transaction costs, and slow government action. The cumulative impact of these procedures is often to rob administrative agencies of the autonomy they need to do their jobs effectively. Too much transparency can and has undercut the possibility of deliberation, as in the U.S. Congress. If demands for accountability become just another weapon in partisan political combat, they will not achieve their purpose. Formal systems that minutely measure performance and punish poor performance often produce what the political scientist Jane Mansbridge labels “sanction-based accountability,” a modern version of Taylorism that is based more on fear than loyalty. Such systems are premised on the idea that workers cannot be trusted to do their jobs in the absence of careful external monitoring; they are surefire ways of killing risk taking and innovation on the part of those being evaluated. Because these procedures, designed to increase accountability and therefore legitimacy, have the ultimate impact of making the government less effective, they paradoxically undercut its legitimacy.

THE BALANCE

The solution to the problem of improving democratic accountability therefore does not necessarily lie in the proliferation of formal accountability mechanisms or in absolute government transparency. The Confucians were right in arguing that no set of rules can ever be adequate to produce good results in all cases. There is an intangible factor that needs to be present to make the political system work, which is trust. Citizens must trust the government to make good decisions reflecting their interests most of the time, while governments for their part must earn that trust by being responsive and delivering on their promises. A properly autonomous bureaucracy is not one that is walled off from citizens, but rather one that Peter Evans describes as “embedded” in society and responsive to its demands. This constitutes a high-level equilibrium in which trust in government begets effective government, which in turn increases trust on all sides.

The opposite, low-level equilibrium, is one in which low-quality government breeds distrust on the part of citizens, who then withhold from the state both the compliance and resources necessary for government to function effectively. Lacking proper authority, such governments turn to coercion to achieve compliance. It is far easier to see how a political system falls out of a high-level equilibrium than rises out of a low-level one, which is perhaps why the latter are so much more prevalent around the world. It is also possible that as citizens' expectations and demands multiply, all governments are headed toward the low-level trap.

If there is a path out of this situation, it is tied to the two characteristics of effective governments described above: capacity and autonomy. Governments need the human and fiscal resources to do their jobs adequately, along with organizational capital. And the handoff of authority from the democratic principals to the bureaucratic agents needs to grant the latter a degree of autonomy matched to the existing level of capacity. No existing government ever achieved this kind of transition overnight; it usually occurs piecemeal, and in political struggle. Getting to Denmark is therefore a very long-term goal.

 

36

POLITICAL ORDER AND POLITICAL DECAY

Political development and biological evolution; political development and its relation to the other dimensions of development; the importance of international influences; getting to a modern state; the role of violence in political development; is liberal democracy a developmental universal?

The two volumes of this book have traced the origin, evolution, and decay of political institutions over time.

Political development is similar to biological evolution in a number of respects. The latter is based on the interaction of two principles, variation and selection. So too in politics: there is variation in the nature of political institutions; as a result of competition and interaction with the physical environment, certain institutions survive over time while others prove inadequate. And just as certain species turn out to be maladapted when their environments change, so too political decay occurs when institutions prove unable to adapt.

But while variation in biological evolution is random, human beings exercise some degree of agency over the design of their institutions. It is true, as authors like Friedrich A. Hayek have argued, that human beings are never knowledgeable or wise enough to be able to predict the outcomes of their efforts to design institutions or plan policies with full
ex ante
knowledge of the results.
1
But the exercise of human agency is not a one-shot affair: human beings learn from their mistakes and take actions to correct them in an iterative process. The constitution adopted by the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949 differed in significant ways from the constitution of the Weimar Republic, precisely because Germans had learned from the failure of democracy during the 1930s.