Political Order and Political Decay (85 page)

FIGURE 29.
Dimensions of Development

Modernization without development has been widespread among many developing countries outside of East Asia. It has important political consequences when compared to the classic path of modernization via industrialization. It can destabilize existing traditional political systems that do not provide routes to political participation—the classic Huntington scenario of political decay. But it can also lead to a stable system of clientelism and elite coalitions built around the distribution of rents. Since the division of labor is much less extensive when there is no vigorous development of a capitalist industrial sector, different types of social groups emerge compared to nineteenth-century Europe. There is neither a large emerging group of middle-class individuals, professionals with higher levels of education, nor a strong industrial proletariat. Rather, such societies have a large, amorphous group of urbanized poor who eke out livings in the informal sector. Many of these people can be highly entrepreneurial when given access to capital and markets. The contemporary microfinance industry and property rights movements are built around providing the poor with such tools.
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But there is no clear path from informal employment to true growth- and job-generating industrialization. Clientelism thrives under these conditions, since the individualized benefits offered by politicians, and the ability to generate rents in the public sector, are often a much more effective path to economic security than the private sector. Politics then centers around zero-sum struggles over rent distribution rather than over programmatic policies. This kind of clientelism poses a big obstacle to reform of the public sector and the upgrading of state capacity, as indicated by the dotted lines in Figure 30.

FIGURE 30.
Modernization Without Development

Ideas concerning legitimacy are an independent dimension of development and have a large effect on the way political institutions evolve. Their primary impact is on the nature of social mobilization. Identity politics—based on nationalism, ethnicity, or religion—has frequently trumped class, or acted as a substitute for class, as the rallying point for social mobilization. This happened in nineteenth-century Europe, when workers were more easily mobilized by appeals to nationalism than to their status as workers. It is also true in the contemporary Middle East, where religion is a powerful mobilizational tool. This has diverted political agendas from questions of economic policy into issues like the establishment of sharia and fights over the status of women. In Kenya and Nigeria, politics has descended into interethnic struggles over rents. As the cases of Indonesia and Tanzania indicated, this was not a natural or inevitable outcome: political leaders in these countries formulated alternative concepts of national identity that reduced the salience of ethnicity.

ALL GOOD THINGS DO NOT NECESSARILY GO TOGETHER

The three components of political order that constitute modern liberal democracy—the state, rule of law, and accountability—are in many ways complementary. In order to be effective and impersonal, states need to operate through law. The most successful absolutist regimes were those that possessed rule by rather than of law, such as the Chinese Empire that could rule vast territories and populations through a bureaucracy, and the Prussian Rechtsstaat that established clear property rights and laid the basis for Germany's economic development. Accountability, whether formal through democratic elections, or informal through a government that serves the substantive needs of its population, is also critical to the good functioning of a state. States accumulate and use power, but they are much more effective and stable if they exercise legitimate authority instead and achieve voluntary compliance on the part of citizens. When governments cease being accountable, they invite passive noncompliance, protest, violence, and in extreme cases, revolution. When liberal democracies work well, state, law, and accountability all reinforce one another (see
Figure 31
).

There is, nonetheless, a permanent tension among the three components of political order. We have seen many examples of the collision of the imperatives of state building and democracy. Effective modern states are built around technical expertise, competence, and autonomy. This is why they could be established under authoritarian conditions, from Prussia and Meiji Japan to Singapore and China today. Democracy, on the other hand, demands political control over the state that in turn reflects popular wishes, and indeed ever-higher levels of participation. This control is necessary and legitimate with regard to the political ends that states pursue. But political control can take the form of contradictory and/or overly detailed mandates, and often seeks to use the state itself as a source of rents and employment. Clientelism emerges in young democracies precisely because the state and its resources constitute useful piggy banks for democratic politicians seeking to mobilize supporters. The nascent American state was captured and controlled by democratic politicians and has been repatrimonialized through interest group influence over Congress. This same process has taken place in countless developing world democracies.

FIGURE 31.
Complementarities and Tensions Among the Political Dimensions of Development

There is also a tension between a high-quality state and rule of law. Effective states operate through law, but formal law can itself become an obstacle to the exercise of an appropriate level of administrative discretion. This tension was well understood in ancient China and was reflected in the debate between Legalists and Confucians. So too in modern debates over rules versus discretion in administrative law. Rules need to be clear and impersonal, but every legal system adjusts the application of rules to fit particular circumstances. Prosecutors are allowed to exercise discretion over when and how to charge defendants; judges exercise discretion in sentencing. The best bureaucracies have the autonomy to use judgment in decision making, to take risks, and to innovate. The worst mechanically carry out detailed rules written by other people. Ordinary citizens are driven crazy by bureaucrats who can't use common sense and insist on mindless rule following. Policy makers occasionally need to take risks and try things that haven't been done before. Excessive deference to rules often makes this impossible and reinforces government's status quo bent.

There is also a long-standing tension between rule of law and democratic accountability. For rule of law to exist, it must be binding on all citizens, including democratic majorities. In many democracies, majorities are content to violate the rights of individuals and minorities, and find legal rules to be inconvenient obstacles to their goals. On the other hand, the ultimate legitimacy of law itself arises out of the degree to which it reflects the norms of justice of the larger community. Moreover, laws are administered by the human beings who operate the judicial branches of government. These individuals have their own beliefs and opinions that may not correspond to the desires of the broader public. Judicial activism can be as much of a danger as weak or politically compliant judiciaries.

Finally, democracy can be in tension with itself: efforts to increase levels of democratic participation and transparency can actually decrease the democratic representativeness of the system as a whole. The great mass of individuals living in democracy are not able by background or temperament to make complex public policy decisions, and when they are asked to do so repeatedly the process is often taken over by well-organized interest groups that can manipulate the process to serve their narrow purposes. Excessive transparency can undermine deliberation.

The tensions that exist between the different components of political order mean that all good things do not necessarily go together. A good liberal democracy is one that holds all three components in some kind of balance. But state, law, and accountability can impede one another's development as well. This is why the sequence in which different institutions were introduced becomes important.

THE INTERNATIONAL DIMENSION

I have portrayed the six dimensions of development as interacting in the context of single societies in a closed system. But the truth of the matter is that every single one of these dimensions is heavily influenced by what goes on at an international level. This is most evident with respect to ideas concerning legitimacy. Well before the Industrial Revolution, ideas could pass from one society to another—indeed, from one civilization to another—and were in fact often the main agents of social change. Islam as an ideology transformed a marginal and backward tribal people on the Arabian peninsula into a major world power, and spread as far as Southeast Asia. Chinese Confucianism migrated to neighboring Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, where it induced the formation of Chinese-style institutions even in the absence of invasion and occupation. Buddhism crossed from India into Southeast and East Asia, where it often became, unlike in its home country, something akin to a state religion. Ideological diffusion has of course become much more intense with the development of modern communications technology. Books and newspapers were critical to the rise and spread of nationalism as an organizing principle. Liberalism, Marxism, fascism, Islamism, and democracy all readily crossed borders in the twentieth century due to electronic technologies from radio and television to the Internet and social media. It is hard to envision the democratic transitions that occurred in sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990s absent the power of the images of the crumbling Berlin Wall that echoed around the world. Similarly, the timing of protests against autocratic regimes during the Arab Spring was driven by television stations like Al Jazeera and by Twitter and Facebook as much as by domestic causes. By the early twenty-first century, democracy has become truly globalized.

Unfortunately, many of the mechanisms for the transmission of institutions across borders were much less gentle: through conquest, occupation, and often the physical enslavement or elimination of indigenous populations. But even the most coercive colonial powers found that they could not re-create their own institutions in different places at will: geography, climate, local populations, and indigenous institutions all interacted to create new forms that diverged from those in the home country.

The most successful instances of institutional transfer were those in which colonial powers settled lightly populated territories with their own people. In North America, Australia, Argentina, Chile, and parts of South Africa, the colonial powers encountered hunter-gatherer and pastoral peoples who were not, with some exceptions, organized into state-level societies. Conquest was often prolonged, bitter, and bloody, but in the end relatively little survived of indigenous political institutions. In Peru and Mexico, the Spanish encountered densely populated state-level societies. But the Inca and Aztec state institutions were neither old nor highly sophisticated, and under the pressure of conquest and disease disintegrated even more rapidly than the tribal societies of North and South America. The Spanish conquests became settler colonies, albeit ones whose Creole populations were smaller relative to the indigenous peoples over whom they ruled and with whom they intermarried. The institutions implanted in Latin America were therefore similar to those of Spain and Portugal at the time of settlement, whether mercantilist in Peru and Mexico, or liberal as in Argentina.

Settler regimes never simply replicated the institutions of their home countries, however, since transplanted populations confronted local conditions that were often substantially different from the ones they left behind. Specific evolution created great variation in outcomes. Thus climate and geography played important roles in shaping the slave societies that emerged in different parts of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the American South. These reinforced imported European traditions of hierarchy and authoritarian government, and in the American South reversed the trend toward increasing social equality that characterized the rest of the country.