Political Order and Political Decay: From The Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

Francis Fukuyama “Political Order and Political Decay: From The Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy” Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014, 548 pp.

This present book is the companion volume to The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution—these two books trace the origin, evolution, and decay of political institutions over time.  I have that previous volume on my to-read list (posted 1/1/2016).  It would probably be better to read them in order but I did not even know there was a previous volume when I came across this present volume.  Fukuyama has written these as an attempt to update Samuel P. Huntington’s classic Political Order in Changing Societies, published in 1968.

Fukuyama maintains that three factors have shaped modern states: rule of law, a state able to exercise a monopoly on use of force, and political accountability.  These three factors often emerged independently in many countries or in various combinations in others.  China, for example, developed a state long before any existed in Europe, yet did not acquire either the rule of law or political accountability. India and much of the Muslim world, by contrast, developed something like the rule of law early on, but not strong states (or, in much of the Muslim world, political accountability). It was only in parts of Europe in the late 18th century, Fukuyama noted, that all three aspects started to come together simultaneously.

I found it most interesting that Fukuyama proposes that the sequencing of political development is important, arguing that “those countries in which democracy preceded modern state building have had much greater problems achieving high-quality governance than those that inherited modern states from absolutist times.”

Fukuyama’s discussion of the United States is used to illustrate the interaction of democracy and state building. Up through the 19th century, he notes, the United States had a weak, corrupt and patrimonial state. From the end of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century, however, the American state was transformed into a strong and effective independent actor, first by the Progressives and then by the New Deal. This change was driven by “a social revolution brought about by industrialization, which mobilized a host of new political actors with no interest in the old clientelist system.” The American example shows that democracies can indeed build strong states, but that doing so, Fukuyama argues, requires a lot of effort over a long time by powerful players not tied to the older order.  He then goes on to show how the U.S. governing system is in decay in the past few decades.

American political development has gone into reverse, its state has become weaker, less efficient and more corrupt. One cause is growing economic inequality and concentration of wealth, which has allowed elites to purchase immense political power and manipulate the system to further their own interests. Another cause is the domination of American political institutions by interest groups that “are collectively unrepresentative of the public as a whole.”  The result is a vicious cycle in which the American state deals poorly with major challenges, which reinforces the public’s distrust of the state, which leads to the state’s being starved of resources and authority, which leads to even poorer performance.

My Notes:

Definitions:

Patrimonal government (pg. 287): governments staffed by the family and friends of the ruler, and run for their benefit.

Neopatrimonial government (pg. 287): has the outward form of a modern state, with a constitution, presidents and prime ministers, a legal system, and pretensions of impersonality, but the actual operation of the government remains at core a matter of sharing state resources with friends and family.

Clientelism (pg 201) the trading of votes and political support for individual benefits.   Clientelism is an efficient form of political mobilization in societies with low levels of income and education and is therefore best understood as an early form of democracy. 

Pg. 6-7:  A background condition for all political life is institutions.  Institutions are stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior that persist beyond the tenure of individual leaders.  They are, in essence, persistent rules that shape, limit, and channel human behavior.  Post-Qaddafi Libya’s problem is lack of basic institutions, most notably a state.  Until there is a single, central source of authority that exercises a legitimate monopoly on use of force in that country, there will be no citizen security or the conditions for individuals to flourish.  At the other end of the scale, the U.S. has long-standing and powerful institutions, but they have been subject to political decay.  Institutions that are supposed to serve the U.S. public have been captured by private interests, such that democratic majorities have a difficult time asserting their control. 

Pg. 12:  In Western Europe, law was the first of the three major institutions to emerge (the other two: The State, and Democratic Accountability).  China never developed a transcendental religion, perhaps for this reason, it never developed a true rule of law. 

Pg. 24:  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 if they are not responsive to the citizens.

Pg. 34:  The timing of the spread of democracy in different countries depended on the changing relative positions of the middle class, the working class, landowning elites, and the peasantry.  In almost all cases, the rise and growth of middle-class groups were critical to the spread of democracy.  Globalization has facilitated and speeded the process.

Pg. 42:  There are six dimensions of development: Economic Growth, Social Mobilization, and Ideas/Legitimacy.  And the three political development dimensions: The State, Rule of Law, and Democracy.  All six interact.

Pg. 53:  In 1996 it was reported in India that fully 48 percent of teachers failed to show up for their jobs.  A follow-up study in 2008 got the same result.

Pg. 82:  Gaming the political system for private gain is what economists label ‘rent seeking.’

Pg. 96:  At the root of Greece and Italy’s problems today is the fact that both countries have used public employment as a source of political patronage, leading to bloated and inefficient public services and ballooning budget deficits.  This is similar to what Britain and the U.S. started the nineteenth century with.

Pg. 198:  All modern societies began with patrimonial states, governments that were staffed with the friends and family of the ruler, or those of the elites who dominated the society.  Modern government—that is, a state bureaucracy that is impersonal and universal—develops only over time, and in many cases fails to develop at all.

Pg. 201:   the trading of votes and political support for individual benefits, Clientelism,  rather than programmatic policies, and distinguished from elite patronage systems in which the scope of clientelist recruitment is far more limited and less well organized.  Clientelism is an efficient form of political mobilization in societies with low levels of income and education and is therefore best understood as an early form of democracy.  The principle of effective government is meritocracy; the principle of democracy is popular participation.  These two principles can be made to work together, but there is always an underlying tension between them.

Pg. 227:  In the year 1500, differences in levels of per capita wealth among Europe, pre-Columbian America, China, and the Middle East would not have been all that great, but in the past two hundred years there has been a great divergence by Europe and the West (which industrialized first) from the others.  The difference in economic outcomes corresponds to a difference in political institutions.  There is a strong correlation between the richest countries and those that have the strongest institutions: countries with effective, relatively uncorrupt states; enforceable transparent legal rules; and open access to legal and political institutions.

Pg. 260:  It appears that strong, modern states were tremendously helped in their formation by the needs for organization imposed by war.  Latin America countries did not experience these interstate wars as did Europe beginning with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, continuing through the wars of Italian and German unification, and ending with the cataclysms of the two world wars.  High levels of military competition led to the formation and consolidation of strong, modern states.  At the same time, rapid industrialization was drawing millions of peasants off the countryside and into dense, diverse cities.  Both external war and internal revolution succeeded in wiping out entire social classes like France’s venal officeholders before the revolution. (pg. 391)

Pg. 317:  A much better American policy in Afghanistan following the initial rout of the Taliban would have been creating a coalition of tribal leaders, warlords, and other power brokers who would among them have agreed to keep the peace and suppress al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.  Instead of attempting to build a democracy in Iraq, the U.S. could have kept Saddam Hussein’s army intact and put it under the charge of a general with no ties to the old regime.

Pg. 357:  China represents the one world civilization that never developed a true rule of law.  In ancient Israel, the Christian West, the Muslim world, and India, law originated in a transcendental religion and was interpreted and implemented by a hierarchy of religious scholars and jurists.  The keepers of the law in each case were a social group separate from the political authorities—Jewish judges, Hindu Brahmins, Catholic priests and bishops, the Muslim ulama.  The degree to which law limited the arbitrary power of rulers depended on the institutional separation of the legal-religious hierarchy from the political.  In China, by contrast, there was never a transcendental religion, and there was never a pretense that law had a divine origin.  Law was seen as a rational human instrument by which the state exercised its authority and maintained public order.  However, as the ruler was the source of all law he was not bound by it—this is rule by law rather than of law.

Pg. 366:  In China no one technically owns an apartment or house.  One owns the equivalent of a lease whose term extends up to seventy years, which is acquired in exchange for land-use fees.  Laws regulating contracts similarly try to square individual rights with ultimate state power.  They fall short of full freedom of contract because they retain provisions that allow the state to manage contracts or void them entirely under poorly defined force majeure conditions.

Pg. 399:  Between 1970 and 2010, the number of democracies around the world increased from about 35 to nearly 120, or some 60 percent of the world’s countries.  This is considered the Third Wave of democratization: the first long wave began in the 1820s and continued through the end of the nineteenth century, while the second shortwave happened in the immediate aftermath of WWII.  The Third Wave began with the democratic transitions in Spain and Portugal in the early 1970s and continued through the end of military rule in Greece and Turkey, followed by a series of Latin American countries including Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, then it moved to Asia with the democratization of the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan; and culminated in the collapse of communism and the transition to democracy in Eastern Europe and some of the successor states of the former Soviet Union.  Some are calling the Arab Spring a fourth wave.

Pg. 405:  It is important to note that the two components of liberal democracy—liberal rule of law and mass political participation—are separable political goals that initially tended to be favored by different social groups.  Thus the middle-class authors of the French Revolution were not committed democrats in the sense that they wanted an immediate expansion of the franchise to peasants and workers. They wanted protection of personal property and personal freedoms of the bourgeoisie.  The same happened in England during the Glorious Revolution as well as in the U.S. during its revolution.  (Women could not vote in the U.S. until 1920).

Pg. 427:  Predictions that Arab societies will not be able to sustain liberal democracy may prove correct in the longer run.  Four years into the Arab Spring and it seems that only Tunisia, the country where it began, will sustain a liberal democracy.  A stable, well-functioning liberal democracy involves the interaction of a number of different institutions: not just elections for a president or legislature but also well-organized political parties, an independent court system, an effective state bureaucracy, and a free and vigilant media.  In addition, there are a number of cultural conditions necessary: politicians and voters cannot have a winner-take-all attitude toward their opponents, they must respect rules more than individuals, and they must share a collective sense of identity and nationhood.

Pg. 440:  There is a difference in the way that economists and sociologists define the middle class.  Economists tend to define middle class in income terms.  A typical way is simply to choose some band like the middle three quintiles of the income distribution, or to count those individuals who fall within 0.5 to 1.5 times the median income.  Sociologists tend to look, not at income, but how that income is earned—occupational status, level of education, and assets.  For the purpose of understanding the political implications of a growing middle class, the sociological approach is vastly preferable.  A strong idle class with some assets and education is more likely to believe in the need for both property rights and democratic accountability. 

Pg. 445:  The U.S. currently provides a laboratory to determine what happens to liberal democracy if the middle class starts to shrink—the top 1 percent of families in the U.S. took home 9 percent of GDP in 1970 and 23.5 percent in 2007. (Of course, the author has here used the economist’s definition rather than the sociologists).

Pg. 460:  Surprisingly, the federal workforce has been capped at approximately 2.25 million employees since the end of WWII, and subject to repeated bouts of downsizing; in 2005 it numbered about 1.8 million.  What has expanded are, first, a series of public authorities that perform public functions while remaining separate from government, and an army of unaccountable contractors who do everything from providing cafeteria services to protecting diplomats to managing the computer systems for National Security Agency.

Pg. 467:  The three categories of political institutions—state, rule of law, and democracy—are embodied in the three branches of government of a modern liberal democracy—the executive, the judiciary, and the legislature. 

Pg. 479:  The explosion of interest groups and lobbying in Washington has been astonishing, with 175 registered lobbying firms in 1971 rising to 1,500 ten years later, and then to more than 12,000 by 2013.

Pg. 541:  Liberal democracy clearly does not represent a human universal since it came into being only a few centuries ago.  However, it can be argued that it does so as a matter of general political evolution, much as band-, tribe-, and state-level institutions came to be dominant forms of political organization across different cultures and regions at different historical moments.  That is, this kind of regime becomes necessary in conjunction with the other dimensions of development—economic, growth, social mobilization, and changes in ideas.  Band- and tribal-level societies had no state or law enforced by third parties, though they arguably had a strong form of accountability.  State-level societies presiding over agrarian economies could persist for centuries, sometimes with law but never with democratic accountability.  The functional need for a balanced regime incorporating all three components becomes necessary only as high levels of economic growth kick in and countries modernize along their economic and social dimensions.