Session 1 slide deck for Refactor Camp 2016, "Weird Political Economy"

1. The Weird State of the
State
A DEEP DIVE into Fukuyama’s Career Bookend Masterpieces…
1. The End of History and the Last Man (1989/1992)
2. The Origins of Political Order (2011)
3. Political Order and Political Decay (2014)
With CAMEO appearances of ideas from Mass Flourishing,
Dictator’s Handbook, How Nations Fail…

2. Francis Fukuyama Who is he? (hint: not John Galt)
• Political scientist (GMU, JHU, Stanford)
• Political philosophy at Cornell under Allan Bloom
• …who was student of Alexander Kojeve, interpreter of
Hegel
• Member of Telluride, along with Paul Wolfowitz
• Toyed with French ideas (Derrida), didn’t like ‘em
• Student of Samuel Huntington
• Who wrote Political Order in Changing Societies
• …and Clash of Civilizations
• …Fareed Zakaria was also a student (The Future of
Freedom, The Post-American World, editor of Foreign
Policy, CNN guy)
• Worked at RAND for a bit
• Wrote essay in National Interest, End of History (1989)
• Made it a book, End of History and the Last Man, 1992
• Associated with neocon coterie in Bush Sr. admin
• Wrote some other good stuff that nobody will remember
• Broke from the neocons ~2004
• Wrote 2-volume magnum opus
• The Origins of Political Order (2011)
• Political Order and Political Decay (2014)
tl;dr: a product of the
American academic-
political complex, with
distinguished lineage
and a hand in history-
shaping

3. Francis Fukuyama Who is he really?
• A Japanese guy (this mattered differently in 1989 than in
2012-14)
• An intellectually honest guy in politics
• In the right place (political science) at the right time
(1989)…
• …with the right BIG IDEA (End of History) that was
interesting, whether or not it was/is right or wrong
• …and framed conversations for a critical decade
• …when people were hungry for relief from post-Cold-
War/Internet era anomie
• … and has spent the last decade working out all the
details of his theories in careful, exhausting level of detail
tl;dr: an intellectually honest and high-integrity guy in a field
not known for either of those traits, who wielded influence at
a critical time, learned a lot, dared to change his mind with
new facts, and cared enough to write it all down

4. Francis Fukuyama No, who is he really?
• An institutional democrat with strong statist tendencies
• Probably the one guy who knows the most about what
democracy means as both an abstract political concept
and as a living, practiced global idea, warts and all
• Somebody whose intellectual faith in democracy has
been harshly tested and has come out stronger
• …but left him with a bit of yearning for a bit of benevolent
authoritarianism of a Confucian-Scandinavian fusion
• A guy with something of a blind-spot when it comes to
corporatist economies
• …and a tendency to overstate the strengths of the
continental European model of democracy while
understating those of the Anglo-Saxon model
• A guy who appreciates the significance of markets more
than many institutionalists, but…
• …underestimates them anyway
tl;dr: somebody worth taking really seriously in forming your
opinions of politics, history, globalization, societal change…

5. The End of History
1. History evolves to an asymptote
1. A double-take on Hegel via Kojeve)
2. …but this is not the naive historicism that Popper critiques
3. Clever bit is identifying “democracy” as the end-state
4. …which makes ALL the difference
5. WHY? Shift from Carsean finite to infinite “end” games
1. Other ends = somebody (‘“good guys”) wins (finite)
2. Democracy as end = “we all continue playing” (infinite)
2. That asymptote is defined by universal spread of democracy
1. Notion of “democratic peace” (that democracies rarely go to
war with each other) is consistent
3. Does not mean events or evolution stop, anymore than victory
of DNA over other replicator molecules “stopped” evolution
4. And characterized by “Last Man” psychology
1. Derived from Nietzsche “men without backs” idea
2. Doesn’t get as much attention but very interesting

6. Impact
1. Neocons co-opted it with a mix of bad faith and misunderstanding
1. …as convenient code for “America wins Cold War = Our Destiny”
2. …as basic navigation aid to post-USSR chaos
3. …as justification (to the “winner” of the “end” the spoils)
2. His former teacher (Huntington) and his later student (Zakaria) didn’t like
it…but couldn’t really counterpunch in Fukuyama’s weight class
3. Derrida didn’t like it, but his criticisms were more whiny than substantive
4. Regular Marxists whined about it, meh
5. Idiots said “haha you’re wrong” by misunderstanding both the events of
post-89, and the book’s thesis
6. tl;dr: Fukuyama was right, but it does not mean what you think it means
7. Think of it as “slouching towards democracy, and leveling up to games
beyond”

7. Montage of Relevant Stuff: 1989 - 2016
1. Fall of Berlin Wall, Tiananmen Square (1989)
2. THE INTERNET HAPPENED
3. Iraq War 1
4. Chechnya, Kosovo, Rwandan genocide…
5. Liberalization of India (1991), Death of Deng Xiaoping,(1997)
6. 9/11 —> Afghan War —> Iraq War 2 —> ‘War on Terror’
7. MOAR INTERNETZ! and subprime crisis too
8. BRICs: Putin’s Russia 2.0, post-Deng China, post-Nehru-Gandhi India, Brazil (??)
9. Failed nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan
10. LOTS MOAR INTERNETZ! AND MOBILEZ!
11. Decline of Al Qaeda and rise of ISIS. Arab Spring
12. Rise of Far Right and Far Left in Europe and a debt crisis
13. #Occupy, Tea Party, Anonymous, Wikileaks
14. SERIOUSLY RIDICULOUS AMOUNTS OF INTERNETZ
15. Syria, Ukraine, Obama deciding NOT invade Syria, Russia
16. NOW, REALLY EMBARRASSING AMOUNTS OF INTERNETZ
17. AND IoT AND DRONES. EVEN FUKUYAMA GOT A DRONE
18. Trump and Bernie and Scottish independence vote and Brexit
19. Faltering of ISIS, Syrian refugee crisis, Europe terror rise, Turkey failed coup

8. HAHA THE END OF HISTORY IS CONTINUING
TO HAPPEN
AND A LOT OF PEOPLE DON’T LIKE IT
Crony Capitalists, Reactionaries, Frustrated
Marxists, Deep State establishment wusses,
tribalists, legalists, terrorists, thought police,
identity regulators, cops who like to shoot black
people, Trump, Singapore Fanboys, Racists,
Boohoo
Yay Liberal Democracy Yay Internetz
Yay (Liberal Democracy+Interenetz)?

9. Big Point
The “End of History” is a real signal
The inexorable rise of the Internet is the ONLY
OTHER signal that matters in the last 30 years
Everything else is noise, no matter how bloody,
sad, stupid or urgent-seeming
So BIG question is….
Does this signal harmonize or interfere with the
End of History?

10. Big Descriptive Thesis across both volumes
There are THREE factors of liberal democracy
1. A strong state*
1. First emerged in China, 300 BC, improved under Ottomans etc.
2. Emerged in modern form in Germany, ~1700 AD
2. Rule of Law
1. Originally religious law (India, Egypt? Sumer?)
2. Then in slowly secularizing form in Europe, post 1100 AD
3. Accountability (coups don’t count)
1. Ancient Greece had whig origin myth version of the idea
2. Real deal: Magna Carta onwards from feudal parliament roots
3. Slow expansion of franchise and mechanisms
4. Okay, maybe there are 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th factors:
1. Modern Markets, post-1800 (Edmund Phelps, Raghuram Rajan
speech)
2. Individualism as a construct, post-1100 (my own hypothesis)
3. Innovation infrastructure (most philosophical technologists)
4. International order: Foreign policy, multinational institutions like EU
5. “Deviant Globalization”: The book, the talk: https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Jz4E2FRslg

11. Null hypothesis from Dictator’s Handbook
•It’s mostly just window dressing, and democracies and
absolutist polities are just points in the same space
•Democrats just rely on larger group to survive, but otherwise
respond to the same incentives in exactly the same ways
•This is mostly consistent with Fukuyama actually, DH is
“behaviorist”, and FF is “cognitive-behaviorist” model
•The BIG difference is that in Fukuyama model, the “middle
class” is better understood through long-term institutional
volition and universalist political goals rather than narrow goals
and responses to incentives
•For middle class, the rest of society free riding on the fruits of its
political actions is an acceptable cost

12. Devil-in-the-Details Supporting Descriptive Theses
1. The sequence matters
2. There are a few ways to get it right
1. Germany (invented the modern state)
2. The UK (invented modern accountability)
3. The US (invented modern clientelism and vetocracy)
4. Japan (getting to rule of law via rule by law)
5. India (mired in clientelism, like US in 1850s-1900)
6. China (trying to marry democracy and pre-Mao statism)
3. There are FAR more ways to get it wrong
4. When you get it wrong, you get institutional collapse BUT
5. This is NOT the same as civilizational collapse
6. This is NOT the same as the End-of-History process unwinding

13. Big Normative Thesis across both volumes
You need to develop mechanisms that create a DYNAMIC
BALANCE among the three pieces
Strong
State
Rule
of Law
Accountability

14. …though he clearly favors something more like this
Strong
State
Rule
of Law
Accountability
“More equal than
others” in balance

15. Page 41, Political Order and Political Decay, data from World Bank
Strength is about effectiveness, not size

16. Page 40, Political Order and Political Decay, data from World Bank
Lack of effectiveness gets you corruption*

17. “Getting to Denmark”
1. There is no right answer, but UK-style parliamentary democracy
over US-style vetocracy
2. …with a stiff dose of Northern European style social democrat
mechanisms (but not EU-level US-style institutions)
3. …and a dose of benevolent corporatism,
4. …and a slight advantage for Confucians over Legalists
5. Gets you to “to Denmark”
6. The Notional Denmark that is…
1. …and here he backslides slightly from a great infinite game
end-of-history argument
2. …to a specific, historicist, Popper-would-hate-it, PASTORAL
end-of-history
7. BUT these are not reasons to throw it out, they are weaknesses in
model to mitigate

18. This brings us to…

19. Evolution of Theorizing
1. Pre-Axial Age (until 800 BC): “Pristine” state formation, not much evidence of
theorizing
2. Axial-Age (800 BC to 800 AD) Monarchist theories of competitive statecraft, not
cleanly separated from military and religious theories. Sun Tzu (China), Kautilya
(India), Plato (Greece) thinkers
3. Medieval Horizontalism (800 AD - 1600): Fragmented world, limited grand
theorizing: Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), Machiavelli’s Prince (1513)
4. 1647: Treaty of Westphalia, “birth” of modern state
5. 1647-1800: Early-modern political theorizing, largely in a Eurocentric vacuum of
data: Hobbes, Rousseau.
6. Modern: 1800-1950:
1. Political science: Various bad-faith theories of dubious intellectual merit, built
around the assumptions of Mercantilism, Marxism, Libertarianism, Capitalism
etc.
2. Political economy: Starting to get serious, get beyond Mercantilism
3. Sociology: Good foundations of sociology: Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936),
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), Max Weber (1864-1920), Marx (1818-1883),
Nietzsche (1844-1900)
7. Cold War (1950-1990): Reign of “Modernization Theory” in US-USSR competitive
context. Theory subservient to political doctrine and “party ideologue” thinking.
Asia, Africa and Latin America as “test set” for theories developed in the Europe-
America “sample set.” Result: resounding failure.
8. 1968: Huntington publishes Political Order in Changing Societies

20. 50 years ago: 1966-74 as a Breakpoint Comparable to 1647 (treaty of Westphalia)
1. 1966: Botswana founded and begins rise as ‘African counterexample’
2. 1968: Fifth Institutional Act (full dictatorship) in Brazil
3. 1968: Japan becomes 2nd largest economy
4. 1969: Internet is turned on, RIP Industrial Age
5. 1969: Apollo 11, Peak Industrial Age technology model
6. 1969-71: Cultural Revolution in China
7. 1971-75: Rise of Indira Gandhi, independence of Bangladesh
8. 1971: Bretton-Woods agreement ends, RIP Gold Standard
9. 1971: Idi Amin rises in Uganda
10. 1973: First oil shock, from $3 to $12 a barrel
11. 1974: Peak Centralization, Nixon impeachment, RIP Industrial social order
12. 1974: Venkat is born, almost nobody notices
Other things from that era: War on Drugs (1971), Vietnam protests, SALT I in Helsinki
(1970)…
Basically, between 1966 and 1974 it became clear that…
1. The post-WW-II world order was on its way down.
2. There were modern playbooks other than the Euro-American playbook
3. A generation of leaders shaped by WW II and anti-colonialism died
4. The technology model peaked and birthed its own disruptor
5. “Westernization” theory in the guise of modernization theory had failed
6. A new game was starting and a positioning scramble was ON

21. Assumptions of Post-Modern Political Theorizing
1. The Western historical experience is not universal
2. Without institutions, ideologies are irrelevant
3. There are non-Whig and non-Western playbooks
4. Democratic transitions may involve authoritarianism
5. In the short-medium term, history matters more than theory
6. Technology is the prime driver of sociopolitical change…
7. …but constrains rather than determines sociopolitical order

22. Part 1: Before the State
Part 2: State Building
Part 3: The Rule of Law
Part 4: Accountable Government
Part 5: Towards a Theory of Political Development

23. Part 1: Before the State
Big idea: Replace Hobbes/Rousseau/Marx/Whig/Game-
Theoretic theorizing with empirical tribalism models
1. Biology matters: kinship and reciprocal altruism
2. mechanical vs. organic solidarity
3. band —> unilinear tribes —> cognatic tribes —>
patron-client tribes
4. property rights: usufactory versus ownership
5. Big Man law, blood feud laws, scaling for warfare
6. Tribalism to patronage
7. Pristine versus competitive state formation
Examples to remember: Papua New Guinea wantoks as little
commons vetocracies, pastoral nomads and access rights,
early clientelism example in Rome

24. There are, however, rules about how blood feuds are to be pursued. The kinsman
of a slain Nuer man may go after the perpetrator, and also any of the perpetrator’s
close male kin, but has no right to touch the mother’s brother, father’s sister, or
mother’s sister, since they are not members of the slayer’s lineage…Parties to a
dispute go through elaborate rituals to prevent escalation, such as sending
the spear that injured a man to the victim’s village, so that it can be magically
treated to prevent the wound from becoming fatal…
…But as tribal societies themselves evolved, the strict genealogical basis of the
segmentary lineage gave way to cognatic tribes, and tribes that accepted
members that could make no claim of actual kinship. If we define tribe more
broadly to include …patrons and clients linked through reciprocity and personal
ties, then tribalism remains one of the great constants of political development…
…In Rome, for example, the agnatic descent groups…were known as gentes. But
already by the time of the early Republic the gentes began to accumulate large
numbers of nonkin followers known as clientes. These consisted of freedmen,
tenants, household retainers, and in later periods poor plebeians willing to offer
their support in return for cash or other favors…
Tribalism

25. Tribal Societies versus Sovereign States
1. Tribal societies versus states
1. First, they possess a centralized source of authority
2. Second, that source of authority is backed by a monopoly of the
legitimate means of coercion
3. Third, the authority of the state is territorial rather than kin based
4. Fourth, states are far more stratified and unequal than tribal
societies
5. Finally, states are legitimated by much more elaborate forms of
religious belief
2. Theories of pristine state formation: as voluntary social contract, as
hydraulic engineering project (Egypt), as response to population density,
as product of violence and compulsion, as product of charismatic
authority
3. Why transition to states is not universal in all pristine tribal conditions:
geography
4. “It is not clear how important it is to develop such a theory, however, since
the vast majority of states around the world were the products of
competitive rather than pristine state formation.”

26. Part 2: Pristine State Building
Big idea: There are multiple ways to exit tribalism, which
create different flavors of initial condition bias, reflecting
history and geography
1. Feudalism as beginnings of territorial states
2. War as key force: 10% mobilization in early China
3. Impersonal state vs family: Eunuchs, Priesthood
4. Ideas matter: Confucianism vs. Legalism
5. Geography: role of cities, large plains
6. Institutions can grow despite cyclic promotion/resistance
Three examples: Early China, Early India, Islamic world

27. “Shang Yang began his career as a minister in the state of Wei before moving to
what was then the relatively backward state of Qin and becoming the chief
adviser to its leader, Duke Xiao. Upon his arrival, he struggled with the existing
patrimonial administration. He attacked their inherited privileges and eventually
succeeded in replacing hereditary office with a system of twenty ranks that were
to be awarded on the basis of merit—meaning, in the case of this frontier state,
military merit. Land, retainers, women slaves, and clothing were all to be
allocated by the state on the basis of performance….
“Confucianism is an intensely backward-looking doctrine that roots legitimacy in
ancient practices…Family and kinship were at the core of that patrimonial order,
and Confucianism can in many ways be seen as an ideology that builds a broad
moral doctrine of the state outward from a model based on the family….
“Mao, like Shang Yang before him, saw traditional Confucian morality and the
Chinese family as obstacles to social progress. His anti-Confucian campaign
sought to delegitimize familistic morality; party, state, and commune were the
new structures that would henceforth bind Chinese citizens to one another.”
China — prototypical early state

28. “The essence of the rule of law is a body of rules reflecting the community’s
sense of justice that is higher than the wishes of the person who happens
to be the king. This was the case in India…The jati system arises out of the
concept of karma…The only possibilities for for social mobility existed…
between lifetimes
“…under the Mauryan empire…[t]he core state of Magadha does not
appear to have had any modern features whatsoever…there was no
feudalism in the Chinese or European sense…
“…there was never the social basis for the development of a tyrannical
state that could concentrate power so effectively that it could aspire to
reach deeply into society and change its fundamental social institutions.
“Individual freedom in India has been limited much more by things like
kinship ties, caste rules, religious obligations, and customary practices. But
in some sense, it was the tyranny of cousins that allowed Indians to resist
the tyranny of tyrants.”
India — prototypical early rule of law

29. 6. The world is a garden,
its walls are the state.
2. There can be no military
without wealth.
3. The reaya produce
the wealth.
1. There can be no royal
authority without the
military.
4. The sultan keeps the reaya
by making justice reign.
5. Justice requires
harmony in the world.
7. The state’s prop is
the religious law.
8. There is no support for
the religious law without
royal authority.
Ottoman
“Circle of Equity”
Middle East — beginnings of synthesis, accountability

30. The Importance of Eunuchs — short-circuiting kinship as a driver
“Socrates points out [in the Republic] that sexual desire and the desire for
children are natural, but that ties to the family compete with loyalty to the
city that the guardians protect. It is for that reason, he argues, that they must
be told the “noble lie” that they are children of the earth, and not of biological
parents.
“Eunuchs played a critical role in the functioning of the system as well. Unlike
eunuchs in China or the Byzantine Empire, Muslim eunuchs were almost all
foreigners who were born outside of Muslim lands…They shared with the
Mamluks the situation of being cut off from their families and hence were
devotedly loyal to their masters. But their sexual condition allowed them to
play an important function as educators of young Mamluks.
“Machiavelli captures the essence of the Ottoman state: it was far more
centralized and impersonally managed than France in the early sixteenth
century, and in that way more modern…Like the manor lord in Europe, the
timar holder provided local government functions like security and the
dispensing of justice.

31. Part 3: Rule of Law
Big idea: Rule of Law versus Rule by Law
1. Rule of Law constrains emperor,
2. Rule by Law simply codifies imperial intentions
3. Rule of Law usually starts with religion
4. Evolution: Tribal law to customary to common
5. Common law versus Constructivism
6. Hayek idea: Law before legislation
7. Transition from status to contracts
8. Property rights evolved due to Church war against family
Examples to remember: Ancient India, Catholic Church,
Islamic Clergy, modern American supreme court

32. “The monk Gratian, trained in the legal curriculum, analyzed thousands of
canons issued over the past centuries; he reconciled and synthesized
them into a single body of canon law. This was published in 1140 in a
massive legal treatise of some fourteen hundred pages, the Concordance of
Discordant Canons, or the Decretum. Gratian established a hierarchy
among divine, natural, positive, and customary law, and established rational
procedures by which contradictions among them could be resolved.
“Where both India and the Middle East differed from Europe was in the fact
that their religious establishments did not extract themselves from the
political order. There was never anything like a Brahmin pope, and while
there was a Muslim caliph, after the Umayyads he was largely a captive
of the dominant political ruler in the Islamic lands.
“Rule of law existed in medieval Europe, the Middle East, and India well
before any of these regions made a transition to modernity. Rulers in all of
these societies acknowledged that they lived under a law that they
themselves did not create. And yet, the degree to which this would impose
real restrictions on their behavior depended not just on this theoretical
acknowledgment but also on the institutional conditions surrounding the
formulation and enforcement of law.”

33. “The Common Law is called common because it is
not particularistic. That is, the myriad customary
rules that governed the different regions of England
were replaced by a single Common Law, in which a
precedent in one part of the realm was applicable to
the rest of the kingdom (the principle of stare
decisis).”

34. “Constructivism, Hayek argued, was a conceit of the last
three hundred years, and particularly of a series of
French thinkers including Descartes and Voltaire, who
thought the human mind was sufficient to understand
the workings of human society. This led to what Hayek
regarded as huge mistakes, such as the French and
Bolshevik revolutions, in which top-down political power
was used to reorder the whole of society based on a
preconceived notion of social justice.”

35. “This body of secular law became known as the
kanunname (derived from the term “canon law” used in
Europe), and was used in areas where traditional Islamic
jurisprudence failed to establish adequate rules”
[Interesting factoid: In hindi, the law is more often referred to as
‘kanun’ (the Urdu word) than ‘nyaya’ (the Sanskrit word) — V]

36. Part 4: Accountability
Big idea: Formal accountability is procedural: the
government agrees to submit itself to certain mechanisms
that limit its power to do as it pleases.
1. Whig history is determinate and historicist
2. Fukuyama version is indeterminate and evolutionary
3. Survival is a matter of balance-environment-fit (BEF)
4. Shift to a monetary economy is the major force
5. Rise of the ideal of equality in terms of dignity
6. Existence of powerful cities as “internal exit”
7. Shift from status to contract

37. “The miracle of modern liberal democracy, in which strong states capable of
enforcing law are nonetheless checked by law and by legislatures, could arise
only as a result of the fact that there was a rough balance of power among the
different political actors within the society. If none of them was dominant, then
they would need to compromise. What we understand as modern
constitutional government arose as a result of this unwanted and
unplanned compromise.
“In what has become known as “Whig history,” the growth of liberty, prosperity,
and representative government is seen as an inexorable progress of human
institutions that begins with Greek democracy and Roman law, is enshrined
early on in the Magna Carta, then threatened by the early Stuarts, but
defended and vindicated during the English Civil War and the Glorious
Revolution…The problem with Whig history is not that it is necessarily
wrong in its fundamental conclusions. In fact, its emphasis on the role of
taxation as the primary driver of accountability is broadly correct. The
problem is rather that, like all single-country histories, it cannot explain
why parliamentary institutions emerged in England but not in other
similarly situated European countries….”

38. [Variational] Framework for State Building
1. “Weak absolutism. The French and Spanish monarchies of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries epitomized the new absolutist state, and they were more
centralized and dictatorial in certain ways than, say, their Dutch and English
counterparts.”
3. “Successful absolutism. The Russian monarchy succeeded in co-opting both its
nobility and gentry, and turning them into a service nobility completely dependent
on the state.”
5. “Failed oligarchy. The aristocracies of both Hungary and Poland succeeded early
on in imposing constitutional limits to the power of the king, who then remained
weak and unable to construct a modern state.”
7. “Accountable government. Finally, England and Denmark were able to develop
both strong rule of law and accountable government, while at the same time
building strong centralized states capable of national mobilization and defense.”
8. Alternatives. “The Dutch Republic and the Swiss confederation represented
alternative republican pathways to accountable government and rule of law, while
the Prussian monarchy developed a strong modern state and rule of law in the
absence of accountability.”

39. Upper
Nobility
Gentry
Third
Estate
The State
Peasantry
Pre-Modern Agrarian Genome
Note: not the same as the traditional “estates” of clergy, nobility,
commoners. There were too many variations in the definitions. Fukuyama
uses a loosely consistent definition across the cases.
Feudal lords Clergy, Minor
nobility
City dwellers,
“bourgeoisie”, free
farmers
The ruler, plus
state machinery
Serfs, non-
politically activated
farmers

40. Upper
Nobility
Gentry Third
Estate
The State
Peasantry
Weak Absolutism Genome: France
“If absolutism didn’t succeed fully in France, neither did the social groups
opposing it succeed in forcing on the state some form of political accountability.
Indeed, their failure was by far the greater of the two and was a result of their
failure to act cohesively”

41. Upper
Nobility
Gentry
Third
Estate
The State
Peasantry
Successful Absolutism Genome: Russia
“Peter replaced the old mestnichestvo with a Table of Ranks in 1722, a
hierarchical system in which each of his subjects was entered into a legally
defined order with its own privileges and obligations. By reaching a certain
grade, a nonnoble servitor, whether bureaucrat or military man, was
automatically entered into the ranks of the hereditary nobility.”

42. Upper
Nobility
Gentry
Third
Estate
The State
Peasantry
Failed Oligarchy Genome: Hungary
“In Hungary, the absolutist project initially failed because a strong and well-
organized noble class succeeded in imposing constitutional limits on the king’s
authority. The Hungarian Diet, like its English counterpart, made the Hungarian king
accountable to itself. Accountability was not sought on behalf of the whole realm
but rather on behalf of a narrow oligarchic class that wanted to use its freedom to
squeeze its own peasants harder and to avoid onerous taxes to the central state…”

43. Upper
Nobility
Gentry
Third
Estate
The State
Peasantry
Accountable Government Genome: England
“But increasingly real power was held by a royal official, the shire reeve (or sheriff), who
was appointed by the king and represented royal authority. The shire reeve organized a
shire moot or council, which all free men (later all free landowners) in the district were
obliged to attend on the occasion of its biannual meetings.The Norman Conquest did not
destroy this system of governance but only renamed it, so that the shires became counties
following continental Frankish practice. However, the power of the king’s representative,
the sheriff, increased greatly at the expense of the hereditary ealdorman.”
“A political system that is all checks and balances is potentially no more successful than
one with no checks, because governments periodically need strong and decisive action.”

44. Part 5: Towards a Theory of Political Development
Big idea: We are now ready to build an empirically
grounded, evolutionary theory of political development that
can address questions related to post-1800 techological
modernity
1. Whig history is determinate and historicist
2. Fukuyama version is indeterminate and evolutionary
3. Survival is a matter of balance-environment-fit (BEF)
4. Shift to a monetary economy is the major force
5. Rise of the ideal of equality in terms of dignity
6. Existence of powerful cities as “internal exit”
7. Shift from status to contract

45. The State of Nature origin myth — Fukuyama edition
• “Human beings never existed in a presocial state. [SO ROUSSEAU WAS RIGHT]
• “Natural human sociability is built around two principles, kin selection and reciprocal
altruism. [TRIBALISM IS NATURAL]
• “Human beings have an innate propensity for creating and following norms or rules.
[BUT SO IS THE TENDENCY TO CREATE IMPERSONAL ANTI-TRIBAL INSTITUTIONS]
• “The human instinct to follow rules is often based in the emotions rather than in reason,
however. Emotions like guilt, shame, pride, anger, embarrassment, and admiration are
not learned behaviors in the Lockean sense of being somehow acquired after birth
through interaction with the empirical world outside the individual. Rather, they come
naturally to small children, who then organize their behavior around genetically
grounded yet culturally transmitted rules. [IT’S ABOUT EMOTIONAL UX/NARRATIVE,
NOT JUST UTILITARIAN FUNCTION…]
• “Human beings have a natural propensity for violence. Human beings by nature desire
not just material resources but also recognition. [BUT HOBBES WAS RIGHT TOO]

46. Differences between political and biological evolution
• “First, in political evolution, the units of selection are rules and their embodiments
as institutions, rather than genes as in biological evolution.
• “Second, in human societies, variation among institutions can be planned and
deliberate, as opposed to random.
• “The third way political development differs from biological evolution is that the
selected characteristics—institutions in one case, genes in the other—are
transmitted culturally rather than genetically.
• “The conservation of institutions has a clear adaptive value: if people did not have a
biological proclivity to conform to rules and patterns of behavior, the rules would
have to be constantly renegotiated at enormous cost to the stability of the society in
question. On the other hand, the fact that societies are so enormously conservative
with regard to institutions means that when the original conditions leading to the
creation or adoption of an institution change, the institution fails to adjust quickly to
meet the new circumstances.”

47. Contemporary Evolution
• “The key is the possibility of sustained intensive economic growth. Growth in per
capita output does far more than put larger resources in the hands of states. It
stimulates a broad transformation of society and mobilizes a host of new social
forces that over time seek to become political actors as well….”
• “…Social mobilization is one important key to breaking out of the dysfunctional
equilibria represented by traditional elites locked in rent-seeking coalitions…”
• “The other hugely important difference between political development then
and now is the degree to which international factors affect the evolution of
national institutions. Almost all of the stories told in this book [Vol 1] involve single
societies and the interplay among different domestic political actors within them.
International influences appear largely as a result of war, conquest or the threat of
conquest, and the occasional spreading of religious doctrines across
borders….” [all in Vol 2]
• …The situation in this regard is very different today. The phenomenon we now label
globalization is only the latest iteration of a process that has been taking place
continuously over the past several centuries with the spread of technologies
related to transportation, communications, and information…There were
“transnational” institutions at this time like the Catholic church and the Islamic
caliphate, which were important in facilitating the diffusion of institutions including
the Justinian Code or sharia across political boundaries.”

48. “[W]e can pose two questions about future political development that are not
answerable at this juncture.”
1. “Can China continue to grow economically and maintain political stability
without either rule of law or accountability?”
2. What is the future of liberal democracy given that “The failings of modern
democracies come in many flavors, but the dominant one in the early
twenty-first century is probably state weakness: contemporary
democracies become too easily gridlocked and rigid, and thus unable to
make difficult decisions to ensure their long-term economic and political
survival.”?
V’s additional questions:
1. Is there a further balance to be achieved between market and state?
2. Is there further secular drift away from biology to post-family individualism?
3. Will there be more complexity in the international order?
4. Will the Dictator’s Handbook change?

49. Part 0: Introduction/Modern Context
Part 1: The State
Part 2: Foreign Institutions
Part 3: Democracy
Part 4: Political Decay

50. On the Subprime Crisis
“But the legislation ignored simpler remedies, such as sharply raising bank
capital requirements or putting hard caps on the size of financial institutions, in
favor of a highly complex stew of new regulations. Three years after passage of
the legislation, many of those detailed rules had not yet been written and would
likely not solve the underlying too-big-to-fail problem even if they were.”
On the Arab Spring
“Indeed, the spread of political Islam can be seen as a form of identity politics
very comparable to its nationalist variant in Europe. This was an argument first
made by Ernest Gellner [who] argued that nationalism is a response to the
identity dislocation that occurs as societies modernize and transition from
Gesellschaft—the small village—to Gemeinschaft—the large city.”
On “Nation Building” in Afghanistan
traditional tribal relationships based on patronage and clientelism began to
break down and were replaced by far more predatory forms of prebendalism in
which individual governors or ministers simply appropriated vast sums of
money without returning much in the way of services.

51. Getting from such a patrimonial state to “Denmark”—that is, an impersonal
state that treats citizens equally, protects their rights, and observes a clear line
between public and private interest—is a much more difficult transition for
most societies than moving from authoritarian government to democracy.
Larry Diamond has argued that we are in the midst of a “democratic
recession,” with setbacks in Turkey, South Africa, Thailand,
something like a stock market correction, in which the longer-term trend
toward spreading liberal democracy has been momentarily interrupted,
or whether it represents a more fundamental turning away.
The problem of decay has to do with the political system. Decay is not the
same thing as civilizational decline;

52. Part 1: The State
Big idea: A modern state is an artificially stabilized
impersonal entity designed to operate effectively while
withstanding corrupting forces, and emerges one institution
at a time
1. Neopatrimonialism
2. Meritocratic Reform
3. Moral hazard instability
4. Vetocracy and Capture

53. Stage 1: Repatromialized Start: [The Old] Forest Bureau, and the Department of Agriculture of
which it was a branch, had been part of the clientelistic party-based nineteenth-century political
system, whose main purpose was to deliver political benefits to members of Congress.
Stage 2: Competence Gap: “but lack the necessary skills to do their jobs; their numbers could
be insufficient to deliver adequate services; or they can lack necessary fiscal resources.
Stage 3: Meritocratic Reform: What Pinchot did was to operate not bureaucratically but
politically, building an informal network of allies both inside and outside government…
…The fact that Gifford Pinchot as an agent was not under the strict control of his congressional
principals suggests that the principal-agent framework by which contemporary economists
understand the problems of organizational dysfunction is perhaps not adequate to really
understand how good bureaucracies work
Stage 4: Golden Age: Gifford Pinchot’s original USFS was regarded as the gold standard of
American bureaucracies he won a high degree of autonomy for an organization of well-trained
professionals dedicated to a centeral mission, the sustainable exploitation of American forests.
The Forest Service Example: Political Order Rising

54. “In fact, the political patronage relationship, whether involving family or
friends, is one of the most basic forms of human social organization in
existence. It is universal because it is natural to human beings. The big
historical mystery that has to be solved is thus not why patronage exists but
rather why in modern political systems it came to be outlawed and replaced
by impersonal organization.”
“Hence patrimonialism has evolved into what is called
“neopatrimonialism,” in which political leaders adopt the outward forms
of modern states—with bureaucracies.”
“What has never happened in German history is the wholesale distribution of
government offices to party workers as a matter of political patronage, as
occurred in the United States, Italy, and Greece.”
“While modern political orders seek to promote impersonal rule, elites in most
societies tend to fall back on networks of family and friends, both as an
instrument for protecting their positions…When they succeed, elites are said
to ‘capture’ the state.”
Neopatrimonialism

55. The bureaucratic tradition established in eighteenth-century Prussia
survived Jena and Napoleon, transition to the German Empire, Weimar
democracy and the Nazi regime, and then the return to democracy under
the postwar Federal Republic.
Britain began the nineteenth century with an unreformed and patronage-
ridden civil service. It cleaned up its bureaucracy beginning in the middle
decades of the century, however, laying the foundations for a modern civil
service that remains in place to this day. The United States similarly
developed a party-led patronage system beginning in the 1820s, in which
political appointees dominated the government at federal, state, and local
levels.
Those countries that created strong bureaucracies while they were still
authoritarian, like Prussia, created enduring autonomous institutions that
survived subsequent changes of regime into the present. On the other hand,
countries that democratized before a strong state was in place, such as
the United States, Greece, and Italy, created clientelistic systems that
then had to be reformed.
Meritocratic Reform of Civil Services

56. Building technocratic capacity in government is not just a matter of sending
bureaucrats to a few weekend executive training sessions. It requires huge
investments in higher educational systems. The Stein-Hardenberg reforms in
Prussia could not have had the positive effect they did without the simultaneous
creation of new universities by reformers like Wilhelm von Humboldt, who
established the new University of Berlin, while the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms
in Britain were accompanied by Benjamin Jowett’s shake-up of Oxford and
Cambridge. One of the most impressive accomplishments of the Meiji oligarchs
in the late nineteenth century was their creation of a network of modern
universities in Japan, whose graduates went on to staff the new bureaucracies
in Tokyo.

57. It is impossible to run a large organization, public or private, without a
bureaucracy, but once authority has been delegated to the administrative
hierarchy, the chief executive loses a great deal of control and often becomes
a prisoner of that very bureaucracy. (This was the central premise of the BBC
comedy series Yes, Minister, where the permanent secretary,
In a well-functioning political system, the agent should have enough autonomy
to do its job well, but should also remain ultimately accountable to the
principal.
On the other hand, bureaucracies can have too much autonomy. I described
what were perhaps the two most notorious cases of this in modern history, the
German and Japanese military bureaucracies prior to the first and second
world wars. In both cases a strong tradition of autonomy led to high-quality
military organizations, but it also led to their usurping of the goal-setting
authority of the political leaders that were nominally their principals.
Moral Hazard Instability

58. Vetocracy and Capture
“American political institutions are unique, if only because they are so
antique…George Washington in his Farewell Address warned against “the
baneful effects of the Spirit of Party; a conflict that would divide and potentially
destroy the new nation…The only Founding Father who showed an interest
in strong and capable government was Alexander Hamilton, who laid out
the case for “energy in the executive”
These regions were the least economically developed in Britain, and it was
indeed their high levels of poverty that drove hundreds of thousands of Scotch-
Irish to emigrate. The Scotch-Irish were poor but intensely proud both in
Britain and in the United States. [Jacksonian Core]
The spontaneous emergence of these machines in response to an expanding
base of relatively poor voters again suggests that clientelism is an efficient way
of energizing this type of population and therefore should be seen as an early
form of democratic participation. Municipal-level political machines were
simply modernized and highly organized versions of the Melanesian Big
Man and tribal wantok

59. Part 2: Foreign Institutions
Big idea: Importing political institutions can fail in more ways
than it can succeed
1. Extractive elitism: South America
2. Displacement without replacement: Africa
3. Cautious, selective import: Japan
4. China: Return to pre-Communist patterns

60. Argentina thus was saddled with two bad historical legacies: a powerful
landed oligarchy and a tradition of personalistic authoritarian leadership.
But authoritarian institutions in Latin America were overdetermined. The
political orders created in Peru and Mexico were settler colonies that
succeeded in eradicating virtually any institutional trace of the dense pre-
Columbian state structures that preceded them. As settlement colonies,
they tended to replicate the class-based, mercantilist society found back
on the Iberian peninsula, in which indigenous laborers and mestizos
took the place of the white European peasantry.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, Latin America as a whole didn’t
look that different from Europe in political terms…Yet in the succeeding two
centuries, Europe underwent a profound series of political changes that left it
much more democratic and economically equal than Latin America. One of
the principal reasons for this was the extraordinarily high level of
violence experienced by Europe during this period,
Only in the 2000s does a more European type of political order appear to be
emerging in Chile and Brazil.
Latin America

61. But African ethnic groups are largely a modern phenomenon, created
either in the colonial period or consolidated in postcolonial times. A
classic segmentary lineage—a tribe, speaking anthropologically—is a group
that traces common ancestry to a progenitor who may be two, three, or more
generations distant.
Modern ethnic groups, by contrast, encompass hundreds of thousands if not
millions of people.
The contemporary African sense of ethnic identity was, as we will see in the
following chapter, often cultivated by the colonial authorities…
It is said that the British Empire was created in a fit of absentmindedness;
this was in fact true not just of that empire but also of those of many
other Europeans.
Africa — sociology is modern, not traditional

62. “Even though Africa encompasses a wide variety of political regimes from
stable democracies to authoritarian kleptocracies to failed states, there are
certain generalizations that can be made about many of them. There is
an African mode of governance that characterizes many states”
“The deadly legacy of European colonialism was not an “extractive”
authoritarian state but rather the profound absence of strong institutions
altogether.”
“Power-crazy psychopaths are particularly numerous in the colonies—far
more so, proportionately, than in France. They belong to a large class of
unbalanced individuals who seek out colonial life; their psychic make-up is
particularly attracted by the exotic.”
“The practice of hacking off hands and arms as warnings in Sierra Leone that
so outraged Western opinion was originally practiced by the Force Publique
in Leopold’s Belgian Congo”
Africa — it IS kinda a country

63. “The colonial powers experienced what today is labeled “mission creep,” which
has been the bane of American post–cold war foreign policy: a small
intervention, designed to be of limited purpose and duration, creates on-the-
ground interests and commitments that then require further interventions to
make the whole effort sustainable.”
“The fact that the African colonies could barely be made to pay for the costs of
their own administration led the Europeans to seek a cheap way out through
“indirect rule,”
“The problem with outside promotion of indigenous rights, however, is that it is
very difficult for outsiders to accurately judge the real interests of local
communities, just as it was for the practitioners of indirect rule. Many of these
communities are already half modernized, just as many Africans were in the
early twentieth century, and many would actually have jumped at the chance to
join the modern world.”
Africa — indirect rule doctrine and mission creep

64. “Given this tradition, then, it was probably inevitable that after studying English
Common Law, Japan passed it up in favor of a civil law system based on
those of France and Germany. The English version, with its sprawling
decentralized system of judge-made law, was less suited to Japanese traditions
than the more compact civil system that could be grafted onto existing
Japanese bureaucratic traditions.”
“They were following a syllogism that said, “All modern states have constitutions;
Japan aspires to be a modern state; therefore Japan must have a constitution.”
East Asia: Japan Chooses What to Import

65. Two Japanese scholars, Okada Asataro and Matsuoka Yoshitada, established
the first modern law school in Beijing in 1906.
[Deng Xiaoping’s] political reform process that unfolded subsequently centered
around the slow construction of a series of rules that would limit the ability of
any future charismatic leader to emerge and wreak havoc on the whole of
Chinese society in the manner of Mao.
The reformers faced principled opposition from ideologues within the party who
were opposed to ownership of property… They squared this circle by creating a
set of usufructuary (usage) rights that could be bought, sold, mortgaged, or
transferred, in which the state nonetheless retained formal ownership.
I would argue that the state that has emerged in China since the beginning of
reforms in 1978 bears more resemblance to this classical Chinese state than it
does to the Maoist state that preceded it, or even to the Soviet state that the
Chinese tried to copy. They no longer study Confucian classics but a
combination of Marxist-Leninist tracts, engineering textbooks, and Western
management literature.
East Asia: China Tries to Invent a New Way

66. One of the fundamental tenets of Western public administration is that public-
sector agencies are not allowed to retain earnings and thus have no incentive to
control costs or perform more efficiently. This explains why there is a big effort to
push money out the door whenever an agency ends the fiscal year with a
surplus. The Chinese party-state upended this verity by in effect permitting
local governments to keep surplus revenues and use them for their own
purposes. Localities were put under a hard budget constraint, given the
authority to extract certain types of taxes, and allowed to start profit-making
businesses to supplement their tax revenues.
In a sense, the Chinese independently discovered the principles of what in the
West has gone under the label of New Public Management, an approach that
sought to extend marketlike incentives to the public sector.
East Asia: China Tries to Invent a New Way

67. Part 3: Democracy
Big idea: Understand it as a specific historical story
1800-2000, not as an abstraction
1. Three-wave spread model
2. The religion angle
3. Economics angle
4. The middle class
5. Marx’s mistake
6. Importance of Institutions
Five examples:

68. Three-Wave Spread Model
“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, in what Samuel Huntington called the Third
Wave of democratization.”
•First (long) wave 1820s to 1900
•Second (short) wave happened in the immediate aftermath of World
War II.
•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… then it moved to Asia…and culminated in the collapse of
communism and the transition to democracy in Eastern Europe

69. Religion Hypothesis
Both Hegel and Nietzsche understood modern political democracy to
be a secularized version of the Christian doctrine of the universal
equality of human dignity.
Tocqueville does not explain why the idea of human equality became
progressively more powerful, except to suggest that it was an act of
God.
This has led to the assertion, made by parties as diverse as Samuel
Huntington, the contemporary Chinese government, and a variety of
Islamists, that liberal democracy does not represent a universal trend
but is something culturally specific to Western civilization.

70. Economics Angle
• “But what is the connection between economic development and democracy?
Do people’s values somehow magically flip over to favor democracy when
they achieve a certain level of well-being?”
• “Adam Smith asserted that the division of labor is limited by the size of the
market, or, put differently, that as markets expanded through increased trade in
a commercial and later an industrial economy, a new division of labor would
arise and deepen.”
• “This division of labor entailed the creation of new social groups…it follows
logically that these new groups, excluded from participation in the political
institutions of the old agrarian society, would demand a share of political
power”

71. The Middle Class
“The key insight [of the Marxist analytical framework as modified by
Barrington Moore] is that democracy is desired most strongly by one
specific social group in society: the middle class.
•“The middle classes, defined in occupational and educational
terms rather than by level of income… tended to support the liberal
part of liberal democracy. That is, they wanted legal rules that
protected their rights…
•“The working classes—Marx’s famous industrial proletariat—were
conversely more interested in the democratic part of liberal democracy,
•“Large landowners, and particularly those making use of repressive
labor (slavery, serfdom, or other nonmarket conditions of labor), have
almost everywhere been authoritarian opponents of democracy.
•“The peasantry had complicated and sometimes inconsistent political
aspirations.”
If you’re in this
symposium this is you

72. Marx’s Mistake
• “Marx’s framework can be summarized as follows. Out of the old feudal order,
the first new social class to be mobilized is the bourgeoisie, townsmen who
were regarded contemptuously by the old landowners but who accumulated
capital and used new technologies to bring about the Industrial Revolution.
• “For example, the bourgeoisie is far from being a unified group. It includes
large industrialists like the Thyssens and Rockefellers as well as small
shopkeepers and urban professionals…
• “For example, the bourgeoisie is far from being a unified group. It includes
large industrialists like the Thyssens and Rockefellers as well as small
shopkeepers and urban professionals…”
• “…one of the weaknesses of Marx’s analytical framework is his use of “class” as
a key determining variable. Marx sometimes talks as if social classes—the
bourgeoisie, the proletariat, feudalists—were clearly defined political actors
• A central problem with any simple class-based analysis of democratization is
that there were a number of cross-cutting issues that united people across
class lines and blurred the class profiles of political parties.”

73. Argument for Institutionalism
•“In reality, social classes are intellectual abstractions, useful
analytically, but incapable of producing political action unless
they are embodied in specific organizations.
•“A stable democratic system will emerge only if these newly
mobilized groups are successfully incorporated into the system
and allowed to participate politically. Conversely, instability and
disorder will occur if those groups do not have institutionalized
channels of participation.
•“[W]hile individual leaders of such [Peasant] revolts might
aspire to join the oligarchy, it never occurred to them to displace
the class-bound system as such.
•“Accountability was the result of what seems in retrospect to be
the almost accidental survival of a feudal institution, the
medieval estate or parliament, into the modern era.

74. Political parties, however, were in most places illegal. In the more repressive
territories, activists had to organize secret societies, like the Young Italy of Giuseppe
Mazzini. It was these middle-class groups, legal and illegal, that would spearhead the
Revolutions of 1848
The creation of merit-based bureaucracies, ultimately accountable to the public but
protected in many ways from the vagaries of democratic politics, is one expression
of the concerns raised in these now-forgotten arguments against the spread of
democracy.
Part of the story of the Third Wave of democratizations in Europe and Latin America has
to do with the reinterpretation of Catholic doctrine after Vatican II in the 1960s to
make it compatible with modern democracy. [RETCON FORCES?]

75. “1848 appears as the one revolution in the modern history of Europe
which combines the greatest promise, the widest scope, and the
most immediate initial success, with the most unqualified and rapid
failure.” The “Springtime of Peoples,” to which the Arab Spring has
been compared
“That is, the Middle East experienced the same kind of shift from
Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, from traditional villages to modern
cities, that Europe experienced in the late nineteenth century, with all
of the anomie and identity confusion that such a shift entails.
“Indeed, the spread of political Islam can be seen as a form of
identity politics very comparable to its nationalist variant in Europe.
This was an argument first made by Ernest Gellner…Gellner, it will be
recalled, argued that nationalism is a response to the identity
dislocation that occurs as societies modernize and transition from
Gesellschaft—the small village—to Gemeinschaft—the large city.”

76. Part 4: Political Decay
Big idea: Vetocracy as most important modern failure
mode… other elements, neopatrimonialism, moral hazard
etc. familiar from other eras/chapters…

77. Stage 5: Crisis: Great Idaho Fire of 1910, which burned some three million acres in Idaho and
Montana, and led to the death of eighty-five people. The political outcry…led the USFS to
increasingly focus on wildfire suppression…
Stage 6: Authoritarian High Modernism: The problem with fighting wildfires is that the early
proponents of “scientific forestry” didn’t properly understand the role of fires in woodland
ecology. Forest fires are a natural occurrence and play an important function in maintaining the
health of western forests. the forests were invaded by species like Douglas firs once fires were
suppressed. (Lodgepole pines in fact require fires to propagate their seeds.)
Stage 7: Moral Hazard and Interest Group Capture: Moreover, as a result of population growth
in the West, more people were living in areas close to forests and therefore vulnerable to
wildfires. By one estimate, the wildland-urban interface expanded more than 52 percent from
1970 to 2000 and would continue to expand well into the future…Like people choosing to live on
floodplains and on barrier islands, these individuals were exposing themselves to undue risks
that were mitigated by government-subsidized insurance.
Stage 8: Vetocratic Gridlock: None of the old missions were discarded, however, and each one
tended to link up to different external interest groups…consumers of timber, environmentalists,
homeowners, western developers, young people seeking temporary jobs as firefighters….Many
of the travails of the Forest Service described earlier can be attributed to the ways its judgments
could be second-guessed through the court system.
The Forest Service Example: Political Decay

78. “The very stability of institutions is also the source of
political decay. Institutions are created to meet the
demands of specific circumstances. However, the original
environment in which institutions are created is subject to
change.”
“In the absence of strong institutional incentives, the
groups with access to a political system will use their
positions to favor friends and family, and thereby erode
the impersonality of the state.”

79. United States
Britain
Dictatorship
Number of Veto Players/Checks and Balances
DifficultyofDecision-Making Modified Buchanan-Tullock Curve

80. Political scientist George Tsebelis coined the term “veto players” as a means of
comparing diverse political systems. All institutional rules that delegate powers
to different political actors within the system constitute potential veto points
where individual veto players can block action by the whole body.
A veto player is simply political science lingo for what Americans have
traditionally called checks and balances.
a linear scale going from an absolute dictatorship, in which there is only one
veto player (the dictator), to a consensus system in which every citizen wields a
potential veto over action by the whole.
There is intense populist distrust of elite institutions and demand either to
abolish them
Ironically, however, Americans when polled show the highest degree of
approval precisely for those institutions—the military, NASA, the CDC—that
are the least subject to immediate democratic oversight.
Vetocracy

81. “Americans have pretended to cap the size of the state by delegating the actual
work of government to legions of contractors, subcontractors, and quasi-public
bodies, some for profit, and many nonprofit, especially in the area of social
services.
“This outsourcing of sovereignty has been celebrated by many people for
different reasons. On the right, many think that private contractors can do the
work of government more efficiently than public agencies. On the left, there are
those who think that nongovernmental organizations providing public services
are more participatory and subject to a kind of direct democratic control.”
Vetocracy

82. Afterword Comment
“Advocates of a “network society” dream of a world in
which all decisions are made on a voluntary, peer-to-
peer basis without the need for hierarchy or
enforcement. But as anyone who has sat through a
meeting of a large committee that cannot come to
consensus knows, or as victims of crime understand,
the real world often doesn’t operate that way.
“While the American economy remains a source of
miraculous innovation, American government is hardly a
source of inspiration”