Political Order and Political Decay (87 page)

But while a regime that is balanced among state, law, and accountability is in fact a general condition of successful modern politics, we need to acknowledge that there is considerable variation in the specific institutional forms that law and accountability can take; the institutional forms adopted by particular countries like the United States do not constitute universal models. Different societies can implement these institutions differently.

In particular, we need to pay attention to the substantive ends that law and accountability are meant to serve, rather than their strict procedural forms. The purpose of law is to codify and make transparent the community's rules of justice and to enforce them evenhandedly. The vast procedural apparatus that is the specialty of the legal profession in the contemporary world is a means to the end of evenhanded justice, not an end in itself. Yet procedure often takes precedence and stymies the substantive ends of justice. Countless rule-of-law societies have legal systems that are excessively slow and costly, in ways that benefit those who are in a position to take advantage of their knowledge of procedure at the expense of justice.

Similarly, democratic procedures regarding free and fair elections do not guarantee the substantive end of accountability. Electoral procedures themselves can be gamed, from outright fraud and vote rigging to more subtle efforts to redraw electoral districts to suit one party, or to disqualify voters of the other. Even under the best electoral procedures, politicians can recruit supporters through clientelistic methods and use markers like ethnicity and religion for their own purposes. In other cases, powerful interest groups can take advantage of existing procedures to protect narrow interests and block broader public goals. Public interest under these circumstances often faces a collective action problem and fails to receive adequate representation.

The worship of procedure over substance is a critical source of political decay in contemporary liberal democracies. Political decay can occur in any regime simply because of the nature of institutions themselves. Institutions are rules that persist beyond the lifetimes of the individuals who created them. They persist partly because they are useful and partly because they are believed to have intrinsic value. The human propensity to invest rules with emotional meaning is what makes them stable over long periods of time, but their rigidity becomes a liability when circumstances change. The problem is often more acute when change occurs after a prolonged period of peace and stability. Moreover, there is a natural tendency to backslide into the default form of sociability, one based on favoring family and engaging in reciprocal exchange of benefits with friends, particularly among elites that have privileged access to the political system. The result is that both law and procedural accountability are used to defeat the substantive ends that they were originally designed to serve.

FUTURE MODELS

There are a number of governments in the early twenty-first century world that see themselves as principled alternatives to liberal democracy. These include Iran and the monarchies of the Persian Gulf, Russia, and the People's Republic of China. Iran, however, is seriously divided, with a large middle class that contests many of the regime's claims to legitimacy. The Gulf monarchies have always been exceptional cases, viable in their present forms only because of their huge energy resources. Putin's Russia, likewise, has emerged as a rentier state, regionally powerful largely because it sits on reserves of gas and oil; outside of the world of Russian speakers, it is no one's idea of a political system worth emulating.

Of the nondemocratic alternatives, China poses the most serious challenge to the idea that liberal democracy constitutes a universal evolutionary model. China, as noted many times in these volumes, builds on a two-millennia-long tradition of strong centralized government and is one of the few state-level societies never to have developed an indigenous tradition of rule of law. China's rich and complex tradition has substituted Confucian morality for formal procedural rules as a constraint on rulers. It was this tradition that was bequeathed to other countries in East Asia and is one important source of the success of post–World War II Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Authoritarian governments can sometimes be more capable than democratic ones of breaking decisively with the past. One of the great advantages that post-Mao China enjoyed was that it was led by a highly autonomous Communist Party.

The central issue facing China today is whether, a mere thirty-five years since the initiation of Deng's reforms, the Chinese regime is itself now suffering from political decay and losing the autonomy that was the source of its earlier success. China's policy agenda in the coming decade will be very different from what it was over the past generation. It is now a middle-income country striving to become a high-income one. The old export-driven model has run its course and needs to rely much more heavily on domestic demand. China can no longer exploit extensive economic growth and the mass mobilization of people into an industrial economy. In its quest for high growth, China has built up huge environmental liabilities that become manifest in unbreathable air, “cancer villages” dotting the country, a failing food safety system, and other daunting problems. It is not clear whether China's educational system is capable of supplying the kinds of skills necessary to sustain broad-based improvements in productivity. A deeper question is whether true innovation can be sustained in the absence of greater individual freedom. With the complexity of the Chinese economy, informational requirements for managing it have also grown. As in dynastic China, the ability of a top-down command-and-control system to stay abreast of what is actually happening in the society is questionable.
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Most important, China has experienced an enormous mobilization of its own population, far more massive and rapid than the shift that occurred in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe. China's rapidly expanding population of educated and increasingly wealthy citizens has different demands and aspirations than the peasants that made up the bulk of Chinese society in the past.

In light of these challenges, the central question is whether the Chinese regime has the autonomy to shift course toward a more liberal system that will encourage greater economic competition and permit a freer flow of information throughout the society. China's rapid growth has created new vested interests that are powerful and have influence over the party's decision making, even in the absence of a legislature and lobbyists. The state-owned enterprises are larger and wealthier than ever. The party leadership itself has fallen into patterns of corruption that make reform personally dangerous for many of them. The party continues to cling to Marxism-Leninism as an ideology, despite the fact that most Chinese ceased to believe in it many years ago.

How the new Chinese middle class behaves in the coming years will be the most important test of the universality of liberal democracy. If it continues to grow in absolute and relative size, and yet remains content to live under the benevolent tutelage of a single-party dictatorship, one would have to say that China is culturally different from other societies around the world in its support for authoritarian government. If, however, it generates demands for participation that cannot be accommodated within the existing political system, then it is simply behaving in a manner similar to middle classes in other parts of the world. The real test of the legitimacy of the Chinese system will come not when the economy is expanding and jobs are abundant but when growth slows and the system faces crisis, as it inevitably will.

Perhaps the greater developmental challenge lies not in the existence of an alternative, more attractive form of political organization, but rather in the fact that many countries will aspire to be rich, liberal democracies, but will never be able to get there. Some observers have suggested that poor countries may be “trapped” in poverty because of the intertwined dimensions of political and economic development.
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Economic growth requires certain minimal political institutions to occur; on the other hand, institutions are very hard to create in conditions of extreme poverty and political fractionalization. How to break out of this trap? Throughout the two volumes of this book, we have seen the role played by accident and contingency—how fortuitous leadership, the unplanned sequencing of the introduction of institutions, or unintended consequences of activities undertaken for other purposes like fighting wars—led certain countries to evolve in unexpected ways. Could it be the case that societies escaping this trap historically were simply lucky, and that others ones not similarly blessed may never develop?

This view is too pessimistic. It is true that luck and accidents have played a role in kick-starting political and economic change historically. But luck and accidents may have been more important for the first societies building new institutions than for ones that come later. Today, there is a large body of accumulated experience about institutions, and a growing international community that shares information, knowledge, and resources. There are, moreover, multiple paths and entry points toward development. If progress fails to materialize along one dimension, it may happen along another over time, and then the interconnected chains of causality will start to kick in. All of this is suggested by the general framework for understanding development presented here, with its economic, political, social, and ideological dimensions.

Does the existence of political decay in modern democracies mean that the overall model of a regime balanced among state, law, and accountability is somehow fatally flawed? This is definitely not my conclusion: all societies, authoritarian and democratic, are subject to decay over time. The real issue is their ability to adapt and eventually fix themselves. I do not believe that there is a systemic “crisis of governability” among established democracies. Democratic political systems have faced such crises in the past, notably during the 1930s when they fell into economic depression and were challenged by alternative fascist and communist competitors, or again in the 1960s and '70s, when they were destabilized by popular protests, economic stagnation, and high inflation. It is very difficult to judge a political system's long-term prospects by its performance in any given decade; problems that seem insuperable in one time period vanish in another. Democratic political systems are often slower to respond to mounting problems than authoritarian ones, but when they do, they are often more decisive because the decision to act is based on broader buy-in.

If there has been a single problem facing contemporary democracies, either aspiring or well established, it has been centered in their failure to provide the substance of what people want from government: personal security, shared economic growth, and quality basic public services like education, health, and infrastructure that are needed to achieve individual opportunity. Proponents of democracy focus, for understandable reasons, on limiting the powers of tyrannical or predatory states. But they do not spend as much time thinking about how to govern effectively—they are, in Woodrow Wilson's phrase, more interested in “controlling than in energizing government.”

This was the failure of the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, which toppled Viktor Yanukovich for the first time. Had an effective democratic administration come to power that cleaned up corruption and improved the trustworthiness of state institutions, it would have cemented its legitimacy across not just western but Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine as well, long before Vladimir Putin was strong enough to undermine its actions. Instead, the Orange Coalition wasted its energy on internal squabbling and shady deals, paving the way for Yanukovich's return in 2010 and the crisis following on his departure in 2014.

India has been held back by a similar gap in performance when compared to authoritarian China. It is very impressive that India has held together, with one brief exception, as an electoral democracy since its founding in 1947. But Indian democracy, like sausage-making, does not look very appealing on closer inspection. The system is rife with corruption and patronage; 34 percent of the winners of India's 2014 elections have
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indictments pending against them, including serious charges like murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault. A rule of law exists, but it is so slow and ineffective that many plaintiffs die before their cases come to trial. Compared to China, the country has been completely hamstrung in its ability to provide modern infrastructure or services like clean water, electricity, or basic education to its population. It was for this reason that Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist with a troubled past, was elected prime minister in 2014 by an impressive majority in the hope that he will somehow be able to cut through all the blather of routine Indian politics and actually get something done.

The inability to govern effectively extends, unfortunately, to the United States itself. The country's Madisonian Constitution, deliberately designed to prevent tyranny by multiplying checks and balances at all levels of government, has become a vetocracy. When combined with political polarization, it has proven unable to move either forward or backward effectively. The United States faces a very serious long-term fiscal problem that is nonetheless solvable through appropriate political compromises. But Congress has not passed a budget, according to its own rules, in several years, and in fall 2013 shut down the entire government because it couldn't agree on paying for past debts. While the American economy remains a source of miraculous innovation, American government is hardly a source of inspiration around the world at the present moment.

No one living in an established liberal democracy should therefore be complacent about the inevitability of its survival. There is no automatic historical mechanism that makes progress inevitable, or that prevents decay and backsliding. Democracies exist and survive only because people want and are willing to fight for them; leadership, organizational ability, and oftentimes sheer good luck are needed for them to prevail. As we have seen, there is a trade-off between the level of popular participation and the effectiveness of government; how to strike that balance is not something that can be theoretically determined with any ease. So while general evolution may dictate the emergence of certain broad institutional forms over time, specific evolution means that no particular political system will be in equilibrium with its environment forever.