State Effectiveness and Democracy

State Effectiveness and Democracy State Effectiveness and Democracy Shaoguang Wang Department of Government & Public Administration The Chinese University of Hong Kong Shatin, NT, HONG KONG Tel. +852-2609-7515 Fax +852-2603-5225 Email: wangshaoguang@cuhk.edu.hk July 19, 2002 “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficult lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” Madison: The Federalist, No. 51 Introduction In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the “third wave” of democratization (Huntington 1991) began to spread from South Europe and Latin America to East Asia, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere, many were very optimistic about the future of the unfolding “worldwide democratic revolution." Now, a decade later, the optimism has somehow faded away. Although the U.S. Government continues to claim, "At long last, democracy is triumphant,"1 those who have made efforts to assess the progress of the third wave find that the reality is not as rosy as people once tended to believe. Among nearly 100 countries that appeared to be moving away from authoritarian rule in the early 1990s, at present, only fewer than 20 are “clearly en route to becoming successful, well-functioning democracies” (Carothers 2002). In addition to over a dozen countries that have suffered “democratic breakdown” or “democratic reversals” (e.g., Pakistan, Kenya, Lebanon, Lesotho, Niger, Peru, Sierra Leone, Zambia, and several post-Soviet states), most transition states seem to have stuck in what Larry Diamond terms "twilight zone" (Diamond 1999b) or what Thomas Carothers calls “gray zone” (Carothers 2002). Falling in between outright dictatorship and well-established democracy, those political systems have recently earned new labels, such as “semi-democracy,” “formal democracy,” “electoral democracy,” “façade democracy,” “pseudo-democracy,” “weak democracy,” “partial democracy,” “virtual democracy” (Collier & Levitsky 1997), “illiberal democracy,” (Zakaria 1997) and “broken-back democracy” (Rose & Shin 2001). However, ever adding qualified adjectives to characterize those systems is still misleading, because most of them are not democratic at all. Why are so many third wave transition countries in trouble? Or more generally, what are the conditions under which democracies can survive and function? The standard answer to this question normally points to three key variables as the preconditions for a successful venture into stable democracy, namely, a relative high level of economic development (which is associated with such intervening variables as a high standard of living, a high level of literacy, a sizable and strong middle class) (Lipset 1959; Fukuyama 1993, Barro 1999; Przeworski et. Al 2000), a vibrant civil society (Putnam 1993; Linz & Stepan 1996),2 and a strong civic culture (Almond & Verba 1963; Inglehart 1997; Diamond 1999). There is no doubt that these are in fact attributes which characterize the old and stable democracies, nor that they are generally lacking in most of the transition countries. However, they are by no means the only things that are absent in the majority of third-wave countries. Another things those countries are commonly wanting seems to be coherent, functioning states. In most countries that once belonged to the former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia, no national state institutions had existed before they began transition. Thus they had to struggle with difficulties of building states from scratch when they became independent. They are still struggling. Throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, states exist but are largely incoherent, nonfunctional, and instable. Latin American countries fare not much better. They mostly entered their attempted democratic transitions with “a deep legacy of persistently poor performance of state institutions” (Carothers 2002). Elsewhere in the third world, transition away from authoritarian rule often unfolded in the context of extremely weak state structures, which are unable to cope with most of the major problems facing these societies, from crime and corruption control to the provision of basic public services, such as health, education, and social security. Almost all of countries with non-performing states are stuck in the “gray zone”, suffering the syndrome of either “feckless pluralism” or “dominant power politics” (Carothers 2002). Interestingly, it is in those third wave countries where state building did not appear to be a major challenge that democratic progress seems to have made much headway. They are primarily countries in Southern and Central Europe as well as the Baltic region, though there are also a few in South America and East Asia. Examples include Spain, Portugal, Greece, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Slovenia, Uruguay, Chile, Taiwan and South Korea (Linz & Stepan 1996; Carothers 2002). This observation sharply contrasts with a misconception about democratic transition that was prevailing all over the world in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At that time, people normally thought that democracy was associated with minimal government, and that democracy and state therefore were antitheses against each other. Since the state was viewed as an obstacle to political opening, then democratization entailed “destatization.” To increase the survival probability of democracy, it was widely believed, state capacity should be weakened rather than strengthened. As a result, democratizing initiatives in many parts of the world, driven by both domestic reformers and international advocates, often focused primary attention on dismantling the structures of control and reducing the extent of state involvement in the economy and society. Only after a decade of experimentation with “shrinking the state” did a growing number of reformers come to realize the critical importance of having a capable state, not just a minimal one, if democracy were to perform effectively and to be consolidated (Grindle 1997) Similarly, transitology has also taken a detour before rediscovering the state. Initially, studies of third wave democratization largely ignored the role of the state. The focus then was on such questions as what could be done to foster a strong civil society, how to institutionalize competitive election, what form of legislative-executive relative was more desirable, etc. The existence of an effective state was either taken for granted or considered inconsequential. As time goes by, however, students of democratization become increasingly aware that in many third wave countries, something is missing. What is it? “The short answer is: basic institutions of the modern state” (丁学良2000; Rose & Shin 2001). O’Donnell’s (1992) was among the first to remind us that the progress of democratization is contingent on the institutional viability and the effectiveness of state institutions. Then in the mid-1990s, Przeworski (1995) as well as Linz & Stepan (1996) arrived at the same conclusion that, without an effective state, there can be no democracy. Now more and more scholars agree that the presence of an effective state is a prerequisite for democracy (Rose & Shin 2001; Carothers 2002). That is true especially among those who study Africa (du Toit 1995; Mengisterab & Daddieh 1999) and the states of the former Soviet Union (Holmes 1997; Kuzio, Kravchuk, & D’Anieri 1999; Sperling 2000; Kopecky & Mudde 2000). Although a new consensus has begun to emerge about the imperative of effective state institutions for successful democratic transition and consolidation, the exact linkages between the two has not yet been systematically explored; and therefore many crucial questions remain unanswered. This research is designed to fill out this vacuum. The paper is organized as follows. The Section I tries to re-conceptualize democracy. Whiles most define democracy as a type of political regime, the section emphasizes that it is also a form of public authority. As such, it needs to acquire what Michael Mann calls “infrastructural power” (Mann 1993: 59-61). The Section II deals with the concept of state effectiveness. In addition to offer a definition of the state, it attempts to identify the nuts and bolts of an effective modern state. By doing so, the section is intended to provide a framework for comparing state effectiveness across countries. The Section III endeavors to answer the central question of the paper: why democracy can work and last without an effective state. Based upon the insight that an effective state is a prerequisite of a high-quality and sustainable democracy, the Section IV derives six hypotheses concerning conducive or adverse circumstances for democratic transition and consolidation. The final section is a brief summary. The upshot of the arguments presented in this paper is that democracy is unlikely to flourish where it is not based upon a solid infrastructure of state institutions.3 I.​ Democracy Democracy as a Type of Regime Democracy is one type of political regimes. What distinguishes democracy from various types of non-democratic regimes lies in that democracy enables people to manage power relations and thus control rulers, while others do not (Shapiro 2001).4 The most influential twentieth century approach to the democratic management of power relations is one pioneered by Schumpeter (1942). According to Schumpeter, democracy is an “institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote” (1942: 269). In such a political system, rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public realm by citizens, not by directly involving in decision-making process, but indirectly through the competition and cooperation of their elected representatives (Schmitter & Karl 1993). As a device for managing power relations, democracy in a minimum must meet two criteria at once, namely, what Dahl calls “inclusiveness” and “public contestation.” The former refers to participation, or more precisely, the right for virtually all adults to vote and contest for office. The latter refers to opposition rights, or creating institutionalized channels for meaningful opposition by those who are adversely affected by government policies. A political system cannot be called democratic unless both inclusive participation and political competition are present. By the end of the eighteenth century, for instance, Britain has already had a highly developed system of public contestation, but only a very small proportion of its population were permitted to take part in political competition. Thus, despite the existence of competitive pluralism, one cannot call the Britain of the nineteenth century a democracy, because one-person-one-vote, which is widely seen as a non-negotiable requirement of democracy, was absent. Britain did not become a modern political democracy until the early twentieth century when all adult citizens were franchised and “entitled to participated on a more or less equal plane in controlling and contesting the conduct of the government” (Dahl 1971: 4). Almost all the Western democracies have followed this public-contestation-first-and-popular- participation-later path to democracy. Conversely, in some political systems, people are allowed and sometimes required to participate in politics, but are stripped the right to oppose government policies. Such systems are not democratic either, for without meaningful opposition, it is not possible for people to control and contest government behavior. Only when contestation and participation are combined, it is realistic for people to curtail domination. Then the system is qualified to be called democratic. Democracy as a Form of Governance Most scholars define democracy only as a type of regime. We think it is necessary to emphasize that democracy is also a form of governance of a state. Democracy differs from other forms of regimes in its distinctive way of governance, but, as Bagehot (1949:3-4) pointed out, every political system must gain authority and then use authority. In other words, “authority has to exist before it can be limited” (Huntington 1968: 8). If a government cannot perform basic state functions, no matter how democratic its form is, the people of the country would not be able to benefit from it. In this sense, “the issues pertaining to the state are logically prior to those concerning the political regime” (Przeworski 1995: 13). Without an effective state, no democracy is meaningful. (Linz & Stepan 1996: 17). The separation between regime type and state allows us to conceptualize democracy as a compound of democratic institutions and state institutions (Rose & Shin 2001). The former refers to institutions that revolve around four stages of democratic representation: pre-voting, voting, post-voting and inter-election period (Shapiro 2001). More specifically, democratic institutions include bundles of rights and obligations associated with citizenship, methods of organizing interests, electoral system, arrangements of dividing and supervising powers, and so on. The central distinctive task of democratic institutions is to limit power (Przeworski 1995). As for state institutions, we will deal with them in the following section. Suffice it to say here that the main purpose of state institutions is to furnish the government with authority and thereby enable it to govern. In the literature, democratization has often been defined as the process of regime change, which involves the emergence of institutionalized contestation and the expansion of participation in the contestation to groups that have been excluded from political life. The conceptualization of democracy as both a type of regime and a form of governance sheds new light on the real meaning of democratization. From this perspective, democratization consists of two separate processes: a process of transition from a non-democratic regime to a more or less democratic one as well as a process of state building or re-building (Rose, 333). Similarly, the concept of consolidation of democracy needs to be reconsidered. In addition to “routinizing” democratic practice and internalizing democratic values (Linz & Stepan 1996: 5), a consolidated democracy must also be able to effectively govern the full territory over which it claims sovereignty. Thus, state-(re)building should be an indispensable undertaking throughout democratization and consolidation. It is ill advised for third wave countries to damage or weaken essential state capacities during their transition. Wherever and whenever the efficacy of the state is in doubt, a crisis of governance is likely to emerge; if unsettled in due course, the crisis of governance may eventually give rise to the crisis of democracy. II. State Effectiveness Because state effectiveness is so vital to democratic transition and consolidation, we devote the section to examining this topic. What is the state? The state may be defined, in the Weberian sense, as a set of institutions that monopolize the legitimate use of force and rule-making within a given territory. The monopolization of physical force is the very foundation the state’s existence rests, which endows the state with power to make authoritative binding decisions and to perform its other functions.5 Without power, a state cannot be effective. Power, of course, has many faces. Following Mann (1993), we believe it useful to distinguish two types of state power: despotic and infrastructural powers. The former refers to the power state elites can exercise “without routine negotiation with civil society groups” (Mann 1993: 59). State despotic power is measured by its intrusiveness or extensiveness. While such power is broad and sometimes unlimited in non-democratic settings, it is more constrained, albeit in varying degrees, in democratic systems. Infrastructural power, on the other hand, is measured by its effectiveness. According to Mann’s definition, “infrastructural power refers to the capacity of the state actually to penetrate civil society, and to implement logistically political decisions throughout the realm.” (Mann 1986: 114). Infrastructurally most powerful states are found in today’s Western democracies, where the state’s capacity to penetrate everyday life surpass that of any historical or contemporary third world state. States in other times and other places may be intrusive and ruthless, but they often encounter enormous difficulties in penetrating people’s social and economic life. State infrastructural power in Western democracies, however, is so pervasive that their citizens cannot even find “hiding place from the infrastructural reach of the modern state” (Mann 1986: 114). Despotic power and infrastructural power are analytically two independent dimensions of state power. While the former defines the nature of the state (or regime type), the latter conditions state capacity and effectiveness. Democratization by definition will weaken state despotic power, but it would be unwise to bring collateral damage to the infrastructural power of the state in the process. A less intrusive state does not entail a less effective state. One can even argue that democracy probably needs more infrastructural power to function effectively, efficiently and sustainably than other forms of government. Where state infrastructural power is deficient, efforts must be made to build essential state institutions and capabilities. In the literature about the state, “state-building” is often vaguely defined as a process in which the state accumulates power. In our understanding, state building involves accumulating only infrastructural power, not despotic power. The above discussion leads to two fundamental questions of this paper: What specific infrastructural power does a state have to possess to be effective? Why is an effective state a prerequisite of sustainable democracy? Despite growing evidence that state effectiveness underpins democracy, to our knowledge, these questions have not been systematically examined. The rest of this section tries to answer the first question and leaves the second to the next section. Given the broad and growing scope of state activities, state effectiveness obviously is a complex and multidimensional phenomenon. No single index seems able to capture all aspects of state effectiveness. Thus, we need to identity some key state functions and use the state’s capability to perform them to gauge the effectiveness of various states. There are six most critical functions we believe effective states should have capacities to perform (Pye 1966; Binder et al 1971; Grew 1978): 1.​ To monopolize the legitimate use of violence 2.​ To extract resources 3.​ To shape national identity and mobilize consent 4.​ To regulate the society and economy 5.​ To maintain internal coherence of state institutions 6.​ To redistribute resources The first two sets of functions are those that define any state, including pre-modern states. According to Weber, as long as there were people or groups that used or threatened to use physical force to pursue their interests, political power existed. But the state did not emerge until there was a political organization that was able to monopolize the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order in a given territory Even pre-modern states were characterized by the creation of regular armies and a taxation system (Weber 1978 I: 54-6). The other four functions are the features of modern nation-state, which add “routine, formalized, rationalized institutions” of wider scope not only over its citizens but also to a very large extent over all actions taking place in the areas of its jurisdiction (Mann 1993: 56). If a state is capable of performing all of tho