Francis Fukuyama Quote
At the root of the problems of Greece and Italy is the fact that both countries have used public employment as a source of political patronage, leading to bloated and inefficient public services and ballooning budget deficits. Germany, as we saw in chapter 4, inherited an autonomous, merit-based, modern bureaucracy from absolutist times. Modernization of the state occurred prior to the arrival of full democratic participation. Political parties when they appeared were based on ideology and programmatic agendas; clientelism was never a source of political power. Greece and Italy, by contrast, did not develop modern bureaucracies before they became electoral democracies, and for much of their recent history used public employment as a means of mobilizing voters. The result has been a chronic inability to control public-sector employment and hence the wage bill up until the present day. Greece and Italy followed a sequence closer to that of the United States in the nineteenth century than to their Northern European counterparts: democracy arrived before the modern state, making the latter subservient to the interests of party politicians.
At the root of the problems of Greece and Italy is the fact that both countries have used public employment as a source of political patronage, leading to bloated and inefficient public services and ballooning budget deficits. Germany, as we saw in chapter 4, inherited an autonomous, merit-based, modern bureaucracy from absolutist times. Modernization of the state occurred prior to the arrival of full democratic participation. Political parties when they appeared were based on ideology and programmatic agendas; clientelism was never a source of political power. Greece and Italy, by contrast, did not develop modern bureaucracies before they became electoral democracies, and for much of their recent history used public employment as a means of mobilizing voters. The result has been a chronic inability to control public-sector employment and hence the wage bill up until the present day. Greece and Italy followed a sequence closer to that of the United States in the nineteenth century than to their Northern European counterparts: democracy arrived before the modern state, making the latter subservient to the interests of party politicians.
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About Francis Fukuyama
Fukuyama has been a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies since July 2010 and the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. In August 2019, he was named director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy at Stanford.
Before that, he served as a professor and director of the International Development program at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. He had also been the Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University.
He is a council member of the International Forum for Democratic Studies founded by the National Endowment for Democracy and was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation. He is also one of the 25 leading figures on the Information and Democracy Commission launched by Reporters Without Borders. In 2024, he received the Riggs Award for Lifetime Achievement in International and Comparative Public Administration.