Many modern democratic constitutions thus enshrine the principle of equal dignity. They are drawing on the Christian tradition that sees dignity rooted in human moral agency. But that agency is no lon...
On the other hand, countries that democratized early, before they established modern administrations, found themselves developing clientelistic public sectors.
Samuel Huntington identified the Tudor character of American politics.1 According to Huntington, the Englishmen who settled North America in the seventeenth century brought with them many of the polit...
Sequencing therefore matters enormously. Those countries in which democracy preceded modern state building have had much greater problems achieving high-quality governance than those that inherited mo...
Shared mental models—most particularly those that take the form of religion—are critical in facilitating large-scale collective action.
Social democracy, one of the dominant forces shaping Western European politics in the two generations following World War II, has been in retreat.
Some 81 percent of all Prussian civil servants had been party members, half having joined before 1933.34 The American, British, and French occupation authorities sought to de-Nazify the German governm...
THE RISE OF POLITICAL ACCOUNTABILITY What political accountability is; how the lateness of European state building was the source of subsequent liberty; what is wrong with Whig history and how politic...
The United States tried to establish a modern, Weberian state during the Progressive Era and New Deal. It succeeded in many respects: the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control,...
The Westminster system understandably produces governments with more formal powers than in the United States. This greater degree of decisiveness can be seen clearly with respect to the budget process...
The degree to which people in developed countries take political institutions for granted was very much evident in the way that the United States planned, or failed to plan, for the aftermath of its 2...
The great concentration of wealth in the hands of the owners of chaebol has also had the consequence feared by the KMT in Taiwan: the entry into politics of a wealthy industrialist. This happened for...
The idea that democracy was the most, or indeed the only, legitimate form of government spread to every corner of the world. Democratic constitutions were rewritten, or written for the first time, in...
The low-trust, family-oriented societies with weak intermediate organizations we have observed have all been characterized by a similar saddle-shaped distribution of enterprises. Taiwan, Hong Kong, It...
The most modern contemporary bureaucracies were those established by authoritarian states in their pursuit of national security.
The opinion that the survival of Islam itself depended on the use of military slavery was shared by the great Arab historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun, who lived in North Africa in the fourteenth ce...
The parallels between contemporary Russia and the society that emerged in the hundred years following the death of Peter the Great are striking. Despite modern Russia’s formal constitution and written...
The relatively high status of women in Western Europe was an accidental by-product of the church’s self-interest. The church made it difficult for a widow to remarry within the family group and thereb...
The remedy is to define larger and more integrative national identities that take account of the de facto diversity of existing liberal democratic societies.
The repeated demand for justice, incorporated into the names of many Islamist parties, reflects not so much a demand for social equality as a demand for equal treatment under the law.
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