This is the meaning of state autonomy: a government that is responsive to interest groups but not owned by them, that is not too easily swayed by the short-term vagaries of democratic public opinion b...
This highly negative narrative about interest groups stands in sharp contrast, however, to a much more positive one about the benefits of civil society, or voluntary associations, to the health of dem...
The young Hegel witnessed Napoleon riding through his university town after the Battle of Jena in 1806 and saw in that act the incipient universalization of recognition in the form of the principles o...
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 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...
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...
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...
Political scientist Ronald Inglehart, who has overseen the massive World Values Survey that seeks to measure value change around the world, has argued that economic modernization and middle-class stat...
On the other hand, countries that democratized early, before they established modern administrations, found themselves developing clientelistic public sectors.
Indeed, the kinds of minimal or no-government societies envisioned by dreamers of the Left and Right are not fantasies; they actually exist in the contemporary developing world. Many parts of sub-Saha...
In societies where most politicians are corrupt, singling one out for punishment is often not a sign of reform but of a power grab.
Imagination is a very scarce resource, and also a highly imperfect one, because thinking about things that have not happened is inherently more difficult than thinking about things that have.
Chinese family businesses instinctively thought of ways of hiding income from the tax collector. The situation is quite different in Japan, where the family is weaker and individuals are pulled in dif...
China was the first world civilization to create a modern state. But it created a modern state that was not restrained by a rule of law or by institutions of accountability to limit the power of the s...
But the simple availability of information about corruption tends not to produce genuine accountability because the politically active part of the population are members of clientelistic networks.
But the impact of national identity on state strength is not limited to its coercive power. Much of what passes for corruption is not simply a matter of greed but rather the by-product of legislators...
Aşağıdaki düşünce deneyini uygulayarak sorunu örnekleyebiliriz. Yirmi yıl sonra eşcinselliğin genetik yönünü gerçekten anlayıp, anne babaların eşcinsel olacak bir çocuğu dünyaya getirme olasılığını ço...
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 b...
ستواجه عملية الأخد بالديموقراطية هي أيضاً مستقبلا يشوبه الغموض، و مع كثرة الشعوب في عالمنا التي تعتتقد على المستوى النظري أنها تريد الرخاء الرأسمالي و الديموقراطية اليبيرالية فلن يكون من المتاح للجميع...
The experience of a more democratic America suggests that there is an inherent tension between democracy and what we now call good governance.