In Europe, demands for expanded popular participation came on the heels of war; the rise of the British Labour Party in the 1920s, for example, was in some ways a consequence of the sufferings of the...
In particular, the virtues and ambitions called forth by war are unlikely to find expression in liberal democracies. There will be plenty of metaphorical wars—corporate lawyers specializing in hostile...
In the hands of good leaders, such a system can actually perform better than a democratic system that is subject to rule of law and formal democratic procedures like multiparty elections. It can make...
In the succeeding two centuries, however, some countries evolved in a very different direction. Prussia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Britain, and other European countries followed France in the developm...
Lant Pritchett, Michael Woolcock, and Matt Andrews have argued that one of the big problems with developing countries’ governments is that they engage in what they term isomorphic mimicry, that is, co...
Many believed that the Mafia, clientelism, and corruption represented traditional social practices that would gradually erode as the country modernized economically.
Many of the failures attributed to democracy are in fact failures of state administrations that are unable to deliver on the promises made by newly elected democratic politicians to voters who want no...
Many of these problems could be solved if the United States moved to a more unified parliamentary system of government, but so radical a change in the country’s institutional structure is inconceivabl...
Modern liberal societies are heirs to the moral confusion left by the disappearance of a shared religious horizon.
On the left, identity politics has sought to undermine the legitimacy of the American national story by emphasizing victimization, insinuating in some cases that racism, gender discrimination, and oth...
On the right, plenty of new white nationalist voices would like to drag the country backward to an identity once again based on race, ethnicity, or religion. It is urgent that
Social capital is a capability that arises from the prevalence of trust in a society or in certain parts of it. It can be embodied in the smallest and most basic social group, the family, as well as t...
Some people today argue that religion is primarily a source of violence, conflict, and social discord.25 Historically, however, religion has played the opposite role: it is a source of social cohesion...
Successful state building is dependent, therefore, on the prior existence of a sense of national identity that serves as a locus of loyalty to the state itself, rather than to the social groups underl...
The increases in productivity brought about by Ford’s innovation were startling and revolutionized not just the automobile industry but virtually every industry serving a mass market. Introduction of...
The inhabitants of warm countries are, like old men, timorous … the people in cold countries are, like young men, brave.
The left continued to be defined by its passion for equality, but that agenda shifted from its earlier emphasis on the conditions of the working class to the often psychological demands of an ever-wid...
The principle of effective government is meritocracy; the principle of democracy is popular participation. These two principles can be made to work together, but there is always an underlying tension...
The vast majority of workers had no such representation; in countries where benefits like pensions were tied to regular jobs, they entered the informal sector. Such individuals had few legally defined...
There are other problems more closely related to the question of culture. The poor fit between large scale and Korea’s familistic tendencies has probably been a net drag on efficiency. The culture has...
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