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Book: Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
Quotes of Book: Political Order and Political
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  1. Francis Fukuyama _ Political Order and Political

    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 modern states from absolutist times.
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  2. Francis Fukuyama _ Political Order and Political

    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 political practices of Tudor, or late medieval, England. On American soil these old institutions became entrenched and were eventually written into the American Constitution, a fragment of the old society frozen in time.2 Those Tudor characteristics included the Common Law as a source of authority, one higher than that of the executive, with a correspondingly strong role for courts in governance; a tradition of local self-rule; sovereignty divided among a host of bodies, rather than being concentrated in a centralized state; government with divided powers instead of divided functions, such that, for example, the judiciary exercised not just judicial but also quasi-legislative functions; and reliance on a popular militia rather than a standing army.
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  3. Francis Fukuyama _ Political Order and Political

    When a rural Greek is hospitalized, relatives are in constant attendance to keep a check on the doctor and the treatment he prescribes.
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  4. Francis Fukuyama _ Political Order and Political

    Sometimes things that don't happen are as important in explaining subsequent events as those that do, as Sherlock Holmes said of the dog that failed to bark. In Latin America, there also was a dog that didn't bark: the large-scale and continuous political violence that was so critical in shaping Western European states and national identity simply didn't convulse the New World. On the one hand, this was a good thing: Latin America has been a much more peaceful continent than either Europe or Asia. On the other hand, its political institutions developed more slowly as a result, and the older forms of authoritarian government as well as the social inequalities on which they were based persisted for much longer. EXPLOITATION
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  5. Francis Fukuyama _ Political Order and Political

    He created, in the words of historian Hans Rosenberg, "a first-rate army which had to be supported by a country which was third-rate in terms of manpower, natural wealth, capital supply, and economic skills.
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  6. Francis Fukuyama _ Political Order and Political

    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 armed services, and the Federal Reserve are among the most technically competent, well-run, and autonomous government bodies anywhere in the world. But the overall quality of American public administration remains very problematic, precisely because of the country's continuing reliance on courts and parties at the expense of state administration. Part of the phenomenon of decay has to do with intellectual rigidity. The idea that lawyers and litigation should be such an integral part of public administration is not a view widely shared in other democracies, and yet it has become such an entrenched way of doing business in the United States that no one sees any alternatives.
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  7. Francis Fukuyama _ Political Order and Political

    These cases illustrate the way institutional arrangements can become self-reinforcing: once the principle of electoral politics is established under a limited franchise, incumbent parties can attempt to stay in power by seeking new voters, shifting to new issues, and reaching out across class lines.22
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  8. Francis Fukuyama _ Political Order and Political

    This seemingly minor point is in fact important in distinguishing Chinese and Western legal concepts: the latter see natural persons as bearers of rights and duties independently of any action of the state, whereas in China citizenship is something conferred on individuals by the state.
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  9. Francis Fukuyama _ Political Order and Political

    They squared this circle by creating a set of usufructuary {usage} rights that could be bought, sold, mortgaged, or transferred, in which the state nonetheless retained formal ownership.
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  10. Francis Fukuyama _ Political Order and Political

    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 government by holding war crimes trials for senior leaders at Nuremburg, and then by purging individuals from the civil service. But as the new Federal Republic was formed in 1949 and pressure mounted to put in place a competent government that could anchor the new NATO alliance against the Soviet Union, large numbers of purged officials were reinstated. A federal law passed in 1951 granted all regular civil servants, including those with Nazi backgrounds and those expelled by East Germany, a right to reinstatement.35 Of the fifty-three thousand civil servants initially purged, only about one thousand remained permanently excluded
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  11. Francis Fukuyama _ Political Order and Political

    Whether he was conscious of it or not, Deng was restoring much of the institutional legacy of traditional Chinese government. Only this time, it was the Communist Party that played the role of the emperor with his eunuch cadres supervising a vast bureaucracy.
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  12. Francis Fukuyama _ Political Order and Political

    Today, these same public-sector unions have themselves become part of an elite that uses the political system to protect its own self-interests. As we will see in Part IV, the quality of American public administration has declined markedly since the 1970s, in no small measure because of these unions' ability to limit merit as a basis for hiring and promotion. They are an integral part of the contemporary Democratic Party's political base, making most Democratic politicians loath to challenge them. The result is political decay.
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