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 Why Is Democracy Performing So Poorly?
Francis Fukuyama

Journal of Democracy, Volume 26, Number 1, January 2015, pp. 11-20 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2015.0017

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/565635

Access provided by Universitat Zurich (1 Sep 2017 14:10 GMT)

 WHY IS DEMOCRACY
PERFORMING SO POORLY?
Francis Fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Center

on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford. His most
recent book is Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial
Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (2014).

The Journal of Democracy published its inaugural issue a bit past the
midpoint of what Samuel P. Huntington labeled the “third wave” of de-
mocratization, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall and just before the
breakup of the former Soviet Union.1 The transitions in Southern Europe
and most of those in Latin America had already happened, and Eastern
Europe was moving at dizzying speed away from communism, while the
democratic transitions in sub-Saharan Africa and the former USSR were
just getting underway. Overall, there has been remarkable worldwide
progress in democratization over a period of almost 45 years, raising
the number of electoral democracies from about 35 in 1970 to well over
110 in 2014.
But as Larry Diamond has pointed out, there has been a democratic
recession since 2006, with a decline in aggregate Freedom House scores
every year since then.2 The year 2014 has not been good for democracy,
with two big authoritarian powers, Russia and China, on the move at
either end of Eurasia. The “Arab Spring” of 2011, which raised expecta-
tions that the Arab exception to the third wave might end, has degener-
ated into renewed dictatorship in the case of Egypt, and into anarchy
in Libya, Yemen, and also Syria, which along with Iraq has seen the
emergence of a new radical Islamist movement, the Islamic State in Iraq
and Syria (ISIS).
It is hard to know whether we are experiencing a momentary setback
in a general movement toward greater democracy around the world, simi-
lar to a stock-market correction, or whether the events of this year signal
a broader shift in world politics and the rise of serious alternatives to
democracy. In either case, it is hard not to feel that the performance of

Journal of Democracy Volume 26, Number 1 January 2015

© 2015 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
12 Journal of Democracy

democracies around the world has been deficient in recent years. This
begins with the most developed and successful democracies, those of the
United States and the European Union, which experienced massive eco-
nomic crises in the late 2000s and seem to be mired in a period of slow
growth and stagnating incomes. But a number of newer democracies,
from Brazil to Turkey to India, have also been disappointing in their per-
formance in many respects, and subject to their own protest movements.
Spontaneous democratic movements against authoritarian regimes
continue to arise out of civil society, from Ukraine and Georgia to Tu-
nisia and Egypt to Hong Kong. But few of these movements have been
successful in leading to the establishment of stable, well-functioning
democracies. It is worth asking why the performance of democracy
around the world has been so disappointing.
In my view, a single important factor lies at the core of many demo-
cratic setbacks over the past generation. It has to do with a failure of
institutionalization—the fact that state capacity in many new and ex-
isting democracies has not kept pace with popular demands for demo-
cratic accountability. It is much harder to move from a patrimonial or
neopatrimonial state to a modern, impersonal one than it is to move
from an authoritarian regime to one that holds regular, free, and fair
elections. It is the failure to establish modern, well-governed states
that has been the Achilles heel of recent democratic transitions.

Some Definitions
Modern liberal democracies combine three basic institutions: the
state, rule of law, and democratic accountability.
The first of these, the state, is a legitimate monopoly of coercive
power that exercises its authority over a defined territory. States con-
centrate and employ power to keep the peace, defend communities from
external enemies, enforce laws, and provide basic public goods.
The rule of law is a set of rules, reflecting community values, that are
binding not just on citizens, but also on the elites who wield coercive
power. If law does not constrain the powerful, it amounts to commands
of the executive and constitutes merely rule by law.
Finally, democratic accountability seeks to ensure that government
acts in the interests of the whole community, rather than simply in the
self-interest of the rulers. It is usually achieved through procedures such
as free and fair multiparty elections, though procedural accountability is
not always coincident with substantive accountability.
A liberal democracy balances these potentially contradictory institu-
tions. The state generates and employs power, while rule of law and
democratic accountability seek to constrain power and ensure that it is
used in the public interest. A state without constraining institutions is a
dictatorship. And a polity that is all constraint and no power is anarchic.
Francis Fukuyama 13

As Samuel Huntington used to argue, before a polity can constrain

power, it must be able to employ it. In the words of Alexander Hamilton,
“A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a gov-
ernment ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice,
a bad government.”3
There is a further critical distinction to be made between patrimonial
and modern states. A modern state aspires to be impersonal, treating
people equally on the basis of citizenship rather than on whether they
have a personal relationship to the ruler. By contrast, patrimonial states
are ones in which the polity is regarded as a species of personal prop-
erty, and in which there is no distinction between the public interest
and the ruler’s private interest. Today there are no fully patrimonial
societies, since no one dares any longer to claim ownership of an entire
country, as kings and queens did in ages past. There are, however, many
neopatrimonial states that pretend to be modern polities, but these in
fact constitute rent-sharing kleptocracies run for the private benefit of
the insiders. Neopatrimonialism can coexist with democracy, producing
widespread patronage and clientelism in which politicians share state
resources with networks of political supporters. In such societies, indi-
viduals go into politics not to pursue a vision of public good, but rather
to enrich themselves.
Coercion remains central to the functioning of the state, which is
why state power so often generates fear and hatred. Michael Mann has
famously distinguished between “despotic” and “infrastructural” power,
the former related to coercion and the latter to the ability to provide
public goods and look after the public interest.4 This distinction might
tempt us to say that “good” states have infrastructural power, while
“bad” states make use of despotic power. But, in fact, coercion is impor-
tant to all states. Successful states convert power into authority—that is,
into voluntary compliance by citizens based on the belief that the state’s
actions are legitimate. But not all citizens agree to obey the law, and
even the most legitimate democracies require police power to enforce
the law. It is impossible to control corruption, for example, or to collect
taxes if nobody goes to jail for violating the law. Enforcement capac-
ity does not emerge simply through passing laws; it also requires in-
vestment in manpower and training, and in establishing the institutional
rules that govern its exercise.
If there is anything that the experience of the past 25 years should
have taught us, it is that the democratic leg of this tripod is much easier
to construct than the rule of law or the modern state. Or to put it slightly
differently, the development of modern states has not kept pace with
the development of democratic institutions, leading to unbalanced situa-
tions in which new (and sometimes even well-established) democracies
have not been able to keep up with their citizens’ demand for high-
quality government services. This has led, in turn, to the delegitima-
14 Journal of Democracy

tion of democracy as such. Conversely, the fact that authoritarian states

like China and Singapore have been able to provide such services has
increased their prestige relative to that of democracy in many parts of
the world.
The recent experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq illustrate this prob-
lem. After the U.S. invasion and occupation of these countries in 2001
and 2003, respectively, the United States was able, with some interna-
tional help, to organize democratic elections that led to the seating of
new governments in both countries. The quality of democracy in both
places—especially in Afghanistan, where the presidential elections of
2009 and 2014 were marred by serious allegations of fraud5—was ques-
tioned by many, but at least a democratic process was in place to provide
leadership that had some semblance of legitimacy.
What did not occur in either place was the development of a modern
state that could defend the country’s territory from internal and exter-
nal enemies and deliver public services in a fair and impartial manner.
Both countries were beset by internal insurgencies, and in 2014 the
U.S.-trained Iraqi army collapsed in the north under the onslaught of
ISIS. Both countries were plagued by extremely high levels of cor-
ruption, which in turn undermined their ability to deliver government
services and undercut their legitimacy. The huge investments in state-
building in both places by the United States and its coalition partners
seem to have had limited effect.
State-building failures also played a key role in events in Ukraine.
Western friends of democracy cheered when the Orange Revolution
forced a new presidential election in 2004, leading to the defeat of in-
cumbent prime minister Viktor Yanukovych by Viktor Yushchenko. But
the new Orange Coalition proved feckless and corrupt, and did nothing
to improve the overall quality of governance in Ukraine. As a result,
Yanukovych defeated Yushchenko in 2010 in what most observers cred-
ited as a free and fair election. Yanukovych’s presidency was marked
by even higher levels of predatory behavior, generating a new round
of protests in Kyiv after his announcement in late 2013 that he would
pursue association with Vladimir Putin’s Eurasian Union rather than
with the European Union. In the meantime, Putin had consolidated his
increasingly illiberal rule in Russia and strengthened his state’s position
vis-`a-vis the outside world, making possible the outright annexation of
Crimea following Yanukovych’s ouster in February 2014.
I would argue that the current conflict pitting Russia against the new
Ukrainian government and its Western backers is less one over democ-
racy per se than over modern versus neopatrimonial political orders.
There is little question that, in the wake of the Crimean annexation,
Vladimir Putin has become very popular in Russia and would be likely
to win overwhelmingly if a new election were to be held. The real choice
facing people in this region is a different one—whether their societies
Francis Fukuyama 15

are to be based on governments seeking to serve the public interest in

an impersonal manner, or are to be ruled by a corrupt coalition of elites
who seek to use the state as a route to personal enrichment.
The legitimacy of many democracies around the world depends less
on the deepening of their democratic institutions than on their ability
to provide high-quality governance. The new Ukrainian state will not
survive if it does not address the problem of pervasive corruption that
brought down its Orange Coalition predecessor. Democracy has become
deeply entrenched in most of Latin America over the past generation;
what is lacking now in countries such as Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico
is the capacity to deliver basic public goods like education, infrastruc-
ture, and citizen security. The same can be said of the world’s largest
democracy, India, which suffers from pervasive clientelism and corrup-
tion. In 2014, it decisively turned to the BJP’s Narendra Modi in hopes
that he would provide decisive leadership and strong government in
place of the feckless and corrupt Congress-led coalition that had been in
power for the past decade.

How to Get to a Modern State

There is by now a huge literature on democratic transitions, much of
it published originally in the Journal of Democracy. There is a much
smaller literature available on the question of how to make the transition
from a neopatrimonial to a modern state, though some progress has been
made over the past decade and a half. This reflects a conceptual deficit,
rooted in misconceptions of the nature of the underlying problem.
For example, there is a tendency to associate state modernity with the
absence of corruption. Corruption, of course, is a huge problem in many
societies and has generated its own large literature. But while there is a
high degree of correlation between levels of corruption and poor state
performance, they are not the same thing. A state may be relatively un-
corrupt and yet be incapable of delivering basic services due to a lack of
capacity. No one has argued, for example, that Guinea, Sierra Leone, or
Liberia has been unable to deal with the recent Ebola epidemic because
of pervasive corruption in their respective public-health systems; rather,
the problem is one of insufficient human and material resources—doc-
tors, nurses, and hospitals with electricity, clean water, and the like.
“State capacity” therefore comes much closer than the absence of
corruption to describing what is at the core of state modernity. Modern
states provide a bewildering array of complex services, from keeping
economic and social statistics to providing disaster relief, forecasting
the weather, and controlling the flight paths of airplanes. All these ac-
tivities require huge investments in human resources and in the material
conditions that allow agents of the state to operate; the simple absence
of corruption does not mean that these will exist. Yet even the term
16 Journal of Democracy

“state capacity” fails to capture the ends that this capacity serves and the
degree to which it is being employed impersonally.
There is, moreover, a serious lack of clarity about the ways in which
strong state capacity has been generated in the past. At the moment,
there is something of a consensus within the international donor com-
munity on how to pursue good gover-
nance, a consensus that is embedded in
Although democracy is programs like participatory budgeting,
a driver of clientelism the Open Government Partnership,
at low levels of per and the initiatives of the numerous
organizations promoting government
capita income, it may
transparency around the world. Under-
open a path toward the lying these approaches is the theory
creation of higher-quality that good governance is the product
government as nations of greater transparency and account-
grow richer. ability. These approaches assume that
more information about government
corruption or malfeasance will lead to
citizen anger and demands for better state performance, which will in
turn push governments to reform themselves. Better-quality democracy,
in other words, is seen as the solution to the problem of corruption and
weak state capacity.
The only problem with this strategy is that there is strikingly little
empirical evidence demonstrating that such an approach is how existing
high-performing governments have been created, either historically or
under contemporary circumstances. Many states with relatively high-
performing governments—China, Japan, Germany, France, and Den-
mark, for example—created modern “Weberian” bureaucracies under
authoritarian conditions; those that subsequently went on to become
democracies inherited meritocratic state apparatuses that simply sur-
vived the transition. The motive for creating modern governments was
not grassroots pressure from informed and mobilized citizens but rather
elite pressure, often for reasons of national security. Charles Tilly’s fa-
mous aphorism that “war makes the state and the state makes war” sums
up the experience not just of much of early modern Europe, but also of
China during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, lead-
ing to the emergence of an impersonal state during the Qin unification
in the third century B.C.E.6
Similarly, there is strikingly little evidence that current donor and
NGO efforts to promote good governance through increasing transpar-
ency and accountability have had a measurable impact on state perfor-
mance.7 The theory that there should be a correlation between the in-
creased availability of information about government performance and
the quality of final government outputs rests on a number of heroic as-
sumptions—that citizens will care about poor government performance
Francis Fukuyama 17

(as opposed to being content to benefit from practices like ethnic-based

patronage); that they are capable of organizing politically to put pres-
sure on the government; that the country’s political institutions are ones
that accurately transmit grassroots sentiment to politicians in ways that
make the latter accountable; and finally, that the government actually
has the capacity to perform as citizens demand.
The actual history of the relationship between state modernity and
democracy is far more complicated than the contemporary theory sug-
gests. Following the framework first established by Martin Shefter, I
have argued elsewhere that the sequence by which democracy (mea-
sured by the degree of universality of the franchise) and state modernity
were established has determined the long-term quality of government.8
Where a modern state has been consolidated before the extension of the
franchise, it has often succeeded in surviving into modern times; where
the democratic opening preceded state reform, the result has often been
widespread clientelism. This was true above all in the country that first
opened the franchise to all white males, the United States, which went
on to create the world’s first pervasively clientelistic political system
(known in U.S. history as the spoils or patronage system). In that country
during the nineteenth century, democracy and state quality were clearly
at odds with each other. The reason for this is that, in democracies with
low levels of income and education, individualized voter incentives (the
essence of clientelism) are more likely to mobilize voters and get them to
the polls than promises of programmatic public policies.9
The situation changes, however, at higher levels of economic de-
velopment. Higher-income voters are harder to bribe through an indi-
vidualized payment, and they tend to care more about programmatic
policies. In addition, higher levels of development are usually driven
by the growth of a market economy, which provides alternative avenues
for personal enrichment outside of politics. The last Taiwanese election
during which clientelism was widespread occurred in the early 1990s;
thereafter, Taiwanese voters were too wealthy to be easily bribable.10
Although democracy is a driver of clientelism at low levels of per
capita income, it may open a path toward the creation of higher-quality
government as nations grow richer. The United States is again an ex-
ample: By the 1880s, the country was rapidly transforming itself from
an agrarian society into an urban industrial one, knitted together in a gi-
gantic continental market by new technologies like railroads. Economic
growth drove the emergence of new economic actors—urban profession-
als, a more complex set of business interests, and middle-class individu-
als more generally—who wanted higher-quality government and had no
strong stake in the existing patronage system. A grassroots movement
made possible the 1883 passage of the Pendleton Act, which established
the principle of merit-based recruitment into the federal bureaucracy
that subsequent presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt (1901–09) and
18 Journal of Democracy

Woodrow Wilson (1913–21) would do much to promote. Party bosses

and political machines continued to thrive for several generations past
that point, but they were gradually eliminated in most U.S. cities by the
middle of the twentieth century through determined political campaign-
ing. If contemporary democracies like India and Brazil are to deal with
problems of patronage and corruption, they will have to follow a similar
route.

The Necessity of Enforcement

The United States had one important advantage, however, that is
lacking in many of today’s new democracies. It always had strong po-
lice power and could enforce the laws that it passed. This capacity was
rooted in the Common Law, which the colonies inherited from Eng-
land and had become well-institutionalized before their independence.
American governments at all levels always maintained relatively strong
police power to indict, try, and convict criminals at various levels of
government. This coercive power was backed by a strong belief in the
legitimacy of law, and was therefore converted into genuine authority
in most places. The capacity to enforce constitutes an area where state
capacity overlaps with the rule of law, and it is critical in dealing with
a problem like corruption. The behavior of public officials depends on
incentives—not just getting adequate pay for doing their jobs, but the
fear of punishment if they break the law. In very many countries, taxes
are not paid and bribes are collected because there is very little likeli-
hood of lawbreakers going to jail.
Effective enforcement was central to the success of one of the
most notable recent efforts to improve public-sector performance, that
of Georgia. Following the 2003 Rose Revolution, the government of
Mikheil Saakashvili cracked down on corruption on a number of fronts,
tackling the traffic police, tax evasion, and the pervasive operations of
criminal gangs known as the “thieves-in-law.” While some of this was
done through transparency initiatives and positive incentives (for exam-
ple, by publishing government data online and by increasing police sala-
ries by an order of magnitude), effective enforcement was dependent on
the creation of new police units that did things like making highly pub-
licized arrests of high-ranking former officials and businessmen. By the
end of the Saakashvili administration, this enhanced police power had
come to be abused in many ways, setting off a political reaction that led
to the election of Bidzina Ivanishvili and the Georgian Dream party.11
Such abuses should not obscure the importance of the state’s coer-
cive power in achieving effective enforcement of the law. Controlling
corruption requires the wholesale shifting of a population’s normative
expectations of behavior—if everyone around me is taking bribes, I
will look like a fool if I do not participate as well. Under these circum-
Francis Fukuyama 19

stances, fear is a much more effective motivator than good intentions

or economic incentives. Prior to the Rose Revolution, Georgia had the
reputation of being one of the most corrupt places in the former Soviet
Union. Today, by a number of governance measures, it has become one
of the least corrupt. It is hard to find examples of effectively governed
polities that do not exert substantial coercive power. Contemporary ef-
forts to promote good governance through increased transparency and
accountability without simultaneously incorporating efforts to strength-
en enforcement power are doomed to fail in the end.
In Political Order in Changing Societies, Samuel Huntington argued
that the political dimensions of development often fail to keep pace with
social mobilization and thus lead to political disorder. There can be a
corresponding failure of state institutions to keep up with the develop-
ment of democratic ones.
This conclusion has a number of important implications for the way
in which the United States and other democracies pursue democracy
promotion. In the past, there has been heavy emphasis on leveling the
playing field in authoritarian countries through support for civil society
organizations, and on supporting the initial transition away from dicta-
torship.
Creating a viable democracy, however, requires two further stages
during which the initial mobilization against tyranny gets institutional-
ized and converted into durable practices. The first is the organization of
social movements into political parties that can contest elections. Civil
society organizations usually focus on narrow issues, and are not set up
to mobilize voters—this is the unique domain of political parties. The
failure to build political parties explains why more liberal forces have
frequently failed at the ballot box in transitional countries from Russia
to Ukraine to Egypt.
The second required stage, however, concerns state-building and
state capacity. Once a democratic government is in power, it must actu-
ally govern—that is, it must exercise legitimate authority and provide
basic services to the population. The democracy-promotion community
has paid much less attention to the problems of democratic governance
than it has to the initial mobilization and the transition. Without the abil-
ity to govern well, however, new democracies will disappoint the expec-
tations of their followers and delegitimate themselves. Indeed, as U.S.
history shows, democratization without attention to state modernization
can actually lead to a weakening of the quality of government.
This does not mean, however, that state modernization can be
achieved only under conditions of authoritarian rule. The fact that many
long-established democracies followed the sequence of state-building
prior to democratization—what Samuel Huntington labeled the “author-
itarian transition”—does not necessarily mean that this is a viable strat-
egy for countries in the contemporary world, where popular demands
20 Journal of Democracy

and expectations for democracy are so much higher. For better or worse,
many countries around the world will have to develop modern states
at the same time that they build democratic institutions and the rule
of law. This means that the democracy-promotion community needs to
pay much more attention to the building of modern states, and not relax
when authoritarian governments are pushed out of power. This also sug-
gests an expanded intellectual agenda for the Journal of Democracy:
Along with its substantial contributions to the study of how democracies
emerge and become consolidated, it needs to focus renewed attention on
how modern state institutions come into being and fall into decay.

NOTES
1. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth
Century (Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

2. See Larry Diamond’s essay “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession,” on pages

141–55 of this issue.

3. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 70 (1788).

4. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, A History of Power from the
Beginning to AD 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

5. See Sarah Chayes, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2015).

6. This point is made in my book The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman
Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).

7. See, for example, Ivar Kolstad and Arne Wiig, “Is Transparency the Key to Re-
ducing Corruption in Resource-Rich Countries?” World Development 37 (March 2009):
521–32; Mehmet Bac, “Corruption, Connections and Transparency: Does a Better Screen
Imply a Better Scene?” Public Choice 107 (April 2001): 87–96; Susan Rose-Ackerman
and Rory Truex, “Corruption and Policy Reform,” working paper prepared for the Copen-
hagen Consensus Project, 27 February 2012; and Luca Etter, “Can Transparency Reduce
Corruption?” paper presented at the Doing Business Conference, Georgetown University,
Washington, D.C., February 2014.

8. See Martin Shefter, Political Parties and the State: The American Historical Experi-
ence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

9. See Francis Fukuyama, “Democracy and the Quality of the State,” Journal of De-
mocracy 24 (October 2013): 5–16.

10. Mushtaq H. Khan, “Markets, States, and Democracy: Patron-Client Networks and
the Case for Democracy in Developing Countries,” Democratization 12 (December 2005):
704–24; Chin-Shou Wang and Charles Kurzman, “The Logistics: How to Buy Votes,” in
Frederic Charles Schaffer, ed., Elections for Sale: The Causes and Consequences of Vote
Buying (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2007).

11. See World Bank, Fighting Corruption in Public Services: Chronicling Georgia’s
Reforms (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2012); Peter Pomerantsev et al., “Revolutionary
Tactics: Insights from Police and Justice Reform in Georgia,” Legatum Institute, London,
June 2014.