What Is Governance?

Francis Fukuyama

Abstract

This paper points to the poor state of empirical measures of the quality of states, that is, executive
branches and their bureaucracies. Much of the problem is conceptual, since there is very little
agreement on what constitutes high-quality government. The paper suggests four approaches:
(1) procedural measures, such as the Weberian criteria of bureaucratic modernity; (2) capacity
measures, which include both resources and degree of professionalization; (3) output measures;
and (4) measures of bureaucratic autonomy. The paper rejects output measures, and suggests a
two-dimensional framework of using capacity and autonomy as a measure of executive branch
quality. This framework explains the conundrum of why low-income countries are advised to reduce
bureaucratic autonomy while high-income ones seek to increase it.

Keywords: governance, states, bureaucracy.

Working Paper 314

www.cgdev.org
January 2013
 What Is Governance?

Francis Fukuyama

This paper has been extensively revised based on presentations and

discussions generated by the Governance Project at Stanford’s Center on
Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. I would like to also thank
the CGD reviewers for their comments.

Francis Fukuyama . 2013. “What Is Governance?.” CGD Working Paper 314. Washington,
DC: Center for Global Development.
http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/1426906

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Contents

Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 1

Definitions ......................................................................................................................................... 3

Procedural measures ........................................................................................................................ 5

Capacity Measures ............................................................................................................................ 6

Output Measures .............................................................................................................................. 8

Bureaucratic autonomy.................................................................................................................... 9

Capacity and Autonomy................................................................................................................. 13

Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................... 16

Appendix: The Inadequacy of Existing Measures of China's Quality of Government ...... 17

Introduction

This paper is the beginning of an effort to better measure governance, which at this point
will amount to nothing more than an elaboration of the issue's complexity and the confused
state of current discussions. Before we can measure good governance, however, we have to
better conceptualize what it is.

The state, that is, the functioning of executive branches and their bureaucracies, has received
relatively little attention in contemporary political science. Since the onset of the Third Wave
of democratizations now more than a generation ago, the overwhelming emphasis in
comparative politics has been on democracy, transitions to democracy, human rights,
transitional justice, and the like. Studies of non-democratic countries focus on issues like
authoritarian persistence, meaning that the focus still remains the question of democracy in
the long run or democratic transition. In other words, everyone is interested in studying
political institutions that limit or check power—democratic accountability and rule of law—
but very few people pay attention to the institution that accumulates and uses power, the
state.

The relative emphasis on checking institutions rather than power-deploying institutions is

evident in the governance measures that have been developed in recent years. There are
numerous measures of the quality of democracy like the Freedom House and Polity
measures, as well as newer and very sophisticated ones like the Varieties of Democracy
project led by Michael Coppedge, John Gerring et al. We have fewer measures of Weberian
bureaucracy—that is, the degree to which bureaucratic recruitment and promotion is merit-
based, functionally organized, based on technical qualifications, etc. One of the only studies
to attempt to do this was by Peter Evans and James Rauch back in 2000, but their sample
was limited to 30-odd countries and produced no time series data. The Varieties of
Democracy project is also collecting data on bureaucratic quality based on expert surveys.
Other bureaucratic quality measures include the Bertelsmann Transformation Index which
“focuses on how effectively policymakers facilitate and steer development and
transformation processes,” and the proprietary Political Risk Service’s Group (PRSG)
International Country Risk Guide. Four of the six World Bank Institute’s Worldwide
Governance Indicators purport to measure state aspects of state capacity (government
effectiveness, regulatory quality, and stability and absence of violence, control of corruption),
but these are aggregates of other existing measures and it is not clear how they map onto the
Weberian categories. For example, does a good absence of violence score mean that there is
effective policing? I suspect that there isn’t much by way of street crime or military coup
attempts in North Korea. (These problems are also true of the Bank’s internal CPIA scores.)
Finally, Bo Rothstein’s Quality of Governance Institute in Gothenberg has developed a set
of measures of quality of governance for 136 countries worldwide, as well as a more detailed
survey of 172 regions within the European Union. It is based again on expert surveys

1
focusing on the degree of a state’s impartiality, which Rothstein argues is a proxy for overall
state quality.

The bias against thinking about state capacity is particularly strong among rational choice
institutionalists. Most in this school begin with Mancur Olson’s assumption that states are
predatory, and that the chief aim of political development is the creation of institutions like
rule of law and accountability that limit the state’s discretion. This school assumes that all
states have the power to be predatory, and seldom raise the question of where state capacity
comes from in the first place, or how it increases or decreases over time. Frankly, it would be
very hard to develop a rational choice theory of state capacity, since capacity in any
organization is so heavily influenced by norms, organizational culture, leadership, and other
factors that don’t easily fit into a model based on economic incentives.

In addition, there has been a large literature on public sector reform coming out of
institutional economics, public administration, and from the communities of practice
surrounding development agencies seeking to improve governance. The approaches favored
by economists sought to conceptualize governance in a principal-agent framework, and have
sought to control corruption and bad administration through manipulation of incentives.
Many of the new approaches under this framework sought to bring market-like incentives
into the public sector through creation of exist options, competition, manipulation of wage
scales, shortening of accountability routes, and better methods of monitoring and
accountability. Many of the techniques of New Public Management was in some sense an
outgrowth of these approaches, though their applicability to developing world contexts has
been questioned.1

The existing measures of state quality or capacity have a number of limitations. There is an
inherent weakness in expert surveys, especially when trying to create time-series data. Since
the concept of good governance is not well established, different experts may intend
different things when responding to the same survey question. For example, there is an
important difference between clientelism and outright corruption; in the former there is true
reciprocity between patron and client, whereas in the latter there is no obligation on the part
of the corrupt official to give anything back. The economic impact of corruption varies
tremendously depending on whether the corruption “tax” is 10% or 50%, and the quality
and nature of the services that clients get in return. In China, for example, corruption seems
to be pervasive, but the tax rate is lower and the service provision rate much higher than in,

1 See inter alia Ferrel Heady, Public Administration: A Comparative Perspective. 4th edition (New York: Marcel

Dekker, 1991); Christopher Pollitt and Geert Bouckaert, Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis, 2nd ed.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); World Bank, World Development Report 2004: World Development Report
2004: Making Services Work for Poor People (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2004); Merilee S. Grindle, "Good
Enough Governance: Poverty Reduction and Reform in Developing Countries," Governance 17(4), 2004: 525-548;
Allen Schick, "Why Most Developing Countries Should Not Try New Zealand Reforms," World Bank Research
Observer 13(8), 1998.

2
say, sub-Saharan Africa. None of the existing corruption surveys are, as far as I know, able
to make distinctions of this sort.

Bo Rothstein makes a number of persuasive arguments that impartiality ought to be the core
measure of the quality of government. However, it would seem entirely possible that a state
could be highly impartial and still lack the capacity and/or autonomy to effectively deliver
services. Rothstein argues that impartiality implies the existence of sufficient capacity. This
may be true, but it is something that needs to be empirically verified rather than simply
asserted.

In addition, there are a number of Rule of Law measures that relate to bureaucratic quality,
such as those published by the ABA Rule of Law Initiative and the World Justice Project’s
Rule of Law Index. Some Chinese scholars have tried to measure the spread of rule-based
decision-making by measuring the number of administrative cases filed against government
agencies, as well as the percentage of such cases that are won by the plaintiffs.

The rule of law is defined differently by different scholars, and can mean, alternatively, law
and order, property rights and contract enforcement, observance of substantive Western
norms of human rights, and constitutional constraints on the power of the executive.2 Some
scholars have distinguished between rule by law, in which the executive uses law and
bureaucracy as an instrument of power, and rule of law, in which the executive is itself
constrained by the same laws that apply to everyone else. In many respects rule by law
overlaps with state quality, since we want states to operate by general, transparent, impartial,
and predictable rules. Rule of law in the narrow sense of constitutional constraints on the
executive, on the other hand, is closely associated with democracy. Both the
Prussian/German Rechtsstaat in the 19th century, Meiji Japan, and contemporary China were
all authoritarian states that could be said to have rule by law but not rule of law. This means
that certain aspects of rule of law would be useful as measures of state quality. On the other
hand, many rule of law measures measure what is measurable rather than the underlying
quality of law, so we would need to be careful in selecting them.

Definitions

As a starting point, I am going to define governance as a government's ability to make and

enforce rules, and to deliver services, regardless of whether that government is democratic or
not. I am more interested in what Michael Mann labels "infrastructural" rather than
"despotic" power.3 The reason I am excluding democratic accountability from the definition
of governance is that we will later want to be able to theorize the relationship between
governance and democracy. The current orthodoxy in the development community is that

2 See Rachel Kleinfeld, “Competing Definitions of the Rule of Law,” in Thomas Carothers, ed., Promoting the

Rule of Law Abroad: In Search of Knowledge (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment, 2006).
3 Michael Mann, "The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results," European

Journal of Sociology 25(2), 1984: 185-213.

3
democracy and good governance are mutually supportive. I would argue that this is more of
a theory than an empirically demonstrated fact, and that we cannot empirically demonstrate
the connection if we define one to include the other.

In this initial conceptualization, the quality of governance is different from the ends that
governance is meant to fulfill. That is, governance is about the performance of agents in
carrying out the wishes of principals, and not about the goals that principals set. The
government is an organization which can do its functions better or worse; governance is
thus about execution, or what has traditionally fallen within the domain of public
administration, as opposed to politics.4 An authoritarian regime can be well governed, just as
a democracy can be mal-administered. (As we will see below, this distinction cannot always
be maintained quite so neatly; principals can set self-undermining tasks for their agents.)

As Bo Rothstein has pointed out, it is not so easy to separate governance as implementation

from the normative ends that government is meant to serve. It is not clear that a well-
governed state is one that has ruthlessly efficient concentration camp guards as opposed to
bribable ones.5 On the other hand, once one starts to introduce substantive ends as criteria
for good government, it is hard to know where and when to stop. As Rothstein points out,
the existing Worldwide Governance Indicators embed a number of normative policy
preferences (e.g., more rather than less regulation) that color the final results. Would we
want to argue that the US military is a low-quality one because it does things we disapprove
of, say, invading Iraq?

Rothstein argues that use of the criterion of impartiality solves this problem as it is both
normative and embeds what most people understand by "good government." However, for
reasons I will elaborate below, I don't think that impartiality by itself is a sufficient metric.6 I
want to put the normative question to the side for the time being, however, particularly since
I am interested in developing measures that will work for both authoritarian and democratic
regimes. Focusing on an extreme case like concentration camps should not distract us from
the fact that there are many valence issues like provision of education, health, or public
safety that are shared by virtually all governments, in which a more instrumental view of
quality of governance will suffice.

4
This distinction was made in Woodrow Wilson's famous article "The Study of Administration," Political
Science Quarterly 2(2), 1887: 197-222. It is also made in Max Weber's equally famous essay, “Politics as a
Vocation,” in Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).
5 Bo Rothstein, The Quality of Government: Corruption, Social Trust, and Inequality in International Perspective

(Chicago, Il: University of Chicago Press, 2011). One would have to say that a concentration camp guard who
executed everyone he was ordered to kill was more impartial than one who played favorites or spared certain
individuals in return for bribes or sexual favors. This points to the difference between impartiality of policies
compared to the impartiality of the way in which policies are executed.
6 One would have to say that a concentration camp guard who executed everyone he was ordered to kill was

more impartial than one who played favorites or spared certain individuals in return for bribes or sexual favors.
This points to the difference between impartiality of policies compared to the impartiality of the way in which
policies are executed.

4
If we accept this definition of the object we are trying to study, then there are at least four
broad approaches to evaluating the quality of governance: procedural measures, input
measures, output measures, and measures of bureaucratic autonomy.

Procedural measures

The most classic effort to define governance in terms of procedures was Max Weber's
famous characterization of modern bureaucracy in Economy and Society.7 We continue to use
the term "Weberian bureaucracy" as an ideal type to which we hope highly corrupt, neo-
patrimonial states will eventually conform. It might be useful to review Weber's conditions
here:

1. bureaucrats personally free and subject to authority only within a defined area;

2. they are organized into a clearly defined hierarchy of offices;

3. each office has a defined sphere of competence;

4. offices are filled by free contractual relationship;

5. candidates selected on basis of technical qualifications;

6. bureaucrats are remunerated by fixed salaries;

7. the office treated as the sole occupation of the incumbent;

8. the office constitutes a career;

9. there is a separation between ownership and management;

10. officials subject to strict discipline and control.

Conditions 1-5 and 9 are probably at the core of what people think of when they talk about
"modern bureaucracy": they clearly delineate such an organization from the kinds of venal or
patrimonial office that existed in Europe under the Old Regime, or that exist in
contemporary neo-patrimonial developing countries today. However, characteristics 6, 7, 8,
and 10 are more problematic. Condition 6, fixed salaries, is not compatible with the kinds of
incentives often offered bureaucrats under New Public Management. Conditions 7 and 8 are
not true of many mid-level officials in contemporary America, in both the public and private
sectors. One could say that the US fails to live up to the Weberian ideal, but it does not seem
likely that the quality of bureaucracy in the US would improve if it were impossible for
talented individuals from the private sector or the academy to serve in government for
periods of time. And condition 10 is incompatible with civil service protection, which during
the Progressive Era was seen as a hallmark of the modern bureaucracy that was replacing the

7
Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), pp. Vol. I, pp. 220-
221.

5
patronage system. More importantly, condition 10 suggests that bureaucrats are simply
robotic agents whose only purpose is to do the bidding of principals. The idea of
bureaucratic autonomy--the notion that bureaucrats themselves can shape goals and define
tasks independently of the wishes of the principals--is not possible under the Weberian
definition.

Nonetheless, certain procedural measures would remain at the core of any measure of quality
of governance. One would want to know whether bureaucrats are recruited and promoted
on the basis of merit or political patronage, what level of technical expertise they are
required to possess, and the overall level of formality in bureaucratic procedure.

Capacity Measures

The problem with all procedural definitions of bureaucracy is that the procedures, however
defined, may not actually correlate with the positive outcomes expected from governments.
We assume that a Weberian bureaucracy will produce better services than one that is highly
discretionary and patrimonial; yet there may be circumstances where the latter's lack of rules
result in faster and better tailored responses. Enforcement power is not part of Weber's
definition; it is possible to have an impersonal, merit-based bureaucracy that nonetheless is
extremely poor at getting things done. To say that a bureaucrat is selected on the basis of
"merit" does not define merit, nor does it explain whether the official's skills will be renewed
in light of changing conditions or technology.

The most commonly used measure of capacity is extractive capacity, measured in terms of
tax extraction. Tax extraction measures capacity in two ways: first, it takes capacity, however
generated, in order to extract taxes; second, successful tax extraction provides resources that
enable the government to operate in other domains. Tax extraction rates can be measured
both by the percentage of taxes to GDP, as well as by the nature of taxation--i.e., whether it
is based on income or wealth, or indirect taxation (since income and wealth taxes are much
more difficult to extract than indirect taxes).

While tax extraction is a reasonable starting point for measuring capacity, it has several
important limitations:

1. There is a difference between extractive potential, and actual extraction rates. Actual
tax rates are set not just by extractive potential, but by policy choices regarding the
optimal rate and types of taxation.8 The United States proved it had the potential to

8 Mancur Olson and others in the rational choice tradition have argued that states are predatory and that all

states will seek to tax at a maximal rate, subject only to limitations on capacity, and the time discount rates of the
sovereign. There is however considerable historical evidence that this is not true, and that states have deliberately
taxed well below their theoretical capacities for a variety of reasons. See Mancur Olson, "Dictatorship,
Democracy, and Development," American Political Science Review 87(9), 1993: 567-76; and Francis Fukuyama, The
Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011),
pp. 303-305.

6
 extract significantly higher levels of taxes during the two World Wars, because it had
an overriding national interest in doing so. The peacetime level reflects normative
preferences for the optimal size of government, which may vary between countries
of identical potential capacity.9

2. A given level of taxation does not necessarily translate into the efficient use of tax
revenues. Revenues can be wasted on poor administration, unproductive transfers,
or outright corruption. Bureaucratic outputs are the result not just of resource
inputs, but of things like organizational culture. Judith Tendler has written about a
poor and under-resourced state in Northeast Brazil that nonetheless achieved very
good governance outcomes.10

3. For many countries, government revenues are based on resource rents or

international transfers rather than domestic taxation. In many countries such rents
and transfers constitute the vast majority of government revenues. One could argue
that if taxation is going to be used as a measure of state capacity, then resource rents
ought to be excluded.

Tax extraction rates are hardly the only possible measures of state capacity. States perform a
whole variety of functions, any one of which can be used as a proxy for state capacity as a
whole. Taxation is a useful proxy for general capacity because it is a necessary function of all
states, and one for which considerable data exists. Melissa Lee and Nan Zhang have
suggested using the capacity to generate accurate census data as an alternative proxy for
capacity, since population registration is a very basic state function.11

Beyond taxation, another critical measure of capacity is the level of education and
professionalization of government officials. Central banks in the early 21st century across the
developing world are incomparably better run than they were in the lead-up to the debt
crises of the 1980s in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, due in part to the significantly
higher degree of professionalism in their staffing. A key aspect of state-building in the
United States during the Progressive Era was the replacement of incompetent political
patronage appointees with university-trained agronomists, engineers, and economists.

A focus on the degree of professionalization of the bureaucracy partially solves the problem
of how to measure of levels of corruption, a measure that is not dependent on expert or
perception surveys. All professional education (with the possible exception of business

9
Marcus Kurtz in his forthcoming book on the state in Latin America makes use of this distinction.
10
See Judith Tendler, Good Government in the Tropics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
On the general importance of organizational culture, see James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy : What Government Agencies
Do and Why They Do It (New York: Basic Books, 1989); and John J. DiIulio Jr., "Principled Agents: The Cultural
Bases of Behavior in a Federal Government Bureaucracy," Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 4(3),
1994: 277-320.
11 Unpublished draft PhD dissertation, Stanford.

7
schools) embeds a strong normative element in which service to one's profession and
broader public goals is paramount. A doctor, for example, is supposed to act primarily in the
interests of the patient rather than seeking first to maximize his or her individual benefit. Of
course, all professionals are also selfish individuals who can act in a corrupt manner. But in
modern organizations we trust highly educated professionals with a much higher degree of
discretion because we assume or hope that they will be guided by internal norms in cases
where their behavior cannot be monitored from the outside.

Since state capacity varies substantially across functions, levels of government, and regions,
one would ideally want capacity measures for all major government agencies. In Brazil, for
example, it has been widely recognized that certain "islands of excellence" exist within the
Brazilian state which would be missed by an aggregate measure. Thus a paper by Katherine
Bersch, Sergio Praça, and Matthew Taylor develops capacity measures across more than 300
different Brazilian federal agencies.12 Obviously, this kind of data does not exist for many
countries, and even in Brazil the authors do not have similar statistics for capacity at a state,
local, and municipal level where a great deal of governance happens. For evaluating a
country like China, it would be very important to generate this type of disaggregated data,
since there is a widely held perception that the quality of governance varies enormously
across the different levels and functions of government.

As a kind of compromise between an unachievable ideal of fully disaggregated capacity data

and a limited aggregate measure, it might be possible to specify a subset of government
functions on which data should be collected. This could be a set of functions theoretically
performed by all governments (e.g., macroeconomic policy management, basic law and
order, primary and secondary education, population registration), or it could incorporate data
on how expansive the functions performed are (e.g., giving extra credit if a government is
able to, say, regulate pharmaceuticals).

Output Measures

Good procedures and strong capacity are not ends in themselves. We want governments to
do things like provide schooling and public health, public security and national defense. This
suggests an alternative measure of government quality, a measure of final output. One could
look at literacy, primary and secondary education test scores, or various measures of health
to get some idea as to how governments are performing.

Attractive as output measures sound, there are several big and, in my view, decisive
drawbacks to their use. First and most important, outputs like health or education are not
simply the consequences of public action; the public sector interacts with the environment
around it and the society it is dealing with to produce results. For example, the Coleman
Report on US education in the 1960s showed that educational outcomes depended much

12 Katherine Bersch, Sergio Praça, and Matthey Taylor, "An Archipelago of Excellence? Autonomous State

Capacity among Brazilian Federal Agencies" (unpublished paper).

8
more strongly on factors like friends and family of students than they did on public sector
inputs to education.13 Joel Migdal's model of weak states and strong societies suggests that a
government's ability to penetrate or regulate a society depends on the ratio of two factors,
state capacity and the self-organization of the underlying society. Two states could have
equal regulatory capacity but unequal regulatory outcomes because the society in one is far
better organized to resist state penetration than the other.14

A second problem is that measuring output is itself problematic methodologically. Public

sectors produce primarily services, which can be notoriously hard to measure. For example,
standardized test scores, a common way of evaluating educational outcomes, have long been
under attack as poor measures of education, and for creating incentives to "teach to the
test." Measures of rule of law, like time to trial, rate of case clearances, etc. say nothing about
the quality of the justice being produced by a legal system.

Finally, outcome measures cannot be so easily divorced from procedural and normative
measures. A police state may succeed in controlling street crime by massively arresting and
torturing suspects; yet most believers in liberal democracy would accept a higher degree of
crime in exchange for procedural protections of individual rights. Even if one is morally
neutral about whether torture is justified as a police method, one would want to know
whether it is employed routinely in evaluating a government.

My own sense is that the problem of the tainting of output measures by exogenous factors
means that they should not be used as state quality measures in the first place. One could
employ a variety of econometric techniques to control for these exogenous factors, but that
entails another layer of complexity and problems. In fact, it might be better to leave output
as an independent variable to be explained by state quality, rather than being a measure of
capacity in itself. If output is not a valid measure of state quality, it implies that we also
cannot generate useful measures of government efficiency as a measure of state quality, since
the latter represents a ratio of state inputs to outcomes.

Bureaucratic autonomy

A final measure of the quality of government is the degree of bureaucratic autonomy

possessed by the different components of the state. Samuel Huntington makes autonomy
one of his four criteria of institutionalization; highly institutionalized political systems have

13
James S. Coleman, Equality of Educational Opportunity (Washington, DC: US Dept. of HEW, 1966).
14
Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third
World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

9
bureaucracies with high autonomy. The opposite of autonomy in Huntington's terminology
is subordination.15

Autonomy properly speaking refers to the manner in which the political principal issues
mandates to the bureaucrats who act as its agent. No bureaucracy has the authority to define
its own mandates, regardless of whether the regime is democratic or authoritarian. But there
are a wide variety of ways in which mandates can be issued. Ideally, the principal should set a
broad mandate to the agent, e.g., procurement of an advanced strike fighter. But the
principal can also issue many other mandates as well regarding the way in which to carry out
the broad mandate, such as purchasing a strike fighter using contractors that increase
employment in Congressional districts X and Y, or through minority and women-owned
businesses, or to achieve Z degree of performance desired by a rival service. In other cases
the principal can issue mandates regarding the bureaucracy's recruitment and promotion of
personnel, requiring that they hire certain individuals, or else setting detailed rules for
personnel management.

Political principals often issue frequently overlapping and sometimes downright

contradictory mandates. Indeed, there can be multiple principals in many political systems,
that is, political authorities with equal legitimacy able to issue potentially contradictory
mandates. State-owned utilities, for example, often have mandates to simultaneously do cost
recovery, universal service to the poor, and efficient pricing to business clients, each
promoted by a different part of the political system. These different mandates obviously
cannot be simultaneously achieved, and generate bureaucratic dysfunctionality. Amtrak could
become a profitable and efficient railway if it were not under Congressional mandates to
serve various low-volume rural communities. In China there are often duplicate functional
agencies, one reporting through a chain of command that goes through national ministries,
the other reporting to municipal or provincial governments; it is not always clear how
conflicts between them are to be resolved.

Autonomy therefore is inversely related to the number and nature of the mandates issued by
the principal. The fewer and more general the mandates, the greater autonomy the
bureaucracy possesses. A completely autonomous bureaucracy gets no mandates at all but
sets its own goals independently of the political principal. Conversely, a non-autonomous or
subordinated bureaucracy is micromanaged by the principal, which establishes detailed rules
that the agent must follow.

An appropriate degree of bureaucratic autonomy does not mean that bureaucrats should be
isolated from their societies or make decisions at odds with citizen demands. Indeed, if the
general mandate is to provide high quality services in health or education, the bureaucracy
would need considerable feedback and criticism from the citizens that it is trying to serve. It

15 Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies. With a New Forward by Francis Fukuyama

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). One could use the term "accountability" as the antonym for
autonomy; however, accountability has certain normative implications that subordination does not.

10
also does not exclude extensive collaboration with private sector or civil society
organizations in service delivery. Indeed, an appropriately autonomous bureaucracy should
be able to make judgment calls as to when and where to engage in such collaborations.

It would seem that the relationship between autonomy and quality of government would
look like an inverted U (see Figure I). At one extreme, that of complete subordination, the
bureaucracy has no room for discretion or independent judgment, and is completely bound
by detailed rules set by the political principal. At the other end of the X-axis, that of
complete autonomy, governance outcomes would also be very bad, because the bureaucracy
has escaped all political control and sets not just internal procedures but its goals as well.
This is basically the idea contained in Peter Evans' concept of "embedded autonomy":
bureaucrats need to be shielded from certain influences of social actors, but also subordinate
to the society with regard to larger goals. 16

Figure 1: Bureaucratic Autonomy and Quality of Government

There are myriad examples of excessive subordination leading to poor performance. One of
the worst forms is when bureaucracies lose control over internal recruitment and promotion
to the political authorities and are staffed entirely by political appointees. This is in effect
what happens in clientelistic political systems. But even in the absence of clientelism,
bureaucracies can been excessively slow-moving and indecisive because they are excessively
rule-bound. However, the curve in Figure I slopes downward at the left end of the X axis
which represents full autonomy. Both Imperial Germany and Japan in the periods before
World War I and World War II, respectively, suffered from this problem. Both countries had

16 Peter B. Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 1995).

11
developed very high quality, autonomous bureaucracies, particularly their military services,
which then took over from the political authorities the task of formulating foreign policy.

The inflection point of the curve in Figure I is shifted to the right, however, due to a general
recognition that the dangers of excessive micromanagement are greater than those posed by
excessive autonomy. A high degree of autonomy is what permits innovation,
experimentation, and risk-taking in a bureaucracy. In Daniel Carpenter's The Forging of
Bureaucratic Autonomy, both the Post Office and the US Forest Service are portrayed as high-
quality autonomous bureaucracies during the Progressive Era precisely because they
innovated and devised agendas not strictly spelled out by Congress.17 This same insight is
embedded in evolution of the US Army's basic field manual for combined arms operations,
FM 100-5. In rethinking combined arms doctrine in light of the Vietnam War, the drafters of
the manual shifted emphasis from centralized command and control to more flexible
Mission Orders under which the commander only set broad goals, and devolved
implementation to the lowest possible echelon of the command structure. The latter were in
other words agents who were permitted a high degree of autonomy, which included
toleration of failure if they sought to innovate or experiment.18 More broadly, one could
argue that modern private sector organizations have evolved over time away from rigid
"Taylorite" hierarchies reflecting strict Weberian criteria to more flexible, flatter
organizations that delegate far more authority to lower levels of the organization.

If an appropriate degree of bureaucratic autonomy is an important characteristic of high

quality government, then neither the Weberian nor the principal-agent models can stand
intact as frameworks for understanding how bureaucracies ought to work. The Weberian
model, as noted earlier, assumes that bureaucrats are essentially rule-bound implementers of
decisions made by political authorities; they may have technical capacity but they don't have
the authority to set agendas independently. The principal-agent framework is inadequate as
well because it too assumes that agents are simply tools of the principals, whereas in a good
bureaucracy authority often flows in the reverse direction, from the agent to the principal.19

How do we measure bureaucratic autonomy? I believe that this is one of the most central
and difficult issues in constructing a good measure of government quality. The most
common approach is to use expert surveys in which experts are asked to evaluate the
autonomy of a given bureaucracy. Expert surveys are particularly problematic in this area

17Daniel P. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy
Innovation in Executive Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
18
This field manual was based on the operational doctrine that had been developed by the German army
from the end of World War I through the beginning of World War II; Mission Orders are an American version
of Aufstragstaktik. See Francis Fukuyama and Abram Shulsky, The Virtual Corporation and Army Organization (Santa
Monica: Rand Corporation MR-863-A, 1997).
19
The latter point, basic in an older tradition of public administration, is made in Herbert Simon,
Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization (New York: Free Press,
1957).

12
since the very concept of autonomy has been poorly specified, and it is not clear exactly
what it is that experts are being asked to judge. Do they have adequate criteria for judging
what proper and improper mandates are, or to look for multiple or conflicting mandates as a
measure of subordination?

It would be nice therefore to have a more objective measure of autonomy. Since autonomy
is the opposite of subordination, one could use the degree of clientelism or political
interference in bureaucratic operations as a measure. One could look, for example, at the
relative number of classified versus political positions in a bureaucracy. However, this gets at
only one type of subordination related to personnel. Political principals can hamstring
bureaucracies by issuing multiple contradictory mandates that have nothing to do with
staffing, or by setting excessively detailed rules for bureaucratic behavior.

Capacity and Autonomy

It would seem to be the case that the quality of government is the result of an interaction
between capacity and autonomy. That is, more or less autonomy can be a good or bad thing
depending on how much underlying capacity a bureaucracy has. If an agency were full of
incompetent, self-dealing political appointees, one would want to limit their discretion and
subject them to clear rules. The assertion embedded in Figure 1 that the optimal amount of
autonomy is shifted to the right is true only in high capacity countries. In very low capacity
countries, the opposite would be the case: one would want to circumscribe the behavior of
government officials with more rather than fewer rules because one could not trust them to
exercise good judgment or refrain from corrupt behavior. This is why Robert Klitgaard
coined the formula Corruption = Discretion – Accountability.20 This is also why
development agencies have been advising poor countries to limit bureaucratic discretion in
recent years. On the other hand, if the same agency were full of professionals with graduate
degrees from internationally recognized schools, one would not just feel safer granting them
considerable autonomy, but would actually want to reduce rule-boundedness in hopes of
encouraging innovative behavior.

Figure 2 illustrates how the optimal autonomy curves would differ for four hypothetical
countries of differing levels of capacity. For each, the curve slopes downward at the
extremes, since every bureaucracy can have too much or too little autonomy. But the lower
capacity countries have their inflection points shifted to the left, while they are shifted right
for higher capacity countries.

20 Robert E. Klitgaard, Controlling Corruption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

13
Figure 2: Optimal Levels of Autonomy for Differing Levels of Capacity

One can control the behavior of an agent either through explicit formal rules and incentives,
or through informal norms and habits. Of the two, the latter involves substantially lower
transaction costs. Many professionals are basically self-regulated, due to the fact that (a) it is
hard for people outside their profession to judge the quality of their work, and (b) because
part of their education, as noted above, consists of socialization to certain professional
norms that seek to preclude certain types of self-seeking behavior. The higher the capacity of
a bureaucracy, then, the more autonomy one would want to grant them. In judging the
quality of government, therefore, we would want to know about both the capacity and the
autonomy of the bureaucrats.

Figure 3: Autonomy and Capacity

14
One would want, in other words, to be able to empirically locate the agency on the matrix
shown in Figure 3. The line sloping downwards and to the left represents the line drawn
through the inflection points of Figure 2, representing optimal levels of autonomy for a
given level of capacity. Bureaucracies that were above the line would be hobbled by
excessive rules; those below it with excessive discretion. For the past decade, international
donors have been advising developing countries to decrease the amount of discretion in the
behavior of their bureaucracies. From Figure 3 it would appear that this is only contingently
good advice; in a high capacity state, one would like to have more rather than less discretion.

Figure 4: Reform Paths

The framework in Figure 3 suggests that there are two quite separate approaches to public
sector reform. One always wants to move up the Y-axis to higher capacity, particularly with
regard to the professionalism of the public service. This however is not something that can
be done easily, and it is not something that can in any case be accomplished in a short period
of time. If a country cannot significantly upgrade capacity in the short run, one would want
to shift the degree of autonomy toward the sloping line. This would mean moving towards
the left in a low-capacity country, and toward the right in a high-capacity country. Figure 3
contains some hypothesized positions, aggregated across the whole government, for
different countries, and suggests that while Nigeria and China need to move left, the US
needs to move right. However, China needs to end up at a point with significantly more
autonomy than Nigeria because of its much higher capacity.

Trying to locate India on this matrix demonstrates some of the complexities of this analysis.
India is famous both for high levels of corruption and clientelism, and for simultaneously
having excessive rules and bureaucratic red tape. India clearly needs much greater state
capacity across the board. But does it need more or less autonomy? The answer to the latter
question is probably both, dependent on specific context. Given the recent scandal, the

15
agency handling spectrum auctions needs to be subjected to much stricter rules; on the other
hand, the Hyderabad Municipal Water Authority needs to be relieved of its multiple and
conflicting political mandates if it is to function properly. This then suggests why devising
single aggregated measures for quality of governance can be inadequate and misleading.

Conclusion

It is clear that in evaluating the quality of governance in large, complex countries like China
or the United States, the existing quantitative measures are woefully inadequate. If we are to
establish desiderata for better ones, we would have to answer the following questions:

 If we are to use procedural measures of government quality, which on Weber's list

do we want to keep?

 For how many countries could we collect disaggregated capacity data?

 If we cannot collect a full set of capacity measures, what are the best proxies for
aggregate capacity? Beyond tax extraction levels, can we come up with measures of
bureaucratic professionalization?

 How do we distinguish between actual and potential capacity, with regard to a

commonly-used measure like tax extraction?

 How, exactly, are we going to define bureaucratic autonomy, and what measures are
available as proxies for it?

 How important is it to have quantitative measures at all, as opposed to qualitative

descriptions of process, or else case studies of particular areas of governance?

This paper does not pretend to answer these questions, but only to serve as a basis for
discussion. Since we cannot measure what we cannot adequately conceptualize, we have to
start with the concept first. I've laid out two separate dimensions of governance, capacity
and autonomy, and suggested some of the components that make them up. Capacity in
particular consists of both resources and the degree of professionalization of bureaucratic
staff. I've further posited that quality of governance is ultimately a function of the interaction
of capacity and autonomy, and that either one independently will be inadequate as a measure
of government quality. Finally, I've also suggested that states need to be disaggregated into
their component parts, both by function, region, and level of government, and that we need
both capacity and autonomy measures for all of these components. Obviously, this volume
of data does not exist for most countries, and may not exist for any country. How much
could be generated? It might be useful to start with a large, relatively data-rich country like
the United States, and see how far we could get.

16
Appendix: The Inadequacy of Existing Measures of China's Quality of
Government

If we accept the fact that quality of government is a mixture capacity and autonomy, and that
governments are themselves complex collections of organizations, then it becomes clear that
existing measures of governance are highly inadequate. The Worldwide Governance
Indicators produced by the World Bank Institute,21 as well as finer-grained measures like
Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index, treat single sovereign nations as
the unit of analysis. Yet it is obvious that the quality of governance varies enormously within
countries, both by specific government function and by region. Moreover, one cannot look
at governance problems at one level only; many occur because of interactions between levels
of governments. A poor national government can reduce the performance of a good local
one, and vice versa.

The problem of single country indicators is evident when we consider something like
Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index. The 2011 index lists China as the
75th most corrupt country in the world. It does a bit better than Brazil and Tunisia (both
#73), it tied with Romania, and is just slightly better than Gambia and El Salvador. Yet this
number is virtually meaningless because it does not take account of the diversity of
outcomes within China. It is widely believed in China, for example, that local governments
in China are much more corrupt than higher-level ones. We don’t in fact know whether this
is true or not. Corruption varies not just by level of government, but by region and by
function; the railroad ministry is very different from, say, the Central Bank.

There is also something very strange about the Worldwide Governance Indicators rankings
of China (see Table 1).

Table 1: China's 2010 performance, Worldwide Governance Indicators

Scores range from -2.5 (weak) to 2.5 (strong)

Category Score Percentile

Voice and Accountability -1.6 5
Political Stability/No Violence -.77 24
Government Effectiveness .12 60
Regulatory Quality -.23 45
Rule of Law -.35 44
Control of Corruption -.60 33

China's low rankings for Voice and Accountability and Rule of Law are not surprising, given
that no one argues either of these are China's strong suit. The other four measures relate to
what we are defining as governance. While both the score and ranking for government

21
See Daniel Kaufmann and Art Kraay, Governance Matters VIII: Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators,
1996-2008 (Washington, DC: World Bank Institute, 2009).

17
effectiveness are higher than for any other measure, China still places only in the 60th
percentile. But what possible meaning can such a figure have? Clearly many local Chinese
government authorities have huge problems; on the other hand, others perform far better.
In my purely subjective estimation, the effectiveness of China's national government with
regard to macroeconomic management of a hugely complex modernization process over the
past three decades has been nothing short of miraculous, given the fact that China was not
just managing an existing set of institutions, but also transforming them in a more market-
friendly direction. It's performance since the Asian financial crisis has arguably been better
than that of the United States, which nonetheless ranks in the 90th percentile.

In terms of the three categories above, what do existing measures of governance measure?
In the case of the WBI Worldwide Governance Measures, it is hard to say, since they are an
aggregate of many other measures. Many of them are perception surveys or expert estimates,
which often reflect output measures, but may also include evaluations of procedures and
capacity. It is not clear whether any of the WWGM components explicitly seek to measure
bureaucratic autonomy. Presumably categories like Political Stability/Control of Violence are
exclusively output measures (where China's low 24th percentile ranking seems a bit bizarre).
The Rule of Law measure has big problems, beginning with the lack of definition of what is
being measured. If rule of law is defined as constraints on the executive, China should rank
even lower than it does since there are no real legal constraints on the behavior of the
Chinese Communist Party. If on the other hand this category means something more like
rule by law (which would make it a component of governance), the ranking should be
considerably higher. Most Rule of Law measures tend to be related to procedures or capacity
rather than output, since the output of a legal system is so hard to measure. But we actually
have no idea what the Chinese numbers actually mean or purport to measure.

18
Bureaucracy and Growth: A Cross-National Analysis of the Effects of "Weberian" State
Structures on Economic Growth
Author(s): Peter Evans and James E. Rauch
Source: American Sociological Review, Vol. 64, No. 5 (Oct., 1999), pp. 748-765
Published by: American Sociological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2657374
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http://www.jstor.org
 BUREAUCRACY AND GROWTH:
A CROSS-NATIONAL ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECTS OF
"WEBERIAN" STATE STRUCTURES ON ECONOMIC GROWTH*

Peter Evans James E. Rauch

University of California, Berkeley University of California, San Diego

The role of bureaucratic authority structures in facilitating economic growth

has been a sociological concern since Max Weber's classic contributions al-
most 100 years ago. Using a recent and original data set, we examine the
characteristics of core state economic agencies and the growth records of a
sample of 35 developing countries for the 1970-1990 period. Our
"Weberianness Scale" offers a simple measure of the degree to which these
agencies employ meritocratic recruitment and offer predictable, rewarding
long-term careers. We find that these "Weberian " characteristics signifi-
cantly enhance prospects for economic growth, even when we control for
initial levels of GDP per capita and human capital. Our results imply that
"Weberianness" should be included as a factor in general models of eco-
nomic growth. They also suggest the need for more attention by policymakers
to building better bureaucracies and more research by social scientists on
variations in how state bureaucracies are organized.

xplaining economic transformation at Growth depends on governance. Decipher-

Li the national level is a classic socio- ing the relation between administrativestruc-
logical preoccupation as well as a central tures and changing levels of economic out-
concern of economic analysis. There are put is, therefore, a perennial preoccupation
many ways to approach this task, but one of of theorists and practitioners alike. In 1997,
the most challenging involves trying to ana- the World Bank took up the task again in a
lyze the role that public institutions play in World Development Report called "The State
fostering (or impeding) economic growth. in a Changing World." Both the choice of
* topic and the content of the report itself sig-
Direct all correspondence to Peter Evans, De- nified an important shift in thinking about
partment of Sociology, 410 Barrows Hall, Uni- the role of the state within the "development
versity of California, Berkeley, CA 94720
(pevans @socrates berkeley .edu). These results establishment." Explaining why some state
grow out of the project on BureaucraticStructure bureaucracies are more effective than others
and Economic Performance directed by Peter seems at last to be taking precedence over
Evans and James Rauch. The project was funded simply condemning excesses of state inter-
in various stages by the Russell Sage Foundation, vention. Pursuing this agenda requires re-ex-
the Center for Institutional Reform and the Infor- ploring classic argumentson the comparative
mal Sector, and Policy Research Department of effectiveness of different forms of adminis-
the World Bank. We thank the 126 country ex-
perts for their generosity in sharing their knowl- trative organization. It is an obvious oppor-
edge and professional expertise. The findings re- tunity for sociological analysis to make a
ported here were produced by Linus Huang and contribution to the understanding of cross-
John Talbot, working under the direction of Peter national differences in rates of economic
Evans and James Rauch. Patrick Heller and Mark growth.
Ritchie provided invaluable assistance in early Among the classic arguments that need to
stages of the data analysis. For comments on be brought together with some systematic
early drafts we thank Ken Bollen, Neil Fligstein,
Trond Petersen, and Erik Olin Wright. Christy comparative evidence, Weber's analysis of
Getz played an invaluable role in the revision of bureaucracyis perhapsthe most obvious can-
the manuscript.We also thank two anonymous re- didate. At the beginning of the century,
viewers and the ASR Editor for their comments. Weber's ([1904-1911] 1968) monumental

748 American Sociological Review, 1999, Vol. 64 (October:748-765)

WEBERIAN BUREAUCRACY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH
essays, Economy and Society, argued for the
fundamental value of bureaucracy as one of
the institutional foundations of capitalist
growth. Subsequent comparative historical
analysis (e.g., Polanyi [1944] 1957) echoed
Weber's assertions, but the "bureaucracyas
a tool of growth" thesis always had to con-
tend with the historically prior and ideologi-
cally powerful "Smithian"view that govern-
ment, regardless of its organizational form,
was the enemy of growth as soon as it went
beyond protecting propertyrights.1
In the 1970s and 1980s, neo-classical po-
litical economy and rational choice analysis
provided new analytical reinforcement for
the Smithian perspective (cf. Buchanan,
Tollison, and Tullock 1980; Colclough and
Manor 1991; Collander 1984; Krueger
1974). Case studies of "rent-seeking" and
"predatory"states complemented these ana-
lytical argumentswith equally powerful em-
pirical support (e.g., Bates 1981; Klitgaard
1988). Unfortunately,in the rush to avoid the
dangers of state intervention, the question of
what kinds of state structuresare most likely
to promote economic growth was easily lost.
By the 1990s, however, economists (but
surprisingly not sociologists) began to focus
on cross-national data that demonstratedthe
importance of looking more closely at how
states were organized. Their results showed
various measures of "quality of government"
to be powerfully connected to economic
growth (Knack and Keefer 1995; Mauro
1995). This rapidly growing literature sug-
gests that earlier neo-classical visions of
government performance were too simplis-
tic. Nonetheless, perhaps because of the ab-
sence of sociologists from the discussion, a
way of describing what "good government"
would look like was still lacking.
Contemporaryempirical analyses of rent-
seeking and corruption often use the term
"bureaucracy" in its everyday pejorative
sense rather than in the Weberian sense of a
set of administrativeorganizations with spe-
cific structural features. Weber viewed bu-
1 By "Smithian"we mean the standard"laissez-
faire" view of government's role that is usually
attributedto Adam Smith. Smith's own view was
actually more sophisticated, including, for ex-
ample, an appreciation of the importance of pub-
lic provision of a range of collective goods.
749
reaucracy,not as a generic collection of state
officials, but as a particular kind of organi-
zational structure, set in contrast to earlier
patrimonial and prebendal forms of govern-
ment administration.
The Weberianperspective does not negate
the positive effects of strengthening market
institutions, but it does postulate that bureau-
cratically structuredpublic organizations,us-
ing their own distinct set of decision-making
procedures, are a necessary complement to
market-based institutional arrangements.2
More precisely, Weberarguedthat public ad-
ministrative organizations characterized by
meritocratic recruitment and predictable,
long-term career rewards will be more effec-
tive at facilitating capitalist growth than
other forms of state organization. This hy-
pothesis cannot be dismissed simply by the
discovery that people who call themselves
bureaucratshave engaged in rent-seeking or
that corrupt governments have undermined
economic growth. Addressing the "Weberian
state hypothesis" means answering the ques-
tion, "Are countries whose administrative
apparatuses more closely approximate bu-
reaucratic forms of organization character-
ized by higher rates of economic growth?"
For some reason, students of economic de-
velopment have lacked the incentive required
to generate a systematic empirical response
to this apparently simple question. Our re-
search reported here represents an initial ef-
fort to fill the lacuna.
Using an original data set, we examine the
effect on economic growth of certain struc-
tural features that were key elements in
Weber's original characterizationof bureau-
cracy. Our "Weberianness Scale" offers a
simple measure of the degree to which core
state agencies are characterized by
meritocratic recruitment and offer predict-
able, rewarding long-term careers.
2 The spirit of the Weberian perspective is at
least partially recaptured in Williamson's (1985)
"new institutionalist" assertions that complex
production systems are likely to require mixing
(essentially nonmarket) governance structures
with more traditional market transactions. But
application of the Williamsonian perspective has
generally been limited to analyses of relations
among private firms and is rarely invoked in stud-
ies of state bureaucracies.
750
RECENT LITERATURE
The literature on the role that state bureau-
cracies play in promoting or impeding eco-
nomic growth ranges from detailed case stud-
ies of particularagencies in particularcoun-
tries to cross-national analyses using statisti-
cal proxies drawn from many countries. Tra-
ditionally, political scientists have dominated
the production of case studies (e.g., Stepan
1978; Waterbury 1983) while sociologists
have focused more on cross-national analy-
ses (e.g., Delacroix and Ragin 1981;
Rubinson 1977; Snyder and Kick 1979). In
recent years, awakened interest among econ-
omists in cross-national analysis has substan-
tially expanded the production of cross-na-
tional statistical studies. The principal stimu-
lus to renewed interest among economists has
been the emergence of "endogenous growth
theory,"which offers formal theoretical sup-
port for the proposition that institutional fac-
tors could have a fundamentaleffect on rates
of growth (cf. Lucas 1988; also see, e.g.,
Romer 1986, 1990, 1994).
The endogenous growth perspective legiti-
mated a variegated set of cross-national
analyses by economists examining the impact
of a variety of noneconomic variables on na-
tional growth rates (see Crowley et al. 1998).
In one of the earliest and most influential of
these studies, Barro (1991) emphasized the
negative role of government by stressing the
negative impact of government consumption
(as a share of GDP) on growth rates.
What both the earlier sociology literature
and the recent cross-national economics lit-
erature lacked was the possibility of seri-
ously addressing the question of how varia-
tions in the form of state organization might
affect economic dynamism.Argumentsin the
early sociological literaturewere formulated
in terms of the dubious concept of "state
strength," with state revenues and expendi-
tures offered as proxies for "state strength"
(e.g., Rubinson 1977). The cross-national re-
gressions of the new endogenous growth
models included even more unsatisfying
proxies, such as using the annualized num-
ber of assassinations or revolutions as a
proxy for political stability ( Barro 1991).
Neither economists nor (oddly enough) so-
ciologists had focused their cross-national
analyses on organizational differences.
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
Nonetheless, a literaturedeveloped that paid
serious attention to bureaucratic structures
and was directly relevant to the Weberianhy-
pothesis. This literaturewas built around de-
tailed case studies of individual countries
and focused primarily on a single region.
Johnson's (1982) classic study of Japan's
Ministry of InternationalTrade and Industry
(MITI) during the golden years of Japanese
industrialization led the way. Johnson's por-
trayal was surprisingly consistent with a
Weberianperspective. Subsequent studies of
Korea (Amsden 1989) and Taiwan (Wade
1990) reinforced the picture.3 Because the
"East Asian Tigers" described in these stud-
ies were also the most economically success-
ful nations in the world during the 1970s and
1980s, they created a strong prima facie case
in favor of the Weberian hypothesis. By the
beginning of the 1990s, even the WorldBank
(1993) seemed to join in the chorus with its
East Asian Miracle report that emphasized
the positive role played by East Asian bu-
reaucracies in the region's spectacularindus-
trialization (also see Campos and Root 1996;
Cheng, Haggard, and Kang 1995; Koh 1995;
Quah 1993). Nonetheless, the argumentcon-
tinued to rest primarily on case studies. The
question remained as to whether the
Weberian state hypothesis could be substan-
tiated with a broader set of systematic evi-
dence.
In the 1990s the case-study literature was
complemented by efforts to connect varia-
tions in the character of state bureaucracies
to economic performanceby means of quan-
titative cross-national analysis. Economists,
rather than sociologists, took the lead in de-
veloping a more organizationalfocus. A new
set of studies utilized the commercially
available assessments of variations across
national governments that businessmen had
been using for some time.4 The methodologi-
3 Simultaneously, a complementary body of lit-
erature began to focus on the weakness of public
institutions as a key barrierto growth in sub-Sa-
haran Africa (cf. Bates 1989; Callaghy 1989;
Easterly and Levine 1997; World Bank 1994,
1997).
4 International Country Risk Guide (ICRG),
Business and Environmental Risk Intelligence
(BERI), and Business International (BI) are
among the most prominent examples of such as-
sessments.
WEBERIAN BUREAUCRACY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH
cal validity and reliability of these measures
were open to question. The rating services
that provided them offered little explanation
of how their data were derived or why they
should be considered reliable. The data
seemed to be based primarily on the assess-
ments of consultants, but the basis on which
these consultants were selected was not usu-
ally specified, and methodological issues
were clearly not a primaryconcern.5The va-
lidity of these ratings as independent deter-
minants of economic growth was also some-
what suspect. Most of the components of the
ratings had clear "good" and "bad"poles-
more or less corruption, more or less red
tape, higher or lower "quality"of the bureau-
cracy, and so on. Because raters were aware
of the economic performanceof the countries
they were rating, a tendency to give "good"
ratings to high-performing countries and
"bad" ratings to low-performing ones was
likely to "buildin" a correlation between the
ratings and economic growth.
Despite their flaws, these ratings did pro-
vide a way to compare bureaucracies across
a wide set of countries, and they did seem to
produce results that confirmed the impor-
tance of variationsacross national bureaucra-
cies in explaining variations in economic
growth. Mauro (1995), using ratings on "cor-
ruption"and "redtape" from Business Inter-
national, found that variation in these ratings
was significantly associated with increased
levels of investment, which were in turn one
of the most obvious and powerful predictors
of economic growth. Knack and Keefer
(1995) used International Country Risk
Guide (ICRG) ratings and Business and En-
vironmental Risk Intelligence (BERI) rat-
ings, and they too discovered that these rat-
ings were directly related to variations in the
growth of per capita income.6
5 From the point of view of investors looking
for the best current assessment of prospective fu-
ture returns in a given locale, the invaluable fea-
ture of the data provided by these rating services
is their timeliness. ICRG, for example, provides
monthly ratings for 130 countries around the
world on a variety of political and economic in-
dicators. No purely academic study could ever
come close to offering such immediate informa-
tion.
6 La Porta et al. (1999) offer an excellent dis-
cussion of the quality of government institutions,
751
Use of data on variations in state bureau-
cracies gives recent studies a clear advantage
over earlier work that had to rely on gross
measures, like aggregate government expen-
ditures, or distant proxies, like numberof as-
sassinations. The fact that recent studies con-
sistently find relationships between bureau-
cratic performance and economic growth
provides new incentive for trying to refine
our understanding of the roots of "bureau-
cratic performance."Nevertheless, even this
new generation of studies remains prisoner
to the available measures. Convincing efforts
to adjudicate the empirical validity of the
Weberian state hypothesis must begin with
information on how the structureof state bu-
reaucracies varies across countries, which is
what we have tried to do in our study.
CONNECTING BUREAUCRATIC
STRUCTURES AND GROWTH
Contemporary analysis of comparative bu-
reaucratic structures needs to move beyond
Weber,but Weber's characterizationsdo pro-
vide a simple, accessible starting point for
comparative research. In contrasting bureau-
cracies with prior organizational forms, We-
ber stressed a number of points that lend
themselves to relatively objective empirical
assessment. We emphasize two of these. The
first is the importanceof meritocraticrecruit-
ment, which ideally is based on some combi-
nation of education and examination (Gerth
and Mills 1958:241; Parsons 1964:333, 339).
The second is a predictable career ladder,
which provides long-term tangible and intan-
gible rewards for those recruited into the bu-
reaucracy (Gerth and Mills 1958:200-203;
Parsons 1964:334-35; Stinchcombe 1974).
We could have selected other Weberianor-
ganizational features.7 One advantage of
but they focus on the determinantsof quality and
performance rather than on their effects on eco-
nomic growth.
7 Because the particularcharacteristics we have
chosen to focus on are only a partial set of those
described by Weber, stressing other features of
Weberian bureaucracy might produce different
results. For example, rule-governed decision-
making, which is clearly a feature of the bureau-
cratic model, might be a double-edged sword, en-
hancing predictability and efficiency up to a cer-
tain point but producing rigidity and organiza-
752
meritocratic recruitment and rewarding/pre-
dictable career ladders is that these features
are relatively easy to translate into simple
measures that can be evaluated across coun-
tries, hence focusing on them facilitates em-
pirical testing. Also, plausible theoretical
connections can be constructed between
these features and improved organizational
ability to deliver the collective goods that
constitute the state's potential contributionto
economic growth.
Meritocraticrecruitmentnot only increases
the likelihood of at least minimal compe-
tence but also helps generate corporate co-
herence and esprit de corps, which in turn
can be argued to have substantive effects on
the motivation of individual officeholders.
Bureaucrats who see themselves as having
joined their confreres in office by virtue of
sharing similar abilities are more likely to
internalize shared norms and goals than are
those who know they owe their office to the
favor of a particularkinsman or patron.Iden-
tification with colleagues and the organiza-
tion itself should also create internalized in-
tangible costs for corrupt activities that sub-
vert organizationalgoals and increase the ef-
fectiveness of monitoring.
Offering rewarding long-term careers
might also increase competence in the long
run, but, regardless of their effects on com-
petence, such careers will increase corporate
coherence. Likewise, the predictable pros-
pect of long-term career rewards reduces the
relative attractiveness of the quick returns
available from corrupt individual practices.
This is obvious insofar as one of the aspects
of long-term career rewards is competitive
salaries. It is equally clear that careers that
provide the expectation of a series of promo-
tions related to performance and conformity
to organizational norms create disincentives
to corruptbehavior, especially if such behav-
ior undermines organizational goals. The
costs of breaking organizational norms are
also directly proportional to the expected
longevity of membership in the organization
and the expected rewards to longevity.8
tional sclerosis when carried further. The same
argument could be applied to the idea that each
office in the state apparatusshould have strictly
defined, nonoverlappingjurisdictions.
8 Stinchcombe (1974:134-35, 147-48) focuses
on industrial rather than administrative bureau-
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
Overall, meritocratic recruitment and pre-
dictable career ladders should help structure
the incentives of individual bureaucratsin a
way that enhances the ability of the organi-
zations they manage to effectively pursue
long-term goals.9
If the argument that these structural fea-
tures contribute to a more competent, purpo-
sive, and cohesive bureaucracy is accepted,
myriad specific causal paths leading to high-
er rates of economic growth are plausible.
The longer time horizons associated with
predictable, rewarding careers will increase
the bureaucracy's propensity to advocate
public-sector infrastructureinvestment rather
than consumptive expenditures. Because the
returns from public infrastructure invest-
ments depend essentially on their "system-
ness," the coherence of the bureaucracy
should enhance their effectiveness. Likewise,
the reduction in individual maximizing (i.e.,
corrupt)practices should reduce the implicit
tax on the private sector that such practices
represent.
Diffuse links may be equally or more im-
portant. Most of the case study literature on
"developmental states" focuses primarily on
the role state bureaucracies play in eliciting
higher rates of private investment (e.g.,
Amsden 1989; Evans 1995; Johnson 1982;
Wade 1991; World Bank 1993). Obviously,
rational, risk-averse entrepreneurswill avoid
making long-term investments in plant and
equipment if they face a corrupt, unpredict-
able bureaucracyunlikely to provide comple-
mentary public investments. By the same to-
cracies but provides a very relevant analysis of
the role of careers in shaping individual motiva-
tions.
9 Meritocratic recruitment and career ladders
are not the only structuralcharacteristics that can
be postulated to enhance the organizational per-
formance of state bureaucracies. In Embedded
Autonomy, Evans (1995) argues that the full po-
tential contributionof state bureaucraciesto capi-
tal accumulation is likely to be realized only
when the corporate coherence provided by
Weberian characteristics is combined with a
dense systematic set of ties to the entrepreneurial
class. In a different vein, theorists of the "New
Public Management" would highlight "market
mimicking" mechanisms such as "pay for perfor-
mance" (see Barzelay 1997; Hood and Jackson
1991; Milgrom and Roberts 1992; Olsen and Pe-
ters 1996).
WEBERIAN BUREAUCRACY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH
ken, shared perceptions of the state bureau-
cracy as dependable, predictable, minimally
competent and committed to long-term
growth makes investment appear less risky.
Competent bureaucracies can help indi-
vidual entrepreneursovercome coordination
problems that may be crucial in instigating
new activities. They can also turn informa-
tional resources into public goods in ways
that increase the likelihood and effectiveness
of investment (e.g., see Rodrik 1995). For
example, when entrepreneursin small coun-
tries are trying to upgrade into world mar-
kets, collective action to gather data on ex-
ternal markets and enforce standardsamong
local producersmay confer importantadvan-
tages. Respected bureaucracies could act as
"honest brokers" in overcoming collective
action problems among exporters.A stronger
version of this argument would see the bu-
reaucracy itself as gathering information and
providing advice and incentives that help lo-
cal firms to better thread their way through
the labyrinthof rapidly changing world mar-
kets.10
Adjudicating among the various paths that
might account for a connection between
competent, coherent state bureaucracies and
economic growth would be a challenging and
worthwhile task, but it is not our aim here.
We aim to establish a basic connection be-
tween bureaucraticstructures and economic
growth, thereby providing additional incen-
tive to explore alternative mechanisms that
might account for the connection.1
To reiterate, we assess the effect of a par-
ticular set of bureaucratic structures; we do
not attempt a comprehensive appraisal of all
the features of bureaucratic structure that
might enhance economic performance. We
10 According to Keesing (1988), this is essen-
tially the role played by trade promotion bureau-
cracies in the four Asian tigers. Also see Rodrik
(1995).
", There is, of course, another set of arguments
in the literaturethat postulates a more central role
for state bureaucraciesin shaping national trajec-
tories of investment and growth. Such arguments
involve both the ability of governments to push
entrepreneursinto investing larger shares of their
profits by "disciplining"them (cf. Amsden 1989),
and the ability of public agencies to stimulate
more risky but ultimately rewarding forms of in-
vestment through selective subsidies and protec-
753
selected meritocratic recruitment and career
ladders because of the strong claims in the
literature on their behalf and because they
constitute an empirically identifiable, theo-
retically plausible set of structuralcharacter-
istics that offers a good starting point for
demonstrating the value of doing new re-
search on the economic consequences of
variations in bureaucraticstructures.
Our strategy for connecting bureaucratic
structures and economic growth obviously
differs from Weber's. Weber was interested
in long-term historical changes in organiza-
tional forms. We are interested in cross-sec-
tional comparisons in the contemporary pe-
riod. Our empirical proposition is a simple
one. We predict that countries whose bureau-
cratic structures incorporatedWeberian fea-
tures will have experienced more rapid eco-
nomic growth over the 20 years between
1970 and 1990 than did those countries in
which such features were less fully incorpo-
rated.
DATA
The absence of comparable measures of bu-
reaucratic structure for a substantial set of
countries is one of the principal impediments
to assessing the effects of variation in bu-
reaucracy on economic growth. We decided
that only by collecting new, original data
could we surmountthis obstacle. The "Web-
erian state data set"12 we have collected is
built on comparable expert evaluations of
bureaucraticstructuresin 35 countries, labo-
riously gathered over a period of almost
three years (1993-1996).
Our sample began with the 30 "semi-in-
dustrialized"countries identified by Chenery
(1980) and was complemented by 5 poorer
tion from external competition (cf. Amsden 1989;
Ernst and O'Connor 1992; Evans 1995; Wade
1990). While these arguments are plausible, they
clearly require more than minimal competence on
the part of the bureaucracy.Insofar as these argu-
ments apply, the case for the importance of bu-
reaucratic structuresbecomes much more impor-
tant, but the theoretical plausibility of the
Weberian hypothesis does not depend on these
stronger arguments regarding the role of public
institutions in making growth possible.
12 The discussion of the Weberian data set is
drawn largely from Talbot (1997).
754
countries. Our reasons for starting with the
Chenery sample were threefold. To begin
with, we estimated that our available re-
sources would not allow us to collect data on
more than about 35 countries, so the
Chenery sample was the right size. Second,
we were interested in understanding varia-
tions in growth among developing countries
rather than between developing and ad-
vanced industrialcountries. We wanted to in-
clude countries that were still confronting
the issue of industrial transformationduring
the period under consideration. The Chenery
sample provided a good range of developing
countries. Third, we wanted a good range of
variation on "Weberianness."Although there
were no systematic data available on Web-
erianness per se, we knew that variation in
"bureaucratic performance" variables was
much greater among developing countries
than among industrialized countries. This
latter consideration was also a motive for in-
cluding some additional countries too poor
to be included in the Chenery sample. Data
on bureaucratic performance made it clear
that excluding poorer countries would under-
sample the low end of the distributionon bu-
reaucratic performance and therefore might
also undersample the low ranges of Web-
erianness (see Rauch and Evans 1999:8-9,
figs. lb, ic). Selection of the poor countries
to be added was driven by a desire for in-
creased representation of the Caribbean,
South Asia, and Sub-SaharanAfrica, and by
our belief that there was a sufficient corps of
experts on the bureaucracies of these coun-
tries to allow us to find at least three experts
for each of them.13The resulting sample of
35 countries represents all the major regions
of the developing world as well as the south-
ern European fringe of the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD). It also offers a range of growth per-
formance over the 1970s and 1980s from
Korea and Singapore (growing consistently
at over 6 percent per capita per year) to Zaire
(shrinking more than 2 percent). At the same
time, our sample of countries offers a good
range in terms of "bureaucratic perfor-
13 The five countries added to Chenery's
sample were Haiti, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sri Lanka,
and Zaire. For other analyses of Chenery's initial
sample see Feder (1983) and Esfahani (1991).
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
mance" as measured by commercial rating
services (see Rauch and Evans 1999:8-9,
figs. ib, ic).
Obtaining measures of different features
of bureaucratic structure in each of these
countries required the cooperation of a large
number of experts, each of whom had spe-
cific knowledge of the state bureaucracy of
a particular country. Collecting responses
was labor intensive, but the level of collabo-
ration was both surprising and gratifying.
We were ultimately able to gather responses
from a total of 126 experts, a minimum of 3
experts for 32 of our 35 countries, and 2 ex-
perts for the remaining 3 countries (Mo-
rocco, Thailand, and Uruguay). The experts
were drawn from a combination of scholars
known for their research on the bureaucra-
cies of each country, local officials with
reputations for having a broad perspective
on their country's administrative structures,
and professionals working on these issues in
multilateral organizations. Together the ex-
perts in our sample account for a substantial
portion of the published literature on the
state bureaucracies for the countries in our
sample.14
The experts' evaluations were structured
by means of a fixed-response question-
naire.15 In answering the fixed-response
questions, the experts were asked first to
identify the central state agencies that played
the most important role in formulating eco-
nomic policy, and then to answer questions
regardingthem.16 We reasoned that the struc-
ture of the core economic agencies probably
had an effect on economic growth, and be-
cause country case studies have shown that
there is usually substantial variation across
agencies, getting a measure that focused on
the most relevant agencies made sense.
Questions concerning the state bureaucracy
14 For a more detailed discussion of the distri-
bution of different types of experts across coun-
tries see Talbot (1997, table 2).
15 All experts were encouraged to provide ad-
ditional commentary and complementary materi-
als, and most did so. This additional material was
reviewed during the coding of the fixed-response
questions, but is not analyzed separately here.
16 Specifically, experts were asked to "list the
four most important agencies in the central state
bureaucracyin order of their power to shape over-
all economic policy."
WEBERIAN BUREAUCRACY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH
generally followed those focused on the core
economic agencies.17
Country experts were not asked to evalu-
ate the performanceor quality of the bureau-
cracy. Instead, the questionnaire focused on
specific descriptive features of the bureau-
cracy that are subject to objective estimation.
We then combined these descriptive features
to construct a simple measure that reflected
a Weberian bureaucratic structure built on
meritocratic recruitment and rewarding pre-
dictable career ladders.
Because bureaucratic structures are noto-
riously resistant to change, we felt secure in
assuming that the differences we discovered
among bureaucraticstructureswould charac-
terize the situation in place at the beginning
of the period (and, indeed, had probablybeen
in place for some time prior to 1970) and
were, therefore, temporally antecedent to
growth during the 1970-1990 period. To
check on this assumption,experts were asked
not only to provide responses that character-
ized the entire period but also to note any
significant changes during the period. De-
spite some references to deterioration in the
situation of bureaucrats over time (particu-
larly in relation to relative salaries), it was
clear from their comments that the bureau-
cratic structures they described antedated
1970-1990 economic growth.'8
Ten questions were used to create what we
call the "WeberiannessScale." (See Appen-
dix A for a discussion of the scale and a list
of items.) An initial question indicated the
importance of the agencies under consider-
ation in generating economic policy. Two of
the subsequent questions (questions 2 and 9
in Appendix A) measured the importance of
exams in recruiting civil servants to the core
economic agencies and more generally.19
Three of the questions tapped issues relating
17 For the full questionnaire see Rauch and
Evans (1999, app. A). For coding of question-
naire, see Talbot (1997, app. A).
18 Although bureaucratic structures were gen-
erally stable during the period under study, ex-
perts' comments indicated that the early 1990s
may have been a period of change in which a
number of bureaucracies were restructuredin re-
sponse to pressure from multilateral agencies.
19Question 9 is actually a composite created by
combining the answers to questions 17 and 18 on
the original questionnaire.
755
to careers: whether civil servants, once re-
cruited, are likely to stay in the civil service
(questions 3 and 5) and whether staying in
the civil service implies possibilities for
moving up within a hierarchy (question 4).
An additional four questions tapped the is-
sue of career rewards, both in terms of sala-
ries and prestige (questions 6, 7, 8, and 10).
The resulting WeberiannessScale provides a
succinct, substantively plausible measure of
the bureaucraticfeatures that are the focus of
our investigation.
To discover what relationship,if any, might
exist between these features and economic
growth during the 1970-1990 period, we
drew on measures from available standard
data sets to create our dependent variable,
growth in GDP per capita from 1970-1990,
and our control variables, initial income level
and pre-existing human capital. (See Appen-
dix B for definitions and data sources for the
dependent variable and control variables.)
The 1994 ("Mark5.5") version of Summers
and Heston's (1991) Penn World Tables pro-
vided the source for our measures of real
GDP per capita in 1965, 1970, and 1990. As
our proxy for human capital we used an up-
dated version of Barroand Lee's (1993) mea-
sure of average years of education for the
population 25 years and older.
ANALYSIS
Our aim is to discover whether "Weber-
ianness" has an effect on economic growth
that is independent of the effects of other
variables classically associated with eco-
nomic development. There is a strong and
significant correlation between score on the
Weberianness Scale and total growth of real
GDP per capita during the 1970-1990 period
(r = .67; p < .001), but it could be argued
that Weberiannessis simply a proxy for over-
all level of development or existing stocks of
human capital. (See Appendix C for Weber-
ianness Scale Scores for the 35 countries in
our sample.) Such an argument cannot be
dismissed out of hand. We know that more
highly developed bureaucracies are more
likely to be found among the developed
countries (Rauch and Evans 1999:8, fig la,
fig. la; also see World Bank 1997). We also
know that high levels of human capital,
which are generally associated with high lev-
756 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

els of development, are strongly associated WeberiannessScale continues to have a pow-

with growth. In fact, virtually no association
emerged between the degree of approxima-
tion to Weberian characteristics and initial
levels of per capita income in this sample of
developing countries (r = .05). In this sample
of developing countries at least, it is hard to
argue that past growth or higher levels of in-
come are importantcauses, in themselves, of
more Weberian states. Put more optimisti-
cally, it seems that low levels of per capita
income are not necessarily a barrier to
achieving more competent and coherent state
bureaucracies. Nonetheless, there is a mod-
est (though not significant) correlation be-
tween the Weberianness Scale in our sample
and preexisting level of human capital (r =
.25, p = .15), and human capital has, in turn,
a significant positive effect on subsequent
growth.
Our first key result, then, is that even after
the effects of initial GDP per capita levels
and preexisting levels of human capital have
been controlled, the relation between the
Weberianness Scale score and economic
growth remains strong and significant. As the
regression equations below indicate, the
erful and significant effect on economic
growth. Weberianness is not simply a spuri-
ous proxy for effects of preexisting levels of
development or human capital.
The basic equation in unstandardizedform
is:
% Change in GDP per capita 1970-1990 =
-44.54 - .02 (Real GDP per capita 1965)
+ 15.77 (Averageyears of schooling 1965)
+ 16.05 (Weberianness score). (1)
In standardizedform the equation is:
% Change in GDP per capita 1970-1990 =
- .317 (Real GDP per capita 1965)
+ .307 (Averageyears of schooling 1965)
+ .615 (Weberianness score). (2)
The scattergram of growth regressed on
the Weberianness Scale with the effects of
initial level of GDP per capita and preexist-
ing levels of human capital controlled is
shown in Figure 1. One of the things that
stands out in this scattergram is the strong
degree to which the regional distribution of
Weberian characteristics parallels regional
differences in growth performance.

300 -

Singaporeu
&- 200-Taiwan
a
200 -
C CY) Hong Kong Korea
o. I Portugal
XO U
~~~~
100100 Tunisia
*~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Malaysia
Syria
CD - *Morocco Thailand Spain
TUrkeyl MXO
0 -
L)
CL ~ ~ Kenya
* Nigeria
UBrazil
Egypt Ina
Guatemalabi Ecuador = E Colombia UPakistan
O .3, ,,g~atIsrael EC6te d'lvoire EGreece
Dominican EHaiti UUruguay
Republic ArninaE U ECosta Rica
-100 R EChile Sri Lanka
0. ~~~~~~~Zairefl
er
(U
*eru EPhilippines

-200 l l
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
Weberianness Scale (Raw Score)

Figure 1. Scattergram Showing Relationship between Weberianness Scale Score and Unexplained
Growth in GDP per Capita, 1970 to 1990
Note: Unexplainedgrowthis that growthnot explained by level of GDP in 1965 and years of school in
1965.
WEBERIAN BUREAUCRACY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH 757

400

300- c...
.-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
n...,5.
t
-......n
5
... n .....
..........
.n
n;
n
.nn
nn

Mc 200-
s.
~ciu N =15
00 100 N
a) N4 12
~ I

-100- I I II
Africa LatinAmerica Other East Asia
Figure 2. Boxplot of Growth in GDP per Capita by Region, 1970 to 1990

Regional differences in both growth in Figure 3 portrays regional differences in

GDP and Weberianness are summarized in
Figures 2 and 3. Figure 2 shows the range,
interquartilerange, and median for growth in
GDP for each of four regional country group-
ings. When the four regions are arrangedin
the order that would be expected on basis of
the existing literature,they almost form a per-
fect regression line with Sub-SaharanAfrica
at the bottom and the four East Asian tigers at
the top. The LatinAmerican region exhibits a
growth performancethat is clearly inferior to
any region except for Sub-Saharan Africa,
largely because Latin America's growth ex-
perience in the period we are examining is
dominated by the "lost decade" of the 1980s.
Weberianness Scale scores and makes the
parallel between regional variations in
growth and regional variations in bureau-
cratic structuregraphically clear. Just as Sub-
SaharanAfrica defines the bottom of the scale
in terms of growth, it is also the region in
which state bureaucraciesare least Weberian.
Likewise, the four East Asian Tigers epito-
mize, during this period at least, both high
growth and Weberianbureaucratictraits. The
Weberianness Scale appears to capture a key
institutional element of the "high perform-
ing" East Asian economies while pointing to
an institutional deficit that may help explain
low rates of growth in Africa.

16 -

14- N 4

O 12- N 15
Cn,

X
10- aa<.-a''a'''".N
N 12=
aa~aa
ee~aaa-
a
a - .-......... ...

u6

04-

0* I
Africa Latin America Other East Asia

Figure 3. Boxplot of Weberianness Scale Score by Region

758 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

Table 1. Standardized Coefficients from Regressions of Growth in Real GDP Per Capita, 1970-1990,
on Selected Independent Variables: 35 Developing Countries

Independent Variable Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4

Weberianness Scale .615** .537** .599** .247*

score (4.649) (3.700) (4.268) (2.418)
GDP per capita, 1965 -.317 -.270 -.324 -.150
(-1.749) (-1.472) (-1.753) (-1.251)
Years of school, 1965 .307 .319 .290 .090
(1.645) (1.725) (1.487) (.724)
Latin America -.180
(-1.242)
Africa -.056
(-.367)
East Asia .696**
(6.638)

Number of countries 35 35 35 35
Adjusted R2 .460 .469 .444 .774
Note: Numbers in parentheses are t-values.
<.05 ** < .01 (two-tailed tests)

Table 1 presents a set of regressions that duce other variables used in standard
add dummy variables for region to the basic growth models? Levine and Renelt (1992)
regression illustratedin Figure 1. The effects surveyed 41 studies that used cross-national
of the WeberiannessScale still appearrobust. regressions to explain economic growth.
Introducingthe dummy variables for Sub-Sa- They concluded that even though "over 50
haran Africa and Latin America reduce the variables have been found to be signifi-
Weberianness Scale coefficient only mod- cantly correlated with growth in at least one
estly (Models 2 and 3). Even more important, regression" (p. 924), the list of variables
a significant "bureaucraticstructure effect" whose effects are truly robust is, in fact,
remains, even when a dummy variable for small. They identified three basic vari-
East Asia (the Four Tigers) is included ables-initial level of GDP per capita, in-
(Model 4).20 vestment, and human capital-as most ro-
Do the effects of Weberianness continue bustly related to growth (1992:947, table 1).
to be significant in regressions that intro- Model 5 in Table 2 shows that the results
20 The effects of the Weberianness Scale are
with respect to these variables using our
sample, time period, and variable defini-
robust in the face of different definitions of re-
tions are consistent with previous work, ex-
gional dummy variables (two variations on the
East Asian dummy variable that include six or cept that the effects of human capital (years
seven Asian countries) and a broader version of of school) fall short of significance (using a
the African dummy (which adds three North Af- two-tailed test). Initial investment is the
rican countries). In fact, the Weberianness Scale most significant predictor of growth, and
has a more powerful effect when the broadest the initial level of GDP per capita continues
definition of "East Asia" is used. Only when the to have a negative relation to growth.
East Asian dummy variable is included along When the Weberianness Scale is added to
with the Sub-Saharan Africa or Latin American this basic equation (Model 7), it becomes the
dummy variable does the effect of the Weberian- most powerful predictor of growth and the
ness Scale drop below statistical significance.
Also, the Weberianness effect is not robust in the adjusted R2 increases significantly. Model 6
face of the simultaneous inclusion of three re- in Table 2 shows the effects of two additional
gional dummies, but as these three dummy vari- variables that Barro (1991) found to have
ables in combination include at least 18 of our 35 significant negative effects on growth-gov-
countries, this is an extremely stringent test. ernment consumption and revolutions. In
WEBERIAN BUREAUCRACY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH 759

Table 2. Standardized Coefficients from Regressions of Growth in Real GDP Per Capita, 1970-1990,
on Selected Independent Variables: 35 Developing Countries

Independent Variable Model 5 Model 6 Model 7 Model 8

Weberianness Scale - .490** .482*

score (3.647) (3.104)
GDP per capita, 1965 -.644** -.778** -.458* -.498*
(-3.171) (-3.642) (-2.554) (-2.402)
Years of school, 1965 .401 .420* .258 .211
(1.988) (2.068) (1.470) (1.115)
Average annual proportion .580** .434* .360* .298
domestic investment, (3.498) (2.463) (2.362) (1.861)
1965-1970
Average annual proportion - -.334 - -.179
government consumption (-2.024) (-1.169)
expenditure, 1970-1985
Average revolutions - -.136 - -.003
per year, 1970-1985 (-.950) (-.023)

Number of countries 35 34a 35 34a

Adjusted R2 .343 .373 .529 .521

Note: Numbers in parentheses are t-values.

a C6te d'Ivoire lacks data on government consumption and is omitted.
<.05 ** < .01 (two-tailed tests)

Model 6 when these variables are added to
the basic Levine and Renelt set (Model 5),
their coefficients are not significant, and they
result in only a trivial increase in the ad-
justed R2.21 In Model 8 the Weberianness
Scale is added to Model 6. The results paral-
lel those of Model 7: The Weberianness
Scale once again becomes the most signifi-
cant predictor, and the adjusted R2 is again
significantly increased.22 Overall, these re-
21 Consistent with Barro (1991), the coefficient
for government consumption is negative. But in
our results it is significant only at the p < .10
level. Government consumption does have a sig-
nificant negative relation with growth when in-
vestment is omitted from the regressors (i.e.,
when only initial level of GDP and human capital
are included). The coefficent for the revolutions
variable is always nonsignificant (though consis-
tently negative).
22 It might be expected that there would be an
interactive relationship between government con-
sumption, the Weberianness Scale score, and
growth such that increased Weberianness would
reduce or reverse the negative effect of govern-
ment consumption on growth. We tried introduc-
ing an interaction term (Weberianness Scale x
government consumption) into several different
suits suggest that if data could be collected
for a broader range of countries, Weberian-
ness would become a valuable addition to the
existing literature on cross-national growth
models.
Given the powerful and robust relationship
between investment levels and growth in the
standardcross-national literatureand the fact
that sociological work on cross-national
models of growth has also emphasized the
important role of investment (cf. Firebaugh
1992:125), it makes sense to look at the ef-
fects of Weberianness on investment levels
as well as on rates of growth.23 Table 3
regressions, but we found no significant effects.
Nonetheless, it is worth noting that there is a
strong negative correlation between Weberian-
ness and government consumption in our sample
(r = -.35; p < .05), which is consistent with the
observations in the case study literature that de-
velopmental states are not usually "big" states in
fiscal terms.
23 Like Firebaugh, Barro (1991:426, table III)
also reportedresults using investment as a depen-
dent variable. He did not, however, use invest-
ment as an explanatory variable in his "basic"
growth regressions (Barro 1991:410-13, table I),
presumably because of concern about endo-
760 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

Table 3. Standardized Coefficients from Regressions of Average Annual Proportion Domestic Invest-
ment, 1985-1990, on Selected Independent Variables: 35 Developing Countries

Independent Variable Model 9 Model 10 Model 11 Model 12 Model 13

Weberianness Scale .489** .477"* .456** .348* .370*

score (3.508) (3.044) (3.103) (2.146) (2.276)
GDP per capita, 1965 -.179 -.172 -.194 -.115 -.354
(-.936) (-.867) (-1.003) (-.603) (-1.609)
Year of school, 1965 .443* .445* .407 .360 .436*
(2.255) (2.225) (1.994) (1.814) (2.128)
Average annual proportion -.314
government consumption (-1.931)
expenditure, 1970-1985
Average revolutions -.136
per year, 1970-1985 (-.951)
Latin America -.026
(-.169)
Africa -.119
(-.747)
East Asia .267
(1.599)

Number of countries 35 35 35 35 34a

Adjusted R2 .400 .381 .392 .429 .434

Note: Numbers in parentheses are t-values.

a C6te d'Ivoire lacks data on government consumption and is omitted.
<.05 ** < .01 (two-tailed tests)

shows that the Weberianness scale score has ders are associated with higher growth rates.
a consistently significant positive effect on Because the data refer primarily to core eco-
end-of-period investment levels, reinforcing nomic agencies, the implication is not that
the position generally taken in the case-study the entire bureaucratic apparatus must be
literature on "developmental states," which structuredin this way to have positive effects
emphasizes the role of the state in elevating on growth. Having Weberianstructuresin the
levels of private investment as a principal strategic core of the bureaucracymay be suf-
mechanism through which states promote ficient.
higher rates of growth (Evans 1995).24 Weberianness provides a parsimonious,
analytically satisfying account of observed
differences in regional growth performance.
DISCUSSION These findings support interpretations of
The evidence we have presented adds cre- high East Asian growth that emphasize the
dence to the proposition that state bureaucra- contribution of competent, cohesive bureau-
cies characterized by meritocratic recruit- cracies and offer a succinct, objective, and
ment and predictable, rewarding career lad- replicable substitute for the unsatisfyingly
amorphous and atheoretical idea of an "East
geneity. We tried to avoid the endogeneity prob- Asian effect." The findings are also consis-
lem by using only the prior level of investment in tent with explanations of low African growth
our growth regressions. rates, which emphasize problems of gover-
24 We also explored the relationship between
Weberianness and levels of public investment nance.
More generally, these findings sug-
with the thought that introducing an interaction gest that an important contribution could be
term might reveal a significant positive effect of made to the existing literature on the cross-
public investment on growth contingent on high national analysis of growth if systematic evi-
levels of Weberianness. We found no such effect. dence on state structureswere gathered from
WEBERIAN BUREAUCRACY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH
a larger sample of countries. Weberiannessis
a potential sociological addition to the small
set of robust predictors of growth that have
been identified by economists in recent cross
-national studies.
Despite the promising character of these
results, we stress that the researchwe present
here is only a beginning. Several avenues for
further work are obvious. Gathering data on
bureaucraticstructuresfor a larger sample of
countries is the first step toward a better test
of the robustness of the relationship found
here.25The success of the initial effort we re-
port here argues that the returnsfrom gather-
ing more and better evidence on cross-na-
tional variations in the structural character-
istics of state bureaucracieswould more than
justify the effort required.
A more ambitious goal is extending the
longitudinal coverage of data collection by
looking at changes in the characterof public
bureaucracies in the 1990s. This task is rel-
evant to understandingthe roots of the cur-
rent economic problems in East Asia. Previ-
ous case studies emphasized that it might be
difficult to sustain the Weberian characterof
East Asian bureaucracies (Amsden 1989;
Evans 1995). Recent commentators have
suggested that the declining integrity of
public bureaucracies has played an impor-
tant role in the deterioration of East Asian
financial systems (e.g., Chang, Park, and
Yoo 1998).
Finally, it would be illuminating to exam-
ine the relationship between Weberianness
and a range of other political, social, and
economic variables that have been shown to
be related to growth. Political regimes
(Alvarez et al. 1996) and the policy outputs
commonly used in cross-country regressions
(e.g., black market premium, fiscal surplus,
price distortions) are two examples.26
25 A project is currently in the planning stages
at the United Nations University that would ex-
tend coverage of the data to an additional 15 or
20 countries in Sub-SaharanAfrica. So far, how-
ever, most efforts to interest funding agencies in
support for building the necessary data infrastruc-
ture have had disappointing results.
26 In another paper (Rauch and Evans forth-
coming), we examine of the relationship between
Weberianness and some commonly used bureau-
cratic performance variables.
761
Although much remains to be done, one
incontrovertible conclusion transcends the
exploratory character of our study: The
"Weberian-state hypothesis" deserves more
attention from sociologists and other social
scientists, both empirically and analytically.
Peter Evans is Chancellor's Professor and Chair
of the Sociology Department at the University of
California, Berkeley. His recent books include
State-Society Synergy: Government Action and
Social Capital in Development (edited collection,
Berkeley, CA. University of California, Berkeley,
International and Area Studies Publications,
1997) and Embedded Autonomy: States and In-
dustrial Transformation. (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1995). He is cur-
rently working on an edited collection entitled
Livable Cities: The Politics of Urban Livelihood
and Sustainability.
James E. Rauch is Professor of Economics at the
University of California, San Diego, and Re-
search Associate at the National Bureau of Eco-
nomic Research. He is author (with Gerald M.
Meier) of Leading Issues in Economic Develop-
ment (7th ed., Oxford University Press, forthcom-
ing) and editor (with Robert C. Feenstra) of Sym-
posium on Business and Social Networks in In-
ternational Trade, a special issue of the Journal
of InternationalEconomics (Vol. 48, No. 1, June
1999). He is currently working on a conference
volume entitled Networks and Markets.
Appendix A. The "Weberianness" Scale
The WeberiannessScale was createdfrom 10 items
in the original questionnaire.The items (with fixed
responsealternativesabbreviated)are shown below.
The full questionnaireandthe recodingused in com-
piling the scale are available at <weber.ucsd.edu/
-jrauch/webstate>.
The individualresponsesto the 10 questions (ex-
cept question 9) were aggregatedto create a coun-
try-level data set, in which each country'sscore was
the average of the responses of all experts answer-
ing each question for that country. (Countryratings
on question 9 were based on the investigators' as-
sessment of combined country expert responses to
two questions regardinginitiationand selectivity of
civil service exams.) Countryaverages for each of
the 10 questionswere recodedinto two or three cat-
egories in such a way as to obtain as equal a distri-
bution of countries over the categories as possible.
The 10 questions were then combined to form a
scale.
762 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

1. Which of the following descriptions best fits the
role of these agencies in the formulation of eco-
nomic policy.
(1) Many new economic policies originate in-
side them.
(2) Some new policies originateinside them.
(3) They rarelyoriginatenew policies.
2. Approximately what proportion of the higher of-
ficials in these agencies enter the civil service
via a formal examination system?
(1) Less than 30% (2 ) 30-60%
(3) 60%-90% (4) More than90%
3. What is roughly the modal number of years
spent by a typical higher level official in one of
these agencies during his career?
(1) 1-5 years (2) 5-10 years
(3) 10-20 years (4) Entirecareer
6. How would you estimate the salaries (and per-
quisites, not including bribes or other extra-le-
gal sources of income) of higher officials in
these agencies relative to those of private sec-
tor managers with roughly comparable training
and responsibilities?
(1) Less than 50% (2) 50-80% (3) 80%-90%
(4) Comparable (5) Higher
7. If bribes and other extra-legal perquisites are
included what would the proportion be?
(1) Less than 50% (2) 50-80% (3) 80%-90%
(4) Comparable (5) Higher
8. Over the period in question (roughly 1970-
1990) what was the movement of legal income
in these agencies relative to salaries in the pri-
vate sector?

4. What prospects for promotion can someone who
enters one of these agencies through a higher
civil service examination early in his/her career
reasonably expect? Assuming that there are at
least a half dozen steps or levels between an en-
try-level position and the head of the agency,
how would you characterize the possibilities for
moving up in the agency? [NB. more than one
may apply.]
(1) In most cases, will move up one or two levels.
(2) In most cases, will move up three or four
levels.
(3) Will move up several levels to the level just
below top political appointees.
(4) In at least a few cases, will move up to the
very top.
5. How common is it for higher officials in these
agencies to spend substantial proportions of
their careers in the private sector, interspersing
private and public sector activity?
(1) Normal (2) Frequentbut not modal
(3) Unusual (4) Almost never
(1) Declined dramatically.
(2) Declined slightly.
(3) Maintainedthe same position.
(4) Improvedtheir position.
9. This variable was createdfrom the combined re-
sponses of all experts for each country, based on
an assessment of the importance of civil service
examinations for entry into the bureaucracy.
(0) No civil service exams, or exams are of triv-
ial importance.
(1) Ambiguousbased on experts' responses.
(2) Civil service exams are an importantcom-
ponent of entry to the bureaucracy.
10. Among graduates of the country's most elite
university(ies), is a public sector career consid-
ered:
(1) The best possible option.
(2, 3) Depends on circumstances.
(4) A second best option.

Appendix B. Variable Definitions and Data Sources

Variable Definition Source

Total percent growth in GDP
per capita 1970-1990
Domestic investment,
1985-1990
Domestic investment,
1965-1970
Total percentage growth of real GDP
per capita from 1970 to 1990.
Average of the annual ratio of real
domestic investment (private plus public)
to real GDP over the period 1965 to 1970.
Average of the annual ratio of real
domestic investment (private plus public) to
real GDP over the period 1965 to 1970.
Penn World Tables (Mark 5.5)
(see Summers and Heston
1991)
Penn World Tables (Mark 5.5)
Taken from updated data set
from Barro and Lee (1993)
Penn World Tables (Mark 5.5)
Taken from updated data set
from Barro and Lee (1993)

(Continued on next page)

WEBERIAN BUREAUCRACY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH 763

Continuedfrom previous page)

Variable Definition Source

Average years of schooling, Average schooling years in the total Updated data set from Barro
1965a population over age 25, 1965. and Lee (1993)

Government consumption, Average of the annual ratio of real Updated data set from Barro
1970-1985 government consumption expenditure net and Lee (1993)
of spending on defense and on education
to real GDP over the period 1970 to 1985.
Average revolutions, Average of the number of revolutions Updated data set from Barro
1970-1985 per year from 1970 to 1985. and Lee (1993)
Africa A dummy variable for the Sub-Saharan
African countries: CMtedIvoire, Kenya,
Nigeria and Zaire.
East Asia A dummy variable for the four "East Asian
Tigers": Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore,
and Taiwan.
Latin America A dummy variable for the Latin American
countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia
Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador,
Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay.
a Data for Average years of schooling, 1965 was unavailable for Egypt, CMtedIvoire, Morocco and Nigeria.

Observations for these four countries were estimated using data on total educational attainment from Nehru,
Swanson, and Ashutosh (1995). The Pearson correlation coefficient between these two variables was .80 (p < .001).

Appendix C. Weberianness Scale Scores for 35 Developing Countries

Country Weberianness Scale Score Country Weberianness Scale Score

Argentina 3.80 Mexico 8.50
Brazil 7.60 Morocco 7.00
Chile 5.00 Nigeria 3.00
Colombia 8.50 Pakistan 11.00
Costa Rica 9.00 Peru 5.00
CMted'Ivoire 8.00 Philippines 6.00
Dominican Republic 2.00 Portugal 5.00
Ecuador 4.00 Singapore 13.50
Egypt 7.80 Spain 10.00
Greece 10.00 SriLanka 8.00
Guatemala 3.00 Syria 3.80
Haiti 4.00 Sra38
Hong Kong 11.00 Taiwan 12.00
India 10.00 Thailand 8.00
Israel 7.00 Tunisia 9.00
Kenya 1.00 Turkey 7.00
Korea 13.00 Uruguay 4.50
Malaysia 10.50 Zaire 4.00

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 latin america:
eight lessons for governance
Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully

Scott Mainwaring is Eugene Conley Professor of Political Science at

the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is The Crisis of
Democratic Representation in the Andes (2006, coedited). Timothy R.
Scully is professor of political science and fellow of the Kellogg In-
stitute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He
is coeditor, with Scott Mainwaring, of Christian Democracy in Latin
America: Electoral Competition and Regime Conflicts (2003).

The “third wave” of democratization in Latin America began thirty

years ago in the Dominican Republic. What have we learned since
then about democratic governance? This essay addresses that question.
Events during the past three decades have often changed how social
scientists and policy makers perceive democratic governance, but there
have been few efforts to systematize lessons about the political aspects
of democratic governance.
Democratic governance is the capacity of democratic governments
to implement policies that enhance a country’s political, social, and
economic welfare. Successful democratic governance entails maintain-
ing reasonably high-quality democratic practice, promoting economic
growth, providing citizen security, and addressing the serious social
problems (poverty, income inequality, poor social services) that afflict,
albeit to very different degrees, Latin American countries.
Democratic governance is conceptually distinct from the quality
of democracy and the quality of governance. Democratic governance
is mostly a top-down phenomenon that refers to how well democratic
government and the state in a democratic regime are functioning. By
contrast, the quality of democracy refers to the “democraticness” of the
political regime.1 Most studies of the quality of democracy focus ex-
clusively on democracy’s procedural aspects, whereas good democratic
governance also involves policy results. It means governing not only
democratically, but also effectively. Our focus also differs from analy-

Journal of Democracy Volume 19, Number 3 July 2008

© 2008 National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press
114 Journal of Democracy

ses of effective governance in general because we specifically analyze

democratic governance—that is, good governance under democracy.
Building effective democratic governance is the greatest chal-
lenge facing most Latin American countries today. Since 1978, Latin
America has made tremendous strides toward governing democratically.
However, only two or three countries in the region—Chile (since 1990)
and to a lesser degree Costa Rica and Uruguay (since 1985)—have rela-
tively consistently met the challenge of governing both democratically
and effectively. Below we present eight lessons about democratic gover-
nance gleaned from the experience of the past three decades.
1) In most countries, creating effective democratic governance has
proven far more difficult than most analysts anticipated in the early
1990s. At that time, the Soviet Union had just collapsed. Many countries
in Latin America, the post-Soviet region, and Africa were experiencing
political liberalization, and a number were transitioning to democracy.
These transitions and regime changes generated optimism regarding future
prospects for democracy as expressed, for example, in Francis Fukuyama’s
1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, which heralded the
worldwide triumph of the ideal of liberal democracy.2
Building democracies that govern effectively, however, has proven
difficult in Latin America and in most other third-wave democratizers.
In many Latin American countries, the quality of democracy has re-
mained poor, with inadequate protection of rights and weak mechanisms
of government accountability. Guatemala, Paraguay, and Venezuela are
only semi-democratic, with even more serious limitations on democratic
practice. Only three countries—Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay—are
high-quality democracies with generally solid rule of law, protection of
rights, free and fair elections, and effective mechanisms of accountabil-
ity for state officials (see the Table on p. 118 for Latin America’s 2007
Freedom House scores).
Chile alone has sustained high rates of economic growth and poverty
reduction; most countries in the region experienced almost no per-capita
growth between 1982 and 2002. Outside Latin America, many countries
that in the early 1990s appeared poised to undergo transitions to competi-
tive political regimes have instead degenerated into competitive authori-
tarian regimes. Moreover, democracies have failed to win the support of
large numbers of citizens.
In the greater sweep of the history of democratization, it is not sur-
prising that many attempts at building effective democracy have failed.
In contrast to the past, however, very few competitive political re-
gimes in Latin America have suffered overt breakdowns. A new pattern
has emerged in the third wave of democratization in Latin America.
Governmental instability has been rampant, but even weak competitive
regimes have rarely succumbed to breakdowns.3 Democratically elected
presidents or their constitutional successors have resigned under pres-
Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully 115

sure or been ousted in Argentina (1989, 2001, and 2002); Haiti (1991);
Brazil (1992); Venezuela (1993); Guatemala (1993); Ecuador (1997,
2000, and 2005); Paraguay (1999); arguably Peru (2000, depending on
how one views the fairness of the election); Bolivia (2003 and 2005);
and Haiti (1991, 2004). But the only clear breakdowns of competitive
regimes occurred in Peru in 1992 and in Haiti in 1991 and 2004.
This combination of glaring deficiencies in democratic governance
and the ongoing persistence of competitive regimes is unprecedented
in the world history of democracy. The phenomenon of competitive re-
gimes that endure despite poor governance runs counter to the expecta-
tions that most policy makers and social scientists held well into the
1990s. For democratic leaders and citizens of the region, the foremost
question is no longer how to avoid democratic breakdown or erosion—
although these issues are not off the table—but rather how to promote
more effective governance under competitive regimes.
2) The outcomes in democratic governance in contemporary Latin
America have varied widely. Although this point seems obvious, the
variance is generally underappreciated. The large number of countries
where democratic governance has been shaky has overshadowed the vari-
ation in outcomes. At one end of the spectrum, Chile has built a robust
democracy, fostered rapid economic growth, and dramatically reduced
poverty. Between 1990 and 2005, Chile’s GDP per capita (GDPpc) grew
4.2 percent per year (in constant 2000 dollars, expressed in purchasing
power parity), generating a cumulative increase of 86 percent in fifteen
years. Chile had the seventh-highest rate of GDPpc growth in the world
during these fifteen years.
At the other end of the spectrum, in Haiti two attempted transitions to
competitive regimes were short-lived, culminating in a coup in 1991 and a
rebellion in 2004, both of which led to the overthrow of a democratically
elected president. The legislature has twice been dissolved (in 1999 and
2004), there have been two international interventions (in 1994 and 2004),
and the state has at times teetered on the brink of collapse. Per-capita
income fell on average by 2.4 percent per year from 1990 to 2005, wors-
ening the squalor in the world’s poorest country outside Africa. Haiti’s
GDPpc fell from $2,136 in 1990 to $1,479 during this same period—a
31 percent drop. This was the tenth-worst performance in the world dur-
ing these years. The income gap between Chile and Haiti increased from
2.7 to 1 in 1990 to 7.2 to 1 in 2005.4 If in this fifteen-year period Chile’s
economy had declined as much as Haiti’s and Haiti’s had grown as much
as Chile’s, Haiti’s GDPpc would have surpassed Chile’s in 2005.
The great disparity in economic growth applies to other important are-
nas of democratic governance as well. In Chile, between 1990 and 2006,
poverty fell by almost two-thirds, from 38.6 percent to 13.7 percent of
individuals. In sharp contrast, in Argentina, poverty increased between
1994 and 2006, from 16.1 percent to 21.0 percent of households.5
116 Journal of Democracy

The level of democracy has also varied considerably across coun-

tries. According to Freedom House, Chile since 2003, Costa Rica since
2004, and Uruguay since 2000 have consistently earned the best-pos-
sible scores for both civil liberties and political rights, indicating high-
quality democracy. By contrast, Haiti (even when it has had a competi-
tive regime), Guatemala, and Venezuela have had serious shortcomings
in democratic practice. And Cuba, of course, remains steadfastly au-
thoritarian.
A final example of the dramatic variance in democratic governance is
the homicide rate, which reflects an important aspect of state capacity.
According to the most recent data (circa 2002) available from the Pan
American Health Organization (PAHO), Bolivia (with 0.4 homicides
per 100,000 inhabitants per year), Peru (3.0), Uruguay (5.0), Chile (5.3),
Cuba (6.3), Costa Rica (6.5), and Argentina (6.8) had moderate homi-
cide rates. The homicide rate in Colombia at that time, one of the highest
in the world at 79.7 homicides per 100,000 people, was vastly higher.
The homicide rates in El Salvador (45.6 per 100,000), Venezuela (34.5),
and Brazil (31.7) were also alarming.6 High murder rates have perni-
cious effects on the quality of everyday life and reflect the differences
in states’ ability to protect citizens from other citizens (and in today’s
world, from organized gangs). These differences in homicide rates an-
tedate the democratic and semi-democratic regimes, but in the countries
with very high crime and homicide rates, these problems have gotten
worse since the transitions to competitive regimes.
Given these differences in regime performance, scholars and policy
makers generalize at peril about performance in democratic governance
for the region as a whole.
3) Effective states are important for successful democratic gover-
nance. Without an effective state, neither democracy nor development
will flourish. An effective state is important for democracy because the
state must protect citizens, uphold their rights, and oversee free and fair
elections.7 An effective state is also critical for development because
the state should provide decent public education, regulate some aspects
of the economy, create an infrastructure that enables investors to make
good use of natural and human resources, combat corruption, and ensure
property rights.8
These observations seem commonplace today. But consider the pre-
vailing wisdom from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s. State bash-
ers were so eager to shrink the state that they failed to appreciate how
important it is for democracy and for economic performance. Rather than
striving to build a more efficient and effective state, many of the reforms
instituted during these years instead dismantled the state. Relearning
how crucial the state is for democracy and development has been one of
the fundamental lessons of the third wave.
The state in most Latin American countries is lacking in many ways.
Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully 117

As Thomas Hobbes wrote, the state’s primordial task is to protect citi-

zens so that life does not turn into a “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short” free-for-all. In most countries of the region, the state fared poorly
at this Hobbesian task. Crime rates are high in most countries. In the
1980s, PAHO has reported, 11 percent of all deaths in Guatemala were
homicides, compared to 0.03 percent in England. By this measure, ho-
micides were a staggering 360 times more frequent in Guatemala than
in England.9 Criminal gangs have displaced the state in the shantytowns
of many cities across Latin America, and the police enter these areas
infrequently and at their own peril.
In much of the region, legal systems are precarious, inefficient, and
corrupt. States are not capable of, and in many cases are not interested
in, enforcing equal rights for all citizens.10 The regulatory capacity of
the state in most countries is poor, and public investment in infrastruc-
ture has lagged. States’ ability to protect and empower citizens through
social policy is fragile in most countries.
Daniel Kaufmann and his colleagues at the World Bank have devel-
oped six measures of the effectiveness of governance, all based on sub-
jective opinion: rule of law, control of corruption, voice and account-
ability, regulatory quality, political stability, and government effective-
ness. Three of these indicators provide useful measures of perceptions
of state capacity: the rule of law, the control of corruption, and regula-
tory quality (see Table on p. 118).11
Based on these indicators, most Latin American states exhibit some
areas of pronounced weakness. Of the twenty Latin American countries,
in 2006, only Chile scored at least half a standard deviation higher than
the world mean on regulatory quality, while seven countries scored at
least half a standard deviation below. For rule of law, only Chile and
Costa Rica scored at least half a standard deviation above the world
mean, and fourteen Latin American countries scored at least half a stan-
dard deviation below. Chile and Uruguay were more than half a standard
deviation above the world mean on control of corruption, but nine coun-
tries were more than half a standard deviation below it.
One contributing factor to weak state capacity in Latin America is
inadequate tax revenue. In parts of the region, tax revenue is exiguous.
According to recent estimates, in nine Latin American countries, the
central government’s tax revenue equaled less than 15 percent of GDP:
Haiti (9.7 percent), Guatemala (9.8 percent), Mexico (11.0 percent),
Venezuela (12.6 percent), Paraguay (13.0 percent), Ecuador (13.4 per-
cent), Costa Rica (13.6 percent), El Salvador (14.2 percent), and Panama
(14.2 percent). Costa Rica compensates for its insufficient federal tax
income with reasonable tax revenues from other levels of government.
Thus total tax revenues accounted for 20.5 percent of Costa Rica’s GDP
in 2005.12 The other countries, however, have weak total tax shares (that
is, central government plus other levels of government).
118 Journal of Democracy

Table—Democracy and Governance Indicators

for Latin America
Combined Rule of Control of Regulatory Satisfaction
Freedom Law Corruption Quality with
Country
House Score (2006)** (2006) (2006) Democracy
(2007)* (2007)***
Argentina 4 -0.58 -0.47 -0.74 33
Bolivia 6 -0.90 -0.64 -1.03 41
Brazil 4 -0.48 -0.33 0.00 30
Chile 2 1.15 1.31 1.41 36
Colombia 6 -0.64 -0.22 0.10 32
Costa Rica 2 0.55 0.37 0.44 47
Cuba 14 -0.91 -0.26 -1.80 No data
Dominican
4 -0.50 -0.59 -0.12 49
Republic
Ecuador 6 -0.96 -0.75 -1.06 35
El Salvador 5 -0.52 -0.18 0.13 33
Guatemala 8 -1.02 -0.70 -0.09 30
Haiti 9 -1.56 -1.47 -0.82 No data
Honduras 6 -0.88 -0.78 -0.44 31
Mexico 4 -0.49 -0.35 0.43 31
Nicaragua 6 -0.76 -0.76 -0.48 43
Panama 3 -0.13 -0.28 0.33 38
Paraguay 6 -0.93 -1.02 -0.68 -9
Peru 5 -0.75 -0.35 0.11 17
Uruguay 2 0.40 0.80 0.31 66
Venezuela 8 -1.39 -1.05 -1.35 59

*For Freedom House scores, see www.freedomhouse.org. This is the combined score for Civil Liberties and
Political Rights. The best combined score is 2, and the worst is 14.
**For the rule of law, control of corruption, and regulatory quality, see Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay, and
Massimo Mastruzzi, “Governance Matters VI: Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators,” World
Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4280, July 2007, 85–93.
***For satisfaction with democracy, see Corporación Latinobarómetro, Latinobarómetro Report 2007, 91.

To place these numbers in comparative perspective, the average total

tax revenue for the fifteen European Union countries circa 2003 was
40.6 percent of GDP. Even the United States and Japan—both low-taxa-
tion countries—raised 26.4 percent and 25.8 percent, respectively, of
GDP in total taxes. High taxes are not necessary for democracy and
development,13 but at the very low levels of tax revenue seen in the
countries above, the state cannot function adequately.
Privatizing some state functions was desirable in the 1980s and
1990s, but other parts of the state—such as education and healthcare,
the police, the judiciary, regulatory agencies, and infrastructure—need
more resources and attention. State policies are crucial to reducing pov-
erty and expanding opportunities for the poor.14 States can help to cre-
Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully 119

ate a friendly environment for innovation, entrepreneurship, investment,

and the development of human resources—all key pillars of economic
growth and social opportunity. As Alejandro Foxley has persuasively
argued, the key question about the state is not its size, but rather its ca-
pacity. States must possess sufficient flexibility to respond to opportuni-
ties and build effective national networks capable of meeting the rapidly
changing challenges of the global market.
Underscoring the positive products of an effective state, of course,
does not mean that all state action is beneficial. States can be predatory,
and they can create perverse incentive systems that lead to bad collective
outcomes. The desire to avoid these pitfalls, however, should not blind
anyone to the importance of state building. In fact, state building—not
to be confused with a patrimonial expansion of the state—reduces op-
portunities for predation by creating stronger mechanisms to thwart it.
One of the key questions in contemporary Latin America is how to
build more effective states. This issue needs further research, but one
conclusion is clear: Adequate tax revenue is necessary, but not suffi-
cient, for a state to be effective. This is not to suggest a blanket prescrip-
tion of raising taxes and expenditures in all low-revenue countries. In the
poor countries of Latin America (and elsewhere), patrimonial practices
and public-sector corruption are pervasive. Thus a significant portion
of tax revenue ends up enriching politicians and their allies rather than
promoting public goods. Under these circumstances, more tax revenue
will not guarantee more public goods.
4) Institutionalized party systems facilitate effective democratic
governance. It has long been established that parties perform important
functions in democracies. The specific idea that the institutionalization
of the party system is important for effective democratic governance,
however, is a product of the third wave of democratization.
An institutionalized party system has four characteristics.15 First,
patterns of interparty competition are relatively stable. Second, a sig-
nificant share of voters develops relatively stable attachments to par-
ties. Third, parties acquire legitimacy as the vehicles for accessing state
power. Finally, party organizations acquire some solidity; they are not
merely the appendages of personalistic political leaders.
Institutionalized party systems provide structure to democratic poli-
tics in the electoral arena and the legislature. The same parties are the
main electoral contenders over a period of time, and this stability gener-
ates moderate predictability in how political actors behave and in the
range of policy choices. As a result, it is more difficult for antiparty po-
litical outsiders—who are less bound by, or even hostile to, the existing
formal institutions and the rules of the game—to come to power. These
outsiders manifest their hostility by violating or encroaching upon dem-
ocratic practice and constraints. Their political style also makes radi-
cal policy shifts and erratic leadership more likely. Under such circum-
120 Journal of Democracy

stances, politicians are more apt to employ a short-term logic that is

inimical to deal making and coalition building.
Additionally, institutionalized parties provide short cuts to informa-
tion about programmatic content in democratic politics. For this reason,
when a party system is not highly institutionalized, voters have fewer
programmatic cues. Moreover, weak party systems hamper programmatic
accountability because it is more difficult to cast a vote on the issues when
parties are personalistic, short-lived, or both.
In countries with a stable party system, parties are the primary actors
in the legislature, and both parties and legislature are generally stronger
because of this. Although autocratic leaders often claim that stronger
parties and legislatures are a hindrance to governance, they are an asset
to democratic governance. Parties organize support for and against poli-
cy proposals in the legislature, which is the most efficient way to govern
democratically in anything but a very small legislature. Furthermore, an
institutionalized party system fosters greater accountability on the part
of political leaders, as they must be answerable to their party.
By contrast, a fluid or inchoate party system can pave the way for
populist politicians who characteristically degrade other institutions and
weaken democratic governance. Fluid party systems introduce greater
uncertainty regarding electoral outcomes. The rate of turnover from one
party to another is higher; the entry barriers to new parties are lower;
and the likelihood that personalistic, antisystem politicians can become
heads of government is much greater. The personalism in weakly in-
stitutionalized party systems can set the stage for authoritarian leaders
(President Alberto Fujimori in Peru in 1992, for example) or for the ero-
sion of democratic or semi-democratic regimes (as in Venezuela under
President Hugo Chávez since 1999).
5) No set of formal institutions is clearly superior to others for pro-
moting successful democratic governance. In the 1980s and 1990s,
some pioneering works argued that specific formal political institutions
have decisive and reasonably consistent advantages over others for dem-
ocratic governance. Juan Linz’s work on the perils of presidentialism is
a prominent example.16 Linz argued that presidentialism was inimical to
stable democracy and that parliamentary systems were better equipped
to foster democratic consolidation. Some of his arguments have ongo-
ing merit, but today there is less agreement that presidentialism under-
mines stable democracy. One reason for the declining consensus is that all
countries in Latin America have retained presidential or quasi-presidential
systems, and yet there have been only three full breakdowns of competitive
political regimes since 1978—Peru in 1992 and Haiti in 1991 and 2004. In
addition, some scholars have argued that the virtues and vices of presiden-
tialism depend on how it interacts with other institutional arrangements.17
This emphasis on formal political institutions as a key to develop-
ment has influenced the actions and approaches of some international
Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully 121

financial institutions, especially the Inter-American Development Bank.

Likewise, scholars have explored how changes in nomination rules and
electoral systems would change incentive structures and as a result
would facilitate or impede democratic governance. Yet two decades of
impressive cumulative learning about political institutions have not pro-
duced easy recipes about the “best” institutions or institutional combina-
tions. The impact of formal political institutions on large matters such as
economic growth and the efficacy of social policy are more conditional
and less clear than many political scientists anticipated.
We are skeptical that reforming formal political institutions is the
primary key to success in contemporary Latin America. Electoral laws
cannot explain major differences in governmental success from one ad-
ministration to the next when there has been no major change in the in-
stitutional rules of the game—for example, from the innovative and rela-
tively successful government of Sánchez de Lozada in Bolivia (1993–97)
to the succession of failed governments between 1997 and 2005, or from
the poor performances of three Brazilian governments between 1985 and
1993 to the more successful governments of Fernando Henrique Cardoso
(1995–2002) and Luiz Inácio (“Lula”) da Silva (2003–present).
The impact of formal political institutions—such as electoral rules,
nominating rules, presidents’ constitutional powers, and federal arrange-
ments—on broad outcomes is mediated by other factors. Moreover, for-
mal political institutions do not always yield the results that one would
anticipate based on deductive reasoning. Gretchen Helmke and Steven
Levitsky present many examples in which informal institutions counter-
act the effects of formal ones.18
Moreover, some institutional reforms that were meant to enhance de-
mocracy, especially its participatory aspects, have hampered governance
capacity. One example is Colombia’s 1991 Constitution. Among its main
objectives was to open what had been a restricted democracy to new chan-
nels of participation and to open political competition. The new constitu-
tion achieved these meritorious objectives, but it paid scant attention to
state-building and actually facilitated the erosion of Colombia’s tradition-
al political parties and the growing atomization of the party system.
6) Historical legacies shape the prospects for the subsequent success
of democratic governance; however, countries also have opportunities
to break from the past and establish new regime dynamics. The impact
of the past on present-day success can be seen in the three countries that
today enjoy the highest level of democracy in Latin America—Chile,
Costa Rica, and Uruguay. These same countries also had the strongest and
longest democratic heritages as of 1973. After periods of harsh military
rule in Chile (1973–90) and Uruguay (1973–84), both countries rejoined
Costa Rica as high-level democracies. Their histories of institutionalized
party systems, functional states, and democratic political cultures enabled
Chile and Uruguay to rebuild democracy after authoritarian rule.
122 Journal of Democracy

This outcome was not preordained. The military regimes in Chile

and to some degree Uruguay had attempted to radically change the two
countries’ political systems. Moreover, at the time of the democratic
transition in Chile, many analysts warned that the very negotiations that
had made a transition possible also shackled the new democracy. Yet in
relatively short order, both countries rebuilt democracy. No other coun-
try in Latin America except Costa Rica has succeeded equally at achiev-
ing high-level democracy.
Other countries’ political regimes exhibit both profound change and
some notable limits to change. In the post-1978 wave of democratiza-
tion, the Latin American countries with strong authoritarian heritages
(Cuba excepted) have established competitive and reasonably free and
fair elections. But they have not created high-quality democracies, suc-
cessfully established the rule of law, or reined in corruption. The patri-
monial nature of many states when they were under authoritarian rule has
impeded the development of high-level democracy today. El Salvador,
Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Paraguay are among the countries still
beleaguered by their authoritarian pasts.
Some other countries have escaped the negative historic legacies of
their past political regimes. After more than half a century (1930–83)
of shifting between unstable authoritarianism and unstable democracy,
Argentina has developed a stable democratic regime, notwithstanding pe-
riodic episodes of governmental instability, most notably in 2001–02.
The same is true of democratic reversals. From 1958 until the late
1970s, Venezuela enjoyed a stable and relatively vibrant democracy.
However, from the late 1970s on, poor economic performance, corrup-
tion, and internecine leadership battles weakened Venezuela’s democratic
regime, ultimately opening the door for Hugo Chávez in 1998. Chávez,
in turn, has deliberately undermined Venezuela’s democratic institutions.
The unraveling of Venezuela’s democracy could not have been predicted
based on the earlier solidity of its institutions. With so many profound
discontinuities, the story of political regimes in Latin America is not one
of clear path dependence.
7) Contrary to earlier expectations, in the post-1990 period success
and failure in most dimensions of democratic governance have gone
hand-in-hand. Much of the literature on development has stressed that
good outcomes are not always accompanied by other good outcomes and
that countries often face steep tradeoffs in accomplishing development
goals. Some analysts believe, for example, that democracy might be harm-
ful to economic growth or that authoritarian regimes are better at fostering
growth. Most economists have maintained that there must be tradeoffs be-
tween economic growth and social programs. The title of a book on Brazil, The
Cruel Dilemmas of Development, is indicative of this emphasis on tradeoffs.19
Tradeoffs among different outcomes certainly exist in principle and in
many real-world situations. In post-1990 Latin America, however, high
Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully 123

levels of democracy have gone hand-in-hand with better performance

in economic growth, control of corruption, the rule of law, job creation,
poverty reduction, and providing greater access to secondary education.
For the twenty Latin American countries of Iberian or French coloniza-
tion, for example, the average Freedom House scores for 1990–2005
correlate very strongly (at .73) with GDPpc growth for the same period,
showing that a high level of democracy and good economic performance
have in fact gone together. Based on previous careful studies in the so-
cial sciences, however, there was no reason to expect that countries with
a higher level of democracy would also perform markedly better in eco-
nomic growth—but that is precisely what has occurred here.
Because of this bundling of good and poor performances across dif-
ferent arenas, a few countries stand out generally as cases of successful
democratic governance, while others are in many ways marked by fail-
ure. Chile has been the great success story in post-1990 Latin America.
On several, but not all, dimensions of democratic governance, Costa
Rica, Panama, and Uruguay have also fared well.
Eleven Latin American countries have generally fared poorly in most
political, social, and economic dimensions of democratic governance
since 1990: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti,
Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela. The remain-
ing four countries—Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and
Mexico—have had very mixed records, with relative success in some
important aspects of democratic governance and deficiencies in others.
(We exclude Cuba from this analysis because it has never had a com-
petitive political regime during this period.)
One potential explanation for why a few countries have performed
respectably in so many discrete areas of democratic governance is that,
once in place, an effective state in turn supports both stronger democracy
and better economic results. Another plausible explanation is that better
socioeconomic results serve as a bulwark for democracy. Conversely,
countries with a low level of democracy have also performed poorly in
economic growth, job creation, and education. This destructive combi-
nation may stem from the close relationship between weak democratic
institutions and widespread clientelism, corruption, and patrimonialism,
which has negative consequences for the level of democracy and for
economic and social performance.
8) Effective democratic governance does not always satisfy popular
aspirations. Good governance does not always generate enduring popu-
lar support. Moreover, governments that govern poorly are nevertheless
sometimes able to capture the public’s backing.
Chile is an example of the former phenomenon. Notwithstanding the
country’s successes, in the 2007 Latinobarómetro public-opinion sur-
vey, only 36 percent of Chileans stated that they were mostly or very
satisfied with democracy. Equally surprising, only 46 percent said that
124 Journal of Democracy

democracy is always preferable to other forms of government. This

second figure is considerably lower than the corresponding figure for
Uruguay (77 percent), Costa Rica (76 percent), Argentina (74 percent),
the Dominican Republic (71 percent), and Venezuela (70 percent), and it
is lower than the Latin American average of 56 percent. Many Chileans
do not express satisfaction with the economic model that has produced
the most growth by far in Latin America and has lowered poverty at a
rate faster than any other country in the region. Furthermore, Chileans’
confidence in political parties is also low.
Chilean dissatisfaction with democracy in the face of many impres-
sive results points to a paradox. When a democratic government suc-
ceeds at a series of tasks, this success generates new expectations and
demands, and in some cases even new rights. Citizens may take for
granted the successes of the recent past and demand new kinds of ac-
complishments and orientations.
Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez represents a contrasting example
of a leader who has produced at best mediocre results for his country in
social and economic terms and who presided over the systematic ero-
sion of Venezuela’s democracy. Yet Chávez has garnered strong sup-
port among the poor and has prevailed in multiple elections. He won
the 2006 presidential election in a landslide, with 63 percent of the vote.
His attacks on the oligarchy, his identification with the poor and their
identification with him, social programs aimed at the underprivileged
(although poorly designed in terms of efficiency), and his personal cha-
risma help to explain his electoral appeal.
Most poor voters in Venezuela believe that Chávez is democratic and
committed to their cause. He has also obviously benefited enormously
from surging oil prices; is impossible to explain his popular support
solely on the basis of cultural, symbolic, and personalistic appeals and
social programs. Although he narrowly lost a December 2007 referen-
dum (50.7 percent voted against it) that would have abolished term lim-
its for the president, Chávez continues to enjoy considerable popularity
among the poor. Other populist leaders in Latin America have likewise
won widespread popular backing despite substandard governing perfor-
mance; Juan Perón, president of Argentina in 1946–55 and 1973–74, is
a prominent example.
Many theoretical approaches to politics assume that good government
outcomes result in voter satisfaction. Morris Fiorina’s seminal work on
retrospective voting, for example, posits that citizens vote on the basis
of government performance.20 In contemporary Latin America, the re-
lationship between successful democratic governance and popular sup-
port is less clear-cut. Remarkably, at the country level, better Freedom
House scores and higher scores for the rule of law, control of corruption,
and regulatory quality have no statistically significant impact (even at
p<.10) on satisfaction with democracy.
Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully 125

Populist leaders can mobilize broad support and legitimacy despite

poor performance. In a region characterized by so much poverty and
inequality, it is easy to politicize the shortcomings and failures of even
relatively successful governments. Conversely, citizens may not only
view poorly performing governments as legitimate, but they may even
vote to keep in office the leaders of these ineffective governments, as
occurred with Chávez. Identity politics, expressive politics, and presi-
dents’ personalistic appeals sometimes trump performance-based voting.
Political outsiders can cultivate popular support by creating mechanisms
that seem to empower hitherto marginalized people. The idea that the
established system must radically change, even if this change does not
bring about promised improvements in living conditions, may deeply
resonate with poor people who have suffered indignities at the hands of
the elite or of state bureaucrats.
The quality of democratic governance is important to citizens, but it
is not all-important. Citizens understandably also care about other is-
sues. And political leaders can use symbols and create leadership styles
that win popular support, even in the absence of effective governance.
Chávez has accomplished this feat masterfully.

The Combination Is the Key

Many factors combine to produce success or failure in democratic
governance. Latin America’s recent experience leads to the conclusion
that it is the specific combination of these factors, rather than discrete
individual policies or specific formal institutions, that is important.
Changing individual policies or formal institutions in an effort to repro-
duce successful cases therefore does not ensure success. Indeed, it can
even lead to failure.
This conclusion runs contrary to the quest for policy prescriptions
that can be generalized across cases, as envisioned by the “Washington
consensus” in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We cannot recommend a
certain approach or set of reforms for one country based simply on what
has worked in another, or for that matter based on what has worked for
a large number of countries (that is, based on quantitative results), and
hope for success. Indeed, eighteen years after John Williamson pub-
lished his influential work on the Washington consensus, the optimism
that general policy prescriptions could pave the way toward success has
faded.
Our emphasis on context specificity does not preclude the idea that
some policies, practices, and institutions are more likely to foster suc-
cess than others. In fact, we wonder whether, in some recent scholarly
works, the pendulum has swung too far toward emphasizing context
specificity. It would be a mistake to retreat completely from the idea
that some policies are more apt to succeed than others. For example,
126 Journal of Democracy

most of Williamson’s ten tenets of the Washington consensus remain

sound policy principles today, especially if they are combined with
his additional suggestions published thirteen years later.21 Success in
democratic governance is not entirely idiosyncratic; certain policies and
institutions do indeed have a greater chance of achieving the desired
outcomes than others.
Recognizing that the path to success is context-dependent is compat-
ible with arguing that some policies and institutions are more likely to
produce success than others, or that successful democratic governance
is not entirely context-dependent or idiosyncratic. We have argued, for
example, that effective states and institutionalized party systems matter
in promoting successful democratic governance. The past thirty years of
efforts to build democracy and foster development suggest some broad
lessons and orientations, even if the specific applicability of these broad
orientations depends on context. A critical challenge for scholars and
policy analysts is to discern what general lessons can be distilled about
successful democratic governance and when such apparent lessons are
resistant to facile generalization.

NOTES
1. Larry Diamond and Leonardo Morlino, eds., Assessing the Quality of Democracy
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Guillermo O’Donnell, Jorge Vargas
Cullell, and Osvaldo M. Iazzetta, eds., The Quality of Democracy: Theory and Applications
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004).

2. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press,
1992).

3. Aníbal Pérez-Li~nán, Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in

Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

4. World Bank, 2007 WDI World Development Indicators (Washington, D.C.: The
World Bank, 2007). Calculated in 2000 constant dollars in purchasing power parity.

5. Data on poverty come from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the
Caribbean, “Social Panorama of Latin America 2007,” Briefing Paper, 11. Available at
www.eclac.cl/publicaciones/default.asp?idioma=IN.

6. See Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Health Analysis and Statistics Unit.
Regional Core Health Data Initiative; Technical Health Information System. Washington
DC, 2007. The data for Bolivia and Peru defy credibility; the reported homicide rates are
too low. This source gives no data for Honduras, known to have a high homicide rate, and
for Haiti. Available at www.paho.org/English/SHA/coredata/tabulator/newsqlTabulador.
asp.

7. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation:
Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press. 1996), 16–37; O’Donnell, “On the State, Democratization, and Some
Conceptual Problems.”

8. Alejandro Foxley, “More Market or More State for Latin America,” in Scott
Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully, eds., Democratic Governance in Latin America
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming); Moisés Naím, “Latin America: The
Second Stage of Reform,” Journal of Democracy 5 (October 1994): 32–48.
Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully 127

9. PAHO, “Guidelines for the Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of

Epidemiological Surveillance Systems on Violence and Injuries,” 2006, 7. Available at
www.paho.org.

10. Daniel Brinks, The Judicial Response to Police Killings in Latin America:
Inequality and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007);
Guillermo O’Donnell, “Poliarchies and the (Un)Rule of Law in Latin America: A Partial
Conclusion,” in Juan E. Méndez, Guillermo O’Donnell, and Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, eds.,
The (Un)Rule of Law and the Underprivileged in Latin America (Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press), 303–37.

11. Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay, and Massimo Mastruzzi, “Governance Matters V:
Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators for 1996–2005,” World Bank Policy
Research Paper 4012, September 2006. Available at www-wds.worldbank.org.

12. See www.cepal.org/ilpes.

13. Of course, high taxes can be a drag on economic growth. Many analysts believe
that this is true in Brazil today.

14. Nancy Birdsall and Miguel Székely, “Bootstraps, Not Band-Aids: Poverty, Equity,
and Social Policy,” in John Williamson and Pedro-Pablo Kuczynski, eds., After the
Washington Consensus: Restarting Growth and Reform in Latin America (Washington,
D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 2003), 49–73.

15. Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully, “Party Systems in Latin America,” in
Mainwaring and Scully, eds., Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin
America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1–34; Scott Mainwaring and Mariano
Torcal, “Party System Institutionalization and Party System Theory After the Third Wave
of Democratization,” in Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, eds., Handbook of Political
Parties (London: Sage, 2006), 204–27.

16. Juan J. Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism,” Journal of Democracy 1 (Winter

1990): 51–69.

17. Matthew Soberg Shugart and John M. Carey, Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional
Design and Electoral Dynamics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); José
Antonio Cheibub, Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, and Democracy (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2007).

18. Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky, eds., Informal Institutions and Democracy:
Lessons from Latin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

19. Sylvia Hewlitt, The Cruel Dilemmas of Development: Twentieth Century Brazil
(New York: Basic Books, 1980).

20. Morris Fiorina, Retrospective Voting in American National Elections (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1981).

21. John Williamson, “An Agenda for Restarting Growth and Reform,” in Pedro-
Pablo Kuczynski and John Williamson, eds., After the Washington Consensus: Restarting
Growth and Reform in Latin America (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International
Economics, 2003), 1–19.