Democracy and Corruption

[Valin]

Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law :

 

Francis Fukuyama

10/5/12

 

I want to make one correction to an assertion I made in my last blog post. In it, I said that delivery of services like education and health care is something that “states accomplish, and not the institutions that check them.”

 

This is a big overstatement. The checking institutions actually play a big role in improving the delivery of services and controlling corruption. Courts are often used to force executive branches to carry out mandated tasks, and of course to prosecute corrupt officials. Democratic accountability, free media, and open information are critical in disciplining corruption and keeping on pressure to improve performance. Much of the international donor community has been promoting mechanisms to increase transparency and accountability in governments as the primary route towards good governance. The Open Government Initiative developed by my colleague Jeremy Weinstein is another worthy effort in this direction. Clearly, the more information that’s out there about corruption and bad governance, the more people are likely to mobilize around pressuring executives to fix things.

 

I was trying to make a different and more complex point. There is no question that greater transparency and accountability, as well as strict application of the law, are critical to improving the performance of governments. However, without basic capacity, no amount of transparency and accountability will produce good services. If you look around the world at all of the great bureaucratic traditions—Germany, Sweden, Japan, Singapore, etc.—not one of them became great because of democratic accountability. In fact, many great bureaucracies were created by authoritarian regimes that needed efficient services, primarily for the sake of national survival. This was true of American state-building as well in the Progressive Era–something that I will have to address in a later post.

 

(Snip)