Building Democracy and International Governance

George M. Guess

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351273268
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Economía
• Sous-sujet: Política económica

Efforts by governments to promote sustained domestic economic development have been mixed. Success depends on many factors including location, geography, climate, external competition, human resources, natural resources, timing, political and governmental institutions, government capacity, implementation, leadership, values—and maybe luck. This complexity means that while development experts can often identify ingredients for success, few can prescribe the specific mix needed by a particular state to achieve sustained development over the long term.

In Building Democracy and International Governance, author George M. Guess uses both case studies and careful data analysis to argue that federalist democracy may just be the most responsive, authoritative, and flexible system for nation building, and that there is value in confronting the challenges that lie in exporting federalist democracy abroad. Guess demonstrates the ways in which federation structures provide positive redundancy against failures, flexibility to change course and implement programs and policies, and state legitimacy and strength. Examining twelve wealthy and developing countries from five regions, representing democratic and authoritarian government structures, confederations, and federations, this book will be of interest to those teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in Political Development, Democratization, Federalism, and Comparative Political Economy.

1Introduction

The Need for Effective Government

The growing threats are to states and the challenge is to strengthen them to withstand these mainly political forces and still be effective deliverers of services and programs. For, states are institutions requiring enough power to defend their people and territory, and to make and enforce necessary laws (Fukuyama, 2014: 37). They can be divided vertically into: ruling regimes or elites, political parties, state bureaucracies and electorates, or ruled subjects.¹ States must rule effectively enough that sales of goods and services from private, state-controlled, or state-owned enterprises provide enough revenue to finance its activities in behalf of electorates. Public budgets must be financed. Max Weber once observed that governments can be ruler-owned and patrimonial or modern and impersonal (Fukuyama, 2014: 10). The latter are legitimated by some combination of functional effectiveness, rule-based authority and electoral or performance-based accountability. States become ineffective and weak because: ruling parties, regimes, and ministries are dominated by narrow cliques, tribes, or ethnicities that govern in their own favor. Such governments rule in a legitimacy vacuum often filled by ethnic-nationalist groups through typically violent means (e.g. Liberia, Ethiopia, and Nigeria). Ineffective government bureaucracies are often patronage-ridden and insulated from citizens and their electorates at best—at worst they are silo-organized to prevent effective policy and budgetary action (e.g. U.K. and U.S.). Weak and ineffective governments are often unaccountable either for economic performance (e.g. China) or through electoral mandates from open and representative elections (e.g. Austria). Weak states can occur in wealthy or poor countries and the practical policy question is, how can this global and perennial problem be reduced?

Consistent with the objective of effective government, the frequent call is for governments that can plan and deliver policies, programs, and projects efficiently and effectively, that is, delivery performance which is least cost and to maximum effectiveness in serving client needs.² Because governments consist of horizontal and vertical structures of organizations and institutional processes, the tendency is to divide up this problem functionally. Thus, horizontally, the executive is often considered the purview of public administration specialists. Analysts set out to rationalize spans of control, clarify staff-line roles, and inject budget calendars with stages that employ critical analysis using formal methods to evaluate spending and taxation objectives. Such specialists also attempt to integrate budgets and program objectives to improve measurable results. Finally, specialists often try to regroup streamlined functions into differently structured organizations. The fact is, such complex processes and methods of administrative reform, state modernization, and reorganization are quite diffuse, hard to replicate, riddled with debatable unanticipated consequences, and have achieved mostly incomplete results in different contexts.³

Moving further to enhance state effectiveness, strengthening parliaments and elections become the responsibility of election and legislative specialists; the judiciary and judicial administration might be handled by lawyers and public administration specialists; regulatory processes are often covered by policy analysts in health, energy, transport, education, and so on. This functional specialization of reform efforts often worsens the perennial “silo” problem that besets effective governments everywhere.⁴ Each specialist reforms his or her special area without government-wide integration of systems and processes. This can prevent the flow of information and orders, discourage learning, and guarantee bad policy results. This could be avoided by integrating budgets and staff to work toward specific and measurable objectives, for example, unnecessary outpatient referrals and reduced emergency referrals from care homes in the British NHS (The Economist, 2017p: 56). States or governmental institutions also require vertical command structures to control, sanction, and motivate staff toward objectives. Governments must be organized from the center with monopolies of force to cover territorial jurisdictions that coincide with their country boundaries. Boundaries themselves have been a historical and current source of intense conflict. Central governments are controlled by regimes that oversee the structures that extend from capitals to small villages in distant territories. Division of authority both vertically and horizontally, is a function of laws, constitutions, charters, and official accords. Governmental structures within which to exercise authority vary. Federations or federal systems, for example, feature autonomous or independent sub-national tiers of government; unitary systems do not, and all authority is deconcentrated from the central government. Authoritarian regimes that operate within any structure interpret laws to give them maximum control over all decisions affecting firms, individuals, and governmental units.⁵ Limits on regime authority derive from constitutions and laws governing basic transactions and ownership and sales of property, commercial relations, civil and criminal procedures, and individual due process rights.⁶ Limits also derive from institutional checks from competing civil society organizations, such as churches, media, and unions. For historical reasons, regimes span the spectrum of controls and limits on their power. In short, strengthening states is a complex task with substantial unintended outcomes anywhere.

The actual quality of government and institutions (de facto not just de jure) is revealed partly by allocation of resources, usually through planning, approval, and execution of public budgets for current services and capital works. Budgetary processes may be open and relatively transparent in contexts where citizen input, feedback and responsiveness are important for accountability. In most other contexts, allocation of resources is an opaque process governed from the top down.⁷ In authoritarian regimes of both rich and poor countries, resources are allocated by what Douglass North et al. (2009) call “limited access orders”, that is, not by legal rules but as privileges from above. In these contexts, informal networks and personal connections take precedence over formal rules and institutions. Printed budgets and other official data become almost meaningless in such patrimonial states as opposed to high-trust, modern states that allocate resources with “open-access orders”. For example, in the neo-patrimonial and personalized Russian system, Vladimir Putin, as chief patron, sits at the top of a vast patronage pyramid. His patron status is legitimized by a personalized system which depends almost entirely on his popularity. His power is maintained by dispensation of public jobs, contracts, and subsidies from the treasury, with support of the formal governing apparatus that includes state security and military organizations. Intermediary or autonomous civil society institutions are either banned or tightly controlled. Effectively, opposition is banned to avoid any “centers of protest” from widening and threatening regime rule.⁸ The fear by such authoritarian leaders is that rule of law could break out from independent institutions not under regime control. Rule of law as opposed to rule by law of a neo-tsar depends on independent prosecutors and judges. Their independence strengthens state institutions and preserves checks and balances; their diminution by loss of funds or institutional independence (as in Poland) threatens substantive rule of law. Neo-tsars in countries such as Russia with Putin must maintain a delicate balance, appearing to defend the people against predatory elites while defending the elites against possible popular uprising (The Economist, 2017o: 25). Leaders at the top of other modern illiberal regimes, such as that of Viktor Orban in Hungary, and personalized authoritarian counterparts in poor countries, such as Robert Mugabe, until recently president of Zimbabwe for 37 years, from the fall of white British-ruled Rhodesia, maintain power through deft use of similar institutional, allocative, and repressive toolkits.

Of course, budget instability and short-termism arise in both democratic and authoritarian countries; or in both rich and poor countries. Nationalism can play a dramatic role but often the causes are the much more mundane issues of political deadlock and lack of positive institutional redundancy leading to inability to plan or execute budgets for more than a few months (Caiden and Wildavsky, 1974). That weakens effectiveness by interrupting services, programs, and projects on which people depend. Bad governance derived from unstable public finances are linked to ineffectiveness. States can perhaps be badly led and well-administered for good results for a time. That time is longer in federations that have multiple levels of government that all have to fail for complete collapse. But in all cases, bad leadership and regime policies will eventually destroy any semblance of effectiveness.

The fact is that most international “bad” governance problems are messy and not actionable without serious unintended consequences. This is, in part, due to the breadth of the notions of “bad” and “governance” which are hard to attribute to anything specific in policy design or implementation. Bad governance is a way of labelling the core problem which is governmental ineffectiveness. Sorting out the precise causes and remedies is difficult even with the most formal methods. Responding to them to try and improve government policymaking and implementation requires the most precise efforts from groups of respected professionals and stakeholders to define the specific problem(s) and estimate the magnitude and range of unintended consequences. To do this, a “good” governance agenda is needed that limits itself to the planning and implementation of realistically manageable sectors, such as health and infrastructure. For, “good governance” itself is too broad a problem target or policy objective to be actionable and, for effectiveness, must be limited to issues within the major health care, transport, education, and agriculture sectors on which quality of life and development depend.

Varieties of ineffectiveness can be distinguished, some of which include inefficiency. Governments might be: inefficient and ineffective (e.g. Nigeria); inefficient and effective (some Middle Eastern countries with benevolent autocrats such as Qatar); or efficient and effective (e.g. Switzerland, New Zealand, and many U.S. state-local governments). Overall, weak or failed states lack independent systems of legal rules, legitimacy from their citizens, and functioning accountability mechanisms. A broad focus on “good” governance often means focusing on diffuse and long-standing structural and institutional problems, such as lack of checks and balances and separation of powers. Such gaps allow “doom-loops” to fester between such regime institutions and processes as: the military and foreign policy; the military and domestic policy; the regime and internal and external auditing; and regime control of budget planning and allocations. These kinds of conflicts of interest weaken governance and diminish legitimacy. A conclusion is that such structural problems can only be changed incrementally and at the margins by modifying the perverse incentives of cultural values and practices that underpin them. Reducing perverse incentives in most societies can be done at the level of sectors and programs which will improve, but clearly not lead to, perfect outcomes.

Why the sectoral focus? The short answer is scale. The longer one is that sector programs and policies affect the majority of people in most countries, those who reside in metropolitan areas and their suburbs. While over 50 percent of the world’s population live in cities today, by 2050 this proportion is expected to grow to 66 percent (Ramirez-Djumena, 2014: 42). Sectors also represent the bulk of budgeted funds for programs and services in most countries and their financing depends on both fiscal policy and the performance of the financial sector. For example, macroeconomic and fiscal policies are important because budgets finance policies and their macroeconomic impact on growth needs to be estimated carefully and controlled. The urban transport sector and a deficient supply of infrastructure assets or failure to maintain those supplied are growing problems in many countries. In response, innovative models of alternative urban transport service delivery and financing are being tried with many transferable lessons. Such operational- and sector-level lessons can be scaled up, benefiting the administration and control of finances at the national government level (Guess and Husted, 2017: 4). Conversely, central government policy successes can be scaled down to the sub-national level for cities.

Additionally, health care sector financing and service delivery are also important problems with many transferable lessons available from around the world at both strategic and operational levels. Education policies are in the midst of an international revolution in cities and countries, particularly in Europe and North America. Social assistance and poverty policies offer a wide range of policy implementation and reform lessons learned, particularly from Latin America, that have already been transferred successfully to countries, both poor and wealthy. Global demand for clean energy is growing and the persistence of coal and petroleum sources continues to require smart environmental regulation and control of air, water, and solid waste pollution. Countries such as India are making important strides in solid waste management that rely on intergovernmental cooperation within the federation from both private firms and the public sector. In other poorer countries, such as Liberia and Bolivia, agriculture and natural resource policies affect more people than the above sectors of wealthier urban countries. In short, sectors serve mostly urban people and reflect general urbanization trends across all regions. Each sector offers examples of controversial policy design (including bold experimentation in some cases) and implementation. They all can be subdivided into programs and projects that may be analyzed for lessons which can be transferred to or from the national and sub-national levels. Threats to political culture values and practices by smaller sectoral reform efforts are also much smaller. They can represent the thin edge of the wedge to whole-systems strengthening and reform.

What should government structures look like if results are to be improved? Structural changes require longer-term efforts, sustained support by top-level elites and regimes, and a higher place on the policy agendas than exists in most countries. Given this reality, efforts should be at the operational level on an incremental, piecemeal (i.e. stages) basis. For, aid-driven state modernization, institution-building and civil service reform efforts have had few notable successes. Where they have made a difference, such efforts often fall victim to the withdrawal of needed top-level regime support.⁹

In the shorter-term, the best chance of sustaining good governance via domestic efforts supplemented by overseas aid is to encourage host country federations or quasi-federalist structures and processes. Federalist structures offer positive redundancy to deepen decentralized democracy, policy flexibility, single-markets for whole countries, and enhanced possibilities for systemic policy and management learning as well as more concerted policy action. Madisonian-style institutional ambition countering ambition democracy would spread power among competing branches of government and among different interests (Fukuyama, 2014: 456). A more comprehensive democracy also needs to spread power vertically as well as horizontally via checks and balances/separation of powers between the national level and independent sub-national tiers of government. Only then does a framework exist for effective government through the creation of positive redundancies and limits on power. By contrast, with exceptions for scale and culture, unitary and confederation systems have not been able to create or sustain effective and legitimate governments.¹⁰ Confederations fall victim to the usual collective action problem of any institution requiring unanimous consent for substantive action. Creation of sustained, effective states via structural changes including federations will require long-term foresight and trial–error incremental efforts. Such efforts can enhance central governments and regimes (just as mayoral innovations often flow upwards to improve federal governance) through the creation of quasi-federation institutions that can evolve into full federations. Development of federalist decision frameworks will require sustained support of efforts by many countries around the world to strengthen their central governments enough to sensibly redefine intergovernmental fiscal and political roles and responsibilities so that sufficient authority and responsibilities are devolved to sub-national governments to meet citizen needs. For example, citizens need accountable sub-national governments that can make and enforce building codes and fire inspections. In unitary and authoritarian centralized countries, this is an unimportant central government function that is poorly performed. Though few countries have devolved core functions, many have redefined intergovernmental fiscal relations and corresponding fiscal transfer formulae, types of aid, recipient eligibility requirements, and incentives for all parties. The effect is to create quasi-federation mechanisms within otherwise unitary and even authoritarian states (e.g. China and the U.K.).

Where regimes provide the supportive will for state-building, external aid can contribute local capacity. The U.S. Reconstruction effort after the 1861–1865 Civil War was considered a successful democracy-promotion effort, supporting civil society groups and southern political organizations willing to accept black political rights. The programmatic goal was to guarantee the basic rights of former slaves and encourage the rise of biracial governments to power throughout the defeated Confederacy (Foner, 2015). States that accepted the condition of democracy received preferential financial and trade assistance. The impact of the Acts and later civil rights laws was significant in mobilizing black voters and producing black officials at every level of government. In the 1870s, they led to the establishment of the South’s first state-funded public school systems; strengthened the bargaining power of plantation laborers; made taxation more equitable; outlawed racial discrimination in transportation and public accommodations; and offered aid to industries that could lead to Southern economic development which could benefit both blacks and whites. But systemic design flaws and a failure of political support from the top allowed white opponents of these programs to defeat their successful implementation through violence and intimidation (i.e. the KKK), failure to provide land (land reform that would prevent former slaves from going back to work on plantations); retreat by the U.S. government from supporting the ideal of equality (the GOP turned more conservative, new president Rutherford Hayes disavowed further national e...