The Democratic Rollback

The Resurgence of the Predatory State

Larry Diamond

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2008

Summary:  After decades of historic gains, the world has slipped into a democratic recession. Predatory states are on the rise, threatening both nascent and established democracies throughout the world. But this trend can be reversed with the development of good governance and strict accountability and the help of conditional aid from the West.

LARRY DIAMOND is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Co-Editor of the Journal of Democracy. This essay is adapted from his new book, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (Times Books, 2008), © Larry Diamond.

Where democracy survives, it often labors under serious difficulties. In most regions, majorities support democracy as the best form of government in principle, but substantial minorities are willing to entertain an authoritarian option. Furthermore, in much of the democratic world, citizens lack any confidence that politicians, political parties, or government officials are serving anyone other than themselves. According to surveys by Latinobarómetro (a Santiago-based corporation conducting public opinion surveys throughout Latin America), only one-fifth of the Latin American population trusts political parties, one-quarter trusts legislatures, and merely one-third has faith in the judiciary. According to similar surveys conducted by the Scotland-based New Democracies Barometer, the figures are even worse in the new democracies of eastern Europe.

Public confidence in many civilian constitutional regimes has been declining. The Asian Barometer (which conducts public opinion surveys throughout Asia) found that the percentage of Filipinos who believe democracy is always the best form of government dropped from 64 percent to 51 percent between 2001 and 2005. At the same time, satisfaction with democracy fell from 54 percent to 39 percent, and the share of the Filipino population willing to reject the option of an authoritarian "strong leader" declined from 70 percent to 59 percent. The Afrobarometer (which conducts similar surveys in African countries) uncovered even sharper decreases in Nigerians' public confidence in democracy between 2000 and 2005 and also found that the proportion of the Nigerian public that felt the government was working to control corruption dropped from 64 percent to 36 percent. This is no surprise: during this period, President Olusegun Obasanjo saw many of his laudable economic reforms overshadowed or undone by continuing massive corruption, by his obsessive bid to remove a constitutional term limit on his presidency, and by the gross rigging of the 2007 elections on behalf of his ruling party.

Electoral fraud and endemic corruption have once again ravaged a promising democratic experiment. If Nigeria reverts to military rule, descends into political chaos, or collapses, it will deal a harsh blow to democratic hopes across Africa. Indeed, the many African countries that remain blatantly authoritarian will never liberalize if the continent's new and partial democracies cannot make democracy work.

IT'S THE GOVERNMENT, STUPID

It is often assumed that economic growth -- or the free-market economy, as Michael Mandelbaum recently argued in these pages -- is the key to creating and consolidating democracy. Certainly, the viability of democracy does hinge to some significant degree on economic development and open markets. But in most of the world's poor countries, the "economy first" advocates have the causal chain backward. Without significant improvements in governance, economic growth will not take off or be sustainable. Without legal and political institutions to control corruption, punish cheating, and ensure a level economic and political playing field, pro-growth policies will be ineffective and their economic benefits will be overshadowed or erased.

Kenya is a tragic case in point. In the last five years, under President Mwai Kibaki's leadership, it has made significant economic progress for the first time in many years, achieving a record five percent annual growth rate and establishing free universal primary education. But much of this progress has since unraveled amid the paroxysms of ethnic violence that greeted allegations of fraud following the December 27, 2007, presidential election. President Kibaki did not fail on the economic policy front, nor did his country lack international tourism and development aid (apart from a brief suspension of World Bank assistance in 2006 due to reports of egregious graft). Rather, he failed politically by condoning massive corruption, ethnic favoritism, and electoral malpractice -- a poisonous mix that has brought a promising new democracy to the brink of chaos.

In the coming decade, the fate of democracy will be determined not by the scope of its expansion to the remaining dictatorships of the world but rather by the performance of at-risk democracies such as Kenya. A list of such democracies would encompass more than 50 states, including most countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, four of the eight democracies in Asia, all of the post-Soviet democracies that do not belong to the European Union, and virtually all of the democracies in Africa. The most urgent task of the next decade is to shore up democracy in these countries.

At-risk democracies are almost universally plagued by poor governance. Some appear so trapped in patterns of corrupt and abusive rule that it is hard to see how they can survive as democracies without significant reform. The problem in these states is that bad governance is not an aberration or an illness to be cured. It is, as the economists Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast have argued, a natural condition. For thousands of years, the natural tendency of elites everywhere has been to monopolize power rather than to restrain it -- through the development of transparent laws, strong institutions, and market competition. And once they have succeeded in restricting political access, these elites use their consolidated power to limit economic competition so as to generate profits that benefit them rather than society at large. The result is a predatory state.

In such states, the behavior of elites is cynical and opportunistic. If there are competitive elections, they become a bloody zero-sum struggle in which everything is at stake and no one can afford to lose. Ordinary people are not truly citizens but clients of powerful local bosses, who are themselves the clients of still more powerful patrons. Stark inequalities in power and status create vertical chains of dependency, secured by patronage, coercion, and demagogic electoral appeals to ethnic pride and prejudice. Public policies and programs do not really matter, since rulers have few intentions of delivering on them anyway. Officials feed on the state, and the powerful prey on the weak. The purpose of government is not to generate public goods, such as roads, schools, clinics, and sewer systems. Instead, it is to produce private goods for officials, their families, and their cronies. In such a system, as Robert Putnam wrote in his classic Making Democracy Work, "corruption is widely regarded as the norm," political participation is mobilized from above, civic engagement is meager, compromise is scarce, and "nearly everyone feels powerless, exploited, and unhappy." Predatory states cannot sustain democracy, for sustainable democracy requires constitutionalism, compromise, and a respect for law. Nor can they generate sustainable economic growth, for that requires actors with financial capital to invest in productive activity.