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A review by lpm100
Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama
informative
medium-paced
5.0
Book Review
Political Order And Political Decay
5/5 stars
"Greatest Hits of PoliSci/ Comparative Politics."
*******
Of the book:
-Doesn't need to be read in order, owing to a PLENTY of repetition; chapters can be selected in order of interest
-Each chapter has a 1 to 2 sentence synopsis at the head
- Bibliography has about 600 sources.
-743 point citations (1.4/ page; ≈20/chapter).
-546 pps prose; ≈15 pps/chapter.
Part I (194 pps, 37%) The State
Part II (182 pps, 35%) Foreign Institutions
Part III (56 pps, 11%) Democracy
Part IV (94 pps, 18%) Political Decay
*******
This book sat on my shelf for ≈7 years, and it occurred to me that I had better get it read because books on Political Science have a fairly short half-life.
°°°On the one hand, the book appears to be credible AS A HISTORICAL PANORAMIC of governance; It seems to be a mashup of a lot of the best / most influential/most long lived books about public policy with examples that are both interesting and pithy. (It has aged fairly well.)
°°°On the other hand, the book has the perfume of evolution/Evolutionary Psychology about it: you can work backwards and explain anything that you want to, but it doesn't seem to be all of that useful for forward predictions (p. 548: "there's no automatic historical mechanism that makes progress inevitable, or that prevents decay and backsliding.") And Fukuyama makes it clear even in the first chapter that he will "not suggest concrete policies or a short-term solution to problems outlined here" and that the book will not offer any easy answers.
He observes many times that the business of war is what makes states, but then (p.209): "Prolonged military competition does not necessarily produce states, because it has not in Papua New Guinea for the last 40,000 years."
Since books about political science tend to be overwrought with detail / have a fairly low signal to noise ratio, I would say that, relative to some of the garbage that I've had to read in undergraduate, Fukuyama reveals everything by covering only what's necessary. (Kind of in the way that a good bathing suit does.)
I would have to say that the single biggest messages of this book (which puts me in mind of Margaret Thatcher's "Statecraft") are that:
1. Governments and countries take different directions because of specific idiosyncratic factors on the ground, and
2. Whatever the case: over the very long term, all of these political arrangements and institutions decay. It's never the same chain of events twice, but it does eventually happen.
*******
Spillover thoughts:
1. Author is *somewhat* data driven.
a. He described Tanzania (2022 GDP $1100) as a "successful" example of creating national identity and Kenya as not (2022 GDP $2082) and Nigeria as not (2022 GDP $2066).
b. (p.173): "Government- operated railroads in Europe and Asia have often been leaders in service efficiency." (I think there is one high speed line in Japan that is profitable and maybe two in France. All the rest lose money.)
2. Rule OF law≠ Rule BY law (=regularized administrative commands of a sovereign).
3. (p.357): "China represents the ONE world civilization that never developed a true rule of law."
4. When the state precedes the law (e.g. China, Japan) it is a very different case to the other way around (Western civilizations).
5. The author keeps singing up the praises of democracy, but I wonder how good of an idea that is. It has been known FOR A LONG TIME that democracies tear themselves apart. (The next Civil War will probably be over something stupid like transvestites on beer cans or drag queen story hours.) Give me good ol' Wealthy Authoritarian Singapore any day of the week in preference to such (democratically chosen) frivolity.
6. Sometimes countries just get stuck in a bad equilibrium. Interest groups provide money to politicians who don't want to give that money up. And interest groups do not want a system where money no longer buys influence because that is their raison d'être.
7. Is following the course of a civilization in a state of decline is the same thing as following a single man who lives and dies: He could die now OR he could die later, but he is still going to die. And there's nothing that can be done about it, and no one knows the day nor the hour.
By extension: governments and countries ultimately fall apart just through sheer entropic factors--and the intellectual exercises are just that.
8. How many societies that exist today are snapshots in time of a much older society that no longer exists in the way that it did? (p.135): "The Englishmen who settled North America in the 17th century brought with them the political practices of Tudor. On American soil these old institutions became entrenched and were eventually written into the American constitution, a fragment of the old society frozen in time." (This topic shows repeatedly throughout the book with respect to Latin American institutions being imported from Spain.)
10. US academia is an evil and heinous place: (p.196): Forgetting [conquering / assimilation] is essential to the process of nation creation, because everybody had to be conquered at some point or assimilate to some other dominant culture. But much of the academic modus operandi is keeping old historical grievances festering--and therefore reverses the development of a national culture upon which a state rests. (The Chinese habit of executing mouthy academics is not such a bad idea, and it also can be seen as the cost of a few worthless Gender Studies parasites against the benefit of having a state in place.)
11. I just wonder what it is about US academics that make Europe the place of All Things Right and True in their minds? (p.157) This is been going on for at least a century and a half (Woodrow Wilson), in spite of all of their wars and Eurosclerosis.
12. Who knew that Greece and Sicily were ruled by foreigners for so many centuries? Those specific cases create a deep distrust of the state.
Vocabulary:
Hanseatic countries
usufructuary rights
demurrage fees
prebendal(ism)
alluvial
collective action problem
low level equilibrium
acephalous
depredations
deracinated
creole (it means "settler population,"as used here not "mixed race" as it does in the Black American lexicon)
cordilleras
captain donatory
Mauryas
intendant system
cadastral survey
1883 Pendleton Act
Northcote-Trevelyan Reforms
Gemeinschaft
Gesellschaft
Quotes:
(p.420): "This view was first articulated by Gaetano Mosca, who stated that the different regime types - monarchy, aristocracy, democracy - made little difference to actual life because all were in the end controlled by elites."
(p.421): "Communism did not eliminate the distinction between rulers and ruled, or end oppression by elites; it merely changed the identity of those in charge."
(p.245): "Slavery had existed in West Africa for several centuries prior to the arrival of Europeans in the late 15th century, largely as a result of the trans-saharan trade from North Africa and the Middle East."
(p.294): "It was only in 1975 that Africa's population density reached the level that Europe enjoyed in the year 1500." In 1900, per km²: Japan had 118.2, China had 45.6, and sub-Saharan Africa had 4.4.
(p.189): "In the 1860s, a quarter of France's population could not speak French, and another quarter spoke it only as a second language. The final linguistic unification of France was not completed until World War I."
Verdict: Recommended
A bit from each chapter:
1. What is political development? Author uses his extremely overworked phrase "getting to Denmark" (=democratic, secure, prosperous, well governed, with low levels of corruption). Institutional rigidity and repatrimonialization are the two forces that contribute to decay of states.
2. The dimensions of development. Not all good things go together. Political development is not a deterministic path and depends on many different things.
3. Bureaucracy. Bureaucracy can be many things, contingent on the ability of the state in question to administer it effectively. It is not categorically good or bad.
4. Prussia builds state. Similar to China 2,000 years ago (during the consolidation of the house of Qin and moving into the Han dynasty), the Prussian military bureaucracy necessary for wars actually created a state. And once the state was established, then the bureaucracy repatrimonialized. German participation in the world wars is reinterpreted as autonomous bureaucracy run amok.
5. Corruption. "Clientelism" (US style corruption of special interests) ≠ "prebendalism" (African style corruption, where the government just steals the money directly)
6. The birthplace of democracy. Inside view of that awesomely corrupt state known as "Greece." Attempts to talk away their inability to get their fiscal house in order as something other than moral corruption.
7. Italy and the low trust equilibrium. Excessively weak governments lead to institutions like the Mafia. Getting into a low trust equilibrium is easy enough, but getting out is next to impossible.
8. Patronage and Reform. Comparison of the early corruption of US and UK government positions and initial steps of reform.
9. The United States invents clienteleism. Discussion of how geographic conditions and initial conditions made the (antique) US state such as it is. Clientelism is a fancy word for "machine politics." (p.147): "One of the reasons that socialism never took hold in the United States is that the Republican and Democratic parties captured the votes of working class Americans by offering short-term rewards instead of long-term programmatic policy changes." Clienteleism involves a reciprocal exchange of benefits, whereas in corruption public officials simply steal.
10. The end of the spoil system. The US cleans up its machine politics with formal creation of the merit-based Civil Service. The US pension for hamstringing the executive as opposed to finding ways to make it more efficient has a long pedigree.
11. Railroads, forests, and American state building. Technical difficulties with public private partnerships as evidenced by the United States figuring out how to regulate the railroads over the course of a century.
12. Nation building. Tribal identity politics is antithetical to nation building. The building of A Nation (as well as its destruction) is the work of men of words. (Martin Luther in Germany; Jose Rizal in the Philippines.) Fukuyama seems to think that language based-culture is a central unifying source of social cohesion. Industrialization and the movement of people from farms makes nation building spontaneous, as people who spoke different languages had to learn to cooperate with each other.
13. Good government, bad government. Recapitulation of the two methods to make a modern state. The Prussia/China model-some bureaucracy is organized around military issues; the US / Britain model, where interest groups create an efficient government because they need one.
14. Nigeria. Dutch disease, and some number of Sorry Black People running a country like a racketeering operation. (This chapter only took 10 pages because of the banality of the subject matter.)
15. Geography. Recapitulation of selected bits of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "Why Nations Fail."
16. Silver, gold and sugar. (Brilliant chapter, by the way.) It describes the slave trade to Latin America as well as the stage at which European intervention found the New World. (They had large states, but they were not very well developed and the Spaniards in Portuguese just replaced it with things that were worse.) A bit on Spanish mercantilism.
17. War made the state and the state made war. The Latin Americans have not fought interstate war as much as the Europeans did and the state building that went with the wars was something that they sat out. States are still very weak even to this day.
18. The Clean Slate. Argentina is singled out as a special case because they didn't start with the same burdens as places like Mexico and peru. Nonetheless, they made several meals calculations and went from having a GDP per capita equal to Switzerland to having one 1/6 the level of Switzerland's.
19. Storms in Africa. Author seems to be very hopeful that the inability of Africans to set up governments is not due to genetic sorriness. If there are not strong states in Africa it is because there never were owing to geographic factors. (For example, the continent is extremely thinly populated with few navigable waterways.) And the colonization of Africa was the third and final wave of colonization. They were not colonies long enough to develop a strong tradition of state.
20. Indirect rule. More about the interest in case of Africa. The colonial government to natives was around 1:50,000.
21. Institutions, domestic or imported. Indirect rule has been successful in many other cases. Interventions today are not the same as before. In United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand direct rule was the order of the day because of small host populations.
22. Lingua Francas. Why Kenya and Nigeria failed to create a national identity and Indonesia and Tanzania did not.
23. The Strong Asian State. It's easier to build a state on top of an existing nation than the other way around. Witness the cases of China and Japan.
24. China had a strong state for 22 centuries that practice ruled by law. Recently, they are taking some very small steps toward rule of law, but they are slow and inconsistent.
25. A lot of the highly centralized and technocratic projects of the current CCP dynasty are actually the re-emergence of a very old form of government that goes back a couple of millennia, since the First Emperor. Even the difficulty of the central government to control various Regional governments goes back that far.govb
26. Three Regions. Comparative analysis of Africa, East Asia, and Western countries.
27. A confused chapter trying to link economic growth, social mobilization, legitimacy, the state, the rule of law, and democracy. Analyzed through something called the Marx-Moore framework.
28. Universal suffrage came in waves, the 3rd of which seems to have started about 1919. The last country to have universal suffrage was Switzerland, in 1990. Conservatives appealing to the working class is not limited to the current US strategy and has been the case at least since the time of Disraeli--a century and a half ago.
29. From 1848 to the Arab Spring. Big surprise! Just because one Arabic dictator is removed from power doesn't mean that democracy is going to magically self-generate: the conditions on the ground have to be right to support it, and it appears that currently they are not. "Political Islam" is closer to Identity politics than revived religiosity.
31. Political decay. Author uses the prototypical example of the United States Forestry Service.
32. A State of courts and parties: Since 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education), the precedent has been set to use the judiciary to effect social change. Not a good idea.
33. Repatrimonialization. Excessive judicialization and interest groups. Just because of the mathematics of it, interest groups hold hugely disproportionate sway over legislation. And that explains how bills that only need to be three pages long end up being 900 pages - - because of carveouts and goodies for special interest groups.
34. Vetocracy. The point at which checks and balances become detrimental is not fixed. The US checks and balance system is an outlier among democracies. (The Westminster system has unicameral legislature, no separate presidency, no written Constitution and therefore no judicial review.) The most autonomous arms of government (CDC, Federal reserve, etc) have the highest levels of approval and the most democratic sections (Congress) have single digit approval.
35. Autonomy and subordination. Discussion of selected dimensions of the principal-agent problem. Kudos to the author for being aware of the 25 century tension between Confucianists and Legalists. (Fukuyama has really done his homework.) If the bureaucracy has too much autonomy, we could have the Japanese military taking it into the second world war. If it has none, then it can actually solve any problems. Where to draw the line? "Taylorism" makes a cameo.
36. There is a directionality to political development, and that's about it for what is worth. It could go forward. It could go backward. It could stop. It could never arrive (see the case of China).
Political Order And Political Decay
5/5 stars
"Greatest Hits of PoliSci/ Comparative Politics."
*******
Of the book:
-Doesn't need to be read in order, owing to a PLENTY of repetition; chapters can be selected in order of interest
-Each chapter has a 1 to 2 sentence synopsis at the head
- Bibliography has about 600 sources.
-743 point citations (1.4/ page; ≈20/chapter).
-546 pps prose; ≈15 pps/chapter.
Part I (194 pps, 37%) The State
Part II (182 pps, 35%) Foreign Institutions
Part III (56 pps, 11%) Democracy
Part IV (94 pps, 18%) Political Decay
*******
This book sat on my shelf for ≈7 years, and it occurred to me that I had better get it read because books on Political Science have a fairly short half-life.
°°°On the one hand, the book appears to be credible AS A HISTORICAL PANORAMIC of governance; It seems to be a mashup of a lot of the best / most influential/most long lived books about public policy with examples that are both interesting and pithy. (It has aged fairly well.)
°°°On the other hand, the book has the perfume of evolution/Evolutionary Psychology about it: you can work backwards and explain anything that you want to, but it doesn't seem to be all of that useful for forward predictions (p. 548: "there's no automatic historical mechanism that makes progress inevitable, or that prevents decay and backsliding.") And Fukuyama makes it clear even in the first chapter that he will "not suggest concrete policies or a short-term solution to problems outlined here" and that the book will not offer any easy answers.
He observes many times that the business of war is what makes states, but then (p.209): "Prolonged military competition does not necessarily produce states, because it has not in Papua New Guinea for the last 40,000 years."
Since books about political science tend to be overwrought with detail / have a fairly low signal to noise ratio, I would say that, relative to some of the garbage that I've had to read in undergraduate, Fukuyama reveals everything by covering only what's necessary. (Kind of in the way that a good bathing suit does.)
I would have to say that the single biggest messages of this book (which puts me in mind of Margaret Thatcher's "Statecraft") are that:
1. Governments and countries take different directions because of specific idiosyncratic factors on the ground, and
2. Whatever the case: over the very long term, all of these political arrangements and institutions decay. It's never the same chain of events twice, but it does eventually happen.
*******
Spillover thoughts:
1. Author is *somewhat* data driven.
a. He described Tanzania (2022 GDP $1100) as a "successful" example of creating national identity and Kenya as not (2022 GDP $2082) and Nigeria as not (2022 GDP $2066).
b. (p.173): "Government- operated railroads in Europe and Asia have often been leaders in service efficiency." (I think there is one high speed line in Japan that is profitable and maybe two in France. All the rest lose money.)
2. Rule OF law≠ Rule BY law (=regularized administrative commands of a sovereign).
3. (p.357): "China represents the ONE world civilization that never developed a true rule of law."
4. When the state precedes the law (e.g. China, Japan) it is a very different case to the other way around (Western civilizations).
5. The author keeps singing up the praises of democracy, but I wonder how good of an idea that is. It has been known FOR A LONG TIME that democracies tear themselves apart. (The next Civil War will probably be over something stupid like transvestites on beer cans or drag queen story hours.) Give me good ol' Wealthy Authoritarian Singapore any day of the week in preference to such (democratically chosen) frivolity.
6. Sometimes countries just get stuck in a bad equilibrium. Interest groups provide money to politicians who don't want to give that money up. And interest groups do not want a system where money no longer buys influence because that is their raison d'être.
7. Is following the course of a civilization in a state of decline is the same thing as following a single man who lives and dies: He could die now OR he could die later, but he is still going to die. And there's nothing that can be done about it, and no one knows the day nor the hour.
By extension: governments and countries ultimately fall apart just through sheer entropic factors--and the intellectual exercises are just that.
8. How many societies that exist today are snapshots in time of a much older society that no longer exists in the way that it did? (p.135): "The Englishmen who settled North America in the 17th century brought with them the political practices of Tudor. On American soil these old institutions became entrenched and were eventually written into the American constitution, a fragment of the old society frozen in time." (This topic shows repeatedly throughout the book with respect to Latin American institutions being imported from Spain.)
10. US academia is an evil and heinous place: (p.196): Forgetting [conquering / assimilation] is essential to the process of nation creation, because everybody had to be conquered at some point or assimilate to some other dominant culture. But much of the academic modus operandi is keeping old historical grievances festering--and therefore reverses the development of a national culture upon which a state rests. (The Chinese habit of executing mouthy academics is not such a bad idea, and it also can be seen as the cost of a few worthless Gender Studies parasites against the benefit of having a state in place.)
11. I just wonder what it is about US academics that make Europe the place of All Things Right and True in their minds? (p.157) This is been going on for at least a century and a half (Woodrow Wilson), in spite of all of their wars and Eurosclerosis.
12. Who knew that Greece and Sicily were ruled by foreigners for so many centuries? Those specific cases create a deep distrust of the state.
Vocabulary:
Hanseatic countries
usufructuary rights
demurrage fees
prebendal(ism)
alluvial
collective action problem
low level equilibrium
acephalous
depredations
deracinated
creole (it means "settler population,"as used here not "mixed race" as it does in the Black American lexicon)
cordilleras
captain donatory
Mauryas
intendant system
cadastral survey
1883 Pendleton Act
Northcote-Trevelyan Reforms
Gemeinschaft
Gesellschaft
Quotes:
(p.420): "This view was first articulated by Gaetano Mosca, who stated that the different regime types - monarchy, aristocracy, democracy - made little difference to actual life because all were in the end controlled by elites."
(p.421): "Communism did not eliminate the distinction between rulers and ruled, or end oppression by elites; it merely changed the identity of those in charge."
(p.245): "Slavery had existed in West Africa for several centuries prior to the arrival of Europeans in the late 15th century, largely as a result of the trans-saharan trade from North Africa and the Middle East."
(p.294): "It was only in 1975 that Africa's population density reached the level that Europe enjoyed in the year 1500." In 1900, per km²: Japan had 118.2, China had 45.6, and sub-Saharan Africa had 4.4.
(p.189): "In the 1860s, a quarter of France's population could not speak French, and another quarter spoke it only as a second language. The final linguistic unification of France was not completed until World War I."
Verdict: Recommended
A bit from each chapter:
1. What is political development? Author uses his extremely overworked phrase "getting to Denmark" (=democratic, secure, prosperous, well governed, with low levels of corruption). Institutional rigidity and repatrimonialization are the two forces that contribute to decay of states.
2. The dimensions of development. Not all good things go together. Political development is not a deterministic path and depends on many different things.
3. Bureaucracy. Bureaucracy can be many things, contingent on the ability of the state in question to administer it effectively. It is not categorically good or bad.
4. Prussia builds state. Similar to China 2,000 years ago (during the consolidation of the house of Qin and moving into the Han dynasty), the Prussian military bureaucracy necessary for wars actually created a state. And once the state was established, then the bureaucracy repatrimonialized. German participation in the world wars is reinterpreted as autonomous bureaucracy run amok.
5. Corruption. "Clientelism" (US style corruption of special interests) ≠ "prebendalism" (African style corruption, where the government just steals the money directly)
6. The birthplace of democracy. Inside view of that awesomely corrupt state known as "Greece." Attempts to talk away their inability to get their fiscal house in order as something other than moral corruption.
7. Italy and the low trust equilibrium. Excessively weak governments lead to institutions like the Mafia. Getting into a low trust equilibrium is easy enough, but getting out is next to impossible.
8. Patronage and Reform. Comparison of the early corruption of US and UK government positions and initial steps of reform.
9. The United States invents clienteleism. Discussion of how geographic conditions and initial conditions made the (antique) US state such as it is. Clientelism is a fancy word for "machine politics." (p.147): "One of the reasons that socialism never took hold in the United States is that the Republican and Democratic parties captured the votes of working class Americans by offering short-term rewards instead of long-term programmatic policy changes." Clienteleism involves a reciprocal exchange of benefits, whereas in corruption public officials simply steal.
10. The end of the spoil system. The US cleans up its machine politics with formal creation of the merit-based Civil Service. The US pension for hamstringing the executive as opposed to finding ways to make it more efficient has a long pedigree.
11. Railroads, forests, and American state building. Technical difficulties with public private partnerships as evidenced by the United States figuring out how to regulate the railroads over the course of a century.
12. Nation building. Tribal identity politics is antithetical to nation building. The building of A Nation (as well as its destruction) is the work of men of words. (Martin Luther in Germany; Jose Rizal in the Philippines.) Fukuyama seems to think that language based-culture is a central unifying source of social cohesion. Industrialization and the movement of people from farms makes nation building spontaneous, as people who spoke different languages had to learn to cooperate with each other.
13. Good government, bad government. Recapitulation of the two methods to make a modern state. The Prussia/China model-some bureaucracy is organized around military issues; the US / Britain model, where interest groups create an efficient government because they need one.
14. Nigeria. Dutch disease, and some number of Sorry Black People running a country like a racketeering operation. (This chapter only took 10 pages because of the banality of the subject matter.)
15. Geography. Recapitulation of selected bits of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "Why Nations Fail."
16. Silver, gold and sugar. (Brilliant chapter, by the way.) It describes the slave trade to Latin America as well as the stage at which European intervention found the New World. (They had large states, but they were not very well developed and the Spaniards in Portuguese just replaced it with things that were worse.) A bit on Spanish mercantilism.
17. War made the state and the state made war. The Latin Americans have not fought interstate war as much as the Europeans did and the state building that went with the wars was something that they sat out. States are still very weak even to this day.
18. The Clean Slate. Argentina is singled out as a special case because they didn't start with the same burdens as places like Mexico and peru. Nonetheless, they made several meals calculations and went from having a GDP per capita equal to Switzerland to having one 1/6 the level of Switzerland's.
19. Storms in Africa. Author seems to be very hopeful that the inability of Africans to set up governments is not due to genetic sorriness. If there are not strong states in Africa it is because there never were owing to geographic factors. (For example, the continent is extremely thinly populated with few navigable waterways.) And the colonization of Africa was the third and final wave of colonization. They were not colonies long enough to develop a strong tradition of state.
20. Indirect rule. More about the interest in case of Africa. The colonial government to natives was around 1:50,000.
21. Institutions, domestic or imported. Indirect rule has been successful in many other cases. Interventions today are not the same as before. In United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand direct rule was the order of the day because of small host populations.
22. Lingua Francas. Why Kenya and Nigeria failed to create a national identity and Indonesia and Tanzania did not.
23. The Strong Asian State. It's easier to build a state on top of an existing nation than the other way around. Witness the cases of China and Japan.
24. China had a strong state for 22 centuries that practice ruled by law. Recently, they are taking some very small steps toward rule of law, but they are slow and inconsistent.
25. A lot of the highly centralized and technocratic projects of the current CCP dynasty are actually the re-emergence of a very old form of government that goes back a couple of millennia, since the First Emperor. Even the difficulty of the central government to control various Regional governments goes back that far.govb
26. Three Regions. Comparative analysis of Africa, East Asia, and Western countries.
27. A confused chapter trying to link economic growth, social mobilization, legitimacy, the state, the rule of law, and democracy. Analyzed through something called the Marx-Moore framework.
28. Universal suffrage came in waves, the 3rd of which seems to have started about 1919. The last country to have universal suffrage was Switzerland, in 1990. Conservatives appealing to the working class is not limited to the current US strategy and has been the case at least since the time of Disraeli--a century and a half ago.
29. From 1848 to the Arab Spring. Big surprise! Just because one Arabic dictator is removed from power doesn't mean that democracy is going to magically self-generate: the conditions on the ground have to be right to support it, and it appears that currently they are not. "Political Islam" is closer to Identity politics than revived religiosity.
31. Political decay. Author uses the prototypical example of the United States Forestry Service.
32. A State of courts and parties: Since 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education), the precedent has been set to use the judiciary to effect social change. Not a good idea.
33. Repatrimonialization. Excessive judicialization and interest groups. Just because of the mathematics of it, interest groups hold hugely disproportionate sway over legislation. And that explains how bills that only need to be three pages long end up being 900 pages - - because of carveouts and goodies for special interest groups.
34. Vetocracy. The point at which checks and balances become detrimental is not fixed. The US checks and balance system is an outlier among democracies. (The Westminster system has unicameral legislature, no separate presidency, no written Constitution and therefore no judicial review.) The most autonomous arms of government (CDC, Federal reserve, etc) have the highest levels of approval and the most democratic sections (Congress) have single digit approval.
35. Autonomy and subordination. Discussion of selected dimensions of the principal-agent problem. Kudos to the author for being aware of the 25 century tension between Confucianists and Legalists. (Fukuyama has really done his homework.) If the bureaucracy has too much autonomy, we could have the Japanese military taking it into the second world war. If it has none, then it can actually solve any problems. Where to draw the line? "Taylorism" makes a cameo.
36. There is a directionality to political development, and that's about it for what is worth. It could go forward. It could go backward. It could stop. It could never arrive (see the case of China).