Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

This is the second volume of political scientist Francis Fukuyama's two-part study of political institutions, following The Origins of Political Order (2011), which traces the emergence of the state, rule of law, and democratic accountability from prehistoric times through the French Revolution. This volume picks up the story from the Industrial Revolution through the early 21st century, examining how these three categories of institutions developed, interacted, and in some cases decayed across different regions.

Fukuyama opens with three contemporary scenarios illustrating how seemingly unrelated political problems share a common root in institutions: state collapse in post-Qaddafi Libya, regulatory capture in the United States after the 2008 financial crisis, and middle-class protests in Turkey and Brazil. The book's analytical framework rests on three pillars: a strong, impersonal state that enforces rules and delivers public goods; rule of law that constrains even the most powerful actors; and democratic accountability that makes government responsive to the broad public. Fukuyama argues that all societies are subject to political decay through institutional rigidity, in which rules persist even when conditions change, and repatrimonialization, in which elites capture impersonal institutions for private benefit.

Part I examines why some countries built effective modern states while others did not. Prussia exemplifies state building driven by military competition. Facing existential threats, successive Hohenzollern rulers centralized power through the army, built a merit-based bureaucracy, and established the Rechtsstaat, a system in which the sovereign governed through institutionalized law without democratic accountability. Prussia's defeat by the French emperor Napoleon at Jena in 1806 triggered reforms that opened bureaucratic posts to commoners based on merit. This autonomous bureaucratic tradition survived two world wars and the Nazi regime, explaining Germany's consistently high governance quality. Greece and Italy, by contrast, extended the franchise to mass electorates before consolidating modern states, producing pervasive clientelism, the exchange of individualized benefits for political support. In Greece, political parties expanded government employment fivefold between 1970 and 2009 by staffing the public sector with loyalists. In southern Italy, the weakness of the central state after unification in 1861 spawned the Mafia as a private provider of property rights protection. Both countries remained trapped in self-reinforcing cycles of distrust between citizens and government.

Britain and the United States represent intermediate cases. Britain reformed its patronage-ridden civil service through the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms of the 1850s, before the franchise was significantly expanded, aided by a compact elite and a Westminster parliamentary system that concentrates power. The United States, having expanded the franchise to all white males under President Andrew Jackson in the 1820s before building a modern state, invented large-scale clientelism. Urban political machines like New York's Tammany Hall mobilized immigrant voters through individualized benefits, functioning as mechanisms of democratic inclusion while fostering corruption. Reform required decades of struggle, from the Pendleton Act of 1883, which created merit-based federal hiring, through the Progressive Era. Fukuyama uses two case studies to illustrate the tension between democratic control and bureaucratic autonomy: The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), the federal agency created to regulate railroads, remained captive to political pressures, while Gifford Pinchot built the U.S. Forest Service into an autonomous, high-quality agency through coalition building. The critical lesson is that the sequence in which institutions are introduced matters enormously.

Part II extends this analysis to the non-Western world. Latin America was colonized earliest and most intensively. The Spanish implanted mercantilist and authoritarian institutions, creating a class hierarchy reinforced by racial divisions between white settlers, Indigenous peoples, and enslaved Africans. Latin America's relative absence of interstate war meant that states never faced the competitive pressures that drove bureaucratic modernization in Europe. Costa Rica and Argentina demonstrate the limits of materialist explanations: Costa Rica escaped the Central American pattern of dictatorship despite similar conditions, while Argentina squandered favorable endowments through poor elite choices.

Sub-Saharan Africa, colonized late and briefly, lacked strong indigenous state institutions. European powers governed through indirect rule, a system in which colonial administrators relied on local chiefs rather than building direct bureaucratic presence. This approach undermined traditional authority without implanting modern institutions. After independence, leaders in countries like Nigeria treated state revenues, including massive oil wealth, as spoils to distribute through ethnic patronage networks, a practice Fukuyama calls prebendalism. Nation building mattered: Indonesia and Tanzania, whose founding leaders constructed inclusive national identities through common languages and integrative ideologies, achieved greater stability than Nigeria and Kenya, where no comparable projects were undertaken.

East Asia stands at the opposite end of the spectrum. China invented the modern state millennia ago and bequeathed traditions of centralized, merit-based governance to Japan and Korea. These traditions allowed Japan to resist colonization and enabled China to rebuild after severe disruptions, including communist leader Mao Zedong's systematic destruction of legal institutions. The region's political challenge is not state weakness but constraining state power through law and accountability. Japan acquired a constitution primarily under foreign pressure, while China has gradually expanded rule-based governance since the post-Mao reforms led by Deng Xiaoping beginning in 1978, though the Communist Party has never accepted the supremacy of law over itself. Fukuyama identifies the "bad emperor" problem as China's central vulnerability: The system can produce excellent results under wise leadership but offers no institutional safeguard against future abuse.

Part III examines why democracy spread. Fukuyama argues that economic growth drives social mobilization, creating new groups, particularly the middle class, that demand political participation. In developed countries, rising incomes and expanding education transformed the industrial working class into a property-owning middle class, stabilizing democracy. Europe's democratization was nonetheless a protracted, violent process stretching over more than a century, frequently derailed by nationalism. The Arab Spring, Fukuyama argues, more closely resembles the European Revolutions of 1848 than the Third Wave, the surge of democratic transitions that swept Latin America, Eastern Europe, and parts of Asia in the late 20th century: The social basis for stable liberal democracy may not yet exist in much of the Middle East. The future of democracy depends on the fate of the middle class, which is growing globally but shrinking in developed countries as technology and globalization hollow out middle-class employment.

Part IV addresses political decay in the United States. Fukuyama argues that the country has returned to being a "state of courts and parties," with the judiciary and Congress usurping executive functions. A deep tradition of distrusting government has produced "adversarial legalism," in which administrative functions are handled through costly litigation rather than professional bureaucracies. Interest groups have captured Congress through legalized reciprocal exchanges of campaign contributions for legislative favors. The constitutional system of checks and balances has become a "vetocracy" that raises the costs of collective action to the point of gridlock. The Forest Service illustrates this trajectory: Once a model bureaucracy under Pinchot, it now pursues contradictory mandates dictated by competing congressional constituencies.

Fukuyama concludes that liberal democracy, combining a strong state with rule of law and accountability, is not merely a Western preference but a functional requirement for stable governance in modern societies. China poses the most serious alternative model, but its sustainability depends on whether a growing middle class will force the expansion of legal and democratic constraints on state power. Even established democracies face threats from political decay, and the United States in particular must reform institutions that have grown rigid and been captured by elites, though its constitutional design makes such reform extraordinarily difficult.