stateeffectivenessanddemocracy.docVIP

State Effectiveness and Democracy Shaoguang Wang Department of Government Public Administration The Chinese University of Hong Kong Shatin, NT, HONG KONG Tel. +852-2609-7515 Fax +852-2603-5225 Email: wangshaoguang@.hk July 19, 2002 “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficult lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” Madison: The Federalist, No. 51 Introduction In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the “third wave” of democratization (Huntington 1991) began to spread from South Europe and Latin America to East Asia, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere, many were very optimistic about the future of the unfolding “worldwide democratic revolution. Now, a decade later, the optimism has somehow faded away. Although the U.S. Government continues to claim, At long last, democracy is triumphant, those who have made efforts to assess the progress of the third wave find that the reality is not as rosy as people once tended to believe. Among nearly 100 countries that appeared to be moving away from authoritarian rule in the early 1990s, at present, only fewer than 20 are “clearly en route to becoming successful, well-functioning democracies” (Carothers 2002). In addition to over a dozen countries that have suffered “democratic breakdown” or “democratic reversals” (e.g., Pakistan, Kenya, Lebanon, Lesotho, Niger, Peru, Sierra Leone, Zambia, and several post-Soviet states), most transition states seem to have stuck in what Larry Diamond terms twilight zone (Diamond 1999b) or what Thomas Carothers calls “gray zone” (Carothers 2002). Falling in between outright dictatorship and well-established democracy, those political systems have recently earned new labels, such as “semi-democracy,” “formal democracy,” “electoral democracy,” “fa?ade democracy,” “pseudo-democracy,” “weak democ