Abstract
This well-crafted study by Pippa Norris makes a highly valuable contribution to the rich tradition in political science and political sociology of assessing the factors that influence human development. Her book is timely considering the new round of state-building following the Arab Spring of 2011 and ongoing U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as long-standing international efforts to stabilize and develop sub-Saharan Africa among other volatile regions. Beyond extensive use of statistical data on economic, political and social conditions of states across the globe, Norris employs a truly “mixed method” approach by regularly employing case studies of nation-states that clarify and illustrate her findings. Through her rigorous analysis she develops a unified theory of “democratic governance” to highlight her central claim that both liberal democracy and governance capacity are crucial for successful human development. Her work thereby challenges popular claims that one goal is preferable over the other, or perhaps neither goal is consequential, relative to structural conditions like ethnic factionalism and the availability of wealth-producing natural resources.
While the claim that both democracy and state capacity are crucial for human development may sound modest or even evasive, Norris makes highly sophisticated arguments to show how these two components of regimes work in tandem to balance their relative strengths and weaknesses. Her work highlights that democratic accountability does achieve concrete benefits of reducing poverty and building lasting peace in developing societies by allowing human security and procedures that permit citizens to hold their leaders accountable. However bureaucratic state capacity, unhindered by an excessively ponderous democratic process, is crucial to actually implement basic services from education to health care and effectively collect revenue. Otherwise, democracy alone can yield little more than frustration and disillusionment. Aware of the tension between democracy and state capacity in developing countries where strength in one area may be linked to weakness in the other, Norris stresses the need for contextual and nation-specific reforms to ensure that both goals can be achieved simultaneously.
Norris bolsters her unified theory by using an extensive review of seminal theorists of democracy promotion (Meltzer and Richard, Sen, Liphart), state-building (Huntington, Weber) and even structuralism (Lipset) to operationalize key measures and controls for her statistical analysis and for careful selection of nation-states for comparative case studies. This allows her to make use of diverse data sources, including the World Bank Institute and Freedom House, to successfully develop and apply index scores for liberal democracy and state capacity—concepts often decried as too intangible for rigorous analysis. By doing so, Norris effectively categorizes the regimes of diverse countries across the globe into four key groups, ranging from bureaucratic democracies (with high democracy and capacity) to patronage autocracies (low levels of both components). By then controlling for factors such as geography, prior levels of human and economic development, ethnic fractionalization, cultural traditions and global trends, Norris can then effectively assess the relative impact of regimes on changes in economic growth, social welfare and conflict over time. Importantly, she is able to move beyond strong statistical claims of association from her robust regression models to make causal arguments via appropriate paired case studies. For example, she can account for the diverging fortunes of nations with similar geographic and economic conditions due to their differing regimes such as the states of the Korean peninsula—the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and their southern neighbor, the Republican of Korea. Beyond this more obvious example, she is also able to make nuanced comparisons between countries like Chile (bureaucratic autocracy) and Ghana (patronage democracy).
While the first half of her book already makes a cogent theoretical and methodological contribution that would greatly assist scholars seeking to measure effectively and interpret regimes and human development, Norris uses the book’s closing chapters to test her unified theory in light of the goals of economic prosperity, social welfare, and peace. Assessing data from countries across the globe, she finds that liberal democracy on its own is insufficient for a country’s economic growth unless there are also conditions such as electoral systems with proportional representation and a parliamentary-based executive branch. Analyzing neighboring Caribbean states between 1960 and 2010 provides a highly illustrative case study: Haiti remains a patronage autocracy and struggles economically, while the Dominican Republican has seen its economic fortunes rise largely based on improvements to both its democratic process and state capacity. Turning her attention to social welfare, Norris accounts for strong associations between human development indicators like life expectancy, child mortality and gender equality in education with regimes under democratic governance and strongly indicates this broad finding with her case study comparing the success of Botswana relative to its neighbor Zambia.
Finally, Norris focuses on the impact of democratic governance on lessening the intractable problem of internal conflict within developing nations and, though the evidence here is less conclusive than in her previous chapters, she builds on the work of Carothers to find support for her unified theory. Global security experts are highly divided on the issue of whether to focus efforts in war-torn nations on state building as a more urgent goal than promoting some form of democracy or power-sharing arrangement; they even worry that regime types may be inconsequential in the face of powerful structural factors like wealth, ethnic fractionalization, and regional conflict. Norris provides a useful chart of the relative level of civil war by regime type, and carefully explains findings that may threaten her thesis, like the fact that bureaucratic autocracies lacking democratic institutions can have lower levels of internal conflict due to their ability to suppress opposition through force. Although her regression models largely confirm the impact of structural factors and find no association between liberal democracy and reductions in internal conflict, she still finds strong support for state capacity and an alternative power-sharing form of democracy as the best combination for improving prospects for peace.
Making Democratic Governance Work is a sound reference for scholars and professionals who seek a comprehensive understanding of how to interpret and resolve problems of human and economic development. Students will appreciate Norris’ thorough review of diverse academic perspectives and practitioners, her sophisticated development of measures, and indices using publicly available data. Area studies experts in Latin America, Africa, and Asia will also appreciate her well-researched comparative case studies of key nations within their regions. While decision-makers at international development agencies may have found it more satisfying if Norris had provided a selection test for whether they should focus on promoting democracy or state-building, her compelling analysis effectively answers that both are necessary.