What is Governance?

The American Interest: What is Governance? Francis Fukuyama

… We Americans tend to believe that democracy is an intrinsic part of good governance and that more democracy means better quality government. …

… I have no doubt that more democratic accountability will improve governance in many poor countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. East Asia is different, however, insofar as it has a very long tradition of relatively high-quality centralized bureaucratic government. This begins with Shang Yang’s reforms in the early state of Qin, and continues to this day in the extraordinary record of the Chinese Communist Party in bringing China through one of the most complex economic transformations one can imagine. Many East Asians today wonder whether rapid democratization will in fact help or hurt the quality of governance there. What they don’t have is either democratic accountability or rule of law.

Conversely, I would argue that the quality of governance in the US tends to be low precisely because of a continuing tradition of Jacksonian populism. Americans with their democratic roots generally do not trust elite bureaucrats to the extent that the French, Germans, British, or Japanese have in years past. This distrust leads to micromanagement by Congress through proliferating rules and complex, self-contradictory legislative mandates which make poor quality governance a self-fulfilling prophecy. The US is thus caught in a low-level equilibrium trap, in which a hobbled bureaucracy validates everyone’s view that the government can’t do anything competently. The origins of this, as Martin Shefter pointed out many years ago, is due to the fact that democracy preceded bureaucratic consolidation in contrast to European democracies that arose out of aristocratic regimes.

This is not to say that I think the quality of governance is better in China than in the US. …

This article illustrates well why calls for democracy as a panacea for what is troubling every struggling country is misguided. The issues are much more complex.