The Origins of Political Order

If we are seeking to understand the functioning of contemporary institutions, it is necessary to look at their origins and the often accidental and contingent forces that brought them into being.

In many cases, things that happened hundreds or even thousands of years ago continue to exert major influence on the nature of politics.

Political decay occurs when political systems fail to adjust to changing circumstances.

The mere fact that a country has democratic institutions tells us very little about whether it is well or badly governed.

Political institutions are necessary and cannot be taken for granted.

A market economy and high levels of wealth don't magically appear when you 'get government out of the way'; they rest on a hidden institutional foundation of property rights, rule of law, and basic political order.

If we could understand how these basic institutions came into being, we could then perhaps better understand the distance that separates Afghanistan or Somalia from contemporary Denmark.

The historical account presented to most American schoolchildren was highly Euro-, and indeed, Anglocentric.

One seldom finds serious comparative analysis of why an institution developed in one society but not in another.

While classic modernization theory tended to take European development as the norm and ask why other societies di­ verged from it, I take China as a paradigm of state formation and ask why other civilizations didn't replicate the path it followed.