Дарон Аджемоглу - Why Nations Fail

WHAT CAN BE DONE to kick-start or perhaps just facilitate the process of empowerment and thus the development of inclusive political institutions? The honest answer of course is that there is no recipe for building such institutions. Naturally there are some obvious factors that would make the process of empowerment more likely to get off the ground. These would include the presence of some degree of centralized order so that social movements challenging existing regimes do not immediately descend into lawlessness; some preexisting political institutions that introduce a modicum of pluralism, such as the traditional political institutions in Botswana, so that broad coalitions can form and endure; and the presence of civil society institutions that can coordinate the demands of the population so that opposition movements can neither be easily crushed by the current elites nor inevitably turn into a vehicle for another group to take control of existing extractive institutions. But many of these factors are historically predetermined and change only slowly. The Brazilian case illustrates how civil society institutions and associated party organizations can be built from the ground up, but this process is slow, and how successful it can be under different circumstances is not well understood.

One other actor, or set of actors, can play a transformative role in the process of empowerment: the media. Empowerment of society at large is difficult to coordinate and maintain without widespread information about whether there are economic and political abuses by those in power. We saw in chapter 11 the role of the media in informing the public and coordinating their demands against forces undermining inclusive institutions in the United States. The media can also play a key role in channeling the empowerment of a broad segment of society into more durable political reforms, again as illustrated in our discussion in chapter 11, particularly in the context of British democratization.

Pamphlets and books informing and galvanizing people played an important role during the Glorious Revolution in England, the French Revolution, and the march toward democracy in nineteenth-century Britain. Similarly, media, particularly new forms based on advances in information and communication technology, such as Web blogs, anonymous chats, Facebook, and Twitter, played a central role in Iranian opposition against Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent election in 2009 and subsequent repression, and they seem to be playing a similarly central role in the Arab Spring protests that are ongoing as this manuscript is being completed.

Authoritarian regimes are often aware of the importance of a free media, and do their best to fight it. An extreme illustration of this comes from Alberto Fujimori’s rule in Peru. Though originally democratically elected, Fujimori soon set up a dictatorial regime in Peru, mounting a coup while still in office in 1992. Thereafter, though elections continued, Fujimori built a corrupt regime and ruled through repression and bribery. In this he relied heavily on his right-hand man, Valdimiro Montesinos, who headed the powerful national intelligence service of Peru. Montesinos was an organized man, so he kept good records of how much the administration paid different individuals to buy their loyalty, even videotaping many actual acts of bribery. There was a logic to this. Beyond just recordkeeping, this evidence made sure that the accomplices were now on record and would be considered as guilty as Fujimori and Montesinos. After the fall of the regime, these records fell into the hands of journalists and authorities. The amounts are revealing about the value of the media to a dictatorship. A Supreme Court judge was worth between $5,000 and $10,000 a month, and politicians in the same or different parties were paid similar amounts. But when it came to newspapers and TV stations, the sums were in the millions. Fujimori and Montesinos paid $9 million on one occasion and more than $10 million on another to control TV stations. They paid more than $1 million to a mainstream newspaper, and to other newspapers they paid any amount between $3,000 and $8,000 per headline. Fujimori and Montesinos thought that controlling the media was much more important than controlling politicians and judges. One of Montesinos’s henchmen, General Bello, summed this up in one of the videos by stating, “If we do not control the television we do not do anything.”

The current extractive institutions in China are also crucially dependent on Chinese authorities’ control of the media, which, as we have seen, has become frighteningly sophisticated. As a Chinese commentator summarized, “To uphold the leadership of the Party in political reform, three principles must be followed: that the Party controls the armed forces; the Party controls cadres; and the Party controls the news.”

But of course a free media and new communication technologies can help only at the margins, by providing information and coordinating the demands and actions of those vying for more inclusive institutions. Their help will translate into meaningful change only when a broad segment of society mobilizes and organizes in order to effect political change, and does so not for sectarian reasons or to take control of extractive institutions, but to transform extractive institutions into more inclusive ones. Whether such a process will get under way and open the door to further empowerment, and ultimately to durable political reform, will depend, as we have seen in many different instances, on the history of economic and political institutions, on many small differences that matter and on the very contingent path of history.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK IS the culmination of fifteen years of collaborative research, and along the way we have accumulated a great deal of practical and intellectual debts. Our greatest debt is to our long-term collaborator Simon Johnson, who coauthored many of the key scientific papers that shaped our understanding of comparative economic development.

Our other coauthors, with whom we have worked on related research projects, played a significant role in the development of our views, and we would like to particularly thank in this capacity Philippe Aghion, Jean-Marie Baland, María Angélica Bautista, Davide Cantoni, Isaías Chaves, Jonathan Conning, Melissa Dell, Georgy Egorov, Leopoldo Fergusson, Camilo García-Jimeno, Tarek Hassan, Sebastián Mazzuca, Jeffrey Nugent, Neil Parsons, Steve Pincus, Pablo Querubín, Rafael Santos, Konstantin Sonin, Davide Ticchi, Ragnar Torvik, Juan Fernando Vargas, Thierry Verdier, Andrea Vindigni, Alex Wolitzky, Pierre Yared, and Fabrizio Zilibotti.

Many other people played very important roles in encouraging, challenging, and critiquing us over the years. We would particularly like to thank Lee Alston, Abhijit Banerjee, Robert Bates, Timothy Besley, John Coatsworth, Jared Diamond, Richard Easterlin, Stanley Engerman, Peter Evans, Jeff Frieden, Peter Gourevitch, Stephen Haber, Mark Harrison, Elhanan Helpman, Peter Lindert, Karl Ove Moene, Dani Rodrik, and Barry Weingast.

Two people played a particularly significant role in shaping our views and encouraging our research, and we would like to take this opportunity to express our intellectual debt and our sincere gratitude to them: Joel Mokyr, and Ken Sokoloff, who unfortunately passed away before this book was written. Ken is sorely missed by us both.

We are also very grateful to the scholars who attended a conference we organized in February 2010 on an early version of our book manuscript at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard. We would particularly like to thank the co-organizers, Jim Alt and Ken Shepsle, and our discussants at the conference: Robert Allen, Abhijit Banerjee, Robert Bates, Stanley Engerman, Claudia Goldin, Elhanan Helpman, Joel Mokyr, Ian Morris, Şevket Pamuk, Steve Pincus, and Peter Temin. We are also grateful to Melissa Dell, Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Sándor László, Suresh Naidu, Roger Owen, Dan Trefler, Michael Walton, and Noam Yuchtman, who gave us extensive comments at the conference and at many other times.