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no bull and the aftermath.

Take it a Vanty West Coast. Feel Good Travel.

Hello and welcome to the LawFair podcast. I'm Benjamin Witties.

Two weeks ago, I found myself in Palo Alto and a meeting of the Hoover Institution's Task Force on national security on the law, sitting at dinner next to Stanford political scientist, Steven Krasner.

Krasner, a colleague of mine on the Hoover Task Force, served as State Department policy planning director during the last administration, and is to put it simply one of the keenest foreign policy minds I have ever met, both in academic and in policy terms.

Over dinner, I found myself riveted by his account of his latest book project, a study of the circumstances in which efforts by external parties to influence democratic and governance development in badly governed countries do and do not succeed.

I asked you to sit down with me and summarize the study and he's finding so far, which we did a day later, the interview took place I should note before the French intervention in Mali.

So tell me about the problem you've been thinking about.

So I mean, here's a big question. It's really the big question, I mean, for political science and maybe more broadly, which is how did Denmark get to be demo?

Or maybe now how did Norway get to be Norway? How do you get these well functioning democratic industrialized states?

And if we look around the world now, I mean, you have to go from Somalia to the Democratic Republic of Chicago to places that are functioning extremely well.

And that very big question, not only is there not an answer, but there's not even a consensus on what the various answers might be, although I think that there are three that are not only in the literature, but also in the policy discussion.

One, the most well-known argument analysis about how states become well governed and highly developed economically is modernization theory.

And modernization theory basically says we get technological change, technological change leads to economic growth, economic growth leads to a larger middle class, a larger middle class as democratic values, or good things go together.

The world will be transformed in 50 years without any doubt China will be a well-functioning democracy. That's one position.

Second position, very different, is an argument which really comes from a lot of recent economic thinking, game theoretic thinking, which I mean, I've labeled rational choice institutionalism, which is kind of a mouthful, but the basic idea is this.

It's not just an up escalator. You can go up the escalator, you can fall down the escalator. A lot of what has happened historically has been the result of historical contingency that then got locked in for one reason or another.

So you had like small differences in the rights of peasants in Europe in the 12th century and 13th century when the black death hits between England on the one hand and Eastern Europe on the other.

In England, you end up with a system where there really are checks and balances ultimately on the authority of the king.

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