With such expensive elections, it was no big surprise that elected officials were corrupt. In the late nineteenth century, legislative corruption in the USA, especially in state assemblies, got so bad that the future US president Theodore Roosevelt lamented that the New York assemblymen, who engaged in the open selling of votes to lobbying groups, ‘had the same idea about Public Life and Civil Service that a vulture has of a dead sheep’.[23]
In this light, the road to democracy in the NDCs was a rocky one. It was only through several decades of political campaigning (e.g., for female or black suffrage) and electoral reforms that these countries acquired even the basic trappings of democracy – universal suffrage and secret ballots – and even then its practice was swamped with electoral fraud, vote-buying and violence.
It is interesting to note that, compared to NDCs in their early stages of development, today’s developing countries actually seem to have had a better record in this regard. As we can see from table 3.2, no NDC granted universal suffrage below the level of $2,000 per capita income (in 1990 international dollars), but most of the wide selection of currently developing countries featured in table 3.2 did so well below that level of development.
Of course, many of these countries have experienced reversals in their democratic progresses in just the same way that the NDCs did, especially through military coups. However, it is important to note that, even as they were suspending elections altogether, none of the non-democratic governments in currently developing countries reintroduced selective disenfranchisement based on factors like property ownership, gender and race – factors that had been widely accepted as legitimate criteria for enfranchisement in NDCs in the early days. This shows that the idea, if not necessarily the practice, of universal suffrage is much more widely accepted in today’s developing countries than it was in the NDCs when they were at similar stages of development.
| Table 3.2 | ||
|---|---|---|
| Income per capita at attainment of universal suffrage | ||
| GDP p.c. (in 1990 international dollars) | NDCs (Year universal suffrage was attained; GDP p.c.) | Developing Countries (Year universal suffrage was attained; GDP p.c.) |
| <$1.000 | Bangladesh (1947; $585)[1] | |
| Burma (1948; $393)[2] | ||
| Egypt (1952; $542) | ||
| Ethiopia (1955; $295) | ||
| India (1947; $641) | ||
| Indonesia (1.945; $514) | ||
| Kenya (1963; $713) | ||
| Pakistan (1947; $631)[1] | ||
| South Korea (1948; $777) | ||
| Tanzania (1962; $506) | ||
| Zaire (1967; $707) | ||
| $1.000-$1.999 | Bulgaria (1945; $1.073) | |
| Ghana (1957; $1.159) | ||
| Hungary (1945; $1.721) | ||
| Mexico (1947; $1.882) | ||
| Nigeria (1979; $1.189) | ||
| Turkey (1946; $1.129) | ||
| $2.000-$2.999 | Austria (1918; $2.572) | Colombia (1957; $2.382) |
| Germany (1946; $2.503) | Peru (1956; $2.732) | |
| Italy (1946; $2.448) | Philippines (1981; ~2.526) | |
| Japan (1952; $2.277)[3] | ||
| Norway (1913; $2.275) | ||
| Sweden (1918; $2.533) | ||
| $3.000-$3.999 | Denmark (1915; $3.635) | Taiwan (1972; $3.313) |
| Finland (1944; $3.578) | Chile (1949; $3.715) | |
| France (1946; $3.819) | ||
| $4.000-$4.999 | Belgium (1948; $4.917) | Brazil (1977; $4.613) |
| Netherlands (1919; $4.022) | ||
| $5.000-$9.999 | Australia (1962; $8.691) | Argentina (1947; $5.089) |
| New Zealand (1907; $5.367)[4] | Venezuela (1947; $6.894) | |
| Portugal (1970; $5.885) | ||
| UK (1928; $5.115) | ||
| >$10.000 | Canada (1970; $11.758)[5] | |
| Switzerland (1971; $17.142) | ||
| USA (1965; $13.316) | ||
Sources: Therborn (1977); Elections (1989); Maddison (1995)
1. GDP p.c. in 1948.
2. GDP p.c. in 1950.
3. Universal suffrage was granted in 1946 under the constitution drawn up by the occupying forces after the Second World War, but it did not come into effect until 1952 with the end of US military rule.
4. When dominion status was achieved.
5. When the Election Act that year granted full franchise.
3.2.2. The bureaucracy and the Judiciary
Few people, even those who are generally sceptical of state activism, would disagree that an effective and clean bureaucracy is crucial for economic development.[24] There is, however, currently a serious debate on how exactly we should define effectiveness and cleanliness, and on how we should design a bureaucratic incentive system to attain these characteristics.
The dominant view during the last century was that espoused by the German economist-sociologist Max Weber. In his view, the modern bureaucracy is based on meritocratic recruitment; long-term, generalist and closed career paths; and corporate coherence maintained by rule-bound management. [25] More recently, however, ‘New Public Management’ (NPM) literature has challenged the Weberian orthodoxy. It argues for a bureaucratic reform based on more short-term, specialist and ‘open’ career paths; keener monetary incentives; and a more ‘businesslike’ (or arm’s-length) management style based on quantifiable and transparent performance.[26]
Although some of the changes advocated by the NPM may be useful in fine-tuning what is basically a Weberian bureaucracy that already exists in the developed countries, the more relevant question for most developing countries is how their bureaucracies might attain even the most basic ‘Weberian-ness’.
