Full Text

The persistence of economic destitution particularly in the developing countries has raised an endless debate on its causes and the way forward. Different theories have been formulated and other theories perished. The present scholarship explains how regimes shape prosperity, welfare and peace. Using various theories Pippa Norris argues that democratic governance is capable of bridging the economic gap and spurring economic growth. Democratic governance assumes that development is most effective where regimes combine the qualities of democratic responsiveness and state effectiveness. Various premises have been put into consideration. First, institutions of liberal democracy encourage elected officials to pay attention to human security. However, in practice, liberal democracy often proves to be imperfect in each of these procedures. This is particularly so where party competition is limited. As a result electoral systems are manipulated or channels of participation are more skewed towards money than people. Second, democratic institutions are by themselves insufficient to achieve development goals. It is quite known that institutions of democracy can limit the abuse of state power but do not ensure the necessary capacity of leaders to implement effective public policies addressing social needs. Therefore, a merging of democracy and governance, particularly state capacity leads to achieving developmental goals. The book is organized in three major parts. The first part introduces various perspectives to expanding human security. These include: democracy-promotion; structuralist-view and governance capacity. The democracy-promotion perspective believes that government (leader) responsiveness and accountability are the key to the attainment of human security. The structuralist-view suggests that development is determined by environment factors of a society. This refers to geographical location, natural resources, and human capital. At this point, it is equally important to state that regimes have minimal effect to development. The last group holds that state capacity (governance) is critical in delivering basic services such as education, health, water, etc and state-building is crucial in post-conflict reconstruction prior to holding elections. The author develops a unified theory out of these perspectives. She opines that a combination of liberal democracy and governance capacity developed in parallel will prove most effective recipe for growth, within the constraints of structural conditions. The second part of the book compares regimes. Methodologically, the author conceptualizes and measures various concepts like liberal democracy, good governance, human security, and state capacity. She goesBook Reviews 370 further to choose cases that share many structural characteristics, for example, geographical location, historical backgrounds, and social composition. However, the cases differ in developmental outcomes and regime types. These are democratic and autocratic regimes. The last part discusses regime effects. The findings show that bureaucratic democracy has a greater effect in economic growth as it combines the most effective macroeconomic management by the state and accountability by electorates. It is impressive to state that the present scholarship provides useful insights to solving problems of instability, war, poverty, and anarchy occurring around the world and particularly developing countries. For example, poverty in Africa, the recent Arab uprisings, instabilities in Burundi, Congo, Nigeria, Mali, and Somalia, and post-election violence in Kenya and Uganda concretize the situation. The book is innovative in theory and empirical data. The author has been able to show a strong correlation between a certain regime and state of prosperity, welfare, and peace. She presents that a regime constitutes the basic framework for governing the nation-state within its territorial boundaries; this includes the overarching constitutional arrangements and the core government institutions (p.43). The first premise indicates that liberal democracy may bring prosperity, welfare and peace. In liberal democracy leaders are elected on basis of free and fair but competitive multiparty elections that meet international standards of integrity. In addition, there is a provision of freedom of expression and respect for civil liberties; checks and balances among regime institutions; independent judiciary; effective legislature; freedom of the media; and associational autonomy. The second premise shows that autocracies cannot ensure development as they are antithesis to democratic practices which are deemed conducive for economic growth. Autocracies in Mauritania, Chad, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Somalia, and Singapore provide vivid examples (p.63-64). Regardless of the good efforts liberal democracy make, the author argues that it is still insufficient to ensure development. For example, Ghana has experienced periodic multiparty contests that international observers have regarded as free and fair; and in 2009 Freedom House rated Ghana 1.5 on its seven-point index of political rights and civil liberties, classifying it as liberal democracy comparable to Greece, Israel, South Korea and Bulgaria (p.61, 63) and yet it is one of the poorest countries. The author explains that the capacity of public sector is limited in terms of discharging prime objectives such as providing social services like education, health, water, etc (p.64). This leads to the third premise of this authority. It is argued that state capacity is very necessary in making liberal democracy wok effectively. The author puts that state capacity determines how far regime authorities can achieve their goals and perform functions essential for collective well-being (p.44). The assumption is that the bureaucratic form of government has better mechanisms of controlling authorities so that effective public policies areCEU Political Science Journal. Vol. 8, No. 3 371 formulated and implemented. The author acknowledges the limitations of bureaucratic form of government even in its new form of New Public Management. Unfortunately, the author does not explain adequately limitations of bureaucratic government to ensuring prosperity, welfare and peace. This is the weakness of the present scholarship. Taking Africa as a reference point, bureaucratic government does not work effectively due to a number of limitations putting aside the common excessive rigidity, and inflexibility. New public management is also limited in a number of ways: the use of business techniques in public sphere confuses most basic requirement of any state, and taking a citizen as a mere customer takes away his/her political participatory rights and duties. It is interesting to note that most of limitations are grounded by external economic bondage. Historically, Africa was colonized by European countries after the Berlin conference in 1884-1885. The motives behind Africa’s colonization were three; resources (raw materials), investments, and markets. After about 80 years of colonization, Africa became politically independent but economically dependent to colonial masters. The colonial motives have intensified in a more sophisticated approach, i.e. globalization, where the emphasis is free trade and private investments. In reality Western countries depend heavily on Africa for investments, raw materials, and markets. Therefore, the emphasis on formal rules by bureaucratic government leads to red tape combined with external economic bondage hence corruption, rent seeking behavior, and a lack of patriotism. A consequence of these is a struggle for resources and thus political instability, war, post-election violence, extreme poverty, ethnic antagonism, and religious intolerance. It is quite shocking, in recent decades to observe the regular conduct of elections in Africa becoming a source of violence. Conclusively, unless economic bondage between Africa and western countries is broken bureaucratic democracy is unlikely to work. In spite of these shortcomings, the book is recommendable to practitioners, policy makers, and academics. It is one of the few books that has extensively dealt with governance capacity. Its strong emphasis on formal rules is peculiar and must not be ignored.