Francis Fukuyama | A State of Courts and Parties

Date
Thu January 22nd 2015, 5:30 - 7:00pm
Event Sponsor
McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society
Location
Cubberley Auditorium

The American political system traditionally emphasized institutions of constraint—the rule of law and democratic accountability—over state power, leading in the 19th century to what Stephen Skowronek has characterized as a state of "courts and parties" with an underdeveloped executive branch riddled with patronage and corruption. The US began to build a Weberian administrative state beginning with the passage of the Pendleton Act in 1883, one that continued to grow in scope through the New Deal and Great Society in the 20th century. Nonetheless, the quality of that state has seriously deteriorated in the second half of the century, with courts and parties continuing to play roles undertaken by administrative bureaucracies in other modern democracies. Many of the dysfunctions of modern American politics can be traced to the fragility of America's Weberian state and its continued subordination to the judiciary and Congress, in which bureaucratic autonomy is limited by "adversarial legalism" and interest group politics.

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. He was previously Bernard Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), John Hopkins University, and Hirst Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University. He has worked at the Rand Corporation and as a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He has written widely on questions concerning democratization and international political economy. His book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions.

This event is a Wesson Lecture.