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A Charter for Democracy (стр. 146)

Since the fall of the Soviet Union democracy has spread rapidly across the developing world. Political scientists actually measure it. There is an index called Polity that rates the degree of democracy on a scale from 0 to 10. In the 1980s the average developing county scored only around 2; now the average is around 4.5. However, to date, this transition to democracy has been defined overwhelmingly in terms of elections. This has been inevitable. Electoral competition can be introduced with great speed even in the most unpromising bottom-billion conditions, such as Afghanistan. As the prospect of elections moves toward becoming a reality, many individuals and groups have incentives to behave in ways that facilitate their introduction: they form political parties as a means to acquiring power. But remember, elections are not enough. Electoral competition can make things worse, because patronage will often win out over honest politics in the struggle for votes—recall the survival of the fattest.

By contrast, checks and balances take time to introduce, and they are political orphans: those parties that expect to rule have a direct interest in frustrating their introduction, and the entire political class stands to lose if patronage politics is made infeasible. Elections determine who is in power, but they do not determine how power is used. Because of the different time scales for elections and for checks and balances, the instant democracies must almost inevitably go through a phase in which electoral competition faces few restraints. The real issue is whether this is merely a phase or becomes a permanent feature of the polity—whether these countries get stuck with a parody of democracy.