Twenty-five years after the founding of the Journal of Democracy, liberal democracy seems to be faltering in many parts of the world. The single factor linking many of these setbacks is the failure of state capacity to keep up with the demand for good government created by the social mobilization underlying democratization. Moving from a patrimonial or neo-patrimonial state to a modern impersonal one is much more difficult than creating democratic accountability, and has been studied a great deal less than democratic transitions. This suggests a new agenda for the Journal of Democracy’s next quarter century.
