The story of how the Angolan government was induced to begin creating checks and balances, from a starting point of massive corruption, is a case study in building institutions from scratch. A dysfunctional state has been driven by a combination of domestic and external pressure to take some initial steps toward accountability.
About the Author
John McMillan is the Jonathan B. Lovelace Professor of Economics in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He is author of Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets (2003), has written extensively on economic reform, and is currently studying the subversion of democracy in 1990s Peru.
After almost ten years of complex and costly efforts to build democracy in these two countries, where do things stand? What lay behind the critical choices that shaped events in…
In recent decades, Costa Rican society has evolved and become less deferential. Political arrangements that worked well in the past no longer meet the country’s needs.
China’s 1989 democracy movement was brutally suppressed, but a former student leader argues that it also planted the seeds for the growth of Chinese civil society and for future democratization.