I’m beginning a new project at Stanford/CDDRL called “The Governance Project.” The intention is to focus on conceptualizing and measuring governance, and applying those measures to two specific countries, China and the United States.The beginning point of the project is definition of governance that excludes the degree to which governments are either democratic or subject […]

Over the past decade the mantra in both development studies and comparative politics has been “institutions matter”—that is, you aren’t going to get economic growth or other human development objectives in the absence of institutions like rule of law, transparent and accountable governments, low levels of corruption, and the like.The empirical basis for this assertion […]

I have been reading Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species at the recommendation of David Sloan Wilson, who has been one of the leading proponents of group selection (or more properly, multi-level selection) in evolutionary theory over the last few years.  (These are people who took issue with the views of Richard Dawkins and many older […]

This is a continuation of the extract of the talk I gave at the University of Geneva in Nov. 2011 on “European Identities.” This part deals with the failure to create an identity at a European level:Let me turn to nation building at the EU level. When we pass from the level of these individual […]

I’m reproducing the transcript of parts of a talk I gave in Geneva last November at the Latsis Foundation Prize Ceremony on “European Identities.”  This excerpt deals with how different European countries have dealt with Muslim immigrant assimilation, and the second excerpt will discuss the lack of identity at a European level.Let me then move […]

In this campaign season, a lot of Republican candidates, particularly Newt Gingrich, have been talking about American Exceptionalism. When Gingrich says that President Obama doesn’t understand how exceptional the United States is, he means this in only a positive sense: that we are freer, more entrepreneurial, or have been a greater force for good in […]

Much of my life has been spent in institutions dedicated to public policy: the State Department, the Rand Corporation and the Rand Graduate School, George Mason’s School of Public Policy, Johns Hopkins SAIS, and now Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. People in these places make policy, give advice about what […]

My resolution for 2012 is to restart the blogging I did on The American Interest’s web site, something I haven’t done since 2009. I stopped writing back then because I was in the process of drafting the first volume of The Origins of Political Order and didn’t have the time.I’m now in the midst of […]

I am probably the only person in the United States who actually likes the fact that President Obama set an 18 month timetable for the beginning of a drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan in his speech on Tuesday night.  Republicans have been attacking it because they say that it sends a signal of weak […]

One of the most obvious policy initiatives that the United States could undertake right now is is to seriously up the amount of help being given Mexico to bolster security along the US-Mexican border and to help to reform the Mexican judicial system.  We started this process last year with the Merida Initiative, but the […]