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violence and the rise of
open-access orders
Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis,
and Barry R. Weingast
Douglass C. North is professor of economics, Washington University–
St. Louis, a Nobel laureate in that discipline, and senior fellow, Hoover
Institution. John Joseph Wallis is professor of economics, University
of Maryland, and research associate, National Bureau of Economic
Research. Barry R. Weingast is Ward C. Kreps Family Professor of
Political Science, Stanford University, and senior fellow, Hoover Insti-
tution. The following essay draws on the authors’ new book Violence
and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded
Human History (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Every explanation of large-scale social change contains a theory of
economics, a theory of politics, and a theory of social behavior. Often
the theories are implicit, and even more often, the theory of economics
and the theory of politics are independent of each other. Despite a great
deal of attention and effort, social science has not come to grips with
how economic and political development are connected either in history
or in the modern world.
The absence of an integrated theory of economics and politics reflects
a lack of systematic thinking about the central problem of violence in
human societies. How societies deal with the ubiquitous threat of vio-
lence shapes human interaction. In our forthcoming book, we develop
a conceptual framework that explains how, over the last ten millennia,
societies have used institutions to limit and contain violence. These
institutions simultaneously give individuals control over resources and
social functions, and limit the use of violence by shaping the incen-
tives that individuals and groups face. We call these patterns of social
organization social orders. Social orders are characterized by the way
in which societies craft the institutions that form human organizations,
limit or open access to those organizations, and shape incentives to
limit and control violence.
Journal of Democracy Volume 20, Number 1 January 2009
© 2009 National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press
56 Journal of Democracy
Human history has known just three types of social orders. The first was
the foraging order: small social groups characteristic of hunter-gatherer
societies. Our concern is with the two social orders that arose over the last
ten millennia. The limited-access order (or natural state) emerged between
five and ten thousand years ago, and was associated with the increasing
scale of human societies. Increasing scale is accomplished through a hi-
erarchy of personal relationships among powerful individuals. Personal
relationships among the elite form the basis for political organization and
constitute the grounds for individual interaction. A natural state is ruled by
a dominant coalition; people outside the coalition have only limited access
to organizations, privileges, and valuable resources and activities. Open-
access orders emerged in the nineteenth century, and are associated with
the beginnings of sustained economic and political development. Identity,
which in natural states is inherently personal, becomes defined in open-
access orders by a set of impersonal characteristics. The development of
impersonal categories of individuals, often called citizens, allowed people
to interact over wide areas of social behavior where no one needed to know
the individual identities of their partners. The ability to form organiza-
tions that the larger society supports is open to everyone who meets a set
of minimal and impersonal criteria. Both limited- and open-access social
orders have public and private organizations, but natural states limit access
to those organizations. Open-access societies do not.
The emergence of societies with widespread political participation,
the use of elections to select governments, constitutional arrangements to
limit and define the powers of government, and unbiased application of
the rule of law is a product of the transition from limited- to open-access
societies. If “democracy” is defined as a social system that creates respon-
siveness to citizen interests and polices corruption, then experience shows
that it requires more than elections; the formal political institutions of
democracy do not produce modern societies by themselves.1 Open access
to organizations in both the polity and the economy animates elections,
and a democratic society requires open access in both. A free press—
representing open access to information—is also essential to democracy.
The transition entails a set of changes in the polity that ensures secure,
impersonal political rights; legal support for a wide range of organizational
forms (including political parties and economic organizations); access
to those organizations for all citizens; and enforcement of prohibitions
against the use of violence. The transition also entails a set of changes in
the economy: the ability to create economic organizations at will, open
entry and competition in many markets, and the free movement of goods
and individuals over space and time. Over the long term, open-access
politics cannot be sustained without open-access economics, and vice-
versa. Although evidence from the last few decades is mixed, over the
last two centuries, political and economic development appear to have
gone hand-in-hand.2
57
Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast
An underappreciated feature of the codevelopment of political and
economic institutions in the two social orders helps to explain why poor
countries stay poor. Economic growth occurs when countries are able to
sustain positive growth rates in per capita income over the long term.
The evidence suggests that until about 1800, the long-run growth rate
was close to zero: For every period of
increasing per capita income, a corre-
sponding period of decreasing income
occurred.3 Modern developed societies
that made the transition to open access
and subsequently became wealthier
than any others in human history, did
so by greatly reducing their episodes of
negative growth.4 The historical pattern
of offsetting periods of positive and
negative growth episodes is apparent
in the modern world where we have
comprehensive data. Using data on
per capita income for 184 countries between 1950 and 2004, we calcu-
lated annual growth rates and then separated the years by whether the
economy was growing or shrinking.5 Surprisingly, the richest countries
were not distinguished from poorer ones by higher positive growth rates
when they grew. In our dataset, the richest non-oil countries with per
capita incomes over US$20,000 grew at an average annual rate of 3.9
percent in years when income was growing and fell at an average annual
rate of 2.3 percent when income was shrinking. In contrast, incomes in
countries where the per capita share was less than $20,000 grew at an
average annual rate of 5.4 percent when income was rising, but shrank
at a rate of 4.9 percent when income was falling. Even more strikingly,
the rich countries experienced positive growth in 84 percent of all years,
while poor countries experienced positive growth in only 66 percent of
the years. The poorest countries, with per capita incomes below $2,000
a year, experienced positive growth in only 56 percent of the years. Poor
countries are not poor because they grow more slowly; they are poor be-
cause they experience more years of negative income growth and more
rapid declines during those years.6
While economic outcomes do not map directly onto political outcomes,
the slow but steady growth of open-access societies suggests that modern
development is not the result of faster growth per se, but instead results
from new forms of political, economic, and social organization that make
a society much better able to handle change. The difference between the
respective economic performances of limited-access and open-access
societies reflects the differential ability of the two social orders to deal
with change, including a wide range of sudden changes or shocks.
Our conceptual framework does not posit a static social equilibrium,
Poor countries are not
poor because they grow
more slowly; they are
poor because they ex-
perience more years of
negative income growth
and more rapid declines
during those years.
58 Journal of Democracy
but instead offers a way of thinking about societies that face shifting
constraints and opportunities. The dynamism of social orders is a dy-
namic of change, not a dynamic of progress. Most societies, especially
natural states, move backwards and forwards with respect to political and
economic development.
All societies must face the problem of violence. Controlling vio-
lence through repeated personal contacts can only sustain cooperation
among small groups of maybe twenty-five to fifty people. In larger
groups, few individuals have sufficient personal knowledge of all the
members of the group, so personal relationships alone cannot be used
to control violence. In larger societies, social institutions must arise to
control violence. No society eliminates violence; at best, violence can
be contained and managed.
Dealing with violence requires institutions and organizations. Institu-
tions are the “rules of the game,” the patterns of interaction that govern
and constrain the relationships among individuals.7 Institutions include
formal rules, written laws, informal norms, and shared beliefs about the
world, as well as the means of enforcement. The critical question is what
types of institutions can survive given the interactions of institutional
constraints, people’s beliefs, and their behavior.8
In contrast to institutions, organizations are made up of individuals
pursuing a mix of common and individual goals through partly coordi-
nated behavior. Organizations coordinate their members’ actions, so an
organization’s actions are more than the sum of the actions of the indi-
viduals who belong to it.
We distinguish two types of organizations: An adherent organization
features self-enforcing agreements among its members. Third parties
are not involved. Cooperation by adherent organizations’ members must
be, at all times, “incentive-compatible” for all members. Contractual
organizations, by contrast, use within themselves not only incentive-
compatible agreements but contracts enforced by third parties external to
the organization. Third-party enforcement allows individuals to commit to
a subset of arrangements that may not otherwise be incentive-compatible.
Our framework revolves around the development of institutional forms
that can support complicated and sophisticated contractual organizations,
both inside and outside the state.
Modern open-access societies often limit violence through institutions.
Institutions frame rules that deter violence by changing the payoffs ex-
pected from violent behavior—most obviously by establishing credible
punishments for those who are violent. People are more likely to obey
rules, even at considerable cost to themselves, if they believe that other
people will obey the rules as well.9 An individual has an incentive to shoot
first and talk later when he fears that others will fail to follow such rules.
In order for a formal institution to constrain violence, some organization
must exist in which a set of officials enforces the rules in an impersonal
59
Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast
manner. The larger the society, the larger the set of enforcers that must
somehow be organized.
Most social scientists abstract from the question of how the enforcers
are actually organized, treating them as a single entity in order to focus on
the relationship between the enforcement entity and the rest of society. For
example, social scientists have modeled the state as a revenue-maximizing
monarch, a stationary bandit, or a single-actor “representative agent.”10
As Max Weber famously said, the state is that organization which has
a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Collapsing the identity
of the state into a single actor or ruler greatly simplifies the problem of
explaining state behavior.
The single-actor model of the state, however, assumes away the prob-
lem of how societies create a monopoly on violence. This approach also
overlooks the reality that all states are organizations. We take another
path to understanding the state. The process of controlling violence is
central to how individuals and groups behave within a society and how
a coalition emerges to structure the state and society. Choosing this path
requires us to formulate a model of the state as an organization of several
actors rather than a single actor.
The Logic of the Natural State
The logic of the natural state follows from its manner of coping with
violence. Individuals and groups with access to violence form a dominant
coalition, granting one another special privileges. These privileges—
including limited access to organizations, valuable activities, and
assets—create rents.11 By limiting access to these privileges, members
of the dominant coalition create credible incentives to cooperate rather
than fight among themselves. Because the coalition’s members know that
violence will reduce their own rents, each has incentives not to fight. In
this way, the political system of a natural state manipulates the economic
system to produce rents that then secure political order. Members of the
dominant coalition typically specialize in a range of military, political,
religious, and economic activities.
Systematic rent-creation through limited access in a natural state is
not simply a method of lining the pockets of the dominant coalition. It is
the essential means of controlling violence. Rent-creation and limits on
both competition and access to organizations are central to the state, its
institutions, and the society’s performance.
To understand the logic of how the dominant coalition functions, it is
helpful to lay out an illustrative example. Consider a world of endemic
violence in which the population is made up of many small groups with no
organized governments. Though all individuals must stand ready to defend
their rights by force of arms, some individuals specialize in the use of vio-
lence. The violence specialists may provide protection to a small group of
60 Journal of Democracy
clients, but the biggest threat facing the specialists is one another. If two
specialists try to agree to disarm, the first to put down his weapons risks
being killed by the other. Therefore, both specialists remain armed.
In order for the specialists to stop fighting, each must perceive that it
is in the other’s interest not to fight. The prospect of peaceful coopera-
tion between the specialists becomes credible when both believe that the
costs of fighting exceed the expected benefits. This arises when the two
specialists divide their world, one part controlled by each specialist, and
where each respects the other’s right to control the land, labor, resources,
and trading within his sphere. The specialists do not disarm, and each
controls a set of rents and privileges. To be credible, the commitment
requires that the violence specialists are both better off when there is
peace, generating rents through the rights that they control.
Gathering rents from society in turn requires elites who specialize in
other activities. In a natural state, each nonmilitary elite either controls or
enjoys privileged access to a vital function, such as religion, production,
resources, trade, education, or the administration of justice. Because of
their positions, privileges, and rents, the individual elites in the dominant
coalition depend on the regime to keep entry limited. All elites therefore
have incentives to support and help maintain the coalition: Failure to do
so risks violence, disorder, and the loss of rents.
Among the most valuable sources of elite rents is the privilege of
forming organizations that the state will support. Elite organizations gen-
erate rents and distribute them to coalition members. By devising ways
to support contractual organizations and then extending the privilege of
forming those organizations solely to its members, the dominant coalition
generates and distributes rents.
The incentives embedded in these organizations produce a double
balance: a correspondence between the distribution and organization of
violence potential and political power on the one hand, and the distribu-
tion and organization of economic power on the other. Societies that are
out of balance are less stable: When a subset of members believes that its
share of the rents is smaller than its capacity to fight, it is likely to threaten
violence to gain what it believes to be its due. Double balance suggests
that stability requires that the political, economic, cultural, social, and
military systems contain sets of incentives that are compatible across the
systems. Because the dominant coalition in any natural state is an adher-
ent organization, peace is not inevitable: Rather, peace depends on the
balance of interests brought into being by the rent-creation process.
The framework generates two implications. First, natural states are
stable, but not static—no dominant coalition is permanent. As conditions
change, some members of the dominant coalition become more powerful
and others weaker. Violence and even civil war are possible, as those who
are growing more powerful seek greater privileges. Dispersed military
power—a classic example is a set of feudal barons, each with his own
61
Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast
castle and private force of armed retainers—is central to the logic of the
natural state. In this way, the threat of violence becomes part of the ar-
rangement that controls the actual use of violence.
Second, privileges in the natural state solve the problem of violence,
but, in comparison with open-access orders, the existence of these privi-
leges greatly hinders economic growth by creating monopolies, rents, lim-
its on the formation of new organizations, and an absence of widespread,
secure, and impersonal property rights. This suggests a fundamental
dilemma of development: The means by which developing countries, as
natural states, solve the problem of violence hamper long-term growth.
Nonetheless, these societies are not sick; they cannot be made well by
applying the right policy medicine.
The Logic of Open Access
Open-access orders control violence through a logic that differs from
that of natural states. These more open societies create powerful, consoli-
dated military and police organizations that are subservient to political
systems which satisfy Weber’s condition of having a monopoly on the
legitimate use of violence.
Consolidating control of violence carries the danger that the state may
wield force for its own ends. As a result, the control of violence in the
open-access order involves three elements: 1) The political system creates
consolidated control of military and police forces; 2) a set of institutions
and incentives constrains the political system and limits the illegitimate
use of violence; and 3) an open-access economic system combines with
political institutions to prevent the political system from manipulating
economic interests, and ensures that if a political group abuses its control
of the military, it will lose office. Control of violence in the larger soci-
ety occurs both through deterrence (the threat that the state will punish
illicit uses of force) and through denying nonstate organizations that use
violence access to enforceable organizational supports.
Competition for control over the political system is open to entry
by any group and contested through prescribed, and typically formal,
constitutional means. These societies are characterized by open access:
All citizens have the right to form contractual organizations. The ability
to form organizations at will, without any need for the state’s consent,
helps to ensure nonviolent competition in the polity and the economy—
indeed, in every area of society that is characterized by open access.12
When embedded in a constitutional setting with institutions that provide
credible incentives for the protection of various rights, open access and
democratic competition prevent illegitimate uses of violence.
Impersonality is a central feature of open-access orders: Everyone is
treated the same. Impersonality grows out of the structure of organiza-
tions and the ability of society to support impersonal organizational
62 Journal of Democracy
forms—that is, organizations with their own identity independent of
the individual identity of the organization’s members. In legal terms,
organizations become perpetually lived, meaning that their existence is
independent of the lives of their members. Perpetually lived organizations
must have an impersonal identity.13 Only over the last five centuries did
the identity of the organization truly become independent of the identity
of its members.
Competition in an open-access order differs from competition in natural
states for two reasons. We have already mentioned the limits that the open-
access order places on competition through violence. In addition, these
societies sustain impersonal relationships on a large scale. Impersonality
fundamentally changes the nature of competition by creating impersonal
markets and impersonal exchange. Individuals and organizations pursue
rents as vigorously as in a natural state, but in an open-access society
impersonal economic and political competition rapidly erodes rents.
In his 1942 classic Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Joseph
Schumpeter described this process of innovation and change in the
economy as “creative destruction.” Economic competition occurs through
the development of new products and services, rather than simply through
the offer of lower prices. When an organization invents a valuable product
or service not easily duplicated by its competitors, the innovation creates
a source of rents. Organizations form to exploit new opportunities and
to pursue the rents associated with innovation. Open entry and access
to sophisticated economic organizations are prerequisites for creative
destruction and a dynamic economy.
Schumpeter’s approach has an important implication for political be-
havior. Because the constellation of economic interests regularly changes
through innovation and the entry of new players, politicians must deal
with a world that is fundamentally different from the one which their
natural-state counterparts face: Open-access orders cannot manipulate
interests in the same way that natural states can. Politicians in both
natural states and open-access orders want to create rents. Rent-creation
rewards their supporters and binds their constituents to support them.
Because open-access orders enable any citizen to form organizations for
a wide variety of purposes, rents created by either the political process
or economic innovation attract competitors in the form of new organiza-
tions. The relative ease with which organizations may be formed means
that those hurt by rent-formation have the ability to mobilize in ways
that are not available in natural states. Further, in Schumpeterian terms,
political entrepreneurs have incentives to put together new coalitions and
organizations to compete for the rents. In open-access politics, just as in
open-access economics, creative destruction rules.14
Like natural states, open-access orders exhibit a double balance: Open
access and entry to organizations in the economy support open access in
politics, and open access and entry in politics support open access in the
63
Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast
economy. Open access in the economy generates a large and varied set
of organizations that act as primary agents of creative destruction. This
forms the basis for the existence of an active civil society, featuring many
groups that can mobilize politically when they fear that their interests are
being threatened. Creative economic destruction produces a constantly
shifting distribution of economic interests, making it difficult for political
officials to solidify their advantage through rent-creation. Similarly, open
access in politics results in creative political destruction through party
competition. The opposition party has strong incentives to monitor the
incumbent and to publicize attempts to subvert the constitution.
A final characteristic of open-access orders is adaptive efficiency.15
As with natural states, open-access orders face various shocks. Open-
access orders provide more flexible means of adapting in the face of such
challenges. By virtue of open access, these societies generate a range of
new ideas in the face of dilemmas. Political competition provides those
in power with strong incentives to adapt policy in ways that address the
problem; failing to do so risks losing power. The political system also
embodies Schumpeterian creative destruction, as the political opposition
has especially strong incentives to devise creative solutions to dilemmas
that incumbents seemingly cannot solve.16
Open-access orders are therefore better than natural states at gen-
erating new ideas and at discarding bad ideas in the face of the omni-
present unfolding of new problems. The open-access order’s adaptive
efficiency is in part responsible for its much greater ability to achieve
long-term growth, where poor countries (as natural states) remain poor
because they are much less able to withstand shocks than are open-
access countries.
The Logic of the Transition
Limited-access orders predominated overwhelmingly until just a cen-
tury or two ago, making them seem the “natural state” of humankind.
This prompts the question: How do natural states become open-access
societies? In seeking to understand this transition, we confront two ob-
stacles. First, the transition begins in the natural state and must therefore
be consistent with the logic of that state. So how does the transition ever
get started? An explanation of the transition must show how conditions
arise within a natural state that put elites in a position where, consistent
with the logic of the natural state, they find it in their interest to transform
personal and privileged intraelite arrangements into impersonal ones that
treat all elite members the same way.
Second, how do impersonal arrangements within the elite translate into
open access for those who are not members of any elite? Some scholars
frame the question as “Why do elites give up their privileged position in
society by allowing nonelites full participation?” This approach is prob-
64 Journal of Democracy
lematic: It carries the implication that elites give something up, but it is
not clear that they do.17 We frame the question differently: “Why do elites
transform their unique and personal privileges into impersonal rights?”
When elites create impersonal open access for themselves to political
and economic organizations, they may also create incentives to expand
access to the nonelite population as well. The transition, as a result,
has two stages. First, a natural state must develop institutional arrange-
ments that enable elites to create the possibility of impersonal intraelite
relationships. Second, the transition proper begins when members of the
dominant coalition find it a matter of self-interest to expand impersonal
relationships and to institutionalize open access for all.
We call the conditions in a natural state that foster impersonal rela-
tionships among elites the doorstep conditions. The doorstep conditions
reflect institutional and organizational support for increased impersonal
exchange. The three doorstep conditions are: 1) the application of the rule
of law to the elites; 2) the creation of perpetually lived elite organiza-
tions in both the public and private spheres; and 3) consolidated political
control over the military.
In combination, the doorstep conditions create an environment that
fosters impersonal elite relations. Applying the rule of law among elites
extends the range of the contracts and relationships that can flourish and
makes possible mutual dependencies that could not survive without some
form of credible legal protection. Perpetually lived organizations can
undertake a wider range of economic and political activities. Moreover,
political institutions that bind not only today’s officials but tomorrow’s
require creating a perpetually lived state. Most limited-access orders lack
such states. Consolidated control over the military removes the need for
elites to maintain alliances with military factions.
Once elite relationships become impersonal, new possibilities begin
to open up. If a society on the doorstep creates and sustains new incen-
tives for elites to open up one sort of access followed by another within
the elite, then a transition proper ensues. Nothing, however, inevitably
impels a society on the doorstep to make the transition.
During the transition proper, all elites gain the right to form organi-
zations–be they political, economic, or social. At that point, the logic
holding the dominant coalition together has changed from the natural-
state logic of rent-creation through privileges to the open-access logic of
rent-erosion through entry.
Our approach has significant implications for a wide range of problems,
including economic development, the theory of the state, and democracy.18 In
the remaining space, we concentrate on the implications for democracy.
An important conclusion flowing from our conceptual framework is
that the same institutions work differently under conditions of limited
as opposed to open access. Markets, for example, perform differently in
natural states than they do in open-access orders because the former are
65
Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast
characterized by extensive privileges, limited access to organizations,
and the absence of secure, impersonal property rights.
Implications for Democracy
This lesson has special force with respect to democracy: Elections and
party competition work differently in natural states than they do in open-
access orders. This view contrasts with the dominant scholarly view, which
follows that of Adam Przeworski and his coauthors and includes the lion’s
share of empirical studies.19 The dominant view defines democracy in terms
of whether a country sustains competitive elections with peaceful partisan
turnover. Similarly, the popular press commonly identifies democracy with
the existence of elections. This approach to democracy lumps together
elections in limited-access orders with those in open-access orders.
We have a different perspective. Although elections are central to
democracy, democracy is not solely about elections, as Robert A. Dahl
argued in his landmark 1971 work Polyarchy. As a set of institutions in
an open-access order, democracy gives citizens a degree of control over
political officials, thereby generating responsiveness to citizens’ inter-
ests while helping to limit corruption. For democracy to work, elections
must be embedded in an institutional environment that allows political
competition to constrain politicians as well as to convey information to
them. Elections in natural states typically fulfill these functions either
inadequately or not at all. Indeed, a host of important differences dis-
tinguish elections in limited-access orders from their counterparts in
open-access orders. These differences show that only open-access orders
can sustain democracy in the sense of citizen control over governments
and officials.
Open-access orders can deliver policies to citizens on an impersonal
basis. This allows such orders to provide a wide range of public goods
and large-scale social-insurance programs of the type that are missing
from natural states. Poverty-reduction programs can be targeted to reach
the poor, as measured by impersonal and observable characteristics;
driver’s licenses can be issued to anyone who meets an age requirement
and passes a competency test; unemployment benefits are available to
those who contribute to the system and meet the impersonal requirements
for being unemployed.
Impersonal delivery of public goods and services prevents political
officials from threatening to withhold such goods as a means to manipu-
late citizens. By contrast, when natural states provide public goods on a
personal basis, officials can use the threat of taking them away to force
citizens to support the incumbents.20 The provision of publicly provided
goods in natural states combines with elections to provide natural-state
governments with a way to keep citizens in line. Under such circum-
stances, elections do not represent the free exercise of citizen choice.
66 Journal of Democracy
Impersonal delivery of public goods has another important implication
for the success of democracy. Many scholars emphasize democracy as
a means of redistribution: If a country includes more low- and middle-
income voters than rich ones, then democracy is likely to result in the
redistribution of wealth from the richer to poorer voters.21 This analysis,
however, ignores the means for redistribution that exist if the government
is able to deliver redistribution impersonally. Impersonal policies allow
open-access orders to respond to citizens in ways that complement markets
so that these policies become a positive-sum game.22 Social-insurance
programs are not simply means of redistribution; they lower individual
risk from market participation.23 Natural states cannot credibly deliver
impersonal public services, so the poor have incentives to use their votes
to secure cash transfers. These states are therefore more susceptible both
to populist appeals launched by factional leaders who seek to shift wealth
and to coups meant to prevent such shifts. This double vulnerability to
sudden populist and antipopulist maneuvers is the dark side of democracy,
a side often visible in natural states.
Open access typically supports an effective opposition and a competi-
tive electoral process. It supports a rich civil society, fostering a wide
range of economic, political, and social groups that can mobilize interests
and help to constrain democratic policy making. Schumpeterian competi-
tion constantly produces new interests and groups. Widespread access to
organizations makes it difficult for public officials to manipulate economic
interests in support of the regime. In contrast, most natural states inhibit
or compromise electoral competition—for example, by the use of violence
to intimidate opposition, by limits on citizens’ ability to organize and the
opposition’s to compete, and by restrictions on freedom of the press.
Taken together, the differences that distinguish limited-access from
open-access orders explain why elections in the former do not perform the
same functions that they do in the latter. Elections in open-access orders
implement the democratic ideals of citizen expression and control over
political officials in ways that elections simply cannot accomplish in natural
states. Open access limits the stakes of power; creates perpetually lived
organizations that survive crises and partisan turnovers; allows a wider
range of groups to form and mobilize; allows more effective competition for
office; and allows the impersonal provision of public goods and services.
The ability of open-access orders to sustain political competition depends
on their parallel ability to sustain open-access economic competition. It is
not simply the form of the institutions in open-access societies that makes
democracy work; it is the dynamic relationships among political, economic,
and other social systems that result when the ability to create organizations
is open to all. In order to spread democracy—and not just elections—more
widely, we must learn how to induce societies to adopt social arrange-
ments that move them to the doorstep conditions beyond which sustainable
impersonal relationships can develop. Then the problem becomes one of
67
Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast
fostering the spread of those political and economic institutions to wider
shares of the populace. Sustainable democracy requires not only an open-
access polity, but an open-access economy too.
NOTES
1. The growing literature on authoritarian elections emphasizes this point. See Beatriz
Magaloni, “Credible Power-Sharing and the Longevity of Authoritarian Rule,” Comparative
Political Studies 41 (April 2008): 715–41.
2. In Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1959),
Seymour Martin Lipset asked why sustainable democracy seemed to require economic
development. Whether a causal link exists between democracy and economic develop-
ment, and if so which way the link runs, remains an open question. See more recent work,
including Adam Przeworksi et al., Democracy and Development: Political Institutions
and Well-Being in the World, 1950–1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
Robert J. Barro, Markets and Choices in a Free Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996);
and Daron Acemoglu et al., “Income and Democracy,” American Economic Review 98
(June 2008): 808–42.
3. For evidence about long-term growth before 1800, see Gregory Clark, A Farewell to
Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007);
see also Robert W. Fogel, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100:
Europe, America, and the Third World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
20–22.
4. Since we have no reliable way of gauging annual per capita income before 1800, the
idea that the recent growth in developed countries is due to the elimination of negative-
growth episodes remains an assertion, but one that accords with evidence about economic
performance in the past.
5. The following discussion summarizes the analysis of Table 1.2 in Douglass C. North,
John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual
Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), ch. 1.
6. More sophisticated empirical confirmation is provided by Dani Rodrik, Making
Openness Work: The New Global Economy and the Developing Countries (Washington,
D.C.: Overseas Development Council, 1999); Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey, “Cross-
Country Evidence on the Link Between Volatility and Growth,” American Economic Review
85 (December 1995): 1138–51; and Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, “Democracy, Volatility and
Development,” Review of Economics and Statistics 87 (May 2005): 348–61.
7. Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3–4.
8. See Avner Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Barry R. Weingast, “Rational Choice Institutional-
ism,” in Ira Katznelson and Helen V. Milner, eds., Political Science, State of the Discipline:
Reconsidering Power, Choice, and the State (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002).
9. Margaret Levi, Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1997).
10. Three well-known examples are Geoffrey Brennan and James M. Buchanan’s notion
of the state as Leviathan, Douglass C. North’s neoclassical theory of the state, and Mancur
Olson’s idea of the state as a stationary bandit. Other models include Douglass C. North,
68 Journal of Democracy
Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981); Yoram Barzel,
A Theory of the State: Economic Rights, Legal Rights, and the Scope of the State (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002); Robert Bates, Avner Greif, and Smita Singh, “Organizing
Violence,” Journal of Conflict Resolution (October 2002): 1–65; Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
et al., The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003); and Charles Tilly,
European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992).
11. A rent is a return to an economic asset that exceeds the return which the asset can
receive in its best alternative use. If a person is only willing to work at a particular job for
$10 an hour, but not for $9.99 an hour, and is paid $15 an hour, she receives a rent of $5
an hour. Importantly, rents can be created or increased by limited access—for example,
when the state grants an individual monopoly privileges over an activity.
12. Although organizations such as corporations require state approval, open entry occurs
when the state approves one for any group that meets a minimal set of requirements.
13. A perpetually lived organization is not infinitely lived, but an organization whose
existence is independent of the lives of its members. For example, a modern corporation
is a perpetually lived organization. Because a modern partnership must be reorganized on
the death of a partner, it is not perpetually lived.
14. For a sophisticated discussion of rent creation, see Mushtaq H. Khan and Kwame
Sundaram Jomo, Rents, Rent-Seeking and Economic Development: Theory and Evidence
in Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
15. Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1960); Douglass C. North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
16. William H. Riker, Liberalism Against Populism: A Confrontation Between the Theory
of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1982).
17. For an example of this approach, which stresses how elites, threatened by revolution
or civil unrest, grant nonelites concessions such as democracy, see Daron Acemoglu and
James A. Robinson, The Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).
18. We deal with several of these issues in Violence and Social Orders, ch. 7.
19. Przeworski, et al., Democracy and Development.
20. Alberto Diaz, Beatriz Magaloni, and Barry R. Weingast, “Tragic Brilliance:
Equilibrium Party Hegemony in Mexico,” Working Paper, Hoover Institution, Stanford
University, 2008. The authors analyze this use of elections as a means of exerting control
over citizens.
21. The classic work is Allan H. Meltzer and Scott F. Richard, “A Rational Theory of
the Size of Government,” Journal of Political Economy 89 (October 1981): 914–27. See
also Acemoglu and Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy.
22. Geoffrey Garrett, Partisan Politics in the Global Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), 5, makes a similar point.
23. Moreover, as the term “social-insurance programs” suggests, these policies are
more about insurance than about redistribution. See Peter H. Lindert, Growing Public:
Social Spending and Economic Growth Since the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (Cambridge
University Press, 2004).
