Frameworks
In democratic countries, the executive is the branch of the government that implements policies. We often call the people in the executive as bureaucrats. The quality of the executive is very important to ensure that the policies made by the legislature reap the benefits. Francis Fukuyama calls this activity using the term ‘governance’. According to him:
(Governance is the) government's ability to make and enforce rules, and to deliver services.
In simple words, governance quality is a measure of how good the executive (bureaucrats) do their job. Fukuyama gives a framework to assess the quality of governance.
According to this framework, quality of governance is the result of an interaction between capacity and autonomy.
What do we mean by that?
1. Capacity
Capacity is the ability of the executive to get a work done. The most commonly used measure of capacity is the ability to extract taxes. Ability to collect taxes signifies both the capacity to collect taxes and it also gives the state the resources to operate in other domains. Another measure of capacity is the level of education and professionalisation of government officials.
2. Autonomy
Autonomy refers to the manner in which politicians issue mandates to the bureaucrats. Often, bureaucrats can receive contradictory mandates from different politicians. Politicians can issue mandates on who should be recruited into the executive, and politicians can issue mandates on how to do a task. Hence, in Fukuyama’s words:
Autonomy therefore is inversely related to the number and nature of the mandates issued by the principal. The fewer and more general the mandates, the greater autonomy the bureaucracy possesses.
Ensuring good governance is a careful dance between capacity and autonomy. That is, depending on how much underlying capacity a bureaucracy has, having more or less autonomy might be advantageous or disadvantageous. One would wish to restrict the discretion of an agency and impose explicit regulations upon it if it were staffed by inept, self-serving political appointees. In contrast, if the same agency were full of professionals with high education and values, one would not just feel safer granting them considerable autonomy, but would actually want to reduce rule-boundedness in hopes of encouraging innovative behaviour.
Fukuyama classifies a few states based on autonomy and capacity as shown in the following graph:
The graph shows where the countries are at and where they need to move. According to Fukuyama, India is a complex example. India evidently has low state capacity. But higher autonomy may not be good right now given corruption and clientelism in the executive.
Thumb Rule: Quality of governance is the result of an interaction between capacity and autonomy. When the capacity of the state is high, it should give more autonomy to it’s personnel and vice versa.