In the 1970s I was among a group of scholars endlessly debating theories of the state. Others in the discussion were my recent predecessor as APSA President, Theda Skocpol, and my immediate successor, Ira Katznelson. What intrigued us was a vast literature, grounded in neo-Marxism and covering huge swaths of history and geography. Nearly all the important books and articles were by sociologists and historians, but with Structure and Change in Economic History, my then colleague, economist Douglass North, transformed the debate by using economic models of transaction costs and property rights to model the state’s role in economic prosperity over time. Most political scientists now acknowledge the importance of this perspective, but it nonetheless helped precipitate twenty years of divergence between historical and new economic institutionalists.

Once again we are increasingly part of the same conversation. We are driven by a common desire to understand what makes for good governments and how to build them. Good governments are those that are: (1) responsive and accountable to the population they are meant to serve; and (2) effective, that is capable of protecting the population from violence, ensuring security of property rights, and supplying the public goods the populace needs and desires. The most responsive and accountable governments are in democracies, but not all democracies have effective governments, and there are relatively effective and even responsive governments in non-democratic states. Although I consider the role democracy may play, I am concerned here not with how to build democracy but how to promote good government, democratic or not. My focus is on effectiveness and on how responsiveness and accountability are implicated in effectiveness.