The international community has spent decades promoting democracy with decidedly mixed results. Some transitions produced stable liberal orders; others yielded electoral authoritarianism, state collapse, or violent fragmentation. The conventional wisdom long held that democracy itself was the crucial variable—get elections right, and everything else follows. This assumption increasingly appears not merely incomplete but potentially dangerous.

A growing body of comparative evidence suggests that the sequence of political development may matter as much as its ultimate destination. The order in which societies build state capacity, establish rule of law, develop national identity, and introduce electoral competition appears to shape outcomes in ways that pure regime-type analysis misses entirely. Prussia's path differed fundamentally from Britain's, yet both produced functioning states—while numerous contemporary democratizers struggle with challenges neither European predecessor faced.

This sequential perspective carries uncomfortable implications for democracy promotion. If political development follows path-dependent trajectories where early choices constrain later possibilities, then the timing and ordering of reforms becomes a strategic variable of first importance. The question transforms from whether to democratize into when and in what sequence—a far more analytically demanding and politically fraught inquiry. Understanding these dynamics requires examining both successful sequences and the characteristic pathologies that emerge when stages are skipped or reversed.

Samuel Huntington's controversial 1968 thesis in Political Order in Changing Societies argued that political stability required institutionalization to precede participation. States that expanded political participation faster than their institutional capacity could absorb it faced praetorianism—the domination of politics by military, religious, or other non-political forces. This argument, largely dismissed during the third wave of democratization, has experienced significant rehabilitation as scholars grapple with democratic backsliding and state fragility.

The empirical record offers striking support for sequencing effects. European states that developed strong bureaucratic capacity before mass democratization—Prussia, Denmark, Sweden, Britain—generally produced more stable liberal outcomes than those where popular mobilization outpaced state-building. The Weberian bureaucratic state, with its impersonal rules, meritocratic recruitment, and clear jurisdictional boundaries, appears to provide essential infrastructure for democratic governance that cannot easily be constructed after electoral competition begins.

Francis Fukuyama has elaborated this insight into a tripartite framework: successful political development requires building state capacity, establishing rule of law that binds state actors, and creating mechanisms of democratic accountability—ideally in roughly that order. Denmark achieved this sequence; contemporary developing countries often face the challenge of building all three simultaneously, or worse, with accountability mechanisms arriving first and undermining the construction of the other two.

The mechanism connecting sequence to outcome operates through elite incentives. When electoral competition precedes effective state institutions, politicians face strong incentives toward clientelism and patronage rather than programmatic governance. Winning elections through particularistic distribution of state resources becomes rational when impersonal bureaucratic allocation is absent. Once established, clientelist equilibria prove remarkably persistent—the very electoral competition meant to improve governance instead locks in its dysfunction.

This analysis does not argue that democracy is undesirable or that authoritarianism is preferable. Rather, it suggests that the conditions under which democracy is introduced shape its subsequent quality and stability. The prescription is not less democracy but more attention to the institutional prerequisites that enable democratic competition to produce liberal outcomes rather than populist capture or state predation.

Takeaway

Effective state institutions may need to precede democratization because electoral competition introduced before bureaucratic capacity is established creates incentives for clientelism that prove extremely difficult to reverse once entrenched.

What actually happens when the canonical sequence reverses—when electoral competition arrives before state capacity, rule of law, or consolidated national identity? The comparative record reveals several characteristic pathologies, each reflecting the specific institutional deficit that electoral competition cannot itself remedy and may actively exacerbate.

Democracy before state capacity produces patrimonial competition—elections become mechanisms for capturing state resources rather than choosing policy directions. This pattern characterizes much of post-colonial Africa, where colonial powers bequeathed electoral forms without corresponding bureaucratic infrastructure. Politicians rationally invest in ethnic mobilization and patronage distribution because these strategies win elections when programmatic differentiation is impossible. The result is not authoritarianism but a distinctive form of dysfunctional democracy where elections are competitive yet governance remains extractive.

Democracy before rule of law yields what Fareed Zakaria termed illiberal democracy—competitive elections that select leaders who then operate without constitutional constraint. The critical missing element is horizontal accountability: courts, legislatures, and other institutions capable of checking executive power. When electoral legitimacy becomes the sole source of political authority, executives can claim popular mandates for dismantling the very constraints that distinguish liberal democracy from majoritarian tyranny. Venezuela under Chávez, Hungary under Orbán, and Turkey under Erdoğan illustrate this trajectory.

Perhaps most explosive, democracy before national identity consolidation can activate rather than resolve ethnic or sectarian cleavages. When populations lack shared civic identity—a sense of common membership transcending ethnic, religious, or regional differences—electoral competition becomes census politics. Politicians mobilize exclusive identities; elections count groups rather than aggregating preferences; and the losing minority faces not policy defeat but existential threat. Yugoslavia's dissolution, Iraq after 2003, and numerous African cases demonstrate how premature democratization can catalyze violence when national identity remains contested.

These pathologies are not inevitable, and exceptional cases demonstrate that sequencing effects can sometimes be overcome. But the frequency with which reversed sequences produce characteristic dysfunctions suggests powerful underlying mechanisms. Understanding these patterns is essential for any realistic assessment of democracy promotion strategies and their likely consequences in specific contexts.

Takeaway

Democratization before state capacity encourages patronage, before rule of law enables illiberal majoritarianism, and before national identity consolidation can weaponize electoral competition along ethnic or sectarian lines—each sequence producing distinctive but predictable pathologies.

Why should early institutional choices matter so much for later development? The answer lies in path dependence—the phenomenon whereby initial conditions and early decisions constrain subsequent trajectories through self-reinforcing mechanisms. Political institutions exhibit strong path dependence because they generate increasing returns: the longer an institution operates, the more actors adapt to it, invest in it, and resist its displacement.

Four mechanisms drive institutional lock-in with particular force in political development. Large setup costs mean that creating alternative institutions requires enormous investment; once a clientelist party system exists, building a programmatic alternative demands resources few reformers command. Learning effects mean that actors become increasingly skilled at operating within existing institutional frameworks, making alternatives appear risky and unfamiliar. Coordination effects mean that as more actors orient their behavior around existing institutions, deviating becomes increasingly costly. Adaptive expectations mean that beliefs about institutional persistence become self-fulfilling.

These mechanisms help explain why premature democratization often proves so difficult to remedy. Once clientelist networks capture electoral competition, the very actors who benefit from dysfunction—politicians skilled at patronage distribution, voters dependent on particularistic benefits, bureaucrats whose positions depend on political loyalty—constitute powerful coalitions against reform. The institutions that produce dysfunction also produce the political forces that defend them.

Institutional complementarities compound path dependence. Political institutions rarely operate in isolation; they form interconnected systems where each element supports and is supported by others. Meritocratic bureaucracy complements programmatic parties; independent courts complement constitutional constraints; civic nationalism complements inclusive citizenship. Conversely, patrimonial bureaucracy, clientelist parties, and ethnic politics reinforce each other. Reforming any single element while leaving complements unchanged typically produces either institutional incoherence or reversion to the previous equilibrium.

This analysis suggests that moments of institutional choice matter enormously—perhaps more than contemporary conditions would suggest. Critical junctures, whether independence, regime transition, or constitutional founding, establish parameters within which subsequent politics operates. Getting sequencing wrong at these moments is not easily corrected; getting it right provides enduring advantages. The practical implication for democracy promotion is sobering: failed transitions may leave countries worse off than more patient, sequenced approaches that defer electoral competition until supporting institutions mature.

Takeaway

Early institutional choices constrain later development through increasing returns and complementarities, meaning that premature democratization can create self-reinforcing dysfunctions that prove extraordinarily resistant to subsequent reform efforts.

The sequencing thesis challenges both optimistic and pessimistic assumptions about political development. Against democratic triumphalism, it insists that the timing and ordering of reforms shapes outcomes as much as democratic forms themselves. Against developmental authoritarianism, it recognizes that authoritarian state-building carries its own pathologies and offers no guarantee of eventual liberalization.

The practical implications for democracy promotion are neither simple prescription nor counsel of despair. Rather, they demand diagnostic precision about specific institutional deficits and strategic patience in addressing them. Supporting state capacity, rule of law, and civic identity formation may sometimes take priority over accelerating electoral competition—a difficult message for democratic advocates.

Political development remains genuinely difficult because sequences that worked in one context may fail in another, and because the actors who could implement better sequences often lack the incentives to do so. Yet understanding sequential dynamics at least clarifies the stakes and illuminates the mechanisms through which institutional choices ramify across time.