I’ve promised to write about the surveillance drone that I’ve been building over the past couple of months. I have always wanted to have my own drone that could send back a live video feed. This is partly inspired by products like the AeroVironment RQ-11 Raven, which is currently in use by the US military, and which you can view in action here. The Raven is basically just a glorified RC airplane, with a sophisticated landing system that allows it to be recovered by a soldier without great pilot skills (which is one reason they cost around $35,000 each).

To get to the bottom line, my drone has taken its first flights, the results of which you can see in a video of my office at Stanford and in a local park.

When my kids were younger I looked into buying an RC helicopter for this purpose and actually tried to wire a camera on a car, but the consumer technology wasn’t up to snuff back then. Now it is.

Instead of using an RC airplane I went with a helicopter for a couple of reasons. I could test the helicopter in my back yard, while an airplane would require a runway. Helicopters are better for precise, close-in surveillance because they can hover. The big drawback is that they are very hard to fly; indeed, learning to fly an RC helicopter is the single biggest impediment to the use of this kind of drone.  (Among other reasons, they’re hard to fly because left and right switch meanings on the joystick when the helicopter is pointing toward you.)

I slowly worked my way up the hierarchy of helicopters, from a Syma S107 to a Blade CX2 to a T-Rex 450 (pictured above) to a DJI Innovations F450 quadcopter (below), which is the platform I used for the videos. It is very difficult to learn to fly a helicopter without a simulator; I’ve logged quite a number of hours on RealFlight 6. While many people use the single main-rotor T-Rexs or their clones as platforms for cameras, they are not very stable; their main purpose is acrobatic flying (they can be flown upside down, among other things, because of the main rotor collective pitch). The practical implication of this is that you have to constantly repair your crashed helicopters, which costs lots of money and takes lots of time.

The DJI F450 quadcopter on the other hand uses an extremely sophisticated Naza controller with a three-axis accelerometer that can sense where the machine is going, and automatically corrects for movement. As a result, they are stable and easy to fly. You still need basic piloting skills, and it is often hard, as with many quadcopters, to see where the nose is pointing, making it hard to maneuver properly when at the limit of visual range. But they hover beautifully and have the lifting capacity to loft a small digital recorder which I used for the videos above. I’m currently using an old Sony flip video camera.

It is extremely easy to build a drone now that can do not just surveillance but can carry rather large payloads.  If you want to see how large some of these planes get, check out this video of a model Airbus A380.  I don’t have to spell out the implications of this.  I want to have my drone before the government makes them illegal.  The US has been fighting such low-tech enemies lately that we haven’t thought through the nature of a world in which lots of people have sophisticated drones, not just other countries but private individuals.  One somewhat worrying thing is that virtually all of this equipment comes from China or Taiwan.

The next stage in this project is to equip the drone with telemetry. I’ve bought the package that includes a real time video transmitter and receiver, camera, and telemetry system that will send back GPS data on the drone’s location, heading, airspeed, etc. This requires, among other things, a ham radio license.  Stay tuned.

I have, to put it mildly, been somewhat astonished at the heated reaction that my blog post “Do Institutions Matter?” has provoked, culminating in a letter from the Hungarian State Secretary for Communication, Zoltán Kovács, to The American Interest complaining about my piece and contesting various points in it. I’m now one of the few Americans to have a web site in Hungarian devoted to my mistakes! In many ways, the vehemence of the response and the extremely uncivil comments that Hungarians have made about each other is a disturbing confirmation that something has gone badly off track with Hungarian democracy.

Let me begin by responding to the criticisms of Mr. Kovács and other commenters about my misunderstanding of the new Hungarian constitution. I readily admit that I made some factual errors, for example that term limits apply to ordinary and not Constitutional Court judges, and for misspelling Fidesz. I’m sorry for this and will be more careful in future fact-checking (this was after all just an unedited blog post).

However, it seems to me that Minister Kovács and the others completely missed the point of my article. Its bottom line was to say that, on paper, the new constitution doesn’t look that bad. As I noted in the post, a classic British Westminster system centralizes far more power in a prime minister and the majority party in Parliament than does the new Hungarian basic law. The problem, I suggested, was not in the formal allocation of powers, but rather in the way that the Orbán government was using those powers. The threat to democracy in Hungary is thus not new institutions per se, but an old political culture that is re-emerging.

(Even on the narrow point about Hungarian judges, my critics missed the more important underlying issue that the Fidesz government has been busy weakening judicial independence through its creation of a National Judicial Office controlled by parliament and hence answerable to the party. The attempt to charge a former Prime Minister with the crime of economic mismanagement is more worthy of Yanukovich’s Ukraine than Hungary. A true rule of law demands much more institutional autonomy for the judiciary that this.)

The Orbán government has undertaken a number of measures that suggest that it doesn’t really understand the norms that must underlie a healthy liberal democracy. Using its supermajority in the Diet, it has enacted not just the new Constitution but a flurry of new laws, almost all of which centralize power in its own hands. Affected institutions include the National Bank of Hungary, controlled now by a Monetary Council largely in turn loyal to  Fidesz–what’s gotten the IMF upset. The supervisory powers of formerly independent watchdogs like the Budgetary Council, parliamentary ombudsmen, and the Health Insurance Inspectorate have all been either eliminated or reduced. Local governments have lost powers to the center with regard to education, health, and disaster preparedness, while control over gymnasia in the capital has been put under a new government regulator and the autonomy of universities curtailed. The autonomy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, as well as public foundations in the arts and sciences, is being more closely controlled by the government.

Any one of these measures in themselves might be justified had they been the product of a prolonged and open public debate. But this huge mass of new legislation was passed hurriedly to take advantage of the government’s present supermajority, giving potential critics no time to even digest the content of the laws. In many cases, Fidesz, which won only a bare majority of the popular vote (52.7%), has embedded its own policy preferences in ways that will be very hard to undo should it lose power in the future.  A liberal democracy is not just about majority rule; its proper functioning rests (as it has in England) on the respect that majorities show towards minorities, and the ability of the society as a whole to engage in informed deliberation. (Not, by the way, something that’s in very good shape here in the US at the moment.)

I said in my earlier post that the Orbán government displays an “authoritarian thin skin” and this is something that I would doubly underline. Perhaps the most disturbing thing happening in Hungary is the centralization of power in a government-controlled Media Authority, and its intimidation of opposition media. Taking away the frequency of an opposition-aligned radio station is something right out of Hugo Chavez’s playbook.

A number of other commentators on my earlier post questioned the premise of my piece, “Do Institutions Matter?” Let me say clearly, of course they matter. Modern political order and economic prosperity rest on good institutions, which was the subject of my recent The Origins of Political Order (which, incidentally, has a whole chapter on medieval Hungary and will be published in Hungarian in the near future). The point I was trying to make is that sometimes the exact specification of democratic institutions matter much less than the informal modes of behavior of political actors. Systems like the British one with few checks and balances can nonetheless be run moderately, while others with lots of checks can behave at best decisively and at worst tyrannically. The kinds of institutional changes being made in Hungary now will matter, but what matters much more is the way that the government is using its present powers. Confiscating private pensions may be legally within the authority of many governments, but it is very unwise policy.

I first visited Budapest May 1989 while accompanying then Secretary of State James Baker while working for the US State Department as a young political appointee in the Bush administration. I remember this as a moment of incredible excitement, as Poland and Hungary seemed poised to leave the Communist camp and become genuine democracies. The last time I visited Budapest, Ferenc Gyurcsány was prime minister and I could well appreciate the degree of disgust that people felt toward the government at the time. The degree of political polarization anger evident then was very disturbing, and I could see why people wanted a change. But governments do not rebuild trust by acting the way that Orbán and Fidesz have.

Hungary has always represented two very positive things to me: first, a small country that has produced a disproportionate number of great physicists, mathematicians, composers, artists, writers, and intellectuals. Second, it was a model for the former Communist world in its rapid transition to democracy and a market economy. Indeed, in 1222, seven years after the English Magna Carta, the Hungarian King Andrew II was forced by his nobles to accept the Golden Bull (Aranybulla), which was one of first examples of constitutional limits being placed on the powers of a European monarch. (You can read more about this in my new book.) So it would be both a surprise and a very great shame if Hungary were to take the lead once again, but in the wrong direction toward the incremental dismantling of democracy and constitutional government.

My earlier blog post on Hungary’s new constitution has elicited a large and often angry response from some Hungarians, and now the Hungarian State Secretary for Communication, Zoltán Kovács, has written a critical letter to The American Interest that you can read here.   I will be responding to all of this in a few days, so stay tuned…

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 to a rule of law that constrains the executive. The reason for this is simple: it seems obvious to me that countries can be better or worse governed regardless of whether they are liberal democracies or not. Singapore is not Zimbabwe, despite the fact that neither is democratic. Separating the quality of the state from either the rule of law or democratic accountability is one of the foundational ideas in The Origins of Political Order.

The reason I want to make this separation is to then be able to empirically evaluate the relationship of governance to democracy and the rule of law. We Americans tend to believe that democracy is an intrinsic part of good governance and that more democracy means better quality government. This view is also embedded in many efforts by the World Bank, DfID, and USAID to promote good governance through the promotion of greater transparency, grass roots organization, and democratic accountability in general. Many existing governance measures like the World Bank Institute’s Worldwide Governance Indicators include “Voice and Accountability” (a.k.a. democracy) and Rule of Law; the union of the two is implicit in terms like “democratic governance.”

However, this postulated relationship remains just a theory that remains subject to more empirical testing. One can think of many ways in which greater democratic participation actually weakens the quality of governance. One case happened in the United States when Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828, as a result of the broadening of the franchise in many states in that period. Jackson argued (1) that since his party won the election, he should get to appoint federal officials; and (2) that there was no job in the US government that was so difficult that any ordinary American couldn’t do it. This was the beginning of the patronage system in the US, in which the federal bureaucracy was controlled by the two political parties and in which jobs turned over with every election cycle. This began to end when President Garfield was assassinated by a frustrated office-seeker, which led to the Pendleton Act in 1883 and the establishment of the first US Civil Service Commission. For the first time, bureaucratic appointments began to rely on examinations and professional credentials, something the Chinese had come up with more than 2100 years earlier. Many of the Progressive Era reforms aimed at stopping patronage and clientelism on both a federal and municipal level involved shielding civil servants from political influence, and hence less democracy.

I have no doubt that more democratic accountability will improve governance in many poor countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. East Asia is different, however, insofar as it has a very long tradition of relatively high-quality centralized bureaucratic government. This begins with Shang Yang’s reforms in the early state of Qin, and continues to this day in the extraordinary record of the Chinese Communist Party in bringing China through one of the most complex economic transformations one can imagine. Many East Asians today wonder whether rapid democratization will in fact help or hurt the quality of governance there.  What they don’t have is either democratic accountability or rule of law.

Conversely, I would argue that the quality of governance in the US tends to be low precisely because of a continuing tradition of Jacksonian populism. Americans with their democratic roots generally do not trust elite bureaucrats to the extent that the French, Germans, British, or Japanese have in years past. This distrust leads to micromanagement by Congress through proliferating rules and complex, self-contradictory legislative mandates which make poor quality governance a self-fulfilling prophecy. The US is thus caught in a low-level equilibrium trap, in which a hobbled bureaucracy validates everyone’s view that the government can’t do anything competently. The origins of this, as Martin Shefter pointed out many years ago, is due to the fact that democracy preceded bureaucratic consolidation in contrast to European democracies that arose out of aristocratic regimes.

This is not to say that I think the quality of governance is better in China than in the US. The Chinese government’s lack of accountability allows it to make fast decisions and put massive infrastructure projects in place rapidly.  But more often than not this comes at the expense of the rights of ordinary citizens who are in response reacting with often violent social protest. The high-speed rail accident last summer, which the authorities tried immediately to cover up, reveals a very dysfunctional Railway Ministry that even the CCP has not been able to control.  China’s apparently good record today contains many time bombs that will go off in the future.  I believe that, down the road, China will have to permit downwards accountability–a.k.a. democracy–precisely if it is to maintain good governance.  But in the short run, the relationship is not so clear.

I discuss these issues at greater length in a paper on authoritarian government in Asia for the Journal of Democracy, and a draft discussion paper on how to define and measure governance for The Governance Project.

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 governments should do, or else try to equip students with high-powered techniques to achieve the same end.

As I’ve gotten older, however, I’ve come to realize that the emphasis put on public policy is mistaken, and that what we should be focusing on and teaching is basic public administration.

There, I’ve said it. Uttering the words “public administration” usually puts people into an instant stupor, or else sends them scrambling to check for messages on their iPhones. But in fact, the biggest problems we face in contemporary governance are often not related to what the government should do, but rather how to actually get the existing machinery to implement a policy that everyone can agree upon.

There are no end of examples of this. In many developing countries, before you can even address the question of the best public school curriculum, you have to solve the problem of getting teachers to show up for their classes every day. My Stanford colleague Scott Rozelle describes an initiative in rural China to get school principals to encourage anemic children to take daily vitamin tablets, the cognitive advantages of which had been proven beyond a doubt. This policy was stymied when the principals gave out eggs instead (which contain no iron), and the parents could not be persuaded to comply–and this in an authoritarian country where everyone assumes the government’s orders will be obeyed.

When it comes to the United States, we of course argue about the direction of policy–higher or lower taxes, whether to build a pipeline through the Midwest, etc. But anyone who has spent time in government realizes that the real questions that preoccupy officials have to do with implementation, or rather, the impossibility of implementing many desirable policies because of the huge number of constraints under which modern governments work. This is certainly the observation of another Stanford colleague, Jeremy Weinstein, who has just returned from Stanford after a stint on the Obama administration’s National Security Council working on democracy and development issues. Despite huge efforts to reform the civilian side of our foreign policy apparatus, aid programs in critical countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan are a mess. Poor implementation undercuts US foreign policy goals, as in the case of the botched occupation of Iraq.

Fixing the public sector therefore has got to be a top priority for anyone interested in public policy. In countries where public services work relatively efficiently, like those in Scandinavia, people are willing to tolerate high tax levels because they think they’re getting something back. In the US, however, as in Latin America, many people object to higher taxes because they are convinced that the government will simply waste their money. The inability to implement effectively affects what policies will be chosen; the Obama administration’s arguments for universal health care in the US would have been much more persuasive if people thought the government could deliver on its promises.

So: stop worrying about public policy, and go back to humbler concerns about public administration. Solve that, and you’ll rise to the top politically.