Francis Fukuyama on the Financial Crisis | FiveBooks | The Browser

http://thebrowser.com/interviews/francis-fukuyama-on-financial-crisis?page=3

But if authoritarian states need more accountability, you can make the case that democratic political systems have been paralysed by the multiplication of checks and balances over time. That really creates a situation of what I call "vetocracy". There are no forcing mechanisms to make the polity take a difficult choice, but there is enough participation that everybody can block things that they don't like. In the US we have a particularly severe form of this because our constitution mandates many more checks and balances and many more vetoes in political decision-making than do the constitutions and basic laws of other societies. The economist Mancur Olson was right, I think, that over long periods of peace and prosperity, the vested interests that take advantage of this kind of political system tend to multiply. So I would relate our current problem to a bad institutional set of rules.

---SPSmith