# Cleaning up institutions without a vetocracy: our week 2 answer on radical centrism and the state

> Spain can clean up its institutions and keep a state that gets things done by changing who controls careers, putting a clock on every veto and moving monitoring close to the people affected. Fukuyama's three pillars and Dahlström and Lapuente's research point to merit careers that depend on peers. Dunkelman's vetocracy warns against adding checkpoints with no deadline. Ostrom shows monitors who answer to the community work, and Popper asks for reforms tested and revised one step at a time.

- URL: https://www.radicalcentre.eu/en/articles/cleaning-up-institutions-without-vetocracy-week-2-answer
- Language: en
- Publisher: radical centre / centro radical
- Published: 2026-10-26
- Topic: Democracy & institutions
- Author: radical centre
- Licence: CC BY 4.0

## Key points

- Week 2 asked how to build a capable state without an overbearing one, starting from the institutional problems in Democracia 21's launch speech.
- The tension all week: every new independent control can become a new veto, and Spain already lived a five-year freeze of its judicial council.
- Research by Charron, Dahlström, Fazekas and Lapuente across 212 European regions found lower corruption risk in procurement where civil servants' careers follow professional criteria.
- Fukuyama's remedy for vetocracy is a stronger, more autonomous bureaucracy; Dunkelman's is to stop boxing government in.
- Our answer: separate careers, a clock on every veto, local monitors accountable to the community, and reforms tested and revised step by step.

Week 2 of our programme on radical centrism started from a speech and a question. The speech was Miriam González's launch of [Democracia 21](/en/articles/democracia-21-miriam-gonzalez-proposals-radical-centre) on 10 October, with its ten problems about a politics that has stopped answering for itself. The question came from the original programme: how do you build a capable state without an overbearing one? Over seven days we read Francis Fukuyama, Marc Dunkelman, Jennifer Pahlka, Elinor Ostrom, Albert Hirschman, John Rawls, Karl Popper and Donald Warren, and we took every problem in the speech in turn.

One tension ran through the whole week. Almost every clean-up proposal adds a control: an independent watchdog, a qualified majority, a new court, a ban. Each control is also a place where something can be stopped. Spain knows how that ends. The judicial council's terms expired in December 2018 and it was renewed in June 2024, after more than five years in which either large party could block the appointment. Clean institutions that can't be appointed are a strange kind of victory.

## What the readings say

Fukuyama gives the frame. As Branko Milanovic summarises *Political Order and Political Decay*, good government stands on three pillars: a strong state, the rule of law and accountability. Fukuyama argues that countries which democratised before building a professional civil service, Greece and Italy among them, slid into clientelism, while Germany, which built the bureaucracy first, did not. He also names two forms of decay that fit Spain uncomfortably well. One is institutional rigidity, of which vetocracy is the clearest case. The other is what he calls repatrimonialisation, where networks of friends and favours take back what the impersonal state had won.

In his 2013 essay for *The American Interest*, Fukuyama described vetocracy as a system of checks and balances that makes majority decisions very hard. He also had a remedy that surprises people who expect more controls: give the bureaucracy more autonomy. He warned that some popular fixes, such as stronger party discipline or more executive power, could backfire when politics is polarised. Brown University's summary of Dunkelman's *Why Nothing Works* makes the same point from the left: reformers who feared the establishment boxed government in, and now nearly anyone can stifle progress. We set the two authors against each other on [day 12](/en/articles/fukuyama-vs-dunkelman-more-checks-or-more-capacity).

The most useful evidence of the week came from Gothenburg. Nicholas Charron, Carl Dahlström, Mihály Fazekas and Victor Lapuente surveyed more than 18,000 public employees in 212 European regions and matched their answers with over 1.4 million procurement contracts. Corruption risks were significantly lower where civil servants' careers followed professional criteria. They estimated that raising EU regions to the level of merit found in Baden-Württemberg could save 13 to 20 billion euros a year. The clean-up here happens through careers. Nobody added a veto.

## Our answer

We would clean up Spain's institutions with four moves, each of which makes the state more honest and keeps it able to act.

**Separate the careers.** A civil servant whose promotion depends on professional peers has little reason to bend a contract for a minister, and a minister has little to offer in return. That is the logic of Dahlström and Lapuente's work and the reason we backed [merit appointments and the cut in advisers](/en/articles/merit-spain-administration-cut-advisers). It also answers Pahlka: a professional service with stable careers is the delivery capacity that *Recoding America* says governments lack.

**Put a clock on every veto.** Independent bodies are good. Appointments that depend on a qualified majority need a deadline and a default, so that a blocking minority can delay a nomination for a few months and no longer. We proposed this for [oversight bodies](/en/articles/oversight-bodies-without-politicians-spain-proposal), for the [renewal of institutions](/en/articles/grand-bargain-spain-institutions-renewal-deadlines) and, today, for every reform in the [five-column exercise](/en/articles/five-column-exercise-ten-problems-democracia-21).

**Move monitoring close to the people affected.** Ostrom's *Governing the Commons*, in Cambridge's description, shows that neither the state nor the market has been uniformly successful at managing shared resources, and that users can govern them for long periods. A review of 91 studies by Michael Cox and colleagues found very strong support for one of her principles: monitors who are accountable to the community. Valencia's [Water Tribunal](/en/articles/valencia-water-tribunal-ostrom-accountability) has done it for centuries. In practice this means published data that neighbours, journalists and local councils can use, and citizens drawn by lot to [scrutinise appointments](/en/articles/sortition-as-a-check-on-power-proposal).

**Reform piece by piece, and check.** Popper's case for piecemeal engineering, which we applied to [sunset clauses](/en/articles/sunset-clauses-evaluation-popper-piecemeal-reform), fits a country with low trust. Small reforms, each with a named evaluator and a review date, can be corrected before they harden into the next rigid institution.

## The synthesis

The left contributes the demand to protect public institutions from capture, by party networks and by private interests that buy influence through favours that are perfectly legal. Fukuyama's essay describes exactly that kind of gift exchange in Washington. The right and the liberal market tradition contribute merit, efficient procedures and fewer political appointees. What belongs to neither is the idea that clean institutions come from design: careers that depend on peers, a deadline on every veto and monitors who answer to the people affected.

That is our week 2 answer to the programme's question. Democratic government can still do things when the people who run it owe their careers to their competence and every check comes with a clock, and when people outside can see the results. Next week the same tools go to work on housing, where most of the vetoes sit in land and permits.

## FAQ

### What is the radical-centre answer to institutional reform in Spain?

Clean up by redesigning incentives and keep the state able to act. Civil servants' careers should depend on professional peers, every veto should come with a deadline and a default, monitoring should sit close to those affected, and reforms should be evaluated and revised.

### Do independent oversight bodies create vetocracy?

They can. A body whose appointment needs a qualified majority can be frozen by either side, as Spain's judicial council was from 2018 to 2024. A deadline with a default appointment keeps the independence and removes the freeze.

### What does Fukuyama say about fixing vetocracy?

In his 2013 essay on American political decay, Fukuyama argued that strengthening the autonomy of the bureaucracy is key, and warned that some popular fixes, such as more party discipline, could backfire under polarisation.

## Sources

- [Political Decay in Our Time: A review of Fukuyama's vol. 2](https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/04/12/2019/political-decay-our-time-review-fukuyamas-vol-2), Global Policy Journal (Branko Milanovic) (2019)
- [The Decay of American Political Institutions](https://www.the-american-interest.com/2013/12/08/the-decay-of-american-political-institutions/), The American Interest (Francis Fukuyama) (2013)
- [Why Nothing Works (research brief)](https://home.watson.brown.edu/research/research-briefs/why-nothing-works), Watson School, Brown University (2025)
- [Careers, Connections, and Corruption Risks: Investigating the Impact of Bureaucratic Meritocracy on Public Procurement Processes](https://api.repository.cam.ac.uk/server/api/core/bitstreams/291a273d-d0fd-4b1f-b9b7-a786d593c445/content), Journal of Politics (Charron, Dahlström, Fazekas and Lapuente) (2017)
- [A Review of Design Principles for Community-based Natural Resource Management](https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss4/art38/main.html), Ecology and Society (Cox, Arnold and Villamayor Tomás) (2010)
- [Governing the Commons](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/governing-the-commons/7AB7AE11BADA84409C34815CC288CD79), Cambridge University Press (1990)