Fukuyama vs Dunkelman: does Spain need more checks on power or more state capacity?

Spain is about to add a lot of independent control. Democracia 21's launch speech asked for watchdogs without politicians, specialised anti-corruption courts and a prosecution service that answers to Parliament, and we've mapped those proposals one by one this fortnight. Two books read side by side say how to do it without freezing the state: Francis Fukuyama's Political Order and Political Decay (2014) and Marc J. Dunkelman's Why Nothing Works (PublicAffairs, 2025).

Fukuyama: three pillars, and a warning about one of them

Fukuyama's question, in the reviewers' shorthand, is how a country gets to Denmark. His answer is three institutions that have to grow together: an effective state, the rule of law and democratic accountability. China has the first without the third; India, as Sophie McBain summarises in The Cairo Review, has accountable leaders and weak state capacity. Sequence matters too. Where a professional civil service came before mass democracy, as in Germany, politics stayed relatively clean; where democracy came first, as in Greece and Italy, parties used public jobs to win votes and clientelism took root. We covered that half of the book in our explainer and in the piece on clientelism and growth.

The second volume ends with decay, and Branko Milanović's review in Global Policy lays out its two forms. One is rigidity: institutions that can no longer adapt, of which vetocracy is the American example, a system where so many actors can block that majorities can barely act. The other is repatrimonialisation: interest groups and politicians trading favours, courts and lawsuits taking over decisions that administrators should make. Fukuyama's United States suffers from both at once. It has too many checks and still lets the powerful capture policy.

Ten years later Fukuyama pushed the point further. In a 2023 lecture to the American Society for Public Administration, published as "In Defense of the Deep State", he argued that every political system has to delegate authority, since elected leaders cannot specify the thousands of daily decisions that running a government requires. He called red tape one of the great scourges of government and warned that procedural controls can slow or block what the state is able to achieve.

Dunkelman: the left built the vetoes

Dunkelman tells the same story from inside American progressivism, and his version is more uncomfortable for the left. He describes two progressive instincts. The Hamiltonian one trusts big institutions to deliver: the Tennessee Valley Authority, the interstate highways, the young Robert Moses. The Jeffersonian one distrusts concentrated power and wants it checked and dispersed. After Moses drove the Cross-Bronx Expressway through East Tremont, and after the 1960s more broadly, the Jeffersonian side won. Environmental review under NEPA, public hearings, standing to sue: each was a reasonable answer to an abuse, and together they gave almost everyone a veto.

His favourite example, in an interview with the Niskanen Center, is the new hall at Penn Station in New York. Nobody opposed it, he says, and yet it couldn't get done; it opened in 2021, decades after it was proposed. His remedy is a phrase worth remembering: give people a voice without a veto. Government has to be able to choose between imperfect alternatives and then move forward. Daniel DiSalvo, reviewing the book for City Journal, calls this a neo-Hamiltonianism and finds the concrete prescriptions vague, which is fair. Dunkelman also accepts openly that the same faster state could build things progressives dislike.

Where they meet

The two books disagree less than their titles suggest. Fukuyama starts from political science and Dunkelman from the history of one movement, and both end up asking for more delegated capacity, held to account in a different way. Both see that checks have a cost, and that the cost falls hardest on the public projects that need many approvals: rail, housing, energy grids.

Spain has a live test. CaixaBank Research reported in April 2026 that Spain had received €55.09bn of the €79.8bn in recovery grants allocated to it, had completed only 54% of the plan's milestones, and that effective public spending financed by the NextGenerationEU funds in 2021–2024 was about €31bn according to Eurostat. Spain now expects to use €22.8bn of the €83.2bn in loans first planned. The gap between money allocated and money actually spent is the kind of cost both authors describe.

A rule for Spain's new watchdogs

The left is right that public power should be able to deliver big collective projects, and right that people affected by a motorway or a housing estate deserve a real voice in it. The right and the market-liberal tradition are right that red tape raises costs and scares away investment, and that a lean, competent administration needs clear rules and room to decide. What neither camp usually says is where the checks should sit in time. Put them after the decision.

That gives one design rule for every proposal in Democracia 21's institutional package. A new watchdog audits results and publishes them; it does not add a prior approval to ordinary decisions. Where a prior approval is truly needed, as with environmental impact or a large contract, it comes with a deadline, and silence counts as consent. Public consultation is open and early, and its answers are published with the reasons for accepting or rejecting them: voice, with no veto. Civil servants get discretion and are judged on what they deliver, through independent evaluation and, for ministers, at the ballot box. Our proposal for oversight bodies already follows this logic: strong watchdogs that inform, audit and sanction, and gain no new power to block.

Fukuyama would recognise it as balance among his three pillars. Dunkelman would recognise a Hamiltonian state that has learned from Moses. Spain gets a cleaner state that can still build a railway on time.