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For the best book published in the U.S. during the previous calendar year on government, politics, or international affairs. The award is supported by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Award Committee: Martha Finnemore, Chair, George Washington Recipient: Jens Meierhenrich, Harvard University Title: The Legacies of Law: Long-Run Consequences of Legal Development in South Africa, 1652-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2008) Citation: Democratization has been a major concern of political scientists, policy makers, and millions of people around the globe. Often observers assume that transitions to democracy entail demolishing non-democratic legacies in order to replace them with principles of equality, liberty, and rule of law. By contrast, this year’s award winner, Jens Meierhenrich, shows how “rules of law” can be a crucial legacy of the non-democratic past. He brilliantly demonstrates how a heritage of faith in law can stabilize expectations and help citizens overcome security dilemmas and commitment problems, thereby producing remarkable democratic outcomes. In developing his counter-intuitive thesis, Meierhenrich synthesizes insights from law and political science to construct a theoretically rigorous and empirically robust analysis of one of the most important transitions of the twentieth century, the establishment of a democratic state in South Africa. He shows how the “rule of law” has two faces: rule of law may buttress non-democratic politics but subsequently play a crucial role in dismantling non-democratic institutions. Drawing on legal theory from the Weimar Republic, he traces the evolution of what he calls the “dual state” in South Africa. Yes, authoritarians have strategic incentives to disregard the law and rule by fiat (the “prerogative state”) but they also have an interest in maintaining some legitimacy for a normative structure of rational law (the “normative state”.) How these two structures evolve through transition is of enormous consequence. Where rational law continues to play a role in decision making, democracy is easier to establish, regardless of whether or not the law is moral or liberal in content. The theoretical framework Meierhenrich constructs to guide his analysis is eclectic and sophisticated, setting legal theory and sociology of law to work in tandem with insights about strategic bargaining. His empirics are extraordinarily rich and wide-ranging. Deep historical analysis of South Africa reveals how the rule of law helped first to institutionalize one of the most undemocratic and inegalitarian of institutions--apartheid--and then to assist in its demise. Insightful comparisons to Chile and Weimar demonstrate the wide-ranging applicability of Meierhenrich’s ideas. |
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