The Decline and Rise of Democracy, a new book by David Stasavage, a political scientist at New York University, reviews the history of democracy, from “early democracy” to “modern democracy.” I review the book in the just-out Fall issue of Regulation. One short quote of my review about the plight of modern democracy in America:

[Stasavage] notes the “tremendous expansion of the ability of presidents to rule by executive order.” Presidential powers, he explains, “have sometimes been expanded by presidents who cannot be accused of having authoritarian tendencies, such as Barack Obama, only to have this expanded power then used by Donald Trump.” We could, or course, as well say that the new powers grabbed by Trump will likely be used by a future Democratic president “who cannot be accused of authoritarian tendencies,” or perhaps who might legitimately be so accused.

The book is a book of history and political theory, not a partisan book. But the history of democracy has implications for today. An interesting one is how bureaucracy typically helped rulers prevent the development of democracy. Another quote from  my review—Stasavage deals with imperial China and I compare with today’s America:

At the apogee of the Han dynasty, at the beginning of the first millennium CE, there was one bureaucrat for every 440 subjects in the empire. … In the United States, which is at the low end of government bureaucracies in the rich world, public employees at all levels of government translate into one bureaucrat for 15 residents (about one for 79 at the federal level only).

If you read my review in the paper version of Regulation, beware. I made an error in my estimate for the federal bureaucracy and the printed version says “37” instead of “79”. It is corrected in the electronic version. Mea culpa.