In many, if not most, modernizing countries elections serve only to enhance the power of disruptive and often reactionary social forces and to tear down the structure of public authority. ‘In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men,’ Madison warned in The Federalist, No. 51, ‘the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.’ In many modernizing countries governments are still unable to perform the first function, much less the second. The primary problem is not liberty but the creation of a legitimate public order. Men may, of course, have order without liberty, but they cannot have liberty without order. Authority has to exist before it can be limited, and it is authority that is in scarce supply in those modernizing countries where government is at the mercy of alienated intellectuals, rambunctious colonels, and rioting students.
Huntington, Samuel P. 1968. Political Order in Changing Societies. Yale University Press, s. 7-8.
Björn Östbring 