I very much appreciate Carles Boix’s review of Political Order and Political Decay, and would in fact agree with him about many of the things that are missing from my book. Let me respond to several of the specific points he raises.

A central issue concerns Boix’s observation that my three institutional legs—state, rule of law, and accountability—are not entirely independent of one another. State and rule of law in particular overlap considerably: The ability to enforce laws is both a component of state capacity and part of the rule of law. Rule of law and democracy, for their part, are alternative ways of constraining state power and often have worked hand in glove to that end. Nonetheless, separating these three pillars conceptually is critical. Many recent institutionalists (see Douglass C. North, John Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History, 2009, and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, 2013) have not been sufficiently precise in distinguishing between them. As a result, they are not able to address long-standing questions, such as whether it is better to sequence introduction of a liberal rule of law prior to extending the franchise, or how the trade-off between state power and legal checks is to be made.

Boix notes that I do not provide adequate evidence linking a state’s Weberian qualities to government performance and, later on, to economic growth. This is, in fact, one of the most understudied issues in contemporary political science. One such effort was that of Peter Evans and James Rauch (“Bureaucratic Structure and Bureaucratic Performance in Less Developed Countries,” Journal of Public Economics 75 [2000]: 49–71), who did in fact see this linkage, but they covered only 37 countries and it was never followed up in a systematic way. More recently, Bo Rothstein (The Quality of Government: Corruption, Social Trust, and Inequality in International Perspective, 2011) has done a number of studies that show a good correlation between impartiality, which is arguably at the core of a Weberian state, and a variety of measures of state performance. Others like Katherine Bersch, Sérgio Praça, and Matthew M. Taylor (“State Capacity, Bureaucratic Politicization, and Corruption in the Brazilian State,” Governance, n.d.) have linked the Weberian characteristics of autonomy and capacity to performance in a single country (Brazil), but do not extend this cross-nationally. This is an area where much more research needs to be done.

Finally, Boix is correct to point out that my book—unlike his—does not establish a clear link between the different institutional characteristics I emphasize and economic growth. That is correct; my primary aim was to explain political rather than economic development. My general observation is that there are probably some minimal institutions necessary for growth. But contrary to many contemporary institutionalists, there is not a clear set of institutional conditions that are either necessary or sufficient to explain historically observed growth (see Ricardo Hausmann, Lant Pritchett, and Dani Rodrik, “Growth Accelerations.” Journal of Economic Growth, 10 [no. 4, 2005]: 303–29). This is the problem with macro theorizing about development more generally: The underlying phenomenon is so complex that most elegant theories reducing explanatory variables to a small number are likely to fail. Nonetheless, we have to keep trying, and I appreciate Carles Boix’s important contributions to this effort.