This paper criticizes the epistemic foundations of democratic state-building, which are derived from a model of political transitions according to which liberal democratic institutions will transform a hitherto authoritarian and troubled country into a more prosperous and stable society and, therefore, foreign interventions to establish these institutions are realistic and worthy investments, provided they are properly planned based on knowledge of what has worked elsewhere. This expectation is based upon two epistemological premises. The first premise, linearity, is that social and institutional change exhibits identifiable input–output relations connecting socioeconomic conditions and outcomes. The second premise, ergodicity, is that these relations, inferred from past samples, provide reliable probabilistic projections about future outcomes, which can guide the focus of policy interventions. Drawing from the study of complex systems, the paper indicates why these two premises offer a flawed conception of political transitions and why radical and large-scale interventions, such as state-building, will tend to generate unintended consequences rather than the planned effect.

中文翻译：

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民主建国的谬误

本文批评了民主国家建设的认识基础，这些基础源自一个政治转型模型，根据该模型，自由民主制度将把一个迄今为止专制和陷入困境的国家转变为一个更加繁荣和稳定的社会，因此，外国干预以建立这些机构是现实和有价值的投资，前提是它们是根据对其他地方的运作情况的了解进行适当规划的。这种期望基于两个认识论前提。第一个前提，线性，是社会和制度变化表现出可识别的投入-产出关系，将社会经济条件和结果联系起来。第二个前提，遍历性，是这些关系，从过去的样本中推断出来，提供了关于未来结果的可靠概率预测，可以指导政策干预的重点。通过对复杂系统的研究，该论文指出了为什么这两个前提提供了一个有缺陷的政治转型概念，以及为什么激进和大规模的干预，如国家建设，往往会产生意想不到的后果，而不是计划中的效果。