Why do some nations fail while others succeed? How can we compare the political capacity of a totalitarian regime to a democracy? Are democracies always more efficient? The Performance of Nations answers these key questions by providing a powerful new tool for measuring governments' strengths and weaknesses. Allowing researchers to look inside countries down to the local level as well as to compare across societies and over time, the book demonstrates convincingly that political performance is the missing link in measuring power and military capability. For the theorist, political performance...