" One of the most intriguing questions of our time is why in the developing countries their newly established liberal political institutions - set up with great hopes and idealism - survived in a handful of them and not in others. Even in countries where they did survive, the nature of infraction against them was brutal and the effectiveness of their resilience against it uncertain.

One of the least explored areas in this respect is whether the developing countries and their elite are capable of learning from their past experiences - despite their political passivity, gullibility and cynicism - how to develop patterns of political conduct which will be widely viewed as proper and fruitful. To put it another way, whether they would be able to learn to strike a balance
between what is normatively desirable and what is politically possible in operating public institutions and in dealing with political adversaries. What then are the problems in their learning and assimilating such normative-pragmatic dos and don'ts?

The area where such problems can be fruitfully examined is the area of political society where different kinds of normative-pragmatic mix and imbalance affect the operation, effectiveness and survival of public institutions. Attempts at overly normative commitments (of personal morality, religion or secular ideology) and an overly pragmatic approach uncommitted to political values (of selfish, corrupt and cynical use of political power) often weaken the operations of liberal political institutions. Hence the need for a normative-pragmatic balance. "

― , Political Society in Developing Countries