State capacity and political regime stability

Abstract

Two recent strands of research have proposed that state capacity facilitates autocratic and democratic survival, respectively. While convincing arguments sustain each of these expectations, prior research has neglected a crucial distinction with respect to state capacity: that between monopoly on violence and administrative effectiveness. In this article, we first formulate propositions about the relationship between each of these different aspects of state capacity and political regime stability. We then subject these propositions to empirical assessment through cross-national, statistical analysis. Our findings show that state capacity does indeed tend to enhance regime stability in both autocracies and democracies. Yet, the analyses also reveal that what primarily matters in autocracies is the monopoly on violence whereas administrative effectiveness is what stabilizes democracies. Finally, we discuss alternative interpretations of the patterns and conclude that our results go a long way toward making sense of apparent inconsistencies in the findings of previous studies.