Abstract
This article studies the legacy of local dynamics of the War of Independence in local state building in Mexico. The analysis shows that municipalities where local militias were organized have a higher number of public servants and a larger budget per capita in the early 1900s than municipalities with an insurgent legacy, relative to those with no conflict. The results hold when restricting the sample to neighbors and controlling for geographic and economic factors. Historical evidence supports existing theories of intra-elite conflict while highlighting the role of local fiscal councils in municipalities with a legacy of local militias. Decentralization during and after the war strengthened local elites, while the negotiated war termination added a political-elite layer of insurgent leaders, born in conflict with colonial-era economic elites. These findings suggest that the local dynamics of civil warfare can have long-lasting effects on state building, boosting local state capacity in some regions and not in others.
Highlights
Civil wars are typically portrayed as dampening governments’ efforts to increase their capacities, fiscal or other
The three types of dynamic with militias or insurgents are positively correlated with local bureaucracy in 1900, relative to regions with no conflict (Table 2), yet the magnitude of the coefficients on militia recapture and local militias is higher than that for insurgents
Our analysis puts forth that war-driven institutions and local elite conflicts resulting from the dynamics of civil warfare may have enduring implications for local state building
Summary
Our empirical results show that municipalities that managed to organize and finance a local militia during the war years have higher levels of local state capacity in the long term These municipalities (and more so those with militia recapture) have more public servants per one thousand people in 1900 and higher per capita budgets in 1910 than municipalities with only an insurgent presence, relative to municipalities with no conflict. Many contemporary conflicts go beyond the traditional civil war versus external war divide, sharing features of both types with long-term effects at the micro level In this context, giving careful consideration to local war dynamics is necessary to understand the long-term state-building legacies of warfare
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