Abstract

We provide a potential explanation, based on the “political agenda effect”, for the absence of, and unwillingness to create, centralized power in the hands of a national state. State centralization induces citizens of different backgrounds, interests, regions or ethnicities to coordinate their demands in the direction of more general-interest public goods, and away from parochial transfers. This political agenda effect raises the effectiveness of citizen demands and induces them to increase their investments in conflict capacity. In the absence of state centralization, citizens do not necessarily band together because of another force, the escalation effect, which refers to the fact that elites from different regions will join forces in response to the citizens doing so. Such escalation might hurt the citizen groups that have already solved their collective action problem (though it will benefit others). Anticipating the interplay of the political agenda and escalation effects, under some parameter configurations, political elites strategically opt for a non-centralized state. We show how the model generates non-monotonic comparative statics in response to the increase in the value or effectiveness of public goods (so that centralized states and public good provision may be absent precisely when they are more beneficial for society). We also suggest how the formation of a social democratic party may sometimes induce state centralization (by removing the commitment value of a non-centralized state), and how elites may sometimes prefer partial state centralization.

Highlights

  • There is a great deal of variation across societies both historically and today in the degree to which a national state has achieved the Weberian monopoly of violence over its territory, developed the authority and the capacity to enforce laws, maintain law and order, and raise taxes and provide public goods — a vector of attributes that social scientists call “state capacity”

  • At the center of our story is a new political economic force which we have called the political agenda effect. This effect captures the phenomenon that state centralization changes the nature of the societal conflict against the state and the political elites that control it

  • If this political agenda effect is sufficiently powerful, the elites prefer to live with a non-centralized state

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Summary

Introduction

There is a great deal of variation across societies both historically and today in the degree to which a national state has achieved the Weberian monopoly of violence over its territory, developed the authority and the capacity to enforce laws, maintain law and order, and raise taxes and provide public goods — a vector of attributes that social scientists call “state capacity”. We provide a new argument here based on the political agenda effect — public goods politics emerge when citizens organize collectively, a process which leads to a demand for public as opposed to parochial transfers This argument provides a potential explanation for the findings of Anderson et al (2015), which document how local elites in Maharashtra, India are able to dominate politics and curtail the provision of public goods, among other things, by clientelism, aimed at preventing coordination by non-elite citizens. The ideas discussed in the Introduction are conceptualized in the context of a model consisting of regional heterogeneity though, as noted there, other dimensions of heterogeneity would be entirely analogous

Preferences and technology
Timing of events and equilibrium
Equilibrium
Choice of conflict capacity
Equilibrium state centralization
Main result
Extension
The role of a social democratic party
Partial state centralization
Concluding remarks
Full Text
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