State Capacity

This paper asks whether patrimonial hiring in colonial contexts can originate with local bureaucrats rather than political principals. Using newly digitized personnel records from six decades of British rule in Ghana, the authors examine patterns of hiring for African staff and assess whether meritocratic or patrimonial rules prevailed. The study contributes to debates about early state-building by highlighting bureaucrats’ potential agency in shaping personnel choices, especially where political leaders were socially distant from governed communities.

A field experiment in South Africa shows that increasing the state's ability to locate households reduces citizens' readiness to take part in mob vigilantism.

Travel time to national and regional capitals is used as a proxy for local state capacity. Comprehensive panel data were constructed to capture how changes in physical access to state centers shaped development across Africa.

This paper investigates whether the arrival of railroads affected the state’s ability to implement national school policy in nineteenth-century Sweden by making school inspectors more able to monitor remote schools. Using fine-grained local education data, the authors compare communities reachable by rail to those that were not and assess differences in school permanence and curricular content. The paper argues for a causal interpretation for at least some outcomes, and presents more tentative evidence on curricular change.

This study asks why some rebel winners succeed in creating obedient, state-like militaries after civil war while others experience postwar military defections. Using a new list of winning rebel groups since 1946 and two case studies (Zimbabwe and Côte d’Ivoire), the author argues that intense security threats during the civil war make field commanders more likely to remain obedient by promoting inclusive leadership and by constraining commanders’ capacity to build local power bases during the war-to-peace transition.

This letter asks whether a "state-first" approach—where a strong state promotes democratic development—holds up when the concept of state strength is disaggregated. Using new Varieties of Democracy data covering 1789–2015, the authors specify eight versions of the state-first argument and test them across the modern democratic era. Their central contribution is to separate bureaucratic quality from broader measures of state capacity and to evaluate their distinct associations with democratic survival and deepening.

This paper examines post-WWII population transfers in Poland.

Elite Competition and State Capacity Development: Theory and Evidence from Post-Revolutionary Mexico

Hypothesis: State capacity influences government response effectiveness during crises.

This study examines whether environmental scarcity—specifically drought severity—interacts with sociopolitical conditions to affect civil conflict onset across sub-Saharan Africa from 1962–2006. The analysis addresses a gap in cross-national evidence on conditional scarcity–conflict relationships.

Many social scientists have either overlooked or insufficiently explored how political factors shape state capacity. Prior work tended to focus on institutional traits of regimes—especially democracy—without fully considering the role of governments and their ideologies. This paper broadens that approach by examining both democratic features and executives’ partisanship as influences on state capacity.