Working Paper
What determines administrative capacity in developing countries?
While it is recognized that effective state institutions are pivotal for economic development, it is not well understood what their origins are and what explains their cross-country differences. We focus on budget institutions in developing economies...
Working Paper
The incursion of Leviathan: wartime territorial control and post-conflict state capacity in Peru
How do civil war dynamics affect state-building decisions in the aftermath of conflict? This paper argues that, in the post-conflict period, the state focuses its efforts to build state capacity on areas in which state power has been eroded during...
Journal Article
COVID-19 and the state
During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was wealthier countries with stronger institutions that suffered the highest numbers of cases and fatalities. Many weaker countries were instead praised for more effective pandemic response. What...
Working Paper
Trust as state capacity
This paper explores the link between trust in government, policy-making, and compliance. It focuses on a specific channel whereby citizens who are convinced that a policy is worthwhile are more motivated to comply with it. This in turn reduces the...
Journal Article
Income inequality in authoritarian regimes
In recent decades, there has been an institutional shift in the literature on authoritarian regimes, with scholars investigating the role of political institutions, such as elections and political parties, in shaping regime stability and economic...
Journal Article
Measures of state capacity
This study provides a systematic comparative analysis of seven common cross-national measures of state capacity by focusing on three measurement issues: convergent validity, interchangeability, and case-specifc disagreement. The author fnds that the...
Working Paper
The pandemic and the state
COVID-19 has brought to the fore the issue of state preparedness in mitigating health emergencies. This paper problematizes the received wisdom of greater state capacity in mitigating the severity of the pandemic. Based on a case study of West Bengal...
Working Paper
The Tanzanian state response to COVID-19
Tanzania received significant global attention for its COVID-19 response during the first year of the pandemic. It did not share pandemic statistics, require masks, implement lockdowns, or close borders; it questioned testing and vaccine efficacy...
Working Paper
COVID-19 and the state: Nicaragua case study
Unlike Latin American peers, and contrary to World Health Organization recommendations, Nicaragua eschewed lockdowns and other common strategies to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Analysts have since demonstrated how Nicaraguan authorities...
Working Paper
Residual capacity and the political economy of pandemic response in Ghana
On the whole, poor countries in Africa and elsewhere seem to have weathered the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19) pandemic better than wealthier countries with superior healthcare systems. Using the Ghanaian case, this paper draws on newspaper...
Working Paper
Pandemic precarity and the complicated case of Maharashtra
The state of Maharashtra and the city of Mumbai have been referred to as the epidemic epicentre of India since the time of the plague of 1896 and influenza epidemic of 1918. During the COVID-19 pandemic too, the state experienced the highest cases...
Working Paper
Governance and COVID-19 in Bolivia
On 10 March 2020, the Bolivian government identified two COVID-19 cases in Bolivians returning from Italy. The national government responded swiftly and sent the country into one of the world’s strictest lockdowns on 22 March 2020. However, low state...
Working Paper
COVID-19 and the state
We expect effective state institutions to matter in a country’s ability to respond to crises. Yet notably in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, what has stood out in simple global snapshots is that wealthier countries with stronger institutions...
Working Paper
Clientelism and governance
Unlike much of the growing literature on political clientelism, this short paper contains mainly the author’s general reflections on the broad issues of governance (or mis-governance including corruption), democracy, and state capacity that...
Working Paper
No taxation without informational foundation
This paper combines cross-national statistical analysis and in-depth historical case studies of Argentina and Chile to explore the relationship between two crucial dimensions of state capacity.We show that information capacity contributes to the...