The Social Foundations of Institutional Order: Reconsidering War and the “Resource Curse” in Third World State Building

Abstract

This manuscript departs strongly from conventional accounts that ascribe a central role to war and the threat of war in Third World state building. Similarly, it challenges the conventional wisdom that abundant exportable natural resource wealth is likely to provoke institutional atrophy. Instead, it argues that a set of logically prior conditions—the social relations that govern the principal economic sectors and the pattern or intraelite conflict or compromise—launch path-dependent processes that help determine when, and if, either strategic conflict or resource wealth contribute to, or impede, institutional development. The argument is tested in the comparative analysis of the state-building process in two Andean neighbors (Chile and Peru), both of which are situated in similar strategic and natural resource environments but which produced qualitatively different outcomes in terms of state capacity or “strength.”

Going Where the Money Is: Strategies for Taxing Economic Elites in Unequal Democracies

“…Meanwhile, political scientists have primarily examined value-added tax (VAT) reforms implemented during structural adjustment in the 1980s and 1990s, which posed distinct political challenges (Eaton 2002, Mahon 2004. 2 Comparative historical analysis on state-building identifies factors that contributed to direct tax capacity, including wars (Tilly 1992 and others), exclusionary racial cleavages (Lieberman 2003), colonial legacies (Mkandawire 2010) or other path-dependent processes (Kurtz 2009), and patterns of contentious politics (Slater 2010). Yet in many developing countries these factors were not present or did not produce significant direct tax capacity, and they are unlikely candidates for effecting change in the contemporary period.…”

The Politics of Governing Oil Effectively: A Comparative Study of Two New Oil-Rich States in Africa

“…Of particular importance in shaping the prospects for development in such contexts is the organisation of power within the ruling coalition (Khan, 2010;Kurtz, 2009;Slater, 2010). Where ruling coalitions are able to either repress or co-opt rival sources of power, then they are able to secure a dominant party political settlement, within which there is relatively little prospect of power changing hands through a formal electoral process.…”

Thinking About the Politics of Inclusive Development: Towards a Relational Approach

“…Again, this approach is both matched and trumped in more comparative accounts within political theory, as with Kurtz's (2009) findings that where the political settlement is reasonably stable and the ruling coalition incorporates all major factions with holding power then the conditions are in place for elites to adopt a longer-term horizon to institution-building and the distribution of public goods. 16 However, Kurtz also stresses that the nature of political competition also matters here:…”