The state does not live by warfare alone: War and revenue in the long nineteenth century

Goenaga, Agustín; Domingo, Oriol; Teorell, Jan

doi:10.1007/s11558-022-09477-x

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…In times of war, the premium of extraction increases as a function of the seriousness of the threat posed against the government and the material needs necessary for averting it. Notably, as long as the government seeks its own survival, and for any given level of threat, the source of that threat, be it a rebel group or another state, ought to have little import (Goenaga et al, 2023; Kisangani & Pickering, 2014). 1 Accordingly, war pushes governments to seek an increase in revenue to meet its fiscal needs – but it does not absolve them from the necessity of popular consent (Feinstein & Wimmer, 2023).…”

Section: Revenue Mobilisation and Tax Compliance In Times Of Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Rallying Fiscal Patriotism: War Taxes in the Contemporary World

Frizell

2023

Comparative Political Studies

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Constituting a central historical link between war and long-term fiscal capacity, war taxes are generally perceived to be a thing of the past. This article corrects the picture by presenting new, global data on war taxes, 68 in total, introduced between 1960 and 2020. Far from having been abandoned, war taxes have remained a crucial war-time fiscal instrument, leaving long-term imprints on tax systems across the contemporary world. Serving the twin imperatives of revenue maximisation and generation of taxpayer consent, I argue that the use of war taxes is conditioned by the relative intensity and the perceived legitimacy of a war, be it civil or inter-state. The proposed logic aligns with case evidence, further supported by macro-quantitative analysis. The results speak to the large literature on war and state-building, challenge the standard disintegrative view of civil wars, and provide new empirical insights into the political economy of conflict-affected countries.

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Section: Revenue Mobilisation and Tax Compliance In Times Of Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2.As noted, the argument of similarity of effects between civil and inter-state wars, while still contested, is supported by several macro-quantitative studies (Frizell, 2022; Goenaga et al, 2023; Han & Thies, 2019; Kisangani & Pickering, 2014). …”

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confidence: 93%

Rallying Fiscal Patriotism: War Taxes in the Contemporary World

Frizell

2023

Comparative Political Studies

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The Great Revenue Divergence

Lee

Paine

2022

Int Org

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This article describes and explains a previously overlooked empirical pattern in state revenue collection. As late as 1913, central governments in the West collected similar levels of per capita revenue as the rest of the world, despite ruling richer societies and experiencing a long history of fiscal innovation. Western revenue levels permanently diverged only in the following half-century. We identify the twentieth-century great revenue divergence by constructing a new panel data set of central government revenue with broad spatial and temporal coverage. To explain the pattern, we argue that sustainably high levels of revenue extraction require societal demand for an activist state, and a supply of effective bureaucratic institutions. Neither factor in isolation is sufficient. We formalize this insight in a game-theoretic model. The government can choose among low-effort, legibility-intensive, and crony-favoring strategies for raising revenues. Empirically, our theory accounts for low revenue intake in periods of low demand (the nineteenth-century West) or low bureaucratic capacity (twentieth-century former colonies), and for eventual revenue spikes in the West.

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Varieties of State-Building: Ecology, Clientelism, and Bureaucratic Rule in Chile

Véjares

2024

Perspect. polit.

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Current research suggests that all states share a perpetual appetite for extraction and standardization. However, this research overlooks the fact that subnational regions present different appeals and challenges to ruling coalitions. While states seek to extend bureaucratic rule over peripheries with valuable assets and favorable geography, they might instead seek to preserve local patrimonial bastions when those areas offer substantial electoral support. In turn, these strategies lead to broad subnational heterogeneity in the reach of the state. This paper focuses on regions’ ecological, military, and clientelistic features to explain local trajectories of bureaucratic rule and country-level state capacity. Empirically, I examine Chile, a successful case of capacity-building in Latin America. Prompted by a fiscal crisis in the mid-1850s, Chile’s central government launched state-building projects to offset its budgetary deficit. Using GIS and original data from censuses, budgets, and other primary sources, I show that Chile’s ruling coalition paradoxically modernized the country’s peripheries while deepening its own traditionalism. These results challenge prevailing narratives about the projection of political authority and Chile’s territorial uniformity.

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The state does not live by warfare alone: War and revenue in the long nineteenth century

Cited by 3 publications

References 81 publications

Rallying Fiscal Patriotism: War Taxes in the Contemporary World

Rallying Fiscal Patriotism: War Taxes in the Contemporary World

The Great Revenue Divergence

Varieties of State-Building: Ecology, Clientelism, and Bureaucratic Rule in Chile

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