The politics of state-building: Studying investments in state capacity through legislative debates

Why are some states better able to raise taxes, control their territory, and provide public services to their population?

Research on this topic has focused on the impact of large-scale processes such as war, economic development, and democratization, on the development of state capacity.

However, at the end of the day, it is decisions made by policy-makers to invest or not in state resources that shape the capacity of the state. This project focuses on the factors that explain those decisions.

Specifically, it will answer when and why policy-makers invest in the fiscal, coercive, administrative, and informational resources of the state.

To this end, we shift attention to national legislatures, the institutional site where policy-makers typically discuss and decide investments in state capacity.

We develop a new methodology to study the politics of state building based on the automated text analysis of historical legislative debates.

The project thus combines the collection, processing, and analysis of all legislative debates available in at least 16 European and American countries from 1789 to 1939, with in-depth historical analysis of key episodes when major investments in state resources were discussed.

The project will produce an original dataset with various measures of the content, tone, and structure of debates related to state capacity, and will advance the first comprehensive theory of the politics of state building based on fine-grained legislative data.