UC Berkeley

How do weak states build state capacity in the face of resistance from powerful local elites? This dissertation explores the historical struggle of weak states to mobilize resources, including (a) information, (b) human capital, and (c) fiscal revenues, due to the opposition of local landowning elites. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rulers adopted new goals beyond waging war. The diffusion of political economic thought promoted the idea that state power was tied to long-term economic development, which required more efficient forms of resource mobilization and public goods provision to create wealth that could be taxed. However, state intervention in the economy threatened the power and privileges of local elites, who sought to shelter their private resources and monopoly on local rent-seeking from the central state.

In response, weak states experimented with local democratization to align local elites' interests with central state-building goals. By introducing institutions of local self-government, states incentivized elites to participate in state-building through representation in local assemblies, creating a new formula of "no representation, without taxation." I argue that local self-government served as an alternative state-building model to parliamentarization or bureaucratization that allowed rulers to overcome elite resistance and enhance state capacity through local participation. Focusing on the case of the zemstvo reform in the Russian Empire in historical comparative perspective, I demonstrate how local assemblies increased state capacity, highlighting the extractive origins of democratic institutions, and offering new insights into the local foundations of state-building and democratization in weak states around the globe.