UC San Diego

Most states of the world are ineffective at implementing policy. State capacity to perform these tasks is dependent both on the will of politicians who make laws and the technical capabilities of bureaucracies who carry them out. Existing measures of state capacity do not effectively separate these two sources of capacity failures, leading to uncertainty about the condition of policy implementation in most states. I develop a measure of state capacity based on types of taxes that better captures the theoretical foundations of state capacity. Additionally, in two empirical chapters, I build research designs that enable us to identify politicians' efforts at encouraging policy implementation and observe the weaknesses of bureaucracies to collect revenue and deliver services. Most studies of state capacity understand the problems of bureaucracies to be rooted in politics but do not consider that the reverse might be true--that weak bureaucracies could themselves affect the political system. I theorize about the role of bureaucracies in the operation and design of political institutions. Specifically, political parties are not able to impose collective discipline and provide inducements for their members in the absence of a quality bureaucracy able to come through on their promises. Parties are thus unable to encourage individual politicians to overcome incentives to behave in short-sighted or localized ways. These innovations in the measurement of state capacity and the analysis of feedback from technical capabilities to party systems are examined in the context of Argentina during its reform era in the 1990s