States that are both strong and democratic seem to be the most capable of delivering human development, as they have the infrastructural capacity to deliver desirable outcomes, and the democratic character that ensures this capacity is used to enhance rather than undermine human welfare. However, knowing that strong democratic states deliver development does not tell us much about how they emerge, or how these two separate components relate to each other dynamically. The central questions posed by this research are: what is the relationship between democracy and state-building in the process of development? Does democracy promote or constrain state-building, leading to or undermining state strength? Although the importance of sequencing has been accepted, discussions of sequencing have often turned into a normative debate about when is the ‘right’ time to democratize. There has been comparatively little theoretical treatment or systematic empirical analysis paid to the issue. In particular we do not have a theoretical argument about why sequencing matters. This is what we seek to put forward in this article.
