The Role of the State in Democratic Development: Capacity Versus Quality

Does the state promote or hinder democratic development? What are the mechanisms that drive any such effects? These questions are at the heart of comparative democratization research and have been reinvigorated by the worldwide democratic crisis in recent years. Nevertheless, literature on the relationship between state and democracy so far leaves the questions fundamentally unanswered because there are few systematic investigations that scrutinize the multifaceted nature of the relationship across all relevant regions and periods. This paper specifies and examines several arguments that connect the state to democracy, relating state capacity and bureaucratic quality with democratic survival, erosion, and deepening. By employing the V-Dem and Historical V-Dem datasets with disaggregate indicators of fiscal capacity, bureaucratic impartiality and rigorousness, and electoral democracy from 1789 to 2016, the analysis spans the entire era of modern democracy and includes the Western developed and post-colonial case universes with disparate expectations of state effects. There are two overall findings: First, we find consistent support – over time and in space – for a protective effect of the state but only with regard to democratic survival and erosion. Second, these protective effects only rise from bureaucratic quality, not the state’s capacity. These findings support the notion that it is the inner, organizational characteristics of the state and the actual performance of the state apparatus rather than the resources it embodies that matter for democracy. Finally, the findings suggest that the traditional causes of democratic breakdown are still highly relevant for understanding recent cases of democratic erosion. Bureaucratic quality is just as important for gradual as for abrupt democratic regression.