Triggered or Overwhelmed? On the Long-Run Relationship between Democracy and State Capacity

On most accounts, there is a reciprocal relationship between democracy and state capacity, although its exact nature is under dispute. On one account, a strong state is a prerequisite for both the establishment and survival of democracy, while it has also been argued that electoral competition creates demand for strengthening state capacity. Another theory holds that democratization, at least in the short-run, bodes ill for state development, and some even hold that state strength bolsters autocratic regimes and hence hinders democracy. In this paper, a different argument is being explored: the extent to which both state capacity and democracy are not directly a function of each other but of the difference between them. If the long-run equilibrium relationship between the two is seen as a race for prize, then state and democratic development are furthered to the extent that they follow each other “neck and neck”; by implication, the larger the gap between the two, the more either the state or democracy are being overwhelmed by the other. If the relationship, on the other hand, works more akin to the one acting as the “rabbit” to the other in a long-distance race, then either democracy or state capacity will be triggered by falling behind the other. This paper puts these arguments to the test through analyzing statistical evidence from a large sample of countries in 1789 to the present, and by comparing the country trajectories of a paired set of cases.