Investigating the State-Democracy Nexus: A New Research Agenda[1]

David Delfs Erbo Andersen

Ph.D. student, Aarhus University,

Paper to be presented at the DPSA annual meeting, October 24, 2013

Abstract

Despite recent decades’ increasing interest in the state’s effect on democratic stability, the causal relationship between state and democracy is still mired in uncertainty due to conceptual disagreement and a tendency to assume away the mechanisms connecting the state with democratic stability. I carry out a conceptual analysis of this literature’s key concept of “stateness” and identify the usefulness of disaggregating this concept into the three different attributes of monopoly on violence, administrative effectiveness, and citizenship agreement which likely affect democratic stability in very different ways. This conceptual and theoretical tripartition forms the basis for a new research agenda. I outline how my Ph.D. dissertation aims at sparking this agenda by conducting empirical analyses of the effects of the three attributes on democratic stability across time and space.

Why do some democracies break down while others survive? As of today, modernization theory seems to give the most guidance to answering this question in terms of compelling theoretical arguments and robust empirical analyses (see, e.g., Lipset 1994; Gasiorowski and Power 1998; Przeworski et al. 2000; Svolik 2008; Boix 2011; Haggard and Kaufman 2012: 512). However, to survive democracies not only need socioeconomic development that forges strong and democratically oriented citizens. Democracies also need a source of authority, the most generalized version of such being the state, that is both able to enforce the democratic rights and accepted to do so by its citizens. In fact, states today are increasingly able and willing to promote the political freedom and welfare of their citizens by means of their own power apparatus (Mann 2004: 31, 2008). That a strong state is necessary for a democratic political order to endure has been a prevalent argument among political theorists (Holmes 1995: 18-21) but among more empirically oriented scholars of comparative politics, the relationship between state and democracy either largely remains a postulate (e.g., Huntington 1968: 9; Rustow 1970: 350; Dahl 1989: 47; Fukuyama 2005) or is studied in very fixed spatial and temporal contexts (see, e.g., Hadenius 2001; Rose and Shin 2001; Bratton and Chang 2006; Kraxberger 2007; Dukalskis 2008; Tansey 2011; Møller and Skaaning 2011; Kuthy 2011). Moreover, the empirical analyses of the state-democracy relationship are characterized by tremendous conceptual and theoretical disagreement on what aspects of the state are important for democracy.

Tellingly, in his review of the democratization literature, Munck (2011: 38) reached the conclusion that “(w)hile the role of the state is thus increasingly addressed in research on democracy, more theoretical and empirical research is needed to develop this relatively new line of inquiry”. In sum, we thus have some strong theoretical reasons for finding the state to be vital for democratic stability but we do not know whether this holds in the real world and what it actually is about the state that stabilizes democracy.

In this paper, I aim to set a new research agenda for the study of the causal relationship between state and democracy. More specifically, I take a step further back than what is usually done in the literature by reconceptualizing what we mean by the state in light of how it relates to political regimes such as democracies (Goertz 2006: 14-16; Saylor 2013: 362-364). This is to lay the groundwork for the empirical analyses which will form the main content of my Ph.D. dissertation.

Narrowing down the agenda

A research agenda about the causal state-democracy relationship is of course a huge endeavor. First, both democracy and state are “essentially contested concepts” (cf. Collier and Levitsky 1997; Hansen 1998). This means that a complete investigation of the relationships between all significant contemporary types, denotations, and connotations of the state and democracy greatly risk becoming unfocused and unfruitful for any advancement of our understanding of the state-democracy relationship. Second, the relationship is spurred with endogeneity in that democratic characteristics such as elections and improved civil and political liberties tend to strengthen the legitimacy and in turn capacity of the state (cf. Bratton and Chang 2006; Lindberg 2006; Mazzuca and Munck 2013). Which of the two variables, state and democracy, is explanatory is thus more a matter of the researcher’s choice of focus in his specific project as it is a matter of empirical relevance.

In this dissertation, I focus my attention on a specific branch of research on the state-democracy relationship, namely that centered on the concept of “stateness”. Starting with Linz and Stepan’s (1996: 17) notion, which built on Rustow (1970: 350), that stateness is a necessary condition for democratic transition and consolidation, this literature focuses on how particular aspects of the state are important stabilizers of new democracies across time and space. This literature has been the greatest contributor to the state-democracy relationship in terms of numbers of articles and empirical investigations. After a slow start, the concept of stateness has become hugely influential in the comparative politics literature, including in analyses of democratic transition and stabilitytuto the unclear and xus – XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. However, just as with the state-democracy literature in general, there is no agreed-upon definition of stateness in general or in analyses of its relationship with democracy. Approaching the state-democracy relationship from the side of the stateness literature therefore seems to give the most focused and contributing analyses. That is, my dissertation will investigate whether and how different aspects of stateness stabilize democracy. This first of all entails the possibility of providing conceptual and theoretical order to the study of the effect of stateness and the state more generally on democratic stability. Second, my empirical analyses may provide some stronger grounds on which to evaluate and possibly correct some of the assumptions underlying the widely held belief that “without a state, no modern democracy is possible” (cf. Linz and Stepan 1996: 17). Moreover, they may shed light on the validity of the gradually old idea in the development assistance community of advancing state-building as a natural precondition to and active stabilizer of democracy (cf. Repnik and Mohs 1992; Fukuyama 2004; see also the rather preliminary analyses in Kaufmann, Kraay, and Mastruzzi 2009). I stress that endogeneity is perfectly possible logically and expresses how, in a condition of modernization, “all good things tend to go together”. Besides, one may control for endogeneity in each analysis.

The definitions of state and democracy to be employed in effect also narrow down the scope of the research agenda. Throughout the dissertation, I employ a procedural and minimalist understanding of democracy as “that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote” (Schumpeter, 2010: 241) – with the precision that “people” requires a certain level of suffrage (cf. Dahl 1989: 225-232). This definition exactly enables a focus on the regimes which have taken the most basic step away from authoritarianism but are still struggling with stabilizing and consolidating the primacy of democratic elections. Democratic stability is then understood dichotomously as the survival or continuous existence of the democratic regime. Conversely, democratic breakdown occurs when the regime de facto withdraws its competitive or participatory edge. It is on the explanatory side, regarding the state, that there is the greatest conceptual work to be done however. I here thus first provide a conceptual analysis of stateness and argue for distinguishing between three different aspects of stateness: state monopoly on the use of violence, administrative effectiveness of the state, and agreement on who are the citizens of the state. Second, and as a virtue of this disaggregation of stateness, I clarify how each of these three aspects may be related to democratic stability. This enables an answer to the research question of my dissertation of whether and how stateness is related to democratic stability. I therefore also suggest how these relationships may be studied empirically which form a proposed outline for my dissertation. I end by providing an outline of a specific study in my dissertation.

Mapping definitions of stateness

Around 1750, the term “state” had clearly come to denote the modern concept of the state as denoting the political community (Hansen 1998: 108-112). It was this modern, European version of the state which Weber (1964: 1043) famously defined as the entity successfully claiming a legitimate monopoly on violence within a specified territory. This definition includes modern institutions such as the military, a police force, a bureaucracy, and courts. In other words, Weber had the modern, territorial state in mind. The Weberian definition provided something remarkably similar for the concept of the state to what Dahl was later to do for democracy (polyarchy) within comparative politics: a definition which scholars at least have to use as a frame of reference for their own definitions. Indeed, a large number of scholars has simply retained the Weberian definition, albeit with some important elaborations which they argue were underspecified by Weber (e.g., Skocpol 1985: 7-8; Rueschemeyer and Evans 1985: 46-47; Gill 2003: 2-7; O’Donnell 2010: 51-53). For instance, Herbst (2000) and Brenner et al. (2003) criticize Weber’s definition for treating the territory as a given, Migdal (1988) and Holsti (1995: 331-332) demand more focus on the interaction between state and society, and Rotberg (2003: 2-5) primarily associates the state with the ability to provide public goods. They all, however, take their starting point in a Weberian conception of the state.

Despite there being a Weberian consensus on the meaning of the state, confusion was fed back into the literature when the concept of “stateness” was introduced by Nettl (1968). The point of departure for this literature is that stateness measures the degree to which a modern state exists. Indeed, the function of stateness as a variable was – and still is – to bring the state into comparative political analysis by being able to measure state strength (Nettl 1968: 579). The reason that this has caused confusion is that scholars mean very different things when they refer to stateness. To illustrate, Evans (1997: 62) defines stateness as “the institutional centrality of the state” in terms of the “extent to which private power can … be checked by public authority”, that is, he construes stateness solely as a matter of capacity. Elkins and Sides (2008: 2) instead argue that “Understanding stateness therefore entails attention to the attitudes and identities of citizens, in particular their attachment to the state”, that is, they perceive stateness solely to be a matter of legitimacy or cultural acceptance. Finally, Bratton and Chang (2006: 1060) define stateness much more broadly as “the bone structure of the body politic or the set of administrative institutions that claim a legitimate command over a bounded territory” potentially including many diverse forms of capacity and legitimacy.

I have carried out a more general review of the way stateness has entered comparative politics,[2] the results of which are presented in Table 1.

Table 1: Attributes of stateness included in extant definitions

Monopoly on violence / Administrative effectiveness / Citizenship agreement
Nettl (1968) / + / +
Tilly (1975a) / + / +
Bayley (1975) / +
Linz and Stepan (1996) / + / +
Evans (1997) / + / +
Fukuyama (2004) / + / +
UNDP (2004) / + / + / +
Bratton and Chang (2006) / + / + / +
Lindberg (2006) / +
Kraxberger (2007) / + / + / +
Tansey (2008) / +
Elkins and Sides (2008) / +
Carbone and Memoli (2008) / + / + / +
Kostovicova and Bojicic-Dzelilovic (2009) / + / + / +
Lemay-Hébert (2009) / + / + / +
Migdal (2009) / + / +
Møller and Skaaning (2011) / + / (+) / +
Sojo (2011) / + / + / +
Ilyin et al. (2012) / + / +
BTI (2012) / + / +
Kurtz and Schrank (2012) / +

The mapping shows that all extant definitions of stateness include one or more of three defining attributes that I have termed “monopoly on violence”, “administrative effectiveness”, and “citizenship agreement”. Conveniently, each of the three attributes is defined in relatively similar ways by most scholars. Monopoly on violence is the “ability to … force people to comply with the state’s laws” (Fukuyama 2004: 6); citizenship agreement is the absence of “profound differences about the territorial boundaries of the political community’s state and profound differences as to who has the right of citizenship in that state” (Linz and Stepan 1996: 17); and administrative effectiveness is “the ability of states to plan and execute policies” (Fukuyama 2004: 7).[3]

These definitions should be understood against the background of some more general distinctions. First, whereas democracy concerns access to power, the common denominator for all three attributes of stateness is that they concern the exercise of power (Mazzucca 2010). However, it is also important to note that stateness refers to the internal dimensions of the state as opposed to the external (juridical) dimensions of the state. In other words, the overarching concept of stateness does not concern the formal recognition by other states of a state’s sovereignty as a person of international law, which is normally captured by the concept of “statehood” (Jackson and Rosberg 1982; Clapham 1998). Investigating the effects of statehood (and through that the effects of shifting international sovereignty regimes) on democratic stability is therefore not a purpose of this dissertation. To this end, I acknowledge Holsti’s (1995: 330) insight that today the security problems of states of developing countries are mostly internal. Second, the stateness attributes concern the power of state institutions and organizations which is in and of itself value-neutral. I thus abstain from Marx-inspired definitions of the state as the blunt instrument of the capitalist ruling class (Giddens 1980: 884). Besides, Marxist state definitions are rarely used in democratization studies and are less relevant in rural or less developed countries (cf. Jessop 2002).

Bearing these distinctions in mind, two different approaches to defining stateness can be identified in Table 1. Stateness is either conceived of as a matter of capacity, that is, a set of coercive or administrative functions that must be carried out with a certain degree of effectiveness, or as a matter of legitimacy, that is, an integrated whole – a body politics – perceived as legitimate by its demos. The first approach is represented by Nettl’s (1968) original definition, it pervades influential analyses such as Tilly (1975a) and Evans (1997: 62, 83), and it has recently been resuscitated by Fukuyama (2004). Here, stateness is a product of a monopoly on violence and/or administrative effectiveness. The other approach was inaugurated by Linz and Stepan (1996: 16, 20-24), who break with the traditional perspective in two ways. First, they sever the link between stateness and the attribute of administrative effectiveness. Second, they introduce citizenship agreement as a hitherto neglected attribute of stateness. More specifically, Linz and Stepan define stateness as a product of monopoly on violence and citizenship agreement – but with most emphasis on the latter attribute.