My comments for this week's readings can be generally divided into two parts. The first part regards the main ideas each reading tackles, followed by my personal broader reflections on this avenue of research in the second part.
To begin with, interestingly almost every reading equates a state's capacity to taxation, by which researchers distinguish strong states from weak ones. While I find their analysis quite compelling, and establishing a modern system of taxation extensive across the entire country was indeed what China attempted to achieve during the last century, and a state's capacity to extract and distribute resources from its subjects surely plays a crucial rule in assuring its survival, I am somehow uncomfortable as in my opinion one piece of the puzzle is omitted, especially in Tilly and Levi's books: Nation-building. While from an economic perspective a state needs to establish an effective system to tax people and mobilize people to defend themselves as one of the national states, how does this goal achieve through ideological means? How do states mobilize people to make them believe they defend the state as a member nation, as Anderson put as an "imagined nation?" When his analysis is heavily grounded on Tilly's work, Herbst more or less touches upon this issue, but I do hope to learn more discussion about nation-building, especially how that relates to the process of state-making as a whole.
In addition to Tilly et al.'s grand historical analysis, other three papers tackle the dynamics of post-communist state-building. Although they are surely not perfect, and at times I find the arguments each author tries to make quite confusing and ambiguous, to be honest, I really enjoy reading all of them - not only because I am doing a class on post-Soviet politics but also because I think each of them advanced some important and interesting theoretical discussions.
First, Gehlbach proposes a quite sophisticated model to explain how different industrial sectors' taxibility affect politicians' provision of collective goods (public goods?) to them. He found out industries that are easier to tax will perceive the provision of collective goods more positively, which in turn implies they are better taken care of. I have to say his argument reminds me of McGillivray's book, and I am a little bit surprised that he does not put her book into his reference list. Both of them try to downplay the influence of organized interest groups over politician's decisions of redistribution. The primary difference between their work might be: While McGillivray expects politicians to acquire as many votes as possible, Gehlbach cautions tax revenues also plays its role (even though I am not quite sure if that is really the case). However, compared to McGillivray well-conducted research, I actually do not find Gehlbach's survey very impressive. Do the independent variables he uses - perceptions of public goods provision - really capture politicians' discriminative treatments across different industrial sectors? Also, similar to my criticism for his earlier article on China, I have a feeling that he tries to put too many things in a paper. It seems like on the one hand he attempts to tackle cross-sectoral variation, but all of sudden he adds the cross-national variation win p.817, which he does not state very clearly in his introduction. In this sense, I find Table 6 very confusing.
For Grzymala-Busse, I also share with Robert's opinions that the proxies she adopts to capture what she calls "robust competition" are somewhat problematic. I am not intended to repeat what Robert has already carefully indicated in his referee paper, but I do wanna say actually I find her article may be a very good contrast to Prof Frye's book. While Prof Frye argues that the high degree of political polarization will be a curse for post-communist democracies as it impedes the execution of consistent political and economic reforms, Grzymala-Busse seems to suggest that a clear-cut party competition may actually be helpful. I would like to know more about how Prof Frye's concept of polarization relates to her ideal of partisan competition and its impact on post-communist transitions.
Then for Ganev, Kim and I talked about this article a little bit and we are all surprised that how come it has so many careless typos that normally we should not see in a published journal article. Having said that, however, I still think it has its own merits because this article properly complements Hellman and Shleifer et al. (With a Map, with D. Treisman)'s work. While Hellman's "partial reform model" aptly points out that it is the earliest winners of economic transitions that impede further stages of reforms (e.g. tax reform in Russia) and Shleifer et al. thoroughly explore how the anti-reform stake-holders wield their influence to retard further reform attempts in the-1990s Russia by using their connection with those holding offices in the Duma and the government, Ganev's insightful recounts of "Multigroup" show that the winners may have other (i.e. informal) means and provide a careful treatment to help us understand how they weaken state agencies. Based on the case she presents, she proposes some questions that I find so interesting and important that really beg further work.
After reviewing each reading, I would like to share some of my personal thoughts. First, when reading Tilly's book, I have to say I am very shocked about how the enterprise of political science has changed: Now many recent studies do not fest their analysis with dense and complicated historical details anymore (e.g. Prof Frye's book). While I agree with Levi that historical analysis remains an integral part for political research, it seems to me that many researchers tend to separate historical part and their stylized argument into two different sections or chapters. I guess to certain degree it is a good thing because the readers will not find it rather hard to tease out the core argument the author would like to address, and the authors will not risk burying their analytical concerns in tons of (most of the time irrelevant) historical facts.
My second thought regards Levi's adherence to the school of rational choice (RC) approach. Establishing the micro foundations for macro political and economic puzzles is surely necessary and crucial, but I such such task somehow intimidating. Though she is surely well grounded to argue RC should to a large degree correct the fallacies of former structuralist or agent-based analytical paradigms, constructing an elegant explanation while in the meantime including rather rich historical and contextual analysis sometimes may only be the ideal virtually infeasible to reach. For example, consider the three papers for this week. Gehlbach's may be too short and problematic as he does not provide too many cases, and other two are clearly obsessed with historical facts too much (and GB's statistical model is also questionable). Including everything in our work seems to be the only solution.
While I ultimately disagree with his conclusions, i must say that I have great admiration for Tilly's project in C,C, and ES. It really is the sort of "big-idea" book that undertakes a massive and fundamental political question, acknowledges the challenges inherent in such an undertaking, and then takes a stab at it. I also love the move he makes on pages 34-36, where he preempts the obvious criticism and then arrogated to himself the right to demarcate the sort of criticism that is and is not reasonable and/or effective. It's a bold move.
In the end, though, I think Hendrik Spruyt's account of the history is most more compelling. To summarize (and this should be taken with a grain of salt): the variety of political organizations that arose in Europe after the medieval period did not end up turning into the state system because states were better at making war. In fact, city-states in Italy and the Hanseatic League were very effective militarily, and, moreover, didn't leave the scene because they were conquered by outside state powers. Rather, elites struggled with internal coordination and the state system had no method for effective treaty-making with non-state entities. Thus, elites in non-states transformed them into states (of varying sizes at varying times) in order to accrue the benefits of being a state in a state system. "war" did not make states, the system did.
I agree with Robert in admiration for Tilly’s project, but despite some flaws, I actually do agree more or less with his account of European national state development. The notion that violence leads to stronger states makes sense—especially when applied to the case of development in England and France. Tilly’s catchphrase, “war made the state, and the state made war” illustrates his point that the formation of the European national state was an inadvertent process that resulted from the attempt of states to acquire the means for war, and that the states most effective at doing so prevailed over those less capable of doing so. Though Herbst criticizes Tilly, claiming that his theory is not able to generalized or exported to other regions, it is important to remember that Tilly himself never claims to have created a general, exportable model beyond Europe. In fact, it is interesting to note that Herbst implicitly accepts Tilly’s argument that means of war fueled European state development. Tilly himself rejects the application of his story to other regions because he claims European state development was historically contingent. Herbst’s account of political geography as the dependent variable of African state development is interesting, especially in that it portrays this variable as so sticky that it impeded colonialism as a critical juncture. Although we didn’t read it for this week, it might be interesting to contrast Ertman 1997 with both Tilly and Herbst because he discusses state development in Europe within the context of the legacy of Roman colonization, whereas Tilly treats Europe as a blank slate.
When Tilly poses the standard to judge whether possible criticism to his book would be proper or not,I have to say that he is basically right. Methodology issue is not always that clear to students of comparative politics.
Ganev's research on malfunctioning state is quite interesting to me. First of all, it might be helpful to remind of the fact that how communist states have been good at establishing strong state power from war-destroyed ground in the past. Thus the question of how post-communist state failed or not in the beginning of transition is more meaningful. Second, while there are many academic works talking about how economy have impacted on political development through intermediate variable, such as change of value or change of social structure, Ganev discusses how economic reform directly affected state structure, and I think this is quite a worthy path to follow for researchers on such issue.
I thought the Levi and Tilly pieces were interesting, and were nicely complementary of each other, since they both addressed the formation of the state and how various constraints shaped different institutional outcomes. I haven't quite finished reading the Tilly piece, so Ill leave my commentary at that.
I wrote my referee report (which will posted up shortly) on the Ganev piece, and while I think its an interesting theoretical argument, I actually didn't find the piece all that convincing. I think he did not state explicitly enough the consequences of Multigroup's affect on state capacity. The example of Multigroup seemed more like it was taking advantage of a weak state, rather than actively contributing to the weakness of the state. Rather, I think he relied on everyone's previous understanding of post Soviet politics to make the logical connections for him. Maybe that's too fine a point to argue...?
Looking at African state formation, Herbst maintains that political geography is the main determinant of state formation in Africa. In contrast to Europe where high-population densities acted as a catalyst for state development, low population densities are a hallmark of African states. This reality inhibited African state-formation from following the same modes of European state development as wars in Africa were waged for tributary reasons, not territorial conquest. Moreover, low population densities made the links between the core (capitals) and the periphery—links that were strong in the European experience--extremely tenuous. As such, political geography castes an cloud over state development in Africa and affected: the costs faced by leaders with expanding state authority; how boundaries are utilized by the state; and the nature of the state system on the continent.
Herbst asserts that when dealing with costs of expanding the writ of the state, leaders adopted strategies that put a premium on core political and economic areas. Moreover, post-colonial rulers accepted the territorial boundaries demarcated by the Europeans even though the authority of the state rarely penetrated that far, and devised means such as citizenship requirements and national currencies to reinforce and strengthen territorial boundaries. Herbst rightfully notes that African states are not judged on the normative functions of the state but are considered states solely due to the international norm of sovereignty. Hence, African countries are in a perpetual state of weakness as territorial boundaries do not match the power dynamics—shaped by political geography--within that territory.
Herbst tries to offer explanations rooted in domestic factors that can be traced back to well before colonial rule arrived. While he does good job of not totally discounting an exogenous factor—the international norm of sovereignty--for why African states remain weak, for the most part he neglects the role of non-endogenous factors. Certainly external factors—colonial legacy, ideology, international norms to name a few—influenced state formation processes and leaders’ decision without the constraint of geography.
Despite this criticism, I like how he takes Tilly's contention--that war drives state building by creating basic institutions to raise revenue--by pointing out that war in Africa wasn't waged for the same purposes and hence, such a theory can't hold for Africa.
1) I think that the relation between the state (or state actors) and state revenue is interesting to look at; and different authors of this week's readings address it. State revenue can be a tool for state-building, a constraint, an instrumental objective, a policy choice. My understanding is that the European historical perspective of Tilly underlines the importance of cities and capital in providing revenue to the state and resources for war/to conquer and of the consequence of this war effort sustained by capitalist/cities: bigger state, more bureaucracy. For Herbst, I believe we can say that, in a certain way, the relative lack of state revenue (among other factors) acted as a constraint to state expansion in Africa, given the high costs of such expansion. For Levi, maximizing revenue is the objective of state rulers, no matter what are their goals: as such, I see this conception of revenue as an instrumental objective. Finally, Gehlbach: if I understand it well, his input is corollary to the maximizing-revenue study of Levi. Given that states are revenue-maximizers, their public choices regarding public goods are determined by how much they think a certain sector will more or less hide tax revenues...
2) I want to make a specific point on Levi. I must say I feel I need to read the whole book to better understand her argument, but I've been quite interested by her introduction to it (I so believe it means it's a good intro, not telling too much, but teasing you...) Anyway, given what I've read, what I want to say is I very much enjoyed her description of rulers' ends: leaving it open for them to be from a great range, from lining their own pockets to altruism. I have not read much literature accounting for such a large spectrum of rulers' objective, but my feeling is that this conception is very much realistic, neither too restrictive nor too utopic.
The Gehlbach article is interesting as it tries to explain how state action depends on the interaction between politicians and organized interest groups as well as the expectations on non-contractible elements. The author points out alternative explanations to his findings, like voluntary tax compliance for good public services, or exiting out to the informal sector for poor public services. I found these alternative arguments more compelling. A lot of the policy debate (at least in India) is focused on improvement of governance (and in turn collective goods?) to ensure better tax compliance. Frankly, I don’t know which of the two explanations to believe, and hope this discussion will be taken up in class.
This week’s readings fall into two topics, those of state formation and the relationship between the state and its actors and institutions –be they lobbies, rulers, organizations, etc. Levi, Tilly and Herbst belong to the former; Gehlbach, Grzymala-Busse, and Ganev to the latter. Farily obvious. What is interesting is the diversity in method, eloquency and success in addressing a related topic. Tilly and Herbst are eloquent, Levi is not. Also, Ganev is eloquent even if his evidence might be preliminary; Gehlbach is very confusing –not only mathematically but conceptually.
The three authors that tackle the big picture –in so far as Europe for Levi and Tilly and Africa for Herbst is the big picture- follow different methods. I think Tilly and Herbst are quite solid. I will criticize Levi and then paraphrase James Robinson’s two main points regarding Herbst. (“Non-disclaimer”: I think not having read all of Levi’s book doesn’t invalidate my comments). The main outline in Levi is: productive forces, international context and form of government define bargaining power, transaction costs and the discount rate in a given political system. ---> ruler’s actions ---> state policy ---> revenue.
Criticism of Levi: 1) She gives far too much importance to the ruler, as I will try to clarify tomorrow in class. 2) Also, why is maximizing state revenue equal or proportional to the maximization of their own revenue? Only sometimes in non-democratic settings. Often, a ruler might maximize his power by diminishing that of the state, especially in democracies where leaders reduce the size of the public sector to maximize popularity and hence future power. 3)The underlying weakness of the book to me is that she uses vocabulary from economics and rational choice that is precise in a blurry fashion, just as in point 2. Since he doesn’t conduct empirical tests, some hypotheses are impossible to assess. Also, her vocabulary is formal but there is no formal model to make her definitions precise.
Regarding Herbst, I would like to borrow 2 points from J. Robinson that I can extend tomorrow in class: 1) Herbst’s analysis of low population density and lack of state conflict as keys to low institutional development probably works for Africa. It is not clear it works for the rest of the world. In fact, Robinson argues it doesn’t. In America, low population densities correlated with better institutions. 2) Robinson makes a clear case that Herbst undermines the effect of colonization, which was not a few decades but from the 17th century slave trade to 20th century independence and 21st century neocolonialism. You don’t need to be Eastern Kenyan like a friend of was talking tonight to know that foreign companies extract their oil, refine it in the US, UK, etc. and the resell it to them at a Multigroup prize. Is this a bigger joke than Ganev’s case? Probably. 3) Robinson argues that Herbst is a good starting point but that measurement and testing is also needed. Finally, I want to raise a point of my own. It seems the key is to establish the relationship (some causality in there for Herbst) between population density (PD) and state capacity/consolidation (SC). It seems the relationship is quadratic. At minimal levels of PD, high SC (Neo-Europes). At low/moderate levels of PD, low SC (Africa). At high levels of PD, high SC (Europe). Shorter comments on Gehlbach and Ganev. The main point of Gehlbach applies: what cannot be agreed matters. It is like the insightful article of Bahrach and Baratz on the faces of power. Some topics are excluded from the agend altogether. At the root of Incomplete contracts is imperfect information and uncertainty. How do we deal with it? With conditionality in the statements. Maybe I don’t know much on the literature and hence his rationale seems a bit hanging… but I am not sure even his definitions are clear. (Hopefully tomorrow someone can explain me the article, which is one of the points of the seminar after all.)
Ganev’s articles is fun to read, a bit like Herbst, because the author can walk you through the argument clearly and make a case. Also, the main weakness of providing just one case study is rightly acknowledged by the author. Someone –or the author himself- should take the ideas in the paper and do a large-N study –or more case studies, at least.
In any even, the main idea that “success goes with those who use the state to force others to play by market rules while they themselves remain exempt from these rules” (Collins, 1975). Surely, this insight applies in many places.
I really like the Gehlbach article for how it takes on an established theory (of collective action)and provides a different take on it. However, some questions came to mind as I was reading the article:
1. Model: Politicians' payoffs are modeled as the weighted average of tax revenues and contributions (e.g. from lobbyists). Both of these appear to be legal, but what of illegal contributions under the table? In the model, the level of public goods provision by politicians depends upon the relative weight politicians assign to their utility from tax revenues vs contributions, but what if there is yet another dimension that affects politicians' utility, e.g. illegal side payments?
What about cases where official tax revenues are low because firms are paying through illegal bribes instead of taxes, i.e. substituting for taxes using bribes (e.g. in developing countries with poorly regulated tax systems and where corruption is rampant)? Certainly, one could argue that public goods provision in some developing countries is problematic and scarce in the first place, because state coffers are often expropriated for personal use. Hence, to better capture the larger politico-economic environment that Gehlbach has argued is important, should we also account for the level of confidence that firms have in the ability and willingness of the state in providing public goods? If firms anticipate that politicians will simply expropriate tax revenues for personal gain, they might evade taxes altogether and the whole system thus collapses. (In a sense, this reflects incomplete contracting of another sort--politicians might renege on their implicit initial promise of providing public goods upon receipt of tax revenues; what then do we need to tie politcians' hands and ensure their credible commitment?)
2. I think it would be interesting to get data from the states on tax evasion and revenue hiding and compare this data to what firms have reported in surveys (Gehlbach only uses the latter) to check if there are any discrepancies. I think checking different data sources is quite important in empirical studies, particularly where sensitive topics such as taxation are concerned.
3. Though perhaps not entirely relevant to Gehlbach's study of post-communist states, it might still be interesting to consider factors such as firms' accessibility to external finance through capital markets, the corporate tax rate and the ease of relocation in the empirical model. In a globalised economy with a proliferation of transnational corporations and offshoring and outsourcing activities, many scholars have argued that "the state is dead" and their power to tax has been eroded by international economic forces, e.g. financial globalisation. To what extent does Gehlbach's argument hold up in light of these factors?
Some thoughts on Ganev: I like how he discusses the process at work using 3 different institutional levels: at the international level through the Topenergy Affair, at the national level through the Himko/Kremikovtzi Affair and at the firm level through the DZU Affair. This approach nicely illustrates the different theoretical (and empirical) perspectives one can still offer even if only a single case, i.e. Bulgaria, is being discussed.
Ganev's argument also made me think of many East Asian societies where "network capitalism" is prevalent, e.g. money politics and the practice of amakudari in Japan where retired bureaucrats take on top management positions in private companies; the influence of the chaebols--large family-run corporations--in Korea; and the importance of "guan xi"--personal relationships--in doing business in China. An interesting question to ask would be: To what extent do powerful economic groups in East Asian economies and societies shape and determine the form and capacity of state institutions in these polities? In addition, I thought a comparison of Eastern European post-communist states with China would be interesting given the similarity of China's political and economic history.
@ Man Yan: While I agree with you that East Asian economies and political regimes do rely a lot on informal relations, I think there is at least one big difference between the ones in the post-Soviet region and East Asia: On what is the relationship based? While on the surface it seems like personal relations, social networks, and even "Guanxi" sound pretty much like informal practice, in East Asia many countries establish these relations on personal merits rather than simply kinship or cronyism. At least in the case of Japan, new bureaucrats are recruited into different cohorts largely according to the colleges (or even the programs) they attend, and the personal connections largely depend on one official's professions rather than "family relations." Moreover, firms make their links with the government not simply because they have good relations with the latter but mostly because they are really competitive. The relationship between the public and private sectors in Japan, at least in my opinion, is not so competitive. They complement each other rather than undermine each other. Therefore, even though personal relations are prevalent within the political and economic systems, the Japanese state is actually very strong, unlike the case of Bulgaria. I think such nuance should be addressed. Peter Evan has a very good article addressing these issues.
So I think one possible answer to your question will be: How is the relationship constructed? What is it based on? Do firms and states always fight or "capture" each other? These questions should determine how private enterprises relate to the state in different countries.
I like Levi's book, mostly because there is a lot of interesting history in their. I think the concept of analytical narratives - which this could be said to a variant of - is useful. One of the reasons why I like this, though, is that it makes it easier for the reader to evaluate the hypothesis as it is employed in particular cases. On this score, I have several objections to what Levi proposes.
These objections take two forms: First, it has to do with plausibility of the utility function of the ruler. As I have mentioned before , I'm not convinced it is meaningful to think of the marginal utility of revenue on this scale as being positive. To be sure, I can accept that ceteris paribus, a few extra pounds sterling wouldn't hurt anybody; but increasing revenue never leaves the cetera paria. When the marginal utility goes to zero, and the cetera are not paria, the theory loses predictive power.
This is a theoretical objection, but I think it is also practically relevant in some of the cases reviewed by Levi. For instance, the role of war as an event that legitimizes raised revenues, makes you think war - or the pretence of war - is something which is desired by rulers in order to raise revenue ("rulers began to link peacetime to wartime expenses by arguing for revenues to ensure preparedness").
I think the interpretations of these event could be different. First, with increased revenues, there are increased demands on the ruler (for instance, to prepare for war). It is not clear that any other personal consumption might increase. Levi seems open to interpret was almost as a consumption good required by the ruler (for instance as a means to increase or secure power, increase prestige etc.). Though this assumption might be defensible in certain instances (Charles XII of Sweden ("The Warrior King") allegedly rejected a peace offer by Peter the Great with the words "But then there would be no war!") I don't think it always holds up to scrutiny. Often war is something which is imposed on sovereign and subjects alike. The perception of a war threat might increase the ruler's perceived need to increase revenues, and he might then try to do so; but that does not prove that a ruler always tries to maximise revenues.
Moreover, although it is likely that rulers in premodern times have usually thought of increasing revenues, and thereby military might, as a good thing, I think Levi's theoretical account could have been presented differently. She talks of transactions costs, and I think this is a good point; but even in her own narrative, it seems to me that in many respects, it matters less what the ruler does or wants to do, than what the taxpayers believe. It is changes in the taxpayers' beliefs about war that increase their demand for military protection and thereby their willingness to pay taxes. It is often not clear whether or not these wars and increased revenues increases the ruler's discretionary spending. More often than not, wars leave the royal household heavily indebted. In some notable cases, it is the king who seeks war, and the nobles who oppose him (England 13th century). But, often it is as Aragorn told Theoden King: "Open war is upon you, whether you risk it or not".
My comments for this week's readings can be generally divided into two parts. The first part regards the main ideas each reading tackles, followed by my personal broader reflections on this avenue of research in the second part.
ReplyDeleteTo begin with, interestingly almost every reading equates a state's capacity to taxation, by which researchers distinguish strong states from weak ones. While I find their analysis quite compelling, and establishing a modern system of taxation extensive across the entire country was indeed what China attempted to achieve during the last century, and a state's capacity to extract and distribute resources from its subjects surely plays a crucial rule in assuring its survival, I am somehow uncomfortable as in my opinion one piece of the puzzle is omitted, especially in Tilly and Levi's books: Nation-building. While from an economic perspective a state needs to establish an effective system to tax people and mobilize people to defend themselves as one of the national states, how does this goal achieve through ideological means? How do states mobilize people to make them believe they defend the state as a member nation, as Anderson put as an "imagined nation?" When his analysis is heavily grounded on Tilly's work, Herbst more or less touches upon this issue, but I do hope to learn more discussion about nation-building, especially how that relates to the process of state-making as a whole.
In addition to Tilly et al.'s grand historical analysis, other three papers tackle the dynamics of post-communist state-building. Although they are surely not perfect, and at times I find the arguments each author tries to make quite confusing and ambiguous, to be honest, I really enjoy reading all of them - not only because I am doing a class on post-Soviet politics but also because I think each of them advanced some important and interesting theoretical discussions.
ReplyDeleteFirst, Gehlbach proposes a quite sophisticated model to explain how different industrial sectors' taxibility affect politicians' provision of collective goods (public goods?) to them. He found out industries that are easier to tax will perceive the provision of collective goods more positively, which in turn implies they are better taken care of. I have to say his argument reminds me of McGillivray's book, and I am a little bit surprised that he does not put her book into his reference list. Both of them try to downplay the influence of organized interest groups over politician's decisions of redistribution. The primary difference between their work might be: While McGillivray expects politicians to acquire as many votes as possible, Gehlbach cautions tax revenues also plays its role (even though I am not quite sure if that is really the case). However, compared to McGillivray well-conducted research, I actually do not find Gehlbach's survey very impressive. Do the independent variables he uses - perceptions of public goods provision - really capture politicians' discriminative treatments across different industrial sectors? Also, similar to my criticism for his earlier article on China, I have a feeling that he tries to put too many things in a paper. It seems like on the one hand he attempts to tackle cross-sectoral variation, but all of sudden he adds the cross-national variation win p.817, which he does not state very clearly in his introduction. In this sense, I find Table 6 very confusing.
For Grzymala-Busse, I also share with Robert's opinions that the proxies she adopts to capture what she calls "robust competition" are somewhat problematic. I am not intended to repeat what Robert has already carefully indicated in his referee paper, but I do wanna say actually I find her article may be a very good contrast to Prof Frye's book. While Prof Frye argues that the high degree of political polarization will be a curse for post-communist democracies as it impedes the execution of consistent political and economic reforms, Grzymala-Busse seems to suggest that a clear-cut party competition may actually be helpful. I would like to know more about how Prof Frye's concept of polarization relates to her ideal of partisan competition and its impact on post-communist transitions.
Then for Ganev, Kim and I talked about this article a little bit and we are all surprised that how come it has so many careless typos that normally we should not see in a published journal article. Having said that, however, I still think it has its own merits because this article properly complements Hellman and Shleifer et al. (With a Map, with D. Treisman)'s work. While Hellman's "partial reform model" aptly points out that it is the earliest winners of economic transitions that impede further stages of reforms (e.g. tax reform in Russia) and Shleifer et al. thoroughly explore how the anti-reform stake-holders wield their influence to retard further reform attempts in the-1990s Russia by using their connection with those holding offices in the Duma and the government, Ganev's insightful recounts of "Multigroup" show that the winners may have other (i.e. informal) means and provide a careful treatment to help us understand how they weaken state agencies. Based on the case she presents, she proposes some questions that I find so interesting and important that really beg further work.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteAfter reviewing each reading, I would like to share some of my personal thoughts. First, when reading Tilly's book, I have to say I am very shocked about how the enterprise of political science has changed: Now many recent studies do not fest their analysis with dense and complicated historical details anymore (e.g. Prof Frye's book). While I agree with Levi that historical analysis remains an integral part for political research, it seems to me that many researchers tend to separate historical part and their stylized argument into two different sections or chapters. I guess to certain degree it is a good thing because the readers will not find it rather hard to tease out the core argument the author would like to address, and the authors will not risk burying their analytical concerns in tons of (most of the time irrelevant) historical facts.
ReplyDeleteMy second thought regards Levi's adherence to the school of rational choice (RC) approach. Establishing the micro foundations for macro political and economic puzzles is surely necessary and crucial, but I such such task somehow intimidating. Though she is surely well grounded to argue RC should to a large degree correct the fallacies of former structuralist or agent-based analytical paradigms, constructing an elegant explanation while in the meantime including rather rich historical and contextual analysis sometimes may only be the ideal virtually infeasible to reach. For example, consider the three papers for this week. Gehlbach's may be too short and problematic as he does not provide too many cases, and other two are clearly obsessed with historical facts too much (and GB's statistical model is also questionable). Including everything in our work seems to be the only solution.
While I ultimately disagree with his conclusions, i must say that I have great admiration for Tilly's project in C,C, and ES. It really is the sort of "big-idea" book that undertakes a massive and fundamental political question, acknowledges the challenges inherent in such an undertaking, and then takes a stab at it. I also love the move he makes on pages 34-36, where he preempts the obvious criticism and then arrogated to himself the right to demarcate the sort of criticism that is and is not reasonable and/or effective. It's a bold move.
ReplyDeleteIn the end, though, I think Hendrik Spruyt's account of the history is most more compelling. To summarize (and this should be taken with a grain of salt): the variety of political organizations that arose in Europe after the medieval period did not end up turning into the state system because states were better at making war. In fact, city-states in Italy and the Hanseatic League were very effective militarily, and, moreover, didn't leave the scene because they were conquered by outside state powers. Rather, elites struggled with internal coordination and the state system had no method for effective treaty-making with non-state entities. Thus, elites in non-states transformed them into states (of varying sizes at varying times) in order to accrue the benefits of being a state in a state system. "war" did not make states, the system did.
I agree with Robert in admiration for Tilly’s project, but despite some flaws, I actually do agree more or less with his account of European national state development. The notion that violence leads to stronger states makes sense—especially when applied to the case of development in England and France. Tilly’s catchphrase, “war made the state, and the state made war” illustrates his point that the formation of the European national state was an inadvertent process that resulted from the attempt of states to acquire the means for war, and that the states most effective at doing so prevailed over those less capable of doing so. Though Herbst criticizes Tilly, claiming that his theory is not able to generalized or exported to other regions, it is important to remember that Tilly himself never claims to have created a general, exportable model beyond Europe. In fact, it is interesting to note that Herbst implicitly accepts Tilly’s argument that means of war fueled European state development. Tilly himself rejects the application of his story to other regions because he claims European state development was historically contingent. Herbst’s account of political geography as the dependent variable of African state development is interesting, especially in that it portrays this variable as so sticky that it impeded colonialism as a critical juncture. Although we didn’t read it for this week, it might be interesting to contrast Ertman 1997 with both Tilly and Herbst because he discusses state development in Europe within the context of the legacy of Roman colonization, whereas Tilly treats Europe as a blank slate.
ReplyDeleteWhen Tilly poses the standard to judge whether possible criticism to his book would be proper or not,I have to say that he is basically right. Methodology issue is not always that clear to students of comparative politics.
ReplyDeleteGanev's research on malfunctioning state is quite interesting to me. First of all, it might be helpful to remind of the fact that how communist states have been good at establishing strong state power from war-destroyed ground in the past. Thus the question of how post-communist state failed or not in the beginning of transition is more meaningful. Second, while there are many academic works talking about how economy have impacted on political development through intermediate variable, such as change of value or change of social structure, Ganev discusses how economic reform directly affected state structure, and I think this is quite a worthy path to follow for researchers on such issue.
I thought the Levi and Tilly pieces were interesting, and were nicely complementary of each other, since they both addressed the formation of the state and how various constraints shaped different institutional outcomes. I haven't quite finished reading the Tilly piece, so Ill leave my commentary at that.
ReplyDeleteI wrote my referee report (which will posted up shortly) on the Ganev piece, and while I think its an interesting theoretical argument, I actually didn't find the piece all that convincing. I think he did not state explicitly enough the consequences of Multigroup's affect on state capacity. The example of Multigroup seemed more like it was taking advantage of a weak state, rather than actively contributing to the weakness of the state. Rather, I think he relied on everyone's previous understanding of post Soviet politics to make the logical connections for him. Maybe that's too fine a point to argue...?
Looking at African state formation, Herbst maintains that political geography is the main determinant of state formation in Africa. In contrast to Europe where high-population densities acted as a catalyst for state development, low population densities are a hallmark of African states. This reality inhibited African state-formation from following the same modes of European state development as wars in Africa were waged for tributary reasons, not territorial conquest. Moreover, low population densities made the links between the core (capitals) and the periphery—links that were strong in the European experience--extremely tenuous. As such, political geography castes an cloud over state development in Africa and affected: the costs faced by leaders with expanding state authority; how boundaries are utilized by the state; and the nature of the state system on the continent.
ReplyDeleteHerbst asserts that when dealing with costs of expanding the writ of the state, leaders adopted strategies that put a premium on core political and economic areas. Moreover, post-colonial rulers accepted the territorial boundaries demarcated by the Europeans even though the authority of the state rarely penetrated that far, and devised means such as citizenship requirements and national currencies to reinforce and strengthen territorial boundaries. Herbst rightfully notes that African states are not judged on the normative functions of the state but are considered states solely due to the international norm of sovereignty. Hence, African countries are in a perpetual state of weakness as territorial boundaries do not match the power dynamics—shaped by political geography--within that territory.
Herbst tries to offer explanations rooted in domestic factors that can be traced back to well before colonial rule arrived. While he does good job of not totally discounting an exogenous factor—the international norm of sovereignty--for why African states remain weak, for the most part he neglects the role of non-endogenous factors. Certainly external factors—colonial legacy, ideology, international norms to name a few—influenced state formation processes and leaders’ decision without the constraint of geography.
Despite this criticism, I like how he takes Tilly's contention--that war drives state building by creating basic institutions to raise revenue--by pointing out that war in Africa wasn't waged for the same purposes and hence, such a theory can't hold for Africa.
1) I think that the relation between the state (or state actors) and state revenue is interesting to look at; and different authors of this week's readings address it. State revenue can be a tool for state-building, a constraint, an instrumental objective, a policy choice. My understanding is that the European historical perspective of Tilly underlines the importance of cities and capital in providing revenue to the state and resources for war/to conquer and of the consequence of this war effort sustained by capitalist/cities: bigger state, more bureaucracy. For Herbst, I believe we can say that, in a certain way, the relative lack of state revenue (among other factors) acted as a constraint to state expansion in Africa, given the high costs of such expansion. For Levi, maximizing revenue is the objective of state rulers, no matter what are their goals: as such, I see this conception of revenue as an instrumental objective. Finally, Gehlbach: if I understand it well, his input is corollary to the maximizing-revenue study of Levi. Given that states are revenue-maximizers, their public choices regarding public goods are determined by how much they think a certain sector will more or less hide tax revenues...
ReplyDelete2) I want to make a specific point on Levi. I must say I feel I need to read the whole book to better understand her argument, but I've been quite interested by her introduction to it (I so believe it means it's a good intro, not telling too much, but teasing you...) Anyway, given what I've read, what I want to say is I very much enjoyed her description of rulers' ends: leaving it open for them to be from a great range, from lining their own pockets to altruism. I have not read much literature accounting for such a large spectrum of rulers' objective, but my feeling is that this conception is very much realistic, neither too restrictive nor too utopic.
The Gehlbach article is interesting as it tries to explain how state action depends on the interaction between politicians and organized interest groups as well as the expectations on non-contractible elements. The author points out alternative explanations to his findings, like voluntary tax compliance for good public services, or exiting out to the informal sector for poor public services. I found these alternative arguments more compelling. A lot of the policy debate (at least in India) is focused on improvement of governance (and in turn collective goods?) to ensure better tax compliance. Frankly, I don’t know which of the two explanations to believe, and hope this discussion will be taken up in class.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis week’s readings fall into two topics, those of state formation and the relationship between the state and its actors and institutions –be they lobbies, rulers, organizations, etc. Levi, Tilly and Herbst belong to the former; Gehlbach, Grzymala-Busse, and Ganev to the latter. Farily obvious. What is interesting is the diversity in method, eloquency and success in addressing a related topic. Tilly and Herbst are eloquent, Levi is not. Also, Ganev is eloquent even if his evidence might be preliminary; Gehlbach is very confusing –not only mathematically but conceptually.
ReplyDeleteThe three authors that tackle the big picture –in so far as Europe for Levi and Tilly and Africa for Herbst is the big picture- follow different methods. I think Tilly and Herbst are quite solid. I will criticize Levi and then paraphrase James Robinson’s two main points regarding Herbst. (“Non-disclaimer”: I think not having read all of Levi’s book doesn’t invalidate my comments). The main outline in Levi is: productive forces, international context and form of government define bargaining power, transaction costs and the discount rate in a given political system. ---> ruler’s actions ---> state policy ---> revenue.
Criticism of Levi:
1) She gives far too much importance to the ruler, as I will try to clarify tomorrow in class.
2) Also, why is maximizing state revenue equal or proportional to the maximization of their own revenue? Only sometimes in non-democratic settings. Often, a ruler might maximize his power by diminishing that of the state, especially in democracies where leaders reduce the size of the public sector to maximize popularity and hence future power.
3)The underlying weakness of the book to me is that she uses vocabulary from economics and rational choice that is precise in a blurry fashion, just as in point 2. Since he doesn’t conduct empirical tests, some hypotheses are impossible to assess. Also, her vocabulary is formal but there is no formal model to make her definitions precise.
Regarding Herbst, I would like to borrow 2 points from J. Robinson that I can extend tomorrow in class:
ReplyDelete1) Herbst’s analysis of low population density and lack of state conflict as keys to low institutional development probably works for Africa. It is not clear it works for the rest of the world. In fact, Robinson argues it doesn’t. In America, low population densities correlated with better institutions.
2) Robinson makes a clear case that Herbst undermines the effect of colonization, which was not a few decades but from the 17th century slave trade to 20th century independence and 21st century neocolonialism. You don’t need to be Eastern Kenyan like a friend of was talking tonight to know that foreign companies extract their oil, refine it in the US, UK, etc. and the resell it to them at a Multigroup prize. Is this a bigger joke than Ganev’s case? Probably.
3) Robinson argues that Herbst is a good starting point but that measurement and testing is also needed.
Finally, I want to raise a point of my own. It seems the key is to establish the relationship (some causality in there for Herbst) between population density (PD) and state capacity/consolidation (SC). It seems the relationship is quadratic. At minimal levels of PD, high SC (Neo-Europes). At low/moderate levels of PD, low SC (Africa). At high levels of PD, high SC (Europe).
Shorter comments on Gehlbach and Ganev. The main point of Gehlbach applies: what cannot be agreed matters. It is like the insightful article of Bahrach and Baratz on the faces of power. Some topics are excluded from the agend altogether. At the root of Incomplete contracts is imperfect information and uncertainty. How do we deal with it? With conditionality in the statements. Maybe I don’t know much on the literature and hence his rationale seems a bit hanging… but I am not sure even his definitions are clear. (Hopefully tomorrow someone can explain me the article, which is one of the points of the seminar after all.)
Ganev’s articles is fun to read, a bit like Herbst, because the author can walk you through the argument clearly and make a case. Also, the main weakness of providing just one case study is rightly acknowledged by the author. Someone –or the author himself- should take the ideas in the paper and do a large-N study –or more case studies, at least.
In any even, the main idea that “success goes with those who use the state to force others to play by market rules while they themselves remain exempt from these rules” (Collins, 1975). Surely, this insight applies in many places.
I really like the Gehlbach article for how it takes on an established theory (of collective action)and provides a different take on it. However, some questions came to mind as I was reading the article:
ReplyDelete1. Model: Politicians' payoffs are modeled as the weighted average of tax revenues and contributions (e.g. from lobbyists). Both of these appear to be legal, but what of illegal contributions under the table? In the model, the level of public goods provision by politicians depends upon the relative weight politicians assign to their utility from tax revenues vs contributions, but what if there is yet another dimension that affects politicians' utility, e.g. illegal side payments?
What about cases where official tax revenues are low because firms are paying through illegal bribes instead of taxes, i.e. substituting for taxes using bribes (e.g. in developing countries with poorly regulated tax systems and where corruption is rampant)? Certainly, one could argue that public goods provision in some developing countries is problematic and scarce in the first place, because state coffers are often expropriated for personal use. Hence, to better capture the larger politico-economic environment that Gehlbach has argued is important, should we also account for the level of confidence that firms have in the ability and willingness of the state in providing public goods? If firms anticipate that politicians will simply expropriate tax revenues for personal gain, they might evade taxes altogether and the whole system thus collapses. (In a sense, this reflects incomplete contracting of another sort--politicians might renege on their implicit initial promise of providing public goods upon receipt of tax revenues; what then do we need to tie politcians' hands and ensure their credible commitment?)
2. I think it would be interesting to get data from the states on tax evasion and revenue hiding and compare this data to what firms have reported in surveys (Gehlbach only uses the latter) to check if there are any discrepancies. I think checking different data sources is quite important in empirical studies, particularly where sensitive topics such as taxation are concerned.
3. Though perhaps not entirely relevant to Gehlbach's study of post-communist states, it might still be interesting to consider factors such as firms' accessibility to external finance through capital markets, the corporate tax rate and the ease of relocation in the empirical model. In a globalised economy with a proliferation of transnational corporations and offshoring and outsourcing activities, many scholars have argued that "the state is dead" and their power to tax has been eroded by international economic forces, e.g. financial globalisation. To what extent does Gehlbach's argument hold up in light of these factors?
Some thoughts on Ganev: I like how he discusses the process at work using 3 different institutional levels: at the international level through the Topenergy Affair, at the national level through the Himko/Kremikovtzi Affair and at the firm level through the DZU Affair. This approach nicely illustrates the different theoretical (and empirical) perspectives one can still offer even if only a single case, i.e. Bulgaria, is being discussed.
ReplyDeleteGanev's argument also made me think of many East Asian societies where "network capitalism" is prevalent, e.g. money politics and the practice of amakudari in Japan where retired bureaucrats take on top management positions in private companies; the influence of the chaebols--large family-run corporations--in Korea; and the importance of "guan xi"--personal relationships--in doing business in China. An interesting question to ask would be: To what extent do powerful economic groups in East Asian economies and societies shape and determine the form and capacity of state institutions in these polities? In addition, I thought a comparison of Eastern European post-communist states with China would be interesting given the similarity of China's political and economic history.
@ Man Yan: While I agree with you that East Asian economies and political regimes do rely a lot on informal relations, I think there is at least one big difference between the ones in the post-Soviet region and East Asia: On what is the relationship based? While on the surface it seems like personal relations, social networks, and even "Guanxi" sound pretty much like informal practice, in East Asia many countries establish these relations on personal merits rather than simply kinship or cronyism. At least in the case of Japan, new bureaucrats are recruited into different cohorts largely according to the colleges (or even the programs) they attend, and the personal connections largely depend on one official's professions rather than "family relations." Moreover, firms make their links with the government not simply because they have good relations with the latter but mostly because they are really competitive. The relationship between the public and private sectors in Japan, at least in my opinion, is not so competitive. They complement each other rather than undermine each other. Therefore, even though personal relations are prevalent within the political and economic systems, the Japanese state is actually very strong, unlike the case of Bulgaria. I think such nuance should be addressed. Peter Evan has a very good article addressing these issues.
ReplyDeleteSo I think one possible answer to your question will be: How is the relationship constructed? What is it based on? Do firms and states always fight or "capture" each other? These questions should determine how private enterprises relate to the state in different countries.
I like Levi's book, mostly because there is a lot of interesting history in their. I think the concept of analytical narratives - which this could be said to a variant of - is useful. One of the reasons why I like this, though, is that it makes it easier for the reader to evaluate the hypothesis as it is employed in particular cases. On this score, I have several objections to what Levi proposes.
ReplyDeleteThese objections take two forms: First, it has to do with plausibility of the utility function of the ruler. As I have mentioned before , I'm not convinced it is meaningful to think of the marginal utility of revenue on this scale as being positive. To be sure, I can accept that ceteris paribus, a few extra pounds sterling wouldn't hurt anybody; but increasing revenue never leaves the cetera paria. When the marginal utility goes to zero, and the cetera are not paria, the theory loses predictive power.
This is a theoretical objection, but I think it is also practically relevant in some of the cases reviewed by Levi. For instance, the role of war as an event that legitimizes raised revenues, makes you think war - or the pretence of war - is something which is desired by rulers in order to raise revenue ("rulers began to link peacetime to wartime expenses by arguing for revenues to ensure preparedness").
I think the interpretations of these event could be different. First, with increased revenues, there are increased demands on the ruler (for instance, to prepare for war). It is not clear that any other personal consumption might increase. Levi seems open to interpret was almost as a consumption good required by the ruler (for instance as a means to increase or secure power, increase prestige etc.). Though this assumption might be defensible in certain instances (Charles XII of Sweden ("The Warrior King") allegedly rejected a peace offer by Peter the Great with the words "But then there would be no war!") I don't think it always holds up to scrutiny. Often war is something which is imposed on sovereign and subjects alike. The perception of a war threat might increase the ruler's perceived need to increase revenues, and he might then try to do so; but that does not prove that a ruler always tries to maximise revenues.
Moreover, although it is likely that rulers in premodern times have usually thought of increasing revenues, and thereby military might, as a good thing, I think Levi's theoretical account could have been presented differently. She talks of transactions costs, and I think this is a good point; but even in her own narrative, it seems to me that in many respects, it matters less what the ruler does or wants to do, than what the taxpayers believe. It is changes in the taxpayers' beliefs about war that increase their demand for military protection and thereby their willingness to pay taxes. It is often not clear whether or not these wars and increased revenues increases the ruler's discretionary spending. More often than not, wars leave the royal household heavily indebted. In some notable cases, it is the king who seeks war, and the nobles who oppose him (England 13th century). But, often it is as Aragorn told Theoden King: "Open war is upon you, whether you risk it or not".