State-Building at the Grassroots in India: Agra District, 1871-2011

• In Event: Beyond Europe: Long-Run Development Across Late Modernizers in Eurasia

Abstract

A flourishing political economy literature has argued that historical events shape contemporary political and economic outcomes. This literature is frequently characterized by highly aggregated units of analysis, a tight focus on a single intervention and an elision of events and conditions between the intervention and the measurement of the outcome. This paper analyses variation in the introduction of local public goods at the village level within a single Indian district over a century and a half, and the correlations of those outcomes with historical and institutional variation. While it finds that there are correlations between institutional changes and contemporary outcomes, the historical interventions are so correlated with each other as to make causal inference difficult. The results indicate the obstacles to modeling the outcomes of complicated and interdependent historical processes.

Author

• Alexander Lee, University of Rochester