State Capacity, Information, and Digital Technologies

• In Event: Civic Media: Local Government and Elected Officials' Use of Digital Tools

Abstract

Information and telecommunication technologies (ICTs) have changed the ways states extract revenue, provide goods and services, and exercise their authority at home and abroad. These changes challenge us to reconsider traditional conceptualizations of state capacity and to consider anew how ICTs have transformed the very notion of state capacity. In this paper, we demonstrate how ICTs have reshaped the traditional extractive, distributive, and repressive dimensions of state capacity both through the availability of large volumes of new kinds of information, and through the increased ability to gather and manipulate that information. Further, we suggest that the extent to which states gather and manipulate information is, in and of itself, an aspect of state capacity that needs theorizing as well as measuring. We argue that information is critical to political survival as a tool for governance, independent of its role in lowering the costs of taxation, enforcement, goods and service provision, or repression. We also flesh out the implications of understanding state capacity in terms of this information-governance nexus for the stability of democratic as well as authoritarian regimes. Whereas recent examinations of information capacity have started to gather available historical measures, like the first completion of a national census and the establishment of offices of national statistics and civil records (Brambor et. al. 2020), we provide a comprehensive theoretical framework to evaluate those measures and consider additional ones.

Authors

• Maria Federica Carugati, King's College London

• Cyanne E. Loyle, Pennsylvania State University

• Jessica Steinberg, Indiana University- International Studies