State Capacity Beyond Taxation

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The existing literature on state capacity focus heavily on tax revenue as an important dimension of state-building, drawing on the Western European countries' trajectories of fiscal evolution. However, state power encompasses other important aspects such as the state's ability to collect legible information of its citizens, to enforce quasi-voluntary compliance, to create an imaginary community through shared linguistic symbols, and to govern effectively with the assistance of local bureaucracies.

This panel features three papers that discuss the dynamics of state-building in three vastly different but theoretically important historical contexts: the Napoleonic France, the 19th US, and the Imperial China.

Melissa Lee and Zhang Nan study when Americans stopped thinking of the United States as comprised of multiple sovereign states and started thinking of it as a single sovereign entity. Their study sheds light on the linguistic aspect of state capacity

Anne Degrave examines how the Napoleonic land cadaster project strengthened the French state by
increasing citizens' tax compliance, highlighting the informational aspect of state capacity.

Peng Peng looks at how merit-based bureaucracy in Imperial China strengthened the Chinese state under politically tenuous circumstances, emphasizing the bureaucratic nature of state capacity.

Sub Unit

• Division 7: Politics and History

Individual Presentations

• From Pluribus to Unum? Statebuilding in 19th Century America - Melissa M. Lee, Princeton University; Nan Zhang, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods

• State Capacity and Fiscal Legibility: Evidence from Napoleonic Cadaster - Anne Degrave, New York University

• Meritocracy and State Capacity: Evidence from Imperial China - Peng Peng, Duke University

Chair

• Volha Charnysh Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Discussants

• Pavithra Suryanarayan Johns Hopkins University

• Xiaobo Lu University of Texas at Austin