Ideas, State Capacity, and the Making of Educational Leviathans in Latin America

• In Event: New Frontiers in the Study of State-Building & Democracy

Abstract

Why do some regimes successfully consolidate national institutions during periods of state formation while similar institutions in other states fail to take shape until much later, if at all? This paper takes up the case of national education in post-independence Latin America to challenge theories of state formation that rely primarily on aggregate state capacity and factors of economic growth to explain institutional outcomes. I argue that the more even the spatial distribution of state capacity is throughout the national territory, the less likely the central state is to delegate institutional responsibility to subnational units of governance, and the more likely that the state will monopolize education at the national level. However, the degree to which the state exercises monopoly power over schooling is contingent not just on spatial dimensions of state capacity, but ideas toward educational governance. In state-building regimes where ideas favoring "national" educational models fail to take root, such as those disseminated from intellectual movements abroad via domestic elites, we can expect the development of educational leviathans to lag behind other states, or even stagnate entirely. The empirical strategy combines econometric and comparative-historical methods to test the argument. First, I leverage subnational measures of state capacity over time—particularly, railway networks and census-taking capabilities—to explain the timing and sequence of institutional consolidation using an original historical dataset of primary and lower-secondary educational reforms from 1830 to 1970. To further examine the role of ideas in constraining or facilitating institution-building, I compare the educational trajectories of Argentina, a federalist state, and Chile, a unitary state, from the post-independence period through the early twentieth century.

Author

• David Lopez, University of Washington