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International wars and interstate rivalry have been at the center of our understanding of the origin and expansion of state capacity. This article describes an alternative path to the development of state capacity rooted in domestic political conflict. Under conditions of intra-elite conflict, political rulers seize upon the temporary weakness of their rivals, expropriate their assets, and consolidate authority. Because this political consolidation increases rulers' chances of surviving an economic elite's challenge, it enhances their incentives to develop state capacity. These ideas are evaluated in post-revolutionary Mexico, where commodity price shocks induced by the Great Depression affected the local economic elite differentially. Negative shocks lead to increased asset expropriation and substantially higher investments in state capacity, which persist to the present.

AbstractWe examine the complementary influence of elite politics, popular grievances, and central government weakness on rebellion. Efforts to strengthen the central state often come at the expense of the elite intermediaries charged with maintaining local political control. By driving a wedge between local elites and the central government, centralizing reforms can reduce intermediaries' willingness to repress mobilization, providing an opening for popular rebellion during both localized and national crises. For a given level of commoner grievance, revolts from below are thus more likely to be attempted and more likely to spread where elites' incentives to enforce order have been diminished. We formalize these ideas and provide supportive evidence using subnational data on rebellion, tax centralization, and drought in colonial Mexico from the late seventeenth century to the War of Independence.

Commentators covering recent social movements, such as the Arab Spring, commonly claim that cell phones enable protests. Yet, existing empirical work does not conclusively support this contention: some studies find that these technologies actually reduce collective action; many others struggle to overcome the selection problems that dog observational research. We propose two mechanisms through which cell phones affect protests: (1) by enabling communication among would-be protesters, cell phones lower coordination costs; and (2) these technologies broadcast information about whether a protest is repressed. Knowing that a larger audience now witnesses and may be angered by repression, governments refrain from squashing demonstrations, further lowering the cost of protesting. We evaluate these mechanisms using high-resolution global data on the expansion of cell phone coverage and incidence of protest from 2007 to 2014. Our difference-in-differences estimates indicate that cell phone coverage increases the probability of protest by over half the mean. Consistent with our second mechanism, we also find that gaining coverage has a larger effect when it connects a locality to a large proportion of other citizens.