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This article discusses three main challenges to gaining a better understanding of whether state capacity contributes to the resilience of electoral authoritarian regimes. First, the concept of state capacity is multi-dimensional and can be entangled with regime organizational structures. Second, there is a range of different mechanisms through which elections may draw upon capacity in these different dimensions to affect authoritarian resilience. Third, good indicators of the dimensions of state capacity for empirical work are sorely lacking. To address these challenges, this article outlines the connections between extractive, coercive and administrative dimensions of state capacity with regard to how electoral authoritarian regimes address threats arising from society and from within the ruling elite. It then assesses different approaches to measuring these dimensions for empirical work.

Empirical research in the New Institutional Economics tradition has concentrated on the degree to which institutional constraints on rulers protect property rights and foster growth through private investment. This view of institutions is overly narrow, neglecting the role of state capacity in particular. Both state authority and constraints on rulers matter for economic performance, but the relative strength of these effects depends upon a country's distance from the frontier of the world economy. Tests using a panel data set that covers up to 84 countries from the period 1960 to 2005 reveal that, in countries that have low Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, constraints on rulers in the form of checks and balances affect neither the rate of productivity growth nor the growth of capital stock per worker. Basic state authority, however, has a strong, positive effect on both of these outcomes. The story is different for advanced industrial economies, where the effects of checks are positive, especially with respect to productivity growth. Institutional checks on rulers are thus not an agent of investment-based growth but support continued growth based upon innovation at the leading edge. Adapted from the source document.

Traditional economic growth regressions are not adequate to identify the role of political institutions because they assume a universal growth paradigm exists. Instead, there are distinct paradigms of investment- and innovation-based growth, and the effects of political institutions vary across them. Using a dataset covering 83 countries from 1965–2008, this study employs a mixture models estimation to identify these paradigms. It finds that state authority is critical for countries engaged in investment-based growth, and competitive political participation tempers the pace of capital accumulation but increases productivity growth. Conversely, where innovation-based growth predominates, state authority has little effect and competitive political participation slows the pace of growth. Constraints on rulers do not support investment in either paradigm.

State capacity is a core concept in political science research, and it is widely recognized that state institutions exert considerable influence on outcomes such as economic development, civil conflict, democratic consolidation, and international security. Yet, researchers across these fields of inquiry face common problems involved in conceptualizing and measuring state capacity. This paper examines these conceptual issues, identifies three common dimensions of state capacity, and uses Bayesian latent variable analysis to assess the extent to which these dimensions are discernible in available indicators of state capacity. The analysis results in a new general-purpose measure of state capacity with demonstrated validity for use in a wide range of empirical inquiries. The paper also establishes the difficulty of achieving empirical distinctions between core dimensions of state capacity. It is hoped that this project will provide effective guidance and tools to researchers studying the causes and consequences of state capacity.

Prepared for presentation at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC ; Version: August 2019 ; In what types of institutional environments are international development projects most likely to succeed? Previous research suggests alternatively that liberal economic policies, democratic political institutions, and institutions characterized by "good governance" are all of primary importance. A serious drawback of this work is that measures of institutional quality tend to have poor coverage and conceptual fuzziness. This paper uses a new measure of state capacity with continuous coverage from 1960-2015 to evaluate the importance of di↵erent types of institutions on the success of over 10,000 World Bank projects. The results suggest that development projects are most likely to succeed where state capacity is relatively high, regardless of regime type and across di↵erent types of loans. Successful World Bank projects can, in turn, have a positive impact on State Capacity suggesting the possibility of a virtuous circle of development projects and state capacity building.