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Canonical studies of the origins of state capacity have focused on macro-historical or structural explanations. I review recent research in historical political economy that showcases the role of politics—agents, their constraints, and their motivations—in the evolution of state capacity. Findings from both developed and developing countries emphasize how elite conflict, principal–agent dilemmas, and ethnic and racial differences have shaped agents' preferences for capacity. These new studies demonstrate that state capacity can be strategically manipulated by political and economic elites, and that the various dimensions of state capacity—extractive, coercive, legal—do not necessarily move together. Refocusing our attention on the political drivers of state capacity has also shed light on why there are such stark subnational variations in the development of state capacity, particularly within large polities like India, China, and the United States. The findings point to the need for more nuanced conceptualization and measurement of state capacity. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 27 is June 2024. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

What explains the popularity of right-wing parties among the poor? This article argues that in hierarchical societies with high social-status inequality, cross-class coalitions can emerge among high-status voters if they believe their social status is under threat. I demonstrate this in the context of the Indian states by exploiting an announcement by the Government of India in 1990 to implement affirmative action for lower castes—an intervention that threatened to weaken the social status of upper caste Brahmans. Using unique data from the 1931 census, this article shows that areas where Brahmans were more dominant in the 1930s experienced a higher surge in right-wing voting after this announcement than other areas. Using survey data, I find that both wealthy and poor Brahmans voted for the right wing where Brahmans were dominant in 1931. The article shows how concerns about social status may make the poor open to appeals by antiredistribution parties.

What explains the popularity of right-wing parties amongst the poor? This paper argues that in hierarchical societies with high social-status inequality, poor high-status voters may ally with rich high-status voters if they believe their social-status is under threat. I demonstrate this in the context of the Indian states by exploiting an announcement by the Government of India in 1990 to implement affirmative action for lower castes - an intervention that threatened to weaken the social-status of upper-caste Brahmans. Using unique data from the 1931 census, this paper shows that areas where Brahmans were more dominant in the 1930s experienced a higher surge in rightwing voting after this announcement than other areas. Using survey data, I find that both wealthy and poor Brahmans voted for the right-wing where Brahmans were dominant in 1931. The paper shows how concerns about social-status may make the poor open to appeals by anti-redistribution parties.

Conventional political economy models predict taxation will increase after franchise expansion to low-income voters. Yet, contrary to expectations, in ranked societies—where social status is a cleavage—elites can instead build cross-class coalitions to undertake a strategy ofbureaucratic weakeningto limit future redistributive taxation. We study a case where status hierarchies were particularly extreme: the post-Civil War American South. During Reconstruction, under federal oversight, per capita taxation was higher in counties where slavery had been more extensive before the war, as predicted by standard theoretical models. After Reconstruction ended, however, taxes fell and bureaucratic capacity was weaker where slavery had been widespread. Moreover, higher intrawhite economic inequality was associated with lower taxes and weaker capacity after Reconstruction in formerly high-slavery counties. These findings on the interaction between intrawhite economic inequality and pre-War slavery suggest that elites built cross-class coalitions against taxation where whites sought to protect their racial status.

The conventional wisdom that the poor are less likely to vote than the rich is based upon research on voting behavior in advanced industrialized countries. However, in some places, the relationship between turnout and socioeconomic status is reversed. We argue that the potential tax exposure of the rich explains the positive relationship between income and voting in some places and not others. Where the rich anticipate taxation, they have a greater incentive to participate in politics, and politicians are more likely to use fiscal policy to gain support. We explore two factors affecting the tax exposure of the rich-the political salience of redistribution in party politics and the state's extractive capacity. Using survey data from developed and developing countries, we demonstrate that the rich turn out to vote at higher rates when the political preferences of the rich and poor diverge and where bureaucratic capacity is high. Adapted from the source document.

It is well established that a country's institutional features can weaken economic voting because voters find it hard to attribute performance to specific parties. We argue that local-level party system institutionalization similarly moderates the link between the economy and vote choice. We focus on one manifestation of party system institutionalization: the strength of party-candidate linkages in elections, operationalized by manually tracing the rerunning patterns of some 80,000 candidates in Indian state elections between 1986 and 2007. Using rerunning patterns to measure party-candidate linkages and rainfall data to measure the state of the economy, we show that voters were more likely to reward incumbent parties for economic performance when parties and candidates were aligned in consecutive elections. We address concerns of endogeneity in rerunning patterns, by showing that the results are robust to alternate measures of local-level party system institutionalization. They are also robust to alternative measures of the state of the economy and to using individual-level survey data.