Hollowing out the state
I doubt many of us picking out our 2020 American politics bingo cards anticipated a pitched battle over the continued existence of the post office. Or, that the USCIS could run out of funds, essentially halting legal immigration into the country (a more ludicrous aspect of this particular saga is that the USCIS has been unable to issue green cards and work permits because of a lack of printers!). Or that the census would try to change who it counts. For a casual observer these may appear to be troubling but disparate events that speak to the Trump government’s incompetence. To a discerning observer they may seem coordinated, but in the service of trying to win elections, or to bring about government reforms (depending on your ideological persuasion). A closer look, however, reveals that this is just one more episode in a long-running pattern in the United States of trying to weaken government capacity as a means for certain groups to hold on to power.
In places as different as the US and India, efforts are underway to weaken the administrative apparatus of the state: a phenomenon that I refer to as hollowing out the state. It is a deliberate strategy of weakening the government’s ability to function in order to achieve ends that elites are unable to achieve through democratic channels.
The phenomenon of institutional weakening is not new to comparative politics scholars. Research like Brinks, Levitsky and Murillo’s recent volume on Latin America illuminates these dynamics in developing world contexts. But the sudden emergence of this phenomena in contexts like the US—long-standing democracies with robust governing capacity—raises interesting questions.
Research on capacity in the advanced industrial countries casts state-building as a slow moving and historically contingent process that occurred over centuries in response to war, underlying resource endowments, and through strategic choices made at pivotal moments. A state’s ability to raise taxes plays a central role in this literature. This is because in order to be able to tax, states need to know where you live, how much you make, and be able to shake you down. The ability to extract creates a bureaucratic infrastructure that the state can deploy for other purposes. Importantly, in these places, the advent of strong bureaucratic capacity pre-dated mass electoral politics, and continues to be something we take for granted every day.
While we know a lot about where state capacity comes from and why it matters, the current moment is pushing us to ask a different question: to paraphrase Levistky and Ziblatt– how does state capacity die?
Hollowing out the state in post-Reconstruction American South.
In a new paper, Steven White and I illustrate one example of hollowing out the state. We study the period after the American Civil War, which ended slavery in the southern states. We look at two time periods. The first, Reconstruction (1865-1877), when the federal government provided protections for the political rights of southern black men, and when new taxes funded a range of public goods. This was followed, though, by “Redemption,” when southern white elites returned to power, reducing not just taxation but also the state’s governing capacity. In figure 1 below, we map where the decline in taxation was most concentrated. Why did this happen?
Second, the past and the present are connected by the coalitions that support President Trump, and those that were key to the success of state weakening during Reconstruction. This suggests that a coalition over the preservation of racial status might be an especially enduring basis to weaken state capacity in the present day just as it was in the 19thcentury.
Finally, it is worth considering whether the process of hollowing out the state is a phenomenon more likely in democracies where elites find electoral pathways to achieving policy objectives blocked. In these cases, uncertainty about the future, a weakening electoral map, and a racial coalition that makes institutional weakening possible, might set into motion active strategies to weaken state capacity, and in turn democracy itself, as was to occur in the American South in the late 19thcentury.
