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Can Leviathan be Democratic? Competitive Elections, Robust Mass Politics, and State Infrastructural Power

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Abstract

Reconciling effective government with accountable government remains an enormous political challenge, especially in the postcolonial world. Can postcolonial states only gain infrastructural power when their rulers enjoy unencumbered despotic power? With their contradictory findings about the influence of democratic parliaments on state autonomy and capacity, the literatures on constitutional states in Western Europe and developmental states in Northeast Asia provide limited guidance on this normatively critical question. As an alternative approach, this essay proposes three causal mechanisms through which competitive national elections can incite the territorial extension of state institutions: (1) catalyzing the construction of mass ruling parties; (2) energizing state registration of marginal populations; and (3) fostering centralized intervention in local authoritarian enclaves. Evidence from Southeast Asia suggests that competitive elections will only have these infrastructural effects when accompanied by robust mass political mobilization. This has intriguing implications for how scholars understand historical patterns of state-building in the West, as well as how policymakers try to build more effective states in the most ungoverned corners of the contemporary world.

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Notes

  1. My use of “robust” draws from John McCormick’s depiction of “Machiavellian democracy,” which combines “electoral mechanisms for elite control” with “more direct and robust modes of popular engagement with politics” (McCormick 2001: 297). While McCormick stresses the benefits of this combination for democratic accountability, I highlight its potentially potent impact on infrastructural power.

  2. See Hillel Soifer’s contribution to this issue.

  3. A dissenting view can be seen in Downing (1992), who argues that monarchs in early modern Europe maximized their revenue haul by dismantling parliaments, not consulting them.

  4. National elections did not precede bureaucratization in Thailand, so Sidel cannot rely on Shefter to explain Thai state weakness. He concludes that the common problem in the Philippines and Thailand was that both experienced democratization under conditions of “primitive capital accumulation” (Sidel 1999).

  5. Why some (perhaps most) mass parties such as Argentina’s Peronists have pursued clientilist rather than programmatic policies and undermined rather than enhanced state capacity is an important question for further research. Thanks to Miguel Centeno for this stark and significant counter-example.

  6. As Daniel Ziblatt argues in this issue, the provision of public goods might be encouraged by preexisting infrastructural power, not just indicated by it. Yet states might also develop the capacity to provide public goods through the process of doing so.

  7. The third longstanding member of this coalition, the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC), is a sideshow compared to these two main players.

  8. This refers to the chronic relative poverty of majority Malays vis-à-vis minority Chinese.

  9. The same can be said of Singapore, Southeast Asia’s consummate authoritarian Leviathan.

  10. See Matthew Lange and Hrag Balian’s article in this issue for more discussion of the debilitating effects of “decentralized despotism” on state infrastructural power.

  11. Quantitative confirmation of the continuing importance of robust mass politics in contemporary democracies can be found in tests by Lee (2007), who finds that labor-led civic mobilization is strongly correlated with effective and transparent governance across high- and middle-income countries.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Pick Hall, 406, University of Chicago, 5828 South University Ave., Chicago, IL, 60637, USA

    Dan Slater

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Correspondence to Dan Slater.

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Thanks to Miguel Centeno, Manali Desai, Andrew Dilts, Richard Doner, Matthias vom Hau, Matthew Lange, James Mahon, Ryan Saylor, Alberto Simpser, Hillel Soifer, David Waldner, Thee Kian Wee, and Daniel Ziblatt for their comments on earlier drafts. Adam Bilinksi provided outstanding research assistance on the contemporary non-Southeast Asian cases.

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Slater, D. Can Leviathan be Democratic? Competitive Elections, Robust Mass Politics, and State Infrastructural Power. St Comp Int Dev 43, 252–272 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-008-9026-8

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