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Pre-colonial
centralisation, traditional indirect rule, and state capacity in
Africa With Jason Sorens, Dartmouth College Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, vol. 56(2), pp. 195–215, DOI: 10.1080/14662043.2017.1404666 What explains contemporary variation in state capacity across African states? Recent research has focused on the possible role played by colonial and pre-colonial institutions. This paper investigates the way in which colonial and pre-colonial institutions interacted to affect the public legitimacy and coercive capacity of African states on independence. A coherent configuration of historical institutions, pre-colonial centralisation combined with colonial indirect rule through traditionally legitimate rulers, contrasts with the incoherent and comparatively illegitimate configurations of pre-colonial decentralisation with traditional rule and pre-colonial centralisation with colonial non-traditional or direct rule. The paper tests the theoretical expectations in a historical instrumental-variables framework. |
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Mapping
Local State Capacity With Gustav Agneman, Kasper Brandt, and David Sjöberg Quality of Government (QoG) Institute’s Best Paper Award 2022 The ability of states to exercise authority often varies considerably within their borders. Yet, the empirical literature on state capacity has typically relied on country-level indicators of state capacity. In this paper, we develop a measure of local state capacity for all five-kilometer grid cells across Sub-Saharan Africa. The measure builds on geocoded survey data on local state presence, which we predict and extrapolate through a machine learning model using readily available data on the costs and benefits of capacity building across space. We showcase the usefulness of measuring state capacity at a local level by employing the index as a moderating factor in the relationship between oil wealth and violent conflict and show that areas with higher levels of state capacity face lower risks of conflict outbreak due to exogenous oil wealth shocks. |
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Taking
Out the Church, Bringing In the State With Jacob Gerner Hariri, University of Copenhagen Many forms of political organization vied for power in medieval Europe, and it was not a given that the modern state would eventually outcompete its rivals. Yet, the Protestant Reformation created a window for secular rulers to confront a competing form of political organization, the Church, and centralize power. This helped clear the way for the modern state. Since it was costly to take on the Church, the Protes- tant Reformation was more likely to take place where rulers were strong enough to shoulder these costs. In the short run, the strengthening of the Crown around the Reformation rendered rulers independent of society, which helped pave the way for Absolutism and impeded economic development. In the longer run, however, the positive developmental consequences of the Reformation outweighed the nega- tive ones. We use original data on castle ownership in medieval and early modern Europe and document our findings using, e.g., difference-in-differences analyses. |
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Tracing
the Origins of the Early Modern State: Introducing the Castles
data
With Jacob Gerner Hariri, University of Copenhagen The modern state originated in medieval and early modern Europe, spread to all parts of the world, and quickly became the dominant form of political organization. Quantitative scholarship on the historical development of the modern state has lacked a measure of historical statehood that reflects the defining feature of the modern state: the monopoly on the use of physical force within a territory. We propose a new measure of statehood, the share of castles controlled by the crown; one that starts from the canonical definition and allows us to trace the origins of the modern state in the period when it actually happened. The measure is based on an original data set on castle ownership across medieval and early modern Europe. In this paper, we introduce the Castles data. To test the validity of the proposed measure, we show that the measure correlates well with historiographical narratives of state formation in Denmark, Sweden, and England. |
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No
Centralization Without Population: The Black Death and State Formation
in Europe When and where do states expand their territorial reach? In this paper, I address this question by studying the impact of the Black Death on local state-building. I argue that the labor scarcity caused by the pandemic, by altering the costs and benefits of local state presence, affected rulers’ decisions of where to invest in state-building. Areas that were hit relatively hard by the plague would ultimately experience a weaker presence of state authority compared to areas with lower mortality rates. Combining data on local mortality rates across Europe and an original dataset on castle ownership, I show that higher mortality rates are associated with lower levels of state presence as measured by the share of crown castles; and this divergence persisted through centuries. I further show that this divergence can be traced even to contemporary variations in critical infrastructure, suggesting a modern-day legacy of the Black Death. |
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Using Large
Language Models to Classify Cultural Heritage [Work in progress] Large language models holds potential to classify and annotate textual data in new and creative ways. Unlike traditional models for annotating text-as-data, they are capable of annotation tasks that require contextual reasoning and interpretation of high-level semantic meaning. In this paper, I test how OpenAI’s GPT performs in comparison to crowd workers when it comes to annotation of cultural attributes in less conventional text genres. Replicating Michalopoulos and Xue’s (2021) classification of gender stereotypes in folklore motifs, I show that GPT annotations (1) are on par with or better than MTurkers when it comes to consistency and (2) yield classifications similar to those of human annotators. |
The Rise of the Territorial State: Fortification of BordersWith Jacob Gerner Hariri, University of CopenhagenThe modern state is intimately and definitionally linked to the notion of territory. Anyone who wishes to understand the origins of the modern state must also confront the origin of the borders, which delimit the territory that defines it. This paper uses an original data set on medieval castles, and who controls them, to document how political power was gradually projected into the borderlands. We show that the process of fortifying the frontier was originally driven by nobles until the Crown eventually took over the nobles’ castles in the borderlands. We use this to time the origin of the territorial state and explore variation in the timing in medieval Europe. We also explore the factors that explain why the ter- ritorial state arose. Preliminary results suggest that war was not a driving force in the fortification of borders. Economic potential and the ability to project authority seems to have mattered more. |
The Coercive Origins of CitiesWith Jacob Gerner Hariri, University of Copenhagen, and Jonathan Doucette, Aarhus UniversityThis paper studies an early manifestation of the fundamental dilemma between coercion and economic activity – the relationship between castles and cities. In medieval Europe, the castle constituted and signaled coercive power. The castle lord offered a source of protection but also constituted a threat to urban activity. We show that castle construction strongly predicts city formation, but there are no signs that the emergence of cities is followed by castle construction. We show that castle construction predicts city formation even where the geographical conditions for urban activity are poor, and that cities formed in the shadow of castles fare no worse than other cities in terms of economic activity. There is little to indicate that locally concentrated coercive power, castles, was also a threat to urban activity. The paper contributes to the literature on city development and the literature on state formation. |
The Historical Origins of Traditional Gender Roles (research project) |
Monopolizing Violence: State Formation in Medieval and Early Modern EuropeWith Jacob Gerner Hariri, University of Copenhagen |
State Formation and Urban DevelopmentWith Jacob Gerner Hariri, University of Copenhagen, and Jonathan
Doucette, Aarhus University |