Which first: state capacity or democracy?
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Voters in India, 2014
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Conventional wisdom says that a sound and functioning state has to be in place before democracy can be introduced. The possibility that democratization might contribute to state-building “has hardly been addressed in empirical research,” Giovanni Carbone and Vincenzo Memoli argue in the current issue of Governance. Their findings? More democratic countries are more likely to develop stronger and more effective states. Countries that reach and sustain a certain level of democratization are particularly likely to realize the benefits of a well-developed state. “Our findings have evident policy implications,” Carbone and Memoli say. “Authoritarian rulers do not make better ‘state consolidators’.” Read the article.
