One problem with many abstract discussions of “the state” is that they often seem very far away from the actual encounters that citizens have with agents of the state. Arguably Migdal’s most important contribution to the study of state capacity was his insistence that understanding states in the developing world requires looking beyond the capital to the local level, where “triangles of accommodation” between state implementers, local political figures, and local strongmen undermine the goals of central leaders and agencies. As Diane Davis puts it, echoing a phrase frequently attributed to former U. S. Speaker of the House Thomas P. O’Neill, “all state formation [is] in essence ‘local.’”71
State capacity and quality vary not only cross-nationally and temporally, but also geographically within the same state. Jeff Goodwin states, “any claim that a particular state is infrastructurally strong should ideally specify where, for whom, and how.”72 A complete account of state building necessitates moving beyond the capital and looking at the behavior of state agents at the regional, local, and even “street level.”73 The effectiveness of law varies, creating areas where the state is present and functions properly (what O’Donnell terms “blue areas”), where the state may be present but does not function properly (“green areas”), and where it fulfills neither condition (“brown areas”).74
Studies of state coercive organs need to pay greater attention to this territorial dimension. It is striking, for example, that we have large literatures on the ethno-national and economic aspects of decentralization and federalism, but very little on the coercive aspects of these issues.75 Mark Ungar notes
“Democracy, Democratization, Democratic Policing,” in Dilip K. Das and Otwin Marenin, eds., Challenges of Policing Democracies: A World Perspective (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 2000), pp. 311-331; Mark Ungar, Elusive Reform: Democracy and the Rule of Law in Latin America (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002).
Migdal 1988; Diane E. Davis, “Contemporary Challenges and Historical Reflections on the Study of Militaries, States, and Politics,” in Davis and Pereira 2003, p. 29. See also: Forrest 1988, pp. 427-43i.
Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945-1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 250. On within-country variation in, respectively, good government and state capacity, see: Judith Tendler, Good Government in the Tropics (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Catherine Boone, Political Topographies of the African State: Territorial Authority and Institutional Choice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1980).
O’Donnell 1993.
On ethno-national aspects, see, for example: Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 601-628; Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977). On economic and fiscal federalism, see, for example: Gabriella Montinola, Yingyi Qian, and Barry R. Weingast, “Federalism, Chinese Style: The Political Basis for Economic Success,” World Politics, 48 (1995), pp. 50-81; Jonathan Rodden, Hamilton’s Paradox: The Promise and Peril of Fiscal Federalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Erik Wibbels, Federalism and the Market: Intergo-vernmental Conflict and Economic Reform in
The important role provincial law enforcement structures play in rule-of-law issues, sometimes serving as a source for reform initiatives and sometimes providing the worst examples of repression and unresponsiveness.76 Even more fundamentally, central and regional governments will often fight for control of policing, in both federal states such as Argentina and unitary ones such as France.77 Migdal contends, “who controls the local police is often one of the most important questions one can ask about the distribution of social control.”78 In some cases, regions exert considerable influence over the military as well.79
A key part of the story told in this book is about how the issue of controlling coercion featured heavily in the politics of Russian state building and federalism under Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. As I elaborate in Chapter 4, the means used for resolving center-region disputes in established democracies were too weak to perform this function in Russia. These struggles for control, however, had no impact on state quality. On the contrary, the focus on control pushed to the background the more important issue for the Russian state: how to transform Russia into a civil state in which coercion serves not just the ruling elite, but society as a whole.
Coercion, state capacity, and state quality IN post-soviet Russia
The dramatic events of the 1980s and 1990s in Russia have been characterized variably as a revolution, an imperial collapse, and a transition. In important respects, of course, it was all of these. Stephen Kotkin argues persuasively that it is a mistake to see the political and economic collapse as an event that took place in December 1991, as opposed to a process that began decades before the formal death of the Soviet Union and continued well after this date.80 And
The Developing World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). A unique and important treatment of the territorial aspects of policing is: David H. Bayley, Patterns of Policing (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985), pp. 53-73.
76 Ungar 2002, pp. 19, 86-89, i43, i49, 178, 203.
77 Laura Kalmanowieci, “Policing the People, Building the State: The Police-Military Nexus in Argentina, 1880-1945,” in Davis/Periera 2003, pp. 209-232; Lizabeth Zack, “The Police Municipale and the Formation of the French State,” in Davis/Periera 2003, pp. 281-302. Zack’s account is weakened by her argument that the French state did not monopolize coercion until the second half of the twentieth century because the central state shared this control with cities and provinces. But a Weberian approach makes no specific claim about what level of the state asserts a monopoly of control over legitimate coercion; regional or local control is still state control.
78 Migdal 1988, p. 32.
79 This was true, for example, in pre-World War II Brazil: Kent Eaton, Politics Beyond the Capital: The Design of Subnational Institutions in South America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 76-78; Alfred Stepan, The Military in Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 18.
80 Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
The 1990s was not just a period of economic depression in Russia but also one of political depression, specifically low stateness.
Such periods of state collapse and weakness are of course not new in Russian history. The cyclical view of Russian history argues that the perennial challenge of Russian statehood has been how to govern such a large and inhospitable territory, particularly in conditions of relative economic backwardness and external threat from more economically advanced and militarily powerful neighbors. The conventional solution has been a revolution from above employing coercive methods, resulting in a strong authoritarian “service state.” The pathologies of this model and changing historical conditions lead to liberalizing reforms designed to make the state more effective. These reforms tend to fail, leading to state collapse and the resumption of the cycle anew.47
It is tempting to view Putin through this angle, as another authoritarian state builder in the tradition of Peter the Great and Stalin.48 Putin himself, consciously or unconsciously, promoted these analogies, hanging a portrait of Peter the Great in his office and echoing Stalin’s famous line about “those who fall behind get beaten” in his September 2004 speech after the Beslan tragedy.49 By the end of Vladimir Putin’s presidency in 2008, the conventional wisdom, in both Russia and abroad, was that the post-collapse political and economic crisis had ended and that Russia was back on its feet, once again ready to reclaim its rightful place in the world as a major power. Conventional explanations for growing power included both structural factors, such as high world energy prices and the resulting economic growth in Russia, and agency in the person of Putin, who was able to rebuild the state by centralizing power in the Kremlin and weakening alternative centers of power, such as the economic barons known as the “oligarchs” and regional governors who had accumulated considerable power under Yeltsin.50
In contrast, I argue that the state-building achievements of Putin, although real, were relatively modest, especially in the coercive realm. Like Peter the Great and Stalin, Putin clearly privileged capacity building over quality building. There was a noticeable increase in the capacity of the Russian state to demand compliance from law enforcement organs to fulfill extraordinary decisions; a new “regime of repression” was built to crack down on political and economic opponents of the Kremlin. The picture with respect to implementing routine tasks was more mixed. The fiscal capacity of the state increased, and in Putin’s last years as president, law enforcement agencies were apparently doing a better job of fighting crime and terrorism, although by comparative standards, their performance was relatively poor. On the other hand, the state did not establish a stable property rights regime.
The quality of Russian state coercive bodies did not improve; these organizations still neglected societal needs, treated citizens unfairly, and thereby failed to regain the trust of the population. Russia at the end of Putin’s reign continued to lag dramatically behind states of comparable wealth around the world in terms of both state capacity and especially state quality; much of this book is devoted to demonstrating this assertion.
Why has state building, particularly in terms of the coercive agencies emphasized by a Weberian approach, been so difficult? I highlight three shortcomings in terms of public administration and political institutions:
1) The continued dominance of patrimonial and informal bureaucratic practices;
2) A faulty strategy for monitoring the behavior of state bureaucracies, especially coercive ones;
3) The failure to institutionalize a new set of values among government employees in the coercive realm that would lead state agents to pursue general rather than particular goods.
These three factors clearly are not the only influences on state capacity and state quality. Stateness is influenced by larger structural factors, such as economic wealth and resource dependence, as well as prior historical legacies, such as inheritances from the Soviet system and the legacies of its collapse.51 The advantage of the three issues I focus on - bureaucratic type, monitoring strategy, and organizational mission - is that they are directly connected to organizational practice and public administration. They also are manipula-ble, in the sense that they can be changed by the actions of politicians and state officials.52 Karl Marx famously observed that “men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves.”53 Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin both thought of themselves as making history and sought to bend the existing circumstances to further their goal of rebuilding the Russian state. It is thus appropriate that we focus on those factors more subject to short - and medium-term change.
World History
