Seminario DONDENA - Pavithra Suryanarayan

State capacity is commonly defined as the ability of a state to collect taxes, enforce law and order, and provide public goods. Studies of the origins of state capacity have surprisingly little to say about when, where, and why strong capacity is deliberately weakened from within. One reason for this silence is that capacity is often treated as indispensable to state survival. Canonical theories of state-building have argued that historical states invested in capacity to wage war and defend themselves from external threats. In the contemporary era, capacity is understood as central not only to defense but also to maintaining domestic order, enforcing property rights, fostering economic development, and providing public goods. Even right-wing parties representing the interests of wealthy elites, those who prefer lower taxes and reduced spending, depend on a functioning state. Theories of state-building and the origins of state capacity have therefore focused overwhelmingly on the challenge of strengthening the state. These accounts, often for good reason, emphasize macro-historical conditions and exogenous shocks such as war, geography, technology and colonialism that forced elites and masses into cooperation and produced investments in capacity. Once achieved, capacity is conceived as an equilibrium, sustained by the self-interest of state and society alike. In this book I lay the theoretical groundwork for a phenomenon called “hollowing out the state” and seek to explain its emergence in democratic contexts. I define hollowing out as the strategic weakening of bureaucratic and informational capacity at specific moments in history. Hollowing out is episodic, employed to blunt the use of the state for purposes it was not intended to serve, and it is likely to occur during moments of political flux when challenges emerge over who controls the state and who it can now serve. This book identifies one particularly consequential basis for such coalitions: social status. Status identities shape ideologies over the role of the state in not just extraction and welfare but also social integration. By social integration, I mean the inclusion of individuals and groups from historically marginalized backgrounds into the social, economic, and political institutions of the community. The impetus to hollow out the state, I argue, follows the social integration of the bureaucratic state and is driven by fears that it will pursue desegregation, weakening rank as a basis of social organization. I develop these arguments in colonial India, where caste played a critical role in both the making and the hollowing out of the bureaucratic state. Using digitized data, I explore whether the expansion of the franchise contributed to a decline in land taxation in districts where status differences between caste groups were particularly pronounced. The chapter argues that upper status Brahmans participated in patterns of reduced tax enforcement that generated high rates of non-compliance and diminished revenue receipts in the years following the announcement of constitutional reform in 1917. Importantly these same places also so a decline in bureaucratic presence a decade later.