Between State and Democracy: The Historical Political Economy of Local Self-Government in the Russian Empire
with Dr. Otto Kienitz, SNF Agora Postdoctoral Fellow
How do weak states build state capacity in the face of resistance from powerful local elites? This paper explores the historical struggle of weak states to mobilize resources, including (a) information, (b) human capital, and (c) fiscal revenues, due to the opposition of local landowning elites. I develop a theory of local democratization as a means to align local interests with central state-building goals. By introducing institutions of local self-government, states incentivized elites to participate in state-building through representation in local assemblies, creating a new formula of “no representation, without taxation.” I argue that local self-government served as an alternative state-building model to parliamentarization or bureaucratization that allowed rulers to overcome elite resistance and enhance state capacity through local participation. Focusing on the case of the 1864 zemstvo reform in the Russian Empire, I demonstrate how elite participation in democratic assemblies increased local state capacity, highlighting the extractive origins of democratic institutions, and offering new insights into the local foundations of the relationship between state-building and democratization.
Where: SNF Agora Conference Room and Zoom