One of the most meaningful conversations Dr. Otto Kienitz has had at the SNF Agora Institute was with former Congressman John Sarbanes, now the institute’s Distinguished Practitioner in Residence. They spoke about H.R. 1, the For the People Act, stalling in the Senate amid a lack of elite buy-in.
Kienitz says the fate of H.R. 1 fits a pattern that persists across centuries of state-building. “Most early modern states struggled to provide public goods because local elites guarded their private information and wealth from central authorities and used their political power to block fiscal reforms. It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century when states experimented with reforms designed to create elite accountability by linking their tax obligations to participation in local democratic assemblies.” The exchange with Congressman Sarbanes over the future of the American state and democracy helped sharpen the research question he applies to centuries of historical political economy: how do states overcome this elite resistance in order to build local capacity that delivers meaningful results to ordinary people?
As a postdoctoral researcher at the SNF Agora Institute, Kienitz studies what makes governments work and what causes them to falter. He focuses on state capacity, which he defines as “the ability of the state to gain access to and mobilize information, human capital, and revenue in efficient ways, not just through extraction but also through public-private partnerships that incentivize state and non-state actors to work together to deliver public goods, and sustain that cooperation into the future.”
At SNF Agora, Kienitz has found a place that pushes his thinking forward. “Here, political scientists, sociologists, and economists all study the conditions that constrain or enable state action,” he says. He credits the institute, and Johns Hopkins more broadly, with expanding how he thinks about the uneven ways people experience government services. He points to projects like Mapping the Modern Agora, led by Hahrie Han, which use data to trace how local civil society organizations and state institutions interact. “SNF Agora stands at the forefront of studying the intersection of democracy, place, and state-society relations,” he says. “That local perspective has changed the way I approach my own work.”
Kienitz’s current research studies historical patterns of state-building by examining how states mobilize resources at the local level.
“Instead of only studying national representative institutions like Congress or Parliament as the cause of economic growth and development,” he says, “we need to understand that ‘all capacity is local’ and built from the bottom up, which often depends on aligning the incentives of the state, local elites, and ordinary citizens to work together to mobilize resources and solve local problems.”
He believes building capacity begins first and foremost with participation. “When and where economic elites shelter their wealth from local taxation and evade accountability, they lack incentives to contribute to their community by helping fund schools, roads, and hospitals.” However, his research on local reforms in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire shows that even autocratic states may turn to democratic assemblies when they need the cooperation and, indeed, participation of economic elites to expand the tax base to overcome local challenges. The lessons in his book manuscript on the history of local democratic reforms speak to the present challenges of unlocking state capacity, “connecting local reforms such as participatory budgeting to tax compliance and the progressivity of local property taxes, which continue to be the main source of funding for many local public goods to this day.”
For Kienitz, studying the relationship between democracy and state capacity is not abstract theory but something “real, local, and increasingly vital if we are to deliver on the grand promises of a democratic society.”
