Have you ever wondered if decentralization policies influenced state-building efforts in Latin America? In this book, Hillel Soifer sets forth two casual factors, ideation and administrative capacity, to explain why some states were crafted stronger or weaker in nineteenth-century Latin America. He claims that states with strong capacity to rule, with a unified political economy and a central city, promoted more liberal “order” and “progress” than decentralized ones. He goes further, asserting that where leaders relied on deployed rules, sending outsiders to communities to serve as administrators over delegated ones, and local elites were appointed to bureaucratic posts, the state grew in power and stature. Soifer affirms that centralization is necessary for a stronger state to grow.
It is common for political economists to try to evaluate public policy outcomes based on state capacity (Bates 1998; Geddes Reference Geddes1994; Smith and Revell Reference Smith and Revell2016). Yet decentralization policies promoted in the 1980s, and nowadays recentralization, are mostly an unsettled policy matter for many distinguished scholars. Endogeneity is often mixed into this literature. Scholars and policy professionals are unsure how decentralization reforms should be made by fragile states. Soifer’s book helps us understand this issue.
To do this, Soifer’s book uses a mixed-methods approach to analyze variation in state capacity in four countries in the region, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, and Chile. He determines that three of the four cases built strong states, characterized by a dominant capital city (or what he calls “urban primacy”) and a “unified political economy.” Yet state-building projects had different outcomes when state agents were sometimes deployed and at other times delegated, such as in Mexico and Peru. By evaluating three areas of state policy for education, taxation, and military recruitment in each country, Soifer identifies how those states built strong or weak governments.
While many comparative politics, public policy, and political economy scholars use quantitative methods, they often worry about claiming too much with suboptimal data. Wouldn’t it be nice to understand how public policy affects state creation, bureaucratic quality, or even democratization in the long run? By working with larger time horizons in histories, Soifer is able to analyze casual mechanisms of this scope.
Critics have suggested biases in Soifer’s work. Principally, historians disagree about whether data-driven accounts demonstrate history or whether they wash away the thick details. Others object to Soifer’s use of “rules” to explain the superiority of his theory that only urban primacy matters over other theories, such as geography, wars, federalism, and tax collection, among others, to explain why and how states form. Still others suggest that Soifer’s theory of state centrality lacks transversality to other countries, or the generalizability question in research methods.
Importantly, this is not the first time scholars have used urban primacy to define state formation and development. Dennis Rondinelli (Reference Rondinelli1981) has long written in the fields of public administration and development economics about the importance not only of how cities drive the bureaucracy but also how and when the proliferation of secondary cities is equally vital. Daniel Carpenter’s book The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy (2001) describes how a federalist state deepened and evolved by promoting bureaucratic autonomy. Guy Peters’s work The Politics of Bureaucracy (2000) demonstrates, through comparative cases, the interworkings of how to strengthen states through different types of bureaucratic formation and execution of public policy.
Case selection and descriptive analysis may be biased in Soifer’s work. For example, Mauricio Merino (Reference Merino1992) has frequently claimed that the administrative state in Mexico was crafted by the Catholic Church, which Soifer does not mention. During the nineteenth century, both liberals and conservatives were fighting for centralization of power. Even though liberal Benito Juárez came from Oaxaca and had regional caciques propel him into office, his administration promised development by centralized agencies for agricultural reforms, promoting the railways and improving international commerce.
While these complaints are relevant, this book provides a great use of mixed methods, employing historical datasets, which often are presented as simple OLS regressions or modest causalities, combined with selective cases to demonstrate assertions. This gives interesting insights on how quantitative comparative work affects long-term and case selection.
Overall, Solfer’s work presents an easily read version of state formation by presenting a “new” alternative explanation for history scholars to engage with: urban primacy. He also demonstrates possible flaws quantitative scholars can create by trying to claim too much with datasets. While this work adds to the academic debates about decentralization versus centralization, without accounting for issues of federalism in state formation, Soifer limits possible solutions to this vacillation.
