Marcus Kurtz
Associate Professor of Political Science
The Ohio State University
“The Social Foundations of Institutional Order: Society, War or the ‘Resource Curse’ in South American State Building”
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
12:30 pm - C103 Hesburgh Center
Marcus Kurtz (PhD, University of California at Berkeley) studies how free market reforms are connected to the process of democratic consolidation in Latin America; the role of the state in economic development; and the cross-national measurement of state capability or governance.
Abstract
The dominant approaches to the understanding of state building have emphasized opposite sides of the same conceptual coin. On the one hand, scholars have pointed to the state-strengthening effects of war and the threat of international conflict in accounts of the development of powerful national administrative systems. On the other, a different literature has identified large stocks of easily taxed natural resources as an explanation for institutional underdevelopment. My approach differs sharply from both versions of the conventional wisdom, arguing that the effects of conflict and ecology can only be understood as a consequence of prior social and political factors that develop over long periods of time in a path-dependent fashion: agrarian social relations and inter-elite political dynamics early in the state-building process. These factors interact to provide the terrain that impels or impedes state-building dynamics and ultimately account for the widely divergent institutional outcomes observed in the South American context.
