Public Sector Capacity and Political Stability in Latin
America
Principal Investigator: Marcus J. Kurtz
Why do some Latin American governments maintain stable
democracies while others succumb to political unrest?
To answer this question, Marcus Kurtz examined the institutional
capacity of states, or their ability to respond to economic
inequality and political unrest in ways that prevent escalation
into crises that threaten the regime.
Kurtz sees two dimensions to state capacity: tax capacity
and bureaucratic effectiveness. In the first area, states
need access to a strong resource base, and they need to
be able to mobilize it quickly. How resources are collected
also matters: taxes on consumption, income and property
are more flexible than taxes on foreign export of natural
resources.
States also must effectively mobilize these resources
to pursue the pubic good. This means they need an effective
bureaucracy, independent enough of special interests to
avoid being captured, but sufficiently linked to civil
actors to implement their policies.
Based on this notion of state capacity, Kurtz has developed
four hypotheses:
• States with well developed tax capacity and effective
bureaucracies show unusual political stability.
• States with well developed tax capacity but ineffective
bureaucracies are politically stable, but may develop
machine politics.
• States with little tax capacity and ineffective
bureaucracies are unresponsive to crises and vulnerable
to political unrest.
• States with effective bureaucracy but little tax
capacity are relatively rare. This is because it is difficult
to govern well with few resources.
To test these hypotheses, Kurtz is studying two pairs
of Latin American states from the 1980s to the present:
Argentina and Uruguay, and Mexico and Chile. These cases
were chosen to match on possible causes of instability
(inequality, history, position in world politics), but
differ in the political outcomes of shared economic crises.
Kurtz is using the results of this project to apply for
a grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct
a broad cross-national study on the causes and consequences
of different processes of state building.
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