Were nineteenth century war outcomes the main determinant of state trajectories in Latin America? In this chapter I turn from examining whether and to which degree war outcomes affected comparative state capacity levels and try to determining whether war outcomes were the main factor affecting the relative position of Latin American countries in the regional state capacity ranking. Exploring the conditions that predict the rank ordering of Latin American state capacity c. 1900—which has remained virtually the same ever since—has become a standard approach in the literature. In this chapter I explore this comparative historical puzzle by replicating previously used techniques. I use qualitative comparative analysis to show that accumulated victory and defeat throughout the nineteenth century is almost a sufficient condition for states to be in the upper and lower end of a state capacity ranking, respectively. I then use simple correlations to evaluate how war outcomes were related to a broad set of state capacity indicators at the turn of the century. Finally, I discuss case-specific expectations in longitudinal data that will be explored in the case studies.

In this chapter I return to the classics of bellicist theory to formalize their insights and derive concrete observational expectations for nineteenth-century Latin America. I first look at the work of Otto Hintze and Max Weber, who suggest a more holistic approach to the effects of war on the process of state formation which combines both pre-war and post-war phases in a single overarching theory. I then use the more modern concepts and logics of historical institutionalism to generate clearer predictions from their theories. I propose that, in a pre-war phase and when hostilities are taking place, mobilization will trigger taxation and repression—i.e., the extraction-coercion cycle. Yet, war outcomes will determine whether those contingent policies will become institutionalized after the critical juncture of war. While victory will consolidate a trajectory of state formation, defeat will render state institutions illegitimate and set losers into a path-dependent process of state weakening. Finally, I discuss actors and mechanisms specific to nineteenth-century Latin America and lay out the observational implications of my argument.

This chapter provides an overview of the literature on labor politics, social movements, and political parties, and locates the main argument in this literature. It operationalizes the two organizational traits, hierarchical relations and factionalism, to show how they produce three strategies. It concludes by laying out the research methods used to carry out the analysis and reach these conclusions.

The chapter introduces the book by presenting the puzzle it seeks to explain. During the decolonization process, colonial and regional powers frequently pursued the policy of amalgamation to avoid creating micro-states, which resulted in numerous cases of merger. However, some rejected merger projects and became independent separately. What, then, accounts for their separate existence? More generally, why did some colonial areas achieve independence separately from neighboring regions when facing pressure for amalgamation or annexation, while others became part of a larger state? This chapter then elaborates the main line of argument and the theoretical framework that underpins it. It argues that oil and a specific type of colonial administration carved out producing areas to create a state that would otherwise not exist. The introduction ends by briefly discussing methods and explaining the structure of the book.

This chapter introduces the research design and comparative case studies in Part II of the book. In this part of the book, I present historical case studies of Poland and East Germany. This is the qualitative component of the integrated, multimethod difference-in-difference research design with which I test the theoretical propositions laid out in Chapter 2. The first case experienced a post-Stalinist transition, while the second did not. By carefully tracing developments in elite cohesion and coercive capacity across the two otherwise very similar cases, I demonstrate that post-Stalinist transitions caused reductions in coercive capacity. I do so by showing that trends in capacity were similar across the Polish and East German regimes before 1953; that post-Stalinist transitions occurred randomly and were not themselves a function of coercive capacity; and by tracing the causal mechanisms that linked transitions to declines in capacity.

Historical contextualization is vital to comparative historical analysis in social science. The meaning of important concepts such as rights, popular sovereignty, and the state differs across diverse historical contexts even within a single case such as England. Neglect of such differences makes state formation appear to occur along a linear trajectory and the state–society relationship seem simply confrontational. A comparative historical analysis based upon deep and solid examination of historical contexts reveals hitherto unobserved similarities in state formation between Western Europe and East Asia. It provides a new account of how domestic governance was attained through state–society collaboration when the state's capacity to directly provide public goods remained quite limited. Moreover, it casts new light on understanding the political “great divergence” in the transition from early modern to modern states, as well as offering a novel explanation of the resilience of contemporary authoritarian regimes that legitimate their power mainly through care for domestic welfare.

This chapter introduces Bayesian reasoning for qualitative research, highlights contributions to methodological literature, and overviews the book.

This chapter illustrates how to apply Bayesian reasoning when analyzing more than one case. The same principles that govern Bayesian updating with multiple pieces of evidence apply to Bayesian inference with multiple cases.

This chapter illustrates how to apply explicit Bayesian analysis to scrutinize qualitative research, pinpoint sources of disagreement on inferences, and facilitate consensus-building discussions among scholars, highlighting examples of intuitive Bayesian reasoning as well as departures from Bayesian principles in published research.

In Chapter 7, I review my key arguments and revisit the comparison of reform-era China to America’s Gilded Age using historical data on reported corruption to highlight their similarities and differences. Finally, I explore the implications of this book for big questions in Chinese political economy and in corruption and capitalism more broadly.