While existing research explains the determinants of national state capacity in the 19th century, the origins of state capacity lie at the sub-national level. To analyse the determinants of sub-national state capacity in early modern times, this paper focuses on the case of Swiss city-states. Swiss city-states typically suffered under ...
(Show more)While existing research explains the determinants of national state capacity in the 19th century, the origins of state capacity lie at the sub-national level. To analyse the determinants of sub-national state capacity in early modern times, this paper focuses on the case of Swiss city-states. Swiss city-states typically suffered under an increasing oligarchization of their political system in the 17th and 18th century, giving rise to corruption and the embezzlement of state finances. To combat power monopolization, some Swiss city-states (i.e., Basel) reformed their election system by randomly selecting political representatives from a pre-elected pool of candidates. Other city-states continued to use traditional selection techniques (i.e., Zurich). This article employs new panel data sets to investigate the effects of these electoral reforms on political equality and state capacity in Zurich and Basel. We have compiled fine-grained information on all political representatives in both city-states between 1650 to 1798. We tie these microdatasets back to the macro-level by compiling data on the cities' fiscal capacity, infrastructure expenditures, and trade volumes. Using fixed-effects regression designs, we find that the introduction of lottery-based election systems improved the equality of distribution of political seats within parliamentary assemblies. We show that this had positive effects on state finances. In states implementing reforms (i.e., Basel), tax revenues and the provision of infrastructure increased. We explain this finding by showing that the introduction of focal random selection was associated with the election of merchants into government positions. City-states under traditional election systems (i.e., Zurich) continued to be predominantly governed by rentiers. Lottery-based election systems thus seem to have helped to overcome power monopolization and its negative effects on state development.
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