Academic Research

Why do states project authority across their territories, and why do some develop strong central bureaucracies while others remain weak? Taming Nature, Building States argues that local ecologies and the economic activities they inspire shape these outcomes more than war-making or capitalism alone. Using archival research and comparative-historical analysis of Latin America and the US during the first globalization era (c. 1870–1930), the book examines how governments governed different peripheral ecologies and the effects of these tools on bureaucratic development. Frontier ecologies that required military conquest, cadastral mapping, and legal enforcement—such as Chile’s Araucanía and the US Great Plains and Texas cotton plains—drove states outward and fostered lasting bureaucratic capacity, often despite indigenous resistance. Conversely, ecologies that thrived without state intervention, such as São Paulo’s coffee rainforests and the River Plate cattle frontier, enabled private elites to generate wealth with minimal central oversight. Coerced-labor estates—haciendas and plantations in Chile’s Central Valley, the Andes, and the US South—actively resisted state penetration, reinforcing landlord authority for generations. By viewing state formation as a combined outcome of environment, capital, and coercion, the book advances our understanding of comparative politics, environmental history, and public policy, highlighting the long-term effects of these patterns on modern governance and illicit economies worldwide.

Canonical theories of state-building suggest that states share a perpetual appetite for extraction and standardization. However, this research overlooks that subnational regions present different appeals and challenges to ruling coalitions. While states seek to extend their rule over peripheries with valuable assets, they might instead seek to preserve local patrimonial bastions when those areas offer clientelistic support. In turn, these strategies lead to broad subnational heterogeneity in the reach of the state.

This paper focuses on regions’ ecological, military, and clientelistic features to explain local trajectories of state capacity. Using original data from censuses, budgets, and other primary sources, I show that Chile’s ruling coalition modernized the country’s peripheries while deepening its traditionalism.

Conventional wisdom suggests that a minimum level of state capacity is necessary for effective industrial policy, as governments need competent bureaucracies to prevent issues like cronyism and corruption. However, developmental projects often end up building the very capacities they supposedly require, reversing the expected cause-and-effect relationship between state capacity and industrial policy. For example, constructing railways, ports, and power grids compels governments to establish engineering teams, cadastral offices, and fiscal systems where none previously existed. Similarly, supporting sectors such as mining, agriculture, and manufacturing lead to the creation of statistical agencies, inspectorates, and development banks. Instead of being prerequisites, specialized bureaus, technical schools, and regulatory bodies often emerge as a result of industrial projects. This paper contends that state capacity and industrial policy are mutually reinforcing, rather than sequential, and illustrates this through case studies where developmental projects directly prompted bureaucratic development rather than being a consequence of it.

The standard view treats geopolitical turmoil as a drag on industrial policy: state support for sectors and firms is thought to require stable markets, predictable rules, and legal certainty to succeed. Yet across modern history, governments have pursued industrial policy precisely when the international order has trembled, not when it has held. This paper argues that geoeconomic disruption is the proximate cause of most ambitious industrial policy episodes, not a friction to be overcome. Uncertainty about access to foreign markets, energy and balance-of-payments shocks, contested international hierarchies, technological races among leading powers, and decolonization have repeatedly pushed states to build domestic industries through tariffs, subsidies, local-content rules, public credit, and state-owned firms. The paper develops this argument as an intellectual and political history of five waves: nineteenth-century infant-industry protection during the first globalization; interwar import-substitution industrialization; the developmental states of the Cold War; the local-content programs that followed the 2008 financial crisis; and the present wave of green industrial policy unfolding amid US–China rivalry, the energy transition, and the reorganization of global supply chains. Read together, these episodes show that the conditions widely seen as obstacles to industrial policy are in fact what call it into being.

The current wave of industrial policy is often framed as a story about national governments. However, in federal systems, this view is increasingly outdated. Today, subnational governments develop sector-specific strategies, manage development agencies, attract foreign investments, form cross-regional alliances, and play a substantial role in federal industrial policies—either supporting or opposing them. We identify two key ways in which subnational industrial policies differ from those at the country level: first, the way state governments coordinate with federal strategies—whether through collaboration, replacement, or conflict—and second, how state governors forge alliances based on ideology, sectoral strategies, or patronage. Using a new dataset of Mexican states from 2015 to 2026, we document the rise of subnational industrial policies. All 32 states pursue independent policies amidst intense geoeconomic competition driven by US–China tensions and USMCA renegotiation, illustrating how multi-level industrial policy has become a defining feature of federal systems.

When do economic elites support democracy, and how do they protect their assets from its redistributive effects? Conventional wisdom holds that landed elites oppose democratization because they fear expropriation after enfranchisement. This association is stronger in contexts of high land inequality and labor-dependent agriculture, where empowered peasants are likely to demand redistribution. This paper challenges that view by examining nineteenth-century Chile. Landowners from the Central Valley—the country’s main agricultural region—supported peasant enfranchisement and helped shape Chile’s emerging competitive regime. Landlords incorporated peasants into the franchise because Chile’s manorial agrarian structure provided the clientelistic ties necessary for voter mobilization and oversight. We also examine whether these elites kept the state’s regulatory capacity away from manorial localities. Using a unique panel dataset of Chilean departments from 1862 to 1920 and a two-way fixed-effects difference-in-differences approach, we find strong support for the first claim and no support for the second: the franchise expanded more in hacienda-heavy departments after 1874, but bureaucratic growth was similar across all departments. Although the quantitative results do not support H2, qualitative evidence suggests that landowners captured local political institutions rather than excluding the state from their localities. Landlords’ control over peasant votes ended in 1958 with the introduction of the secret ballot. By extending voting rights to peasants and shaping electoral rules in their favor, landed elites positioned themselves for long-term electoral dominance. Our findings challenge prevailing assumptions about the dynamics of first-wave transitions to democracy and the agrarian origins of political regimes.

Every major theory of state-building claims to explain Chile’s development. Bellicists attribute it to the War of the Pacific, while fiscal scholars emphasize commodity booms. Colonial-legacies researchers focus on Chile’s peripheral position within the Spanish Empire, and legibility scholars highlight early efforts to enhance informational capacity via censuses and statistical yearbooks. This essay reevaluates Chilean state-building in light of Valenzuela and Valenzuela’s (1983) review of theories on Chilean democracy. It examines the explanatory power and limitations of each approach, questioning what is actually being measured—be it railroads, taxation, schooling, censuses, or bureaucratic data—each reflecting a different perspective and a specific theoretical stance. I argue that the bellicist explanation is overstated. The development of bureaucracy, census efforts, territorial expansion, and schooling occurred long before the War of the Pacific (1879–1883). International conflicts were just one of several shocks driving capacity-building, alongside commodity downturns and civil wars.