Hollowing Out the State: Franchise Expansion and Fiscal Capacity in Colonial India

Suryanarayan, Pavithra

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2951947

Cited by 11 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Take, for instance, the case of colonial India where an episode of limited franchise expansion in 1920 was associated with greater tax avoidance and lower tax collections. Suryanarayan (2016) finds that greater social inequality between castes was associated with greater tax noncompliance and a decline in the size of the district bureaucracy a decade later. She argues that franchise expansion threatened the social dominance of upper castes, who controlled vast aspects of the British bureaucracy and who sought to protect their control of education, drinking-water wells, sanitation, and temples from lower castes.…”

Section: Taxation Bureaucratic Capacity and Social Statusmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…However, empirical studies of many parts of the world have not found a growth in taxation following franchise expansion (Acemoglu et al 2015;Perotti 1996). Recent research has argued that incumbent elites, facing the prospect of losing power, can "hollow out" the state's bureaucratic machinery (Suryanarayan 2016). While scholars studying variation in spending and taxation across democracies have emphasized factors that shape fiscal policy (Alesina and Glaeser 2004;Iversen and Soskice 2006;Lee and Roemer 2006;Stasavage 2006a, 2006b), this new research has emphasized how elites can target both levels of taxation and the bureaucratic capacity essential for taxation and redistribution.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A strategy focused on institutional weakening is more likely to be successful in ranked societies (Suryanarayan 2016). In hierarchical systems, "highstatus" groups value their rank in the social hierarchy, which they preserve and perpetuate through direct systems of control such as slavery, aristocracy, or caste.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Slavery, Reconstruction, and Bureaucratic Capacity in the American South

Suryanarayan

White

2020

Am Polit Sci Rev

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Conventional political economy models predict taxation will increase after franchise expansion to low-income voters. Yet, contrary to expectations, in ranked societies—where social status is a cleavage—elites can instead build cross-class coalitions to undertake a strategy of bureaucratic weakening to limit future redistributive taxation. We study a case where status hierarchies were particularly extreme: the post-Civil War American South. During Reconstruction, under federal oversight, per capita taxation was higher in counties where slavery had been more extensive before the war, as predicted by standard theoretical models. After Reconstruction ended, however, taxes fell and bureaucratic capacity was weaker where slavery had been widespread. Moreover, higher intrawhite economic inequality was associated with lower taxes and weaker capacity after Reconstruction in formerly high-slavery counties. These findings on the interaction between intrawhite economic inequality and pre-War slavery suggest that elites built cross-class coalitions against taxation where whites sought to protect their racial status.

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Section: Taxation Bureaucratic Capacity and Social Statusmentioning

confidence: 98%

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confidence: 99%

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Slavery, Reconstruction, and Bureaucratic Capacity in the American South

Suryanarayan

White

2020

Am Polit Sci Rev

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“…The colonial period contained neither of these extremes but was characterized by moderate shifts in literacy, from 4.5% in 1891 to 8% in 1931 (including Burma). The rise in literacy was inhibited by colonial underinvestment in education, itself a product of the suspicion of both British and Indian elites towards an educated populace (Chaudhary 2009; Suryanarayan 2014). Colonial educational policy consequently favored English over the vernacular, and high education over primary education (Seth 2007; Chaudhary 2009).…”

Section: Historical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Origins of Ethnic Activism: Caste Politics in Colonial India

Lee

2019

J. Race Ethnicity Politics

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Existing accounts of ethnic mobilization have focused on the role of group size or state policy. This paper suggests that narrow identity activism was also non-linearly related to education since poorly-educated groups are unlikely to have an educated elite to participate in activism, while in very educated groups this elite existed but participated in the colonial state or anti-colonial nationalism. This theory is tested using a historical panel dataset of Indian caste groups, with petitions to the colonial census authorities being used as an index of caste activism.

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“…6The data were copied from books digitized using OCR. For further information about the 1931 data, see Suryanarayan (2016); for the 1971 data, see Bhavnani and Jensenius (2015). …”

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confidence: 99%