What Do States Do? Politics and Economic History

Abstract

Although politics has a huge effect on economic outcomes, we still know too little about what public goods states furnish or what determines the laws, regulations, and policies that states adopt. Worse yet, we do not really understand how states arise in the first place and how they gain the ability to tax. There are numerous unanswered questions here that economic historians can profitably work on, and their research will be particularly valuable if they model the politics, gather data on taxation and spending by local and central governments, and pay serious attention to the historical details and to political behavior that may not involve optimization.

Public Economics and History: A Review of Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States, Edited by Andrew Monson and Walter Scheidel

“…Historically, compulsion played a role, but so did leaders who could convince people that taxes would, in fact, be used to furnish essentials such as security or a stable means of exchange. The historical evidence here in fact fits the evidence from public-goods experiments, where outcomes depend on the recent history of play and can change if participants become convinced that others will contribute (Hoffman 2015a(Hoffman , 2015bArifovic and Ledyard 2012). It also exemplifies the sort of negotiation that Kiser and Levi discuss in their chapter.…”

“…War, for them, was at least in part a consumption good, and because they avoided most of the costs of fighting and reaped a disproportionate share of the benefits, they were extremely likely to engage in conflict (Hoffman 2015a(Hoffman , 2015bJackson and Morelli 2007).…”

Geopolitics and Asia’s little divergence: State building in China and Japan after 1850

“…In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the importance of states being both effective in providing basic public goods and strong enough to prevent rent-seeking interests from vetoing pro-growth policies (North et al, 2009;Besley and Persson, 2011;Hoffman, 2015a). 2 We study the problem of state building in the context of a hostile external environment to offer a novel understanding of why external threats could encourage the rise of a strong and effective state in some instances but not in others.…”

Plague, Politics, and Pogroms: The Black Death, Rule of Law, and the Persecution of Jews in the Holy Roman Empire

“…10 In this sense they were not states (Hoffman, 2015 Political authority in the Holy Roman Empire was both fragmented and contested. The emperor was at the apex of the system.…”