Democratisation as a State-Building Mechanism: A Preliminary Discussion of an Understudied Relationship
| Published date | 01 February 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1478-9302.12020 |
| Date | 01 February 2015 |
| Author | Giovanni Carbone |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Democratisation as a State-Building Mechanism:
A Preliminary Discussion of an Understudied
Relationship
Giovanni Carbone
Università degli Studi di Milano
This review article explores the connection between two key terms in the current international development
agenda, namely democratisation and state building.It does so not by looking at the establishment of well-functioning
states as a necessary condition for the introduction of democracy, but rather by examining the idea that democ-
ratisation may itself play a role in favouring the consolidation of the state. Despite a recent debate on whether
democracy or the state comes first, very few empirical studies have addressed the issue of the possible impact of
democratic institutions and politics on state development. In the search for additional explanations and empirical
evidence concerning this relationship, something more is to be learned as we turn to works that examine the effect
of democratic reforms on more specific and partial dimensions, components or indicators of the state,such as violent
conflict, corruption or taxation.The inclusion of the latter analyses, however, not only confirms that we still know
very little about the democracy–state relationship, thus corroborating the need for new empirical research, but also
highlights the conceptual and methodological flaws we must avoid when deciding what notions and measures of
state and democracy are most appropriate in tackling this issue.
Keywords: democracy; democratisation; state; state building; consequences of
democratisation
Can democratisation help to strengthen state authority and institutions in developing and
emerging countries? Do elections in new democracies support the achievement of
domestic political order, the establishment of functioning bureaucracies and the legitima-
tion of public authority? While positive answers to these questions underlie many
common-sense as well as scientific arguments, the issue has rarely been systematically
addressed and hardly empirically explored. This article offers a preliminary discussion of
the democracy–state connection through a review of different strands of the political
science literature.
The first section identifies the key dimensions of ‘the state’ when examined by the
empirical literature. It then introduces the debate on the causal direction of the democracy–
state linkage.The next section looks at the very few works that have directly examined such
a nexus.Additional insights are drawn from studies that, by focusing on conflict, legitimacy,
corruption or taxation, indirectly tell us something about the issue we are investigating.
Finally, as a first step towards a theory of democratisation and state building, the article
highlights the methodological problems related to the operationalisation of the notions of
democracy and the state when studying the relationship between the two.
State or Democracy: Which Comes First?
Political scientists have long searched for common ground on the issue of how to define
the state, a core concept in the discipline. Empirical studies of the state typically emphasise
POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW: 2015 VOL 13, 11–21
doi: 10.1111/1478-9302.12020
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© 2013 TheAuthor. Political Studies Review © 2013 Political Studies Association
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