State Capacity as an Organizational Problem. Evidence from the Growth of the U.S. State Over 100 Years
We study how the organization of the state evolves over the process of development of a nation, using a new dataset on the internal organization of the U.S. federal bureaucracy over 1817- 1905. First, we show a series of novel facts, describing how the size of the state, its presence across the territory, and its key organizational features evolved over the nineteenth century. Second, exploiting the staggered expansion of the railroad and telegraph networks across space, we show that the ability of politicians to monitor state agents throughout the territory is an important driver of these facts: locations with lower transportation and communication costs with Washington DC have more state presence, are delegated more decision power, and have lower employee turnover. The results suggest that high monitoring costs are associated with small, personalistic state organizations based on networks of trust; technological innovations lowering monitoring costs facilitate the emergence of modern bureaucratic states.
-
-
Copy CitationNicola Mastrorocco and Edoardo Teso, "State Capacity as an Organizational Problem. Evidence from the Growth of the U.S. State Over 100 Years," NBER Working Paper 31591 (2023), https://doi.org/10.3386/w31591.Download Citation
-
-
Related
More from the NBER
In addition to working papers, the NBER disseminates affiliates’ latest findings through a range of free periodicals — the NBER Reporter, the NBER Digest, the Bulletin on Health, and the Bulletin on Entrepreneurship — as well as online conference reports, video lectures, and interviews.
