Electoral Competition and State Capacity in the U.S. States

Abstract

For different reasons, both democracies and autocracies have incentives to develop state capacity. This paper focuses on the impact of democratic political competition on state capacity development in U.S. states. Parties competing for control of the government develop state capacity in order to maintain power. Politicians in competitive environments must be able to identify and resolve problems with public service delivery that lead to voter discontent. To solve these problems effectively, they must build state capacity. We test this argument by examining the impact of competition for state legislative control on state capacity in the American states. We employ measures of state-level party competition, democracy, policy liberalism, and a 20-year dataset of state-level state capacity to study this relationship at the subnational level in the United States from 2000-2019. We find that greater competition leads to greater capacity in states that run free and fair elections.