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I spent 4 days down the state capacity rabbit hole and this is what I learned: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1346144331774750724
Most helpful to me: Cingolani (2018) has a great review article breaking down the ways in which scholars talk past each other in addressing “state capacity” complete with multi page tables of the purported conceptualizations. Go check it out.
It’s not that no one has anything good to say about state capacity, or a clever measure of it, it’s that the phrase has come to mean so many things that it’s easily intentionally misconstrued. Like sovereignty.
Realistically, as Krasner’s Sovereignty suggested for that word, we probably mean bits and pieces of all the conceived definitions, meaning no one addresses the whole. It’s not erroneous. Sometimes things are bigger after a lot of research than they looked b4 the research.
