St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251

DOI 10.1007/s12116-008-9028-6

State Infrastructural Power: Approaches

to Conceptualization and Measurement

Hillel Soifer

Published online: 6 August 2008

# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008

Abstract Michael Mann’s infrastructural power is a concept often applied but rarely
rigorously conceptualized and precisely measured. Three distinct analytical lenses of
infrastructural power can be derived from his definitions: infrastructural power as the
capabilities of the central state, as the territorial reach of the state, and as the effects
of the state on society. Exemplary texts applying each of these approaches are used
to demonstrate their connection to Mann’s ideas, the relationships between these
dimensions, and the boundaries between this and other aspects of the state’s strength.
Moving from conceptualization to measurement, the paper shows the costs of
common errors in the measurement of infrastructural power, and develops guidelines
for its proper empirical application.

Keywords State infrastructural power . State building .

State-society relations

State infrastructural power, as delineated by Michael Mann, refers to the

“institutional capacity of a central state … to penetrate its territories and logistically
implement decisions” (1984: 113). Mann distinguishes the state’s infrastructural
power from its despotic power, or the range of policies that the state can introduce.
We can also distinguish it from the commonly referenced autonomy or bureaucratic
professionalism of the state. This aspect of the state, though often referenced by

H. Soifer (*)
Department of Politics, Princeton University,
130 Corwin Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544–1012, USA
e-mail: hsoifer@princeton.edu
232 St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251

scholars, has rarely been rigorously conceptualized and precisely measured. This
article seeks to fill that void.1
In prominent recent scholarship, state strength has been shown to be crucial to
outcomes such as the emergence and persistence of insurgency, economic
development, and the quality of democracy. Two problems characterize the current
application of infrastructural power in these literatures. The first problem, addressed
in the introduction to this issue, is that many scholars rely on infrastructural power
without referring to it as such and without drawing on Mann’s conceptual apparatus.
This has limited the cumulation of knowledge about which aspects of the state are
crucial in these literatures, since scholars have developed a broad variety of
terminology to refer to the infrastructural power of the state. Second, scholars have
not recognized that distinct ways to study the state’s power can be drawn from
Mann’s concept.2 As a result, there has been insufficient realization of how much a
range of findings about state power may capture the same underlying concept, and
this has limited how much scholars utilize the analytical tools of Mann’s conceptual
framework.
Given the utility of infrastructural power to a broad range of scholarship, a
rigorous exploration of Mann’s concept and the measurement strategies it entails has
significant payoffs. The conceptual analysis in this article provides the tools for
scholars to precisely conceptualize infrastructural power, and to more closely
integrate conceptual precision into their measurement.
I identify below three analytical approaches to infrastructural power. The first
approach captures the capabilities of the central state, the second conceptualizes
infrastructural power in terms of its territorial reach,3 and the third focuses on the
effects of the state on society.4 These three distinct analytical lenses in Mann’s
concept provide three ways to conceptualize the state’s power to implement policy
throughout the territory it claims to govern. Examples of work that take each of these
three approaches are used to illustrate the connections between each and Mann’s
concept. The identification of these distinct lenses makes infrastructural power more
concrete, and shows its broad applicability. Any attempt to demonstrate the broad
relevance of a concept is vulnerable to charges of conceptual stretching. In addition
to developing three approaches to infrastructural power, I address this by delineating
boundaries between the infrastructural power of the state and other aspects of its
power. This complements the discussion of the relationship between infrastructural
power, autonomy, and bureaucratic “Weberianess” in the introduction to this issue.

1
I am grateful for the comments of Miguel Angel Centeno, Matt Lange, James Mahon, Ryan Saylor, Dan
Slater, Milan Vaishnav, and Daniel Ziblatt. Matthias vom Hau has greatly shaped my thinking on the state
over the past several years.
2
Joel Migdal et al. (1994) echoes these concerns, calling for a more explicit application of Mann’s
concept, and for more analyses of the local weight of the state, and of the relations between the state’s
commanding heights and its local representatives.
3
In addition to uneven reach over territory, states are often marked by uneven penetration of society. This
aspect of unevenness is explored in more detail below.
4
A similar conceptualization of infrastructural power can be found in Ziblatt (2006: 13), who argues that
infrastructural power encompasses three distinct dimensions: “(1) state rationalization, (2) state
institutionalization, and (3) embeddedness of the state in society.”
St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251 233

The article also addresses measurement issues within each of these approaches,
showing that the analytical approach chosen has implications for measurement. The
misalignment of measurement and conceptualization creates serious costs in the
reliability of the research, as several examples show. Alternatively, the careful design
of a measurement strategy within the framework of the chosen approach can pay off
by generating precise measures of state infrastructural power that match the
theoretical framework of the research project to which they are applied. By carefully
selecting the appropriate framing of infrastructural power based on theoretical
relevance, and carefully matching measurement to conceptualization, scholars can
test precisely the causal mechanisms of their theories that build on the ability of the
state to implement policies and exercise territorial and social control.
The first part of the article derives three aspects of infrastructural power from
Mann’s definition of the concept and his broader analysis of the state and its
relations to society. Each of these has been commonly applied, and the second part
details the three analytical approaches to infrastructural power. The first choice faced
by researchers who seek to deploy the concept is to identify which approach best
suits their theoretical framework. The discussion in the second part provides some
guidelines for that decision. The third part moves on to issues of measurement,
showing the costs of misalignment between approach and measurement strategy,
with reference to several examples of influential and recent research. I then highlight
examples of effective measurement that have built on each analytical approach. A
brief conclusion reflects on the potential payoffs from careful conceptual
development and measurement, which are amply demonstrated in the articles that
follow in this issue.

Mann and the State: The Concept of Infrastructural Power

To analyze the concept of infrastructural power, it is useful to begin with the

genealogy of the concept provided by Mann himself. In his 1984 essay, Mann
develops “two different senses in which states and their elites might be considered
powerful” (p. 113). These are infrastructural and despotic power. As discussed in
the introduction to this collection, despotic power is more closely related to the
Marxist tradition of scholarship about the autonomy of the state, while infrastructural
power is connected to the Weberian tradition of the state as a set of institutions that
exercise control over territory and regulate social relations.5 An illustration of the
distinction between the two types of power is aptly captured by Alexis de
Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the French Revolution, in which he suggests
that “the sovereign should punish immediately any fault that he discovers, but he

5
Mann himself (1993: 58–59) has recognized the relationship of his two concepts to these two distinct
traditions of statist analysis. This distinction does to some extent reify the differences between the Marxist
and Weberian traditions, but this simplification aids in the precise definition of state infrastructural power.
For a more detailed analysis of how Mann’s conceptual framework (which includes many aspects of the
state and of power beyond the one explored in this collection) fits into these traditions of statist analysis,
see Hall and Schroeder (2006).
234 St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251

cannot flatter himself into supposing that he sees all the faults he should punish.”6
The despotic power or ability to punish, in this analogy, is distinct from the ability to
monitor and receive information, which captures infrastructural power.
The place of infrastructural power within the Weberian conceptualization of the
state must be more carefully analyzed beyond its distinction from despotic power.
Mann begins this task by unpacking Max Weber’s definition of the state into three
layers of concepts that it contains.7 He argues that Weber’s discussion of the state
includes three layers: political power, the state, and the modern state. He describes
political power as the base layer. Fundamentally territorial, political power predated
the origin of the institution of the state, and is protected by the application of force.
The state as the monopoly of legitimate force emerged over time and became layered
over political power, in a process studied by Charles Tilly (1975, 1992) and other
scholars of the emergence of the territorial state. The addition of legitimate authority
and the monopoly of force to the territorial basis of political power institutionalized
the control of the state.
The modern state, as Mann defines it, adds bureaucracy to these layers. The
modern state is an administrative form by which the monopoly of legitimate force
over territory is administered. Mann argues that the bureaucratic “iron cage” of the
Weberian modern state rests on the foundation of the territorial state. But the state
may not fully exercise control of the territory within its borders. Its infrastructural
power, or the de facto “reach of the state,” to borrow a phrase from Shue (1988),
determines how far into society a bureaucracy, no matter how professional, can
reach. Infrastructural power, in other words, is the aspect of the state that determines
how far its bureaucracy can reach to exert control and regulate social relations.8
The state, in Mann’s framework, is defined with reference to the “political
relations [which] radiate outwards from a center to cover a territorially demarcated
area” (1984: 112).9 States consist of a central elite that interacts with a society
constituted by a variety of overlapping power networks. In a country of any
significant size (in terms of either population or territory), the state cannot directly
exercise control from the center. State elites need to rely on representatives to act on
their behalf as they implement policies and seek to control and regulate social

6
This citation is from Kalyvas (2006: 174).
7
This discussion is based on the delineation of his view of the state in Mann (1993).
8
This implies that only where the state effectively penetrates society should we expect that the formal
institutions of politics can adequately explain outcomes of interest. Where states penetrate society weakly
and cannot enforce laws, greater divergence from the outcomes predicted by theories that build on the
formal institutions of politics. In these contexts, the strategies and outcomes of politics are shaped less by
formal institutions than by informal institutions. State infrastructural power, in other words, is an often
unexamined scope condition in the application of formal institutional analysis. Helmke and Levitsky
(2004), Ichino (Thugs and Voters, Harvard University, unpublished paper), and Soifer (2008) have
explored the analytical power of informal institutions in the contexts of infrastructurally weak states.
9
See Herbst (2000) for a similar analysis of the state as radiating authority from the center into the
national territory. To these two components (radiation of political relations and territorial demarcation),
Mann adds the state’s “differentiated set of institutions and personnel” and its “monopoly of authoritative
decision-making.”
St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251 235

relations within the territory it claims to govern.10 These representatives of the state
are the embodiment of the political relations radiating outward from the center in
Mann’s definition of the state. State infrastructural power relates to the set of
relationships that link these institutions of control to the local communities they
penetrate, and to central state elites.
A focus on the relationships between three collective actors: central state leaders,
the radiating institutions of control on which they rely, and society suggests three
distinct facets of state infrastructural power. The central contribution of this article is
to delineate the research strategies that can be built on the exploration of these three
facets. Each relationship reveals an aspect of the power of the central state to
exercise control in its interactions with societal actors throughout the territory within
its borders, and each can be explored as one approach to the study of Mann’s
concept. Thus, the indirect relationship between the central state and society captures
the capabilities of the state to exercise control, the relationship between the central
state and its radiating institutions captures the spatial reach of the state and its
subnational variation, and the relationship between the radiating state institutions
and society captures the effects, or weight, of the state on societal power networks.11
The second section of this article develops these three approaches in detail, while the
third section provides guidelines for measurement of infrastructural power which
build on each approach. The three approaches are summarized in Table 1.

Three Approaches to State Infrastructural Power

The three approaches developed below and described in Table 1 can briefly be
summarized as follows. The first is a national capabilities approach that sees state
infrastructural power as a characteristic of the central state and highlights the extent
of the resources at its disposal for exercising this power via its institutions of

10
The forms of administration of society and territory are traditionally divided into direct rule and indirect
rule. The effects of the design of institutions of administration on the power of the state is the subject of
work by scholars such as Waldner (1999), Ertman (1997), and Soifer (2006) among many others.
11
Goertz (2005: 42–49) cautions that conceptual development requires explicit definition of the
aggregation rule, which explains how the underlying concept combines its components. I do not explore
this issue in detail in this paper, which focuses instead on the differential utility of the three aspects across
theoretical contexts. Given the broad relevance of each of the three aspects, we can treat each as a
necessary (but insufficient) condition for the identification of high infrastructural power in a specific case.
In this framing, where a state completely lacks the power implicit in any of these three relationships, it has
no infrastructural power. The infrastructural power of the state is shaped by how much (1) the central state
has the capabilities at hand to exercise control over society, (2) the state has institutions which radiate
through society and territory, and (3) the state shapes society at the local level. This means that we can
build the following mathematical model of state infrastructural power, assuming for the moment that we
could quantify each of these three aspects, and that each has equal causal weight: State infrastructural
power = (state capabilities) × (spatial reach) × (effects on society) There is one notable inconsistency
among the three attributes. The first two are necessary conditions that must exist for its exercise by the
central state. On the other hand, the relationship between the central state and society is assessed post hoc,
capturing the effects of the state. This inconsistency is an artifact of measurement rather than theory, as
discussed further below, and could be resolved if we could measure the power of the state in this third
relationship independent of its effects.
236 St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251

Table 1 Three approaches to state infrastructural power

Approach State capabilities Weight of the state Subnational variation

Key relationship Central state and Radiating institutions and Central state and radiating
society society institutions
Sample Fiscal resources Effects on identity Spatial spread of institutions of
components Size of army control
GNP per capita Outcomes of state policy
Empirical Mann (1993) Weber (1976) Kalyvas (2006)
examples Straus (2006) Vaughan (1997) Goodwin (1999)
Soifer (2006)

control.12 The second approach captures the weight of the state and highlights how
the exercise of state power shapes the society it controls, delineating its effects on
the actions, and even the identities, of societal actors. The third approach focuses on
subnational variation in the ability of the state to exercise control within its
territory.13 Striking a middle ground between the other two approaches, it seeks to
maintain a focus on the capabilities of the state while taking into account that these
may vary spatially or socially. In the development of these three approaches, we can
see how each addresses the conceptual issues that surround the idea of power in
general, as well as the relationship between state and society.

The National Capabilities Approach

The first framing of state infrastructural power highlights the relationship between
the “commanding heights” of the state and its institutions of control over society. It
sees power as the capability to exercise control—a view consistent with most
analyses of power.14 To measure the extent of state capabilities, this approach
assesses the resources at the disposal of the state for exercising control over society
and territory. As Jack Goldstone writes, “the degree of infrastructural power
corresponds to the resources that a leader can command to pursue a goal” (2006,
p. 265). This resource-based view draws on the notion of power as a dispositional
attribute—one that exists as a potentiality that an actor can choose to activate
(Morriss 2002). Although resources do not measure what James Mahoney (2004,
p. 474) calls “emanation”—the degree that capabilities are directed at a particular
outcome, and are thus analytically distinct from power itself—they do serve as a
crude approximation of the extent of state capabilities, perhaps as an upper bound.
In this approach, state infrastructural power is a characteristic of the central state,
invariant within a particular country. To measure it, we could imagine constructing
an index of the resources available to state leaders.15 These resources could be used

12
Slater, Lange and Balian, and vom Hau take the “national capabilities” approach in the articles in this
issue.
13
Ziblatt and Schensul take the “subnational variation” approach in this issue.
14
See for example Mahoney (2004).
15
Note that while the capabilities of the central state might be measured by the resources at its disposal,
capabilities are analytically distinct from resources. Theoretical analyses of infrastructural power should
focus on capabilities and choose the most analytically relevant resource for measurement purposes.
St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251 237

to construct the radiating institutions that allow the state to exercise control of
society: they could be financial resources. Alternatively, they could be the
institutions of control and regulation themselves: the number of police officers or
soldiers (or tax collectors) that the state could deploy to exercise power throughout
its territory—or the extent of legitimacy at its disposal in motivating societal
acquiescence to its control.16 The particular nature of the resources considered could
vary widely, but the crucial characteristic of this approach is that it sees these
resources as indicative of the extent of power state leaders have to control societal
relations and territory.17
The national capabilities approach to state infrastructural power is the most
commonly applied of the three possible framings. One factor underlying the ubiquity
of its application is the relative ease of data collection—scholars need only collect
national level data about the resources and capabilities of the state, which is easier to
acquire than the information required for the alternative approaches—in particular
when cross-national statistical methods are applied. In addition, the common
application of this framing of infrastructural power likely has resulted because Mann
himself applied it in his own empirical work.
In volume two of his Sources of Social Power (1993, Chap. 11) Mann assesses
the extent of state infrastructural power in the major countries of Western Europe
and the USA by tracking trends over time in the revenues and expenditures of
national governments. Data on revenue (p. 361) “clues us into the state’s relation
with power actors in civil society.” It reveals how much autonomy the central state
has from the actors from which revenue is extracted. State expenditures reflect the
state’s infrastructural power—as Mann writes, “expenditure reveals state functions.”
Controlling for the size of the national economy, for population, and for inflation,
data on expenditures reveals the resources available to state leaders. This fits well
with Mann’s conceptualization of infrastructural power as the set of levers at the
disposal of central state leaders, allowing them to implement policy throughout the
national territory.
The extent that state leaders can implement policy is particularly striking in the
case of genocide. Most scholars (Goldhagen 1996 is one exception) argue that
genocide depends on the ability of state leaders to lead thousands of people to carry
out atrocities against their fellow citizens, making state infrastructural power a
natural object of study for these scholars. Scott Straus (2006) uses evidence from
structured interviews with hundreds of Hutu perpetrators to uncover the factors that
caused their participation in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. He finds that state leaders
were (with few exceptions) uniformly able to impose their genocidal policies in each
region of the country until that region fell to the invading RPF army. This

16
A more thorough accounting of the complex relationship between legitimacy and infrastructural power
is developed in vom Hau’s article in this issue. It is surprising that Mann neglected legitimacy since his
definition of the state is firmly in the Weberian tradition, which sees it as a fundamental attribute of the
state.
17
Centeno (2002) and Soifer (2008) use the census as a measure of this aspect of infrastructural power,
arguing that it provides the state with the information necessary to assert control over society.
238 St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251

homogeneity in the ability of the Rwandan state to implement its policies leads
Straus to focus on state power as an attribute of the central state.
Drawing on his interviews, Straus argues, “the Rwandan state has unusual depth
and resonance at the local level” (p. 8) throughout the country. This meant that
control of the central state gave Hutu hardliners “the capacity to enforce their
decisions nationwide.” Genocide perpetrators describe the state as a “leviathan,”
which compelled their participation, and are struck that “the idea of authority was so
resonant in Rwandan society” (p. 202). Like Mann, Straus frames the Rwandan
“leviathan” in terms of the resources available to the central state. But these
resources, for Straus, are not fiscal. In seeking to explain how much the Rwandan
state could “command compliance” (p. 202) and mobilize the civilian population on
a large scale, Straus focuses on the permissive geographic context, and on the
tradition of unpaid labor mobilization in Rwanda.
The pervasive reach of the state, Straus argues, was facilitated by features of
Rwanda’s physical and human geography.18 The hilly topography and the heavily
settled land “increase the capacity for surveillance, and they limit the opportunities
for exit and escape” (p. 215). As a result, whether sought as victims, or to compel
participation, “Rwanda’s citizenry is eminently findable.” In Straus’ account,
Rwanda in 1994 combines a state with high despotic power (the ability to order a
wide range of policies implemented) with conditions that allowed the enforcement of
even its genocidal policies. In Rwanda, to quote Mann, “there [was] no hiding place
from the infrastructural reach of the modern state” (1984: 114).
If the reach of the state was facilitated by geographic factors, the tradition of
unpaid labor mobilization also played a crucial role in the genocide. Since
precolonial times, Rwandese participated in two unpaid mandatory labor programs:
umuganda and amarondo. These programs normalized the mobilization of large
portions of the population, and thus served as a resource that the state could use to
implement policies, including the genocide. In this manner, even a fiscally poor state
like Rwanda can have a great deal of infrastructural power since the tradition of
massive mobilization made its policies easy to implement.
Both Mann and Straus define infrastructural power as the capability of the state to
implement policies and exercise control, and measure it in terms of the resources—
whether financial or institutional—which allow it to do so. For both authors, despite
their divergent conceptualizations of the resources that underlie infrastructural
power, the state is seen as a leviathan standing astride society, and exercising its
capabilities to control both population and territory. This view of the state is
complemented by a very different approach taken by scholars who focus on the local
weight of the state and move away from its capabilities to study its effects on the
population it seeks to control.

18
We might see geography as a contextual variable, which facilitates or constrains the ability of the state
to deploy its resources to reach through territory and exercise control. As such, geography is not
constitutive of power itself, but determines the efficiency with which state resources can be translated into
power. The Rwandan state’s power can depend on the geographic context without concluding that
geography either causes or constitutes state power.
St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251 239

The Weight of the State Approach

The relationship between capabilities and power has been one of much contention in
the philosophical investigation of power. Many scholars warn against the conflation
of the two, and this has been a criticism leveled against the “state capabilities”
approach to infrastructural power outlined above. Snider (1987: 317) criticizes the
conception of state power in terms of capabilities, arguing, “there simply exists the
underlying assumption that additional increments of resources are somehow
converted into additional corresponding increments of power.” In addition, there is
a concern that the theoretical focus on the internal dynamics of the state has, in the
words of Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent (1994: 11), “brought the state back in,
but left the people out.” The second approach to infrastructural power is therefore
more reluctant to assess power based on the resources at the disposal of the central
state, and more concerned with how states are limited and constructed by nonstate
actors. Paying more attention to how states are shaped by the societies they claim to
regulate and control (Migdal 1988, 2001), this approach does not assess power in
terms of the resources of the state, but focuses on the specific local manifestations of
the state—its radiating institutions—and their impact on society.
Scholars who take this approach to infrastructural power assess it as the extent of
state effects on society. Scholars often focus on how societal power networks and
identities are transformed by interaction with the state, and trace the complicated
relationship between the radiating state institutions and the societies that they seek to
control. Alan Knight (2002) described this approach as the assessment of the
“weight of the state”—which captures how much the radiating state institutions
weigh on societal actors. Conceptualizing power as “weight” raises the question of
the range of effects seen as power.
One particularly salient issue in bounding the concept of infrastructural power is
the question of intentionality. If infrastructural power is conceptualized as the effects
of the state on societal actors, whether collective or individual, we must ask whether
state power can only be evaluated by assessing how much the state can shape society
as it seeks to do. Infrastructural power, as Mann defined it, is the ability of the state
to implement its policies—which suggests that it must be limited to the realm of
intentional effects. This view of state power as the production of intentional effects
fits very well with the conceptualization of power proposed by Morriss (2002), who
argues that power should be defined as affect rather than effect to restrict the domain
of power to the effects of intentional action.
Limiting the scope of state power to intentional action aligns with the finding
(Yashar 1999) that infrastructural power is associated with more limited unintended
consequences from state actions. For example, it is precisely the infrastructural
weakness of Andean states, which has led to the emergence of indigenous
mobilization in response to the emergence of a neoliberal citizenship regime (Yashar
2005). Thus, both the intended and unintended consequences of state actions shed
light on the infrastructural power of the state. While unintended consequences
highlight its limitations, the degree that the state can produce its intended effects is
the center of Mann’s concept.
Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen (1976) is perhaps the paradigmatic
study that takes this approach to state power, examining the extent that the late
240 St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251

nineteenth-century French state’s actions produced the intended effect. Weber

demonstrates the state’s role in transforming the identities and self-definitions of
French peasants. This study of homogenization and modernization complements the
traditional view that the French state’s power dates back at least to the French
Revolution. Weber shows that even a state that was infrastructurally powerful in
terms of the resources available to the central state, and that had a high level of
despotic power, had not extended its power into rural regions. In many parts of the
“periphery,” as Weber exhaustively demonstrates, the French state had no “weight”
until after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1871. Defeat in the war with Prussia
prompted state leaders to undertake the Freycinet plan, which “carried the regime’s
influence into the countryside” (p. 210) and transformed “peasants into Frenchmen”
during the next several decades. Although his study explores local variation in the
extent of this transformation based on the countless anecdotes from towns
throughout the country, Weber’s focus is on the extent that the French state
homogenized French society as a result of the increased presence of the national
state in communities throughout the country, which was reflected in the construction
of roads and railroads, changes in conscription practices, and the arrival of
schoolteachers and other state representatives in communities throughout the
country.
The increased penetration of the French state into the countryside in the late
nineteenth century could be studied by measuring the increased capabilities of the
French state—for instance, the fiscal resources at its disposal, or the number of
teachers it hired. It could also be studied by mapping the spread of state institutions
through the national territory, as in the third approach to infrastructural power,
described in more detail below. Rather than take either of these approaches, Weber
studies the changes in the French countryside and argues that these reflect the
increased power of the state. His evidence of state power is the increase in the
number of peasants who spoke French and thought of themselves as French, an
assessment of state power based on its effects. The ability of the state to produce
these changes in French society uncovers the extent of its infrastructural power.19
Mary Kay Vaughan’s (1997: 5) study of education after the Mexican Revolution
also takes the weight of the state approach to infrastructural power. In the 1930s,
Mexican state leaders “became convinced of [the] need and capacity to transform
culture for purposes of integration, rule, and development.” To this end, they
designed a program called “socialist education,” which implied a major educational
reform. Her work focuses on the interaction between teachers and their communities
in the states of Sonora and Puebla. She examines how much teachers were able to
turn their schools into a means of modernizing and nationalizing the rural

19
Weber’s study is a complement, rather than a rejoinder, to the many analyses of state formation in
Europe that highlight the early emergence of the French state. In this way, the careful distinction between
infrastructural power and other aspects of the state highlights ambiguities in the conceptual frameworks of
“state formation” and “state building,” which can be resolved with more clarity about what aspect or
aspects of the state are being “formed” or “built.” I thank Dan Slater for bringing this point to my
attention.
St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251 241

populations of these two states—the focus of her work is the extent of divergence
between intention and outcome, which reflects the extent of infrastructural power.20
In their role as the representatives of the central state charged with implementing
its policies, postrevolutionary Mexican teachers personified the radiating institutions
of the state. They confronted the reality of local communities less than willing to
transform themselves to meet the state’s vision of modernity and development. This
resistance induced teachers to moderate the decrees they received from the education
ministry in Mexico City. As a result, the transformation of Mexican rural society
through education was more limited, with significant variation shaped by the local
context in which teachers operated. The finding that societal power networks shape
the effects of the state is consonant with the arguments of Migdal (1988) about the
effects of society on the power of the state. Like Weber’s study of France, Vaughan’s
investigation of the limited social transformation achieved by the Mexican state
reveals the extent of its infrastructural power.
Approaching infrastructural power as the weight of the state raises the question of
whether all effects of the state on society should be considered. If state
infrastructural power is to be a useful conceptual tool, it must be bounded
conceptually: the set of aspects of the state not included in infrastructural power
must be clearly defined.21 Two steps in that direction are the distinction between
views of state power espoused by Mann and Michel Foucault, and the related
distinction between state power and “state formation.” Foucault’s discussion of state
power highlights the “technologies,” which the state constructs as a means of
exercising control over society through the “conduct of conduct.”22 In other words,
these means of control seek to shape people’s self-conceptions and behaviors to
make them more disciplined and orderly. While Mann’s infrastructural power is that
of the autonomous state, Foucault explores how state power operates more broadly
and manifests itself in the ability to discipline society at large, for instance, by
creating certain subjects and social identities and denying others through
administrative routines, quotidian rituals, or outright oppression. By challenging
the distinction between state and society, Foucault moves away from the idea of a
potentially autonomous state with intentions that is central to Mann’s concept of
infrastructural power.
There is also an important distinction between infrastructural power and the study
of “state formation,” which at first glance seems to fit well with Mann’s conception

20
The example of Vaughan’s work is particularly useful in illuminating this approach to infrastructural
power because it can be compared to the analysis of the Mexican state’s project of social transformation
provided by vom Hau in this issue, which finds that the Mexican state was more successful in some of its
educational goals than in Vaughan’s account. In his focus on the ability of the Mexican state to transform
the content of nationalism, vom Hau studies the relationship between teachers and the ministry of
education rather than mirroring Vaughan’s focus on the interaction between teachers and local
communities. This illustrates the distinct insights generated by divergent approaches to the study of
infrastructural power, which can be cumulated in this case because of the care both scholars take to specify
their conception of state power.
21
See Goertz (2005) for a discussion of the importance of boundedness in conceptual construction.
22
I thank Miguel Angel Centeno for bringing this issue to my attention. This discussion of Foucault’s
analysis of power is based on Foucault (1977, 1991).
242 St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251

of infrastructural power as “the essence of the routinized powers of states” (Mann

2006: 353). Where accounts of state formation23 focus on how a disembodied state
“works through us” via “cultural forms which penetrate deep into civil society,”
(Corrigan and Sayer 1985), they are distinct from Mann’s focus on the radiation of
concrete state institutions through society, whose weight is revealed through the
extent that they produce intended outcomes. The great arch conceptualization of the
state, so popular among cultural historians, lacks both the intention and the
concreteness that are central to the concept of state infrastructural power. Whereas
this perspective makes clear the wide range of arenas in which the weight of the state
is experienced, this aspect of the state must be distinguished from its ability to reach
into society and implement policy. This article also identifies the bounds of Mann’s
concept rather than arguing for its ubiquity. By showing that infrastructural power
can be conceived as the weight of the state on society, I delineate both the distinction
between this and the two other approaches of state power, and the external bounds of
Mann’s concept.

Subnational Variation Approach

A third approach to state infrastructural power focuses on the uneven reach of the
state, centered on the varied ability of a particular state to exercise control within its
territory. Striking a middle ground between the two approaches described above, it
seeks to maintain a view of power based on the capabilities of the state rather than
measuring state power in terms of its effects. In this approach, the capabilities of the
state vary subnationally: the state is not homogeneously powerful throughout the
national territory; its reach is uneven over territory and over societal actors.24
Because the state has more power in some regions than others reflects the limited
reach of its radiating institutions through the national territory. Thus, scholars have
approached infrastructural power in terms of the reach of state institutions across
territory to control and regulate social relations.
This approach allows the identification of geographic areas where the state is
more and less able to exercise authority. This territorial variation in state power fits
well with the study of insurgency and domestic conflict since conflict is
fundamentally territorial. Many studies of the dynamics of insurgency conceive of
the infrastructural power of the state in terms of the spread of institutions of control
through the national territory.

23
This approach to the state informs a variety of substantive research agendas. For instance, it enjoys
substantial prominence among cultural historians working on state formation in Latin America (see
Nugent and Alonso 1994).
24
This social reach, explored in the introduction to this issue, is a focus of O’Donnell (1993). There has
been little systematic exploration of this aspect of the state’s power, as scholars who have focused on the
uneven relationship between the state and societal sectors have tended to focus on the state’s autonomy
from social actors rather than its power over them. The territorial unevenness of the state has been the
focus of much more systematic analysis. Thus, the discussion here will focus on the territorial unevenness
of the state’s reach, while calling for more research on other dimensions of unevenness.
St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251 243

Jeff Goodwin’s No Other Way Out (1999) makes the case for adding the territorial
reach of the state to the other dimensions addressed in earlier scholarship on
revolutions. He acknowledges the significance of Theda Skocpol’s (1979) analysis
of the state in terms of the institutional linkages between states and elites (the
autonomy of the state) and the nature of its bureaucracy (state capacity) in the study
of revolutions. To explain the success of insurgent movements, Goodwin argues that
“revolutions are unlikely … where the state effectively governs throughout the
national territory”25 (p. 27). Goodwin conceives of state infrastructural power as the
territorial reach of the coercive capacity of the state through the national territory,
and sees it as potentially uneven. Geographic areas where the state is weak provide
lacunae in which revolutionaries can organize and evade repression.
With a similar attention to the territorial unevenness of coercive capacity, Stathis
Kalyvas explains the patterns of violence against civilians in civil wars. His theory,
like Goodwin’s, pivots on control, which he defines as the ability of armed actors
(incumbents and insurgents) to exercise “exclusive rule on a territory”26 (p. 111).
The level of control shapes how much individual members of society collaborate
with the claimant to power—the ability of the coercive actor to compel compliance
and implement policies. Where citizens comply with the coercive actor by informing
on opponents, violence is predominantly selective. But where the coercive actor
cannot compel compliance—in particular where reliable informants are not
sufficiently available—it has to resort to indiscriminate violence as a means of
enforcing order. The ability of the coercive actor to compel compliance from the
population depends on its construction of an effective infrastructure of administra-
tion that can register inhabitants and control the population. In other words, Kalyvas
argues that where states (or insurgents) have infrastructural power, they will not need
to resort to indiscriminate violence to compel compliance from the civilian
population.
The territorial reach of the state defines the geographic area within which its
policies can be enforced. Herbst (2000), who asks why some African states are more
able than others to exercise what he calls “authority over distance,” also explores this
conception of infrastructural power. Many states, particularly in the developing
world, have only limited territorial reach—one example of this is the fact that at least
5% of the Peruvian population, mostly in the Amazonian region of the country, were
unable to participate in that country’s 2006 elections because they had not been
issued official identity cards.27 A map of the reach of state institutions would show

25
Goodwin (1999) graphically portrays the relationship between these three dimensions of the state and
the probability of revolutionary emergence and success in Fig. 1.4, p. 29.
26
Because his theory incorporates the extent of control exercised by both incumbents and insurgents, it
takes a broader view of control than does the concept of state infrastructural power. Kalyvas is concerned
with the ability of both state and nonstate actors to penetrate society and implement their chosen policies.
His book raises the possibility that we can conceive of nonstate actors as having infrastructural power,
which fits well with recent analyses of insurgent state building.
27
Yashar (2005) has argued that the Peruvian state, like its neighbors, has never exercised effective
control over the Amazon.
244 St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251

systematically where the state is and is not capable of enforcing its policies, and thus
capture this approach to infrastructural power.28
Recent events have called the attention of scholars and policymakers to failed and
collapsed states.29 These terms describe countries in which states, according to
Robert Rotberg, “cannot control their peripheral regions, [and] … lose authority over
large sections of territory” (Rotberg 2004: 6). He suggests that “the extent of a state’s
failure can be measured by the extent of its geographical expanse genuinely
controlled (especially after dark) by the official government” (ibid.). At first glance,
this way of assessing the reach of the state appears to fall within with the radiating
institutions approach to infrastructural power. However, a precise delineation of this
analytical lens also clarifies an external bound of the concept of infrastructural
power. It is important to remember that infrastructural power must remain distinct
from the state’s power as raw coercion. In defining it as “the essence of the
routinized powers of states,” Mann (2006: 353) separates infrastructural power from
the force of the state. The state can have very low levels of infrastructural power—as
conceptualized by any of the three approaches developed in this article—and still be
far from “collapsed” or “failed.” Mann’s concept highlights the wide range of
variation in state power among and within states that function quite adequately,
reminding us of the importance of state power beyond the “functional”/”failed”
dichotomy that characterizes the study of state failure. Infrastructural power refers to
the ability of the state to exercise more authority than the bare monopoly of force
which defines the minimum condition of “stateness.”

From Concept to Measurement

To illustrate the distinction between these three approaches to the study of

infrastructural power, we might imagine a scholar seeking to study taxation as a
reflection of the ability of the state to impose policies on society. A scholar taking
the national capabilities approach—the first approach described above—would
likely focus on the quantity of tax which the state extracted, or on the size and
capacity of the tax bureaucracy: the resources available to the state for tax collection
(Gallo 1991). A focus on the weight of the state as the measure of infrastructural
power would examine how taxation changed local practices such as patterns of
landholding (Scott 1998). Finally, a study that explored the territorial variation in the
ability of the state to compel compliance would focus on the territorial incidence of
taxation (Soifer 2006).
Another illustration can be found in the study of state practices of identification,
whose relevance to infrastructural power is clear. A national capabilities approach to
infrastructural power would focus on the logistical techniques available to the state—
the technologies of fingerprinting, retinal scans, passports, and the like. On the other
hand, approaching this issue in terms of the weight of the state would look at how

28
Although recent years have seen much analysis of the formal institutional relations between center and
periphery (most notably the massive literature on federalism), the reach of state institutions through
territory is an analytically distinct aspect of the state—explored in work such as Boone (2003).
29
For a recent critique of the conceptual framework of state failure, see di John (2008).
St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251 245

these technologies of identification have transformed social identities, as scholars of

the Rwandan genocide have explored in detail.30 Finally, a local variation approach
would focus on the variant ability of the state to put these available technologies to use
—studying, for example, the failure to distribute national identity cards to the
population of the Peruvian Amazon mentioned above.31
Scholars have undertaken all three of these approaches to the study of these
aspects of state power, and to the study of infrastructural power more generally. But
the approach taken must be informed by the question of interest that underlies the
research question. In the study of insurgency, the territorial variation in the reach of
the state is theorized to be relevant to the emergence and success of insurgency. It is
therefore most appropriate, in that context, to conceptualize infrastructural power in
terms of this territorial variation. On the other hand, the ability of the state to extract
revenue from the population underlies its success in warfare—a finding central to the
“bellicist” approach to state formation exemplified by the work of Tilly (1992). In
the context of that literature, it is appropriate to view the state’s power in terms of its
capability to impose policies on a population, and the resources at its disposal to do
so. Scholars of nationalism often focus on the ability of the state to inculcate the
population with a belief in its officially constructed discourse of national identity.32
In this vein, it is appropriate to follow the lead of Eugen Weber and explore the
state’s power in terms of its effect on the identity and discourse of citizens. Whatever
the choice made, the approach to infrastructural power must be selected explicitly
with reference to the theoretical framework under analysis.
Having made a decision about the conceptual approach to infrastructural power,
scholars must also be attentive to its measurement. Measurement is a separate
challenge from conceptualization, and decisions about the former must be made after
choosing a conceptualization of infrastructural power. The validity of the chosen
measurement strategy is particularly important: a measurement strategy is only valid
when the indicator chosen captures the underlying concept itself, rather than its
causes, its effects, or a different aspect of the state altogether.33 Inattention to
measurement validity can render empirical research unconvincing, while carefully
designed measurement is necessary for the generation of compelling findings.
Of particular salience is the issue of alignment: scholars must take care to measure
infrastructural power with indicators that capture the aspect of the concept
incorporated into their theories. When the measurement strategy captures a different
aspect of infrastructural power from that which is theorized, it imprecisely tests the
causal mechanism proposed in the theory being tested.34 One recent illustration of

30
See for example Mamdani (2002).
31
This paragraph is based on a set of distinctions drawn in Caplan and Torpey (2001: 3).
32
See vom Hau’s article in this collection and Darden and Grzymala-Busse (2006) on this question.
33
If multiple indicators are used, scholars must also be attentive to the issue of aggregation: how multiple
indicators are combined to score a particular case. Other issues central to measurement are replicability,
and reliability, which relate to the coding of cases. Although these are major concerns, my focus here is on
the more abstract issues of research design that relate to the operationalization of the concept of state
infrastructural power.
34
See Adcock and Collier (2001) and Lieberman (2002) for discussions of the consequences of choices
about measurement.
246 St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251

such a failure to align conceptualization and measurement is James Fearon and David
Laitin’s (2003) investigation of the causes of insurgency. The authors show that state
weakness, rather than ethnic heterogeneity, explains why insurgencies plague some
countries and not others. Their causal mechanism is that “the reach of the state into
rural areas” is “most important for the prospects of a nascent insurgency” (p. 80). In
other words, they argue that the territorial reach of the state is the crucial aspect of
infrastructural power in determining the emergence of insurgencies. This theoretical
claim has been echoed by other scholars, but Fearon and Laitin offer the first cross-
national statistical investigation of the role of this aspect of state power in
insurgencies. In their statistical analysis, GDP per capita is used as a measure of the
reach of the state, and it is shown to be strongly related to the rise of insurgency.
This measure of state power, however, is territorially invariant, and is therefore
misaligned with the causal mechanism operating in the argument. The level of GDP
per capita—even if related to the resources available to the state as it seeks to
exercise coercion against insurgents—tells us nothing about where the state is strong
and weak. The same level of GDP per capita could be associated with a state that
deploys its resources to exercise a moderate level of coercion nationwide, or with a
state which has the resources to effectively exercise coercion in the capital, but no
presence in more remote areas of the country. Yet, according to the theory developed
by Fearon and Laitin, we would expect insurgency to be more likely in the second
hypothetical state above than in the first.
In contrast to Fearon and Laitin’s strategy, a more compelling examination of the
role of infrastructural power in insurgency can be found in Goodwin (1999). His
study compares the emergence and success of insurgencies in several Central
American countries, testing the role of infrastructural power in suppressing and
defeating insurgencies. He distinguishes between two relevant aspects of infrastructural
power: first, the means of coercion available to the state and the material means underlying
these, and second the ability to extend this repressive capacity through the national
territory. His theory incorporates both the national capabilities and the subnational
variation approaches to infrastructural power. Goodwin then develops measures of both of
these aspects of infrastructural power. The first is measured with data on military
expenditures per capita, armed forces as a proportion of the population, and government
revenue as a percentage of GDP. These are all more appropriate measures of national
capabilities, it should be noted, than the GDP per capita measure proposed by Fearon and
Laitin.35 The second is measured by density of highways and railroads and the
proportion of military aircraft to the size of the national territory. As Goodwin himself
acknowledges (p. 250), the measures of state infrastructural power as capabilities are
more adequate than the measures of the reach of the state through territory.
To test this relationship between state power as territorial reach and insurgency
more convincingly, a measure of state power that captures territorial reach must be
constructed. Given the limitations of subnational data (Snyder 2001) and the
heightened challenge that this poses to cross-national research (Herrera and Kapur
2007), it seems as though the measurement of the subnational variation in the reach
of the state is particularly difficult. As a result, many cross-national studies which

35
In addition to the misalignment between concept and measurement discussed above, Fearon and Laitin
also fail to choose a measure that captures any dimension of infrastructural power.
St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251 247

conceptualize infrastructural power in terms of this dimension rely on measures that

are territorially invariant. This misalignment results in statistical relationships, which
fail to test the specified causal mechanisms, and are therefore limited in their utility.
Yet there are some studies that precisely measure this territorial aspect of state
power. Kalyvas (2006, see especially Chap. 8) is more successful in testing a
different relationship between territorial reach and insurgency because he explicitly
measures control as spatially variant. Using indicators ranging from road networks
(Herbst 2000) to records of court cases (Walker 1999), scholars can literally map the
institutions of control that reach through the national territory to carry the authority
of the state. Soifer (2006) measures the territorial spread of military and police
presence, taxation, and public primary education through several Latin American
countries. Where the state operates primary schools, oversees the content of
education, and collects taxes from the population, it demonstrates that it has
infrastructural power. The time series maps, which can be generated from this
operationalization of infrastructural power, show explicitly where the state can
exercise distinct aspects of control over society at any point in time.36
In addition to the problem of misalignment between dimension and indicator
discussed above, another challenge to the empirical study of infrastructural power is
the failure to address alternative explanations—a problem to which the weight of the
state approach is particularly susceptible. Capturing the effects of the state requires
research designed not only to compare across time and contrast identity or behavior
before and after state intervention, but also to demonstrate that the observed
difference resulted from the increased presence of the state rather than from an
alternative factor. In other words, scholars need to measure infrastructural power in a
way that distinguishes power from its effects, and this is often difficult to do.
A clear example of this problem can be seen in Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen
(1976). The tremendous bulk of historical detail in his book reveals the massive and
multifaceted investigation required to demonstrate the changes in French society
over the course of the late nineteenth century. These effects are attributed by Weber
to the increased weight of the state in the lives of French peasants. But the
measurement of state power in terms of its effects depends on the demonstration that
the effects—in this case changes in identity—are not caused by other factors.
Because we have no independent measure of the increased weight of the state apart
from its effects, a convincing demonstration that the state has had an effect requires
the elimination of alternative explanations for the observed effects.37 Weber finds

36
This raises again the issue of aggregation: the question of how the extent of police presence, educational
oversight, and tax extraction should be combined into a unitary measure of infrastructural power. The
assumption too commonly made is that a state that can tax can also exercise coercive power, and so forth:
that state power is homogeneous across its arenas. The result of this assumption of homogeneity is that we
lack precise categories for states with significant power divergences across arenas.The relationship
between the various arenas of state power has been undertheorized beyond the virtuous cycle of taxation
and military power, which characterized European state formation. For preliminary approaches to this
important gap in the study of state development, see Slater’s article in this issue and Loveman (2005).
37
By conceptualizing state-society relations as a process, scholars who explore the hegemony of state-
society relations claim to solve this problem. See Mallon (1994). However, the difficulty of measuring
hegemony still remains.
248 St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251

that factors such as increased contact with other regions, increased mobility, and other
elements of modernization also played a role in transforming French society along
with the increased weight of the state. It is difficult to distinguish between the causal
role of these two transformations of rural France—to know how much of the observed
change in the identity of rural residents of France to attribute to the increased weight of
the state, and how much to socioeconomic modernization.
Scholars who conceive of infrastructural power as the weight of the state are
particularly vulnerable to challenges based on alternative explanations. Since they
have no measures of infrastructural power independent of its effects, they must
explicitly test and reject alternative explanations for the pattern of effects observed.
Although these challenges appear daunting, addressing them with care allows
scholars to generate powerful insights about the ability of states to transform the
societies within their borders.

Conclusion

As the articles in this issue show, the concept of state infrastructural power is a
powerful analytical tool when applied with care and precision, since the ability of the
state to penetrate society and implement its chosen policies is relevant to many areas
of social research. The conceptual discussion in this article has provided a set of
guidelines for maximizing the payoffs of research into this important aspect of the
state.
First, I have argued that scholars need to be explicit about the approach taken to
infrastructural power, and that they should make this decision based on the causal
mechanisms elaborated in their theories where the state’s power plays a role. To aid
in the task of connecting causal mechanisms to attributes of the state, I have
identified three possible approaches to infrastructural power. These capture three
distinct ways to conceptualize the ability of the state to penetrate society and
successfully implement its policies. The national capabilities approach focuses on
the resources at the disposal of the central state, which can be leveraged to exercise
control over society and regulate social relations. The weight of the state approach,
in contrast, focuses on the effects of the state on societal actors to observe its power
in operation. As opposed to both of these, the subnational variation approach
examines the potentially uneven reach of state institutions through territory. Each of
these three approaches is appropriate for a wide range of social research, but scholars
must exercise caution in choosing the analytical lens that appropriately captures the
relationship between state and society under investigation.
The second guideline proposed in this article argues that the theoretically
informed choices about conceptualization also have implications for measurement: It
is crucial to select a measure of infrastructural power that captures the appropriate
conceptualization: failure to do so leaves untested the causal mechanisms specified
in the argument. Despite the data requirements for measurement of the territorial
reach of the state, particularly in cross-national analysis, theories with causal
mechanisms that draw on this aspect of state power depend on the collection of
appropriate data to measure the reach of the state. A similar warning applies to the
measurement of the weight of the state where the threat of alternative explanations
St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251 249

makes it incumbent on the researcher to exhaustively test the full range of causal
arguments.
Although the state was “brought back in” (Evans et al. 1985) 20 years ago, much
remains to be done to develop tools for the systematic analysis of state power. Since
its origins and its effects are central to social research, more scholars should
explicitly build on Mann’s framework. This article has attempted to provide some
guidelines for the study of infrastructural power. The articles that follow in this issue
demonstrate the payoffs of systematic analysis of infrastructural power in
contributing to our understanding of changes of nationalism, urban development,
public good provision, and how regimes affect states. With careful attention to
research design and conceptual clarity, infrastructural power has the potential to be
relevant not only in these areas of research, but also even more broadly.

References

Adcock R, Collier D. Measurement validity: a shared standard for quantitative and qualitative research.
Am Polit Sci Rev. 2001;95(3):529–46.
Boone C. Political topographies of the African state: territorial authority and institutional choice.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2003.
Caplan J, Torpey J, editors. Documenting individual identity: the development of state practices in the
modern world. Princeton: Princeton University Press; 2001.
Centeno MA. Blood and debt: war and the state in Latin America. State College, PA: Penn State Press;
2002.
Corrigan P, Sayer D. The great arch: English state formation as cultural revolution. Oxford: Blackwell;
1985.
Darden K, Grzymala-Busse A. The great divide: literacy, nationalism, and the communist collapse. World
Polit. 2006;59:83–115. October.
Di John J. Conceptualizing the causes and consequences of failed states: a critical review of the literature.
Crisis States Research Centre, Working Paper no.25; 2008.
Ertman T. Birth of the Leviathan: building states and regimes in medieval and early modern Europe.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1997.
Evans P, Skocpol T, Rueschemeyer D. Bringing the state back in. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press; 1985.
Fearon J, Laitin D. Ethnicity, insurgency and civil war. Am Polit Sci Rev. 2003;97(1):75–90.
Foucault M. Discipline and punish. New York: Vintage; 1977.
Foucault M. Governmentality. In: Burchell G, et al, editors. The Foucault effect: studies in
governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1991.
Gallo C. Taxes and state power: political instability in Bolivia 1900–1950. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press; 1991.
Goertz G. Social science concepts: a user’s guide. Princeton: Princeton University Press; 2005.
Goldhagen D. Hitler’s willing executioners: ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Vintage;
1996.
Goldstone JA. A historical, not comparative method: breakthroughs and limitations in the theory and
methodology of Michael Mann’s analysis of power. In: Hall JA, Schroeder R, editors. An anatomy of
power: the social theory of Michael Mann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2006. p. 263–82.
Goodwin J. No other way out: states and revolutionary movements 1945–1991. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press; 1999.
Hall JA, Schroeder R. An anatomy of power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2006.
Helmke G, Levitsky S, editors. Informal institutions and democracy in Latin America. Johns Hopkins
University Press; 2004.
Herbst J. States and power in Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press; 2000.
Herrera Y, Kapur D. Improving data quality. Polit Anal. 2007;15:365–86.
250 St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251

Joseph GM, Nugent D. Popular culture and state formation in revolutionary Mexico. In: Joseph GM,
Nugent D, editors. Everyday forms of state formation: revolution and the negotiation of rule in
modern Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; 1994. p. 3–23.
Kalyvas SN. The logic of violence in civil war. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2006.
Knight A. The weight of the state in Modern Mexico. In: Dunkerley J, editor. Studies in the formation of
the nation-state in Latin America. London: ILAS; 2002. p. 212–53.
Lieberman ES. Taxation data as indicators of state-society relations: possibilities and pitfalls in cross-
national research. Stud Comp Int Dev. 2002;36(4):89–115. (Winter).
Loveman M. The modern state and the primitive accumulation of symbolic power. Am J Sociol. 2005;110
(6):1651–83. (May).
Mahoney J. Revisiting general theory in historical sociology. Soc Forces. 2004;83(2):459–89. (December).
Mallon FE. Reflections on the ruins: everyday forms of state formation in nineteenth century Mexico,
Chapter 3. In: Joseph GM, Nugent D, editors. Everyday forms of state formation: revolution and the
negotiation of rule in modern Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; 1994. p. 69–106.
Mamdani M. When victims become killers: colonialism, nativism, and the genocide in Rwanda. Princeton:
Princeton University Press; 2002.
Mann M. The autonomous power of the state. Oxford: Blackwell; 1984. (reprinted in Mann, States, War,
and Capitalism, 1988).
Mann M. The sources of social power, vol 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1993.
Mann M. The sources of social power revisited: a response to criticism. In: Hall JA, Schroeder R, editors.
An anatomy of power: the social theory of Michael Mann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;
2006. p. 343–96.
Migdal J. Strong societies, weak states. Princeton: Princeton University Press; 1988.
Migdal J, Kohli A, Shue V. State power and social forces: domination and transformation in the Third
World. New York: Cambridge University Press; 1994.
Migdal J. State-in-society: studying how states and societies transform and constitute one another.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2001.
Morriss P. Power: a philosophical analysis. 2nd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press; 2002.
Nugent D, Alonso AM. Multiple selective traditions in agrarian reform and agrarian struggle: popular
culture and state formation in the Ejido of Namiquipa, Chihuahua. In: Joseph GM, Nugent D, editors.
Everyday forms of state formation: revolution and the negotiation of rule in modern Mexico. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press; 1994. p. 209–46.
O’Donnell G. On the state, democratization and some conceptual problems: a Latin American view with
glances at some postcommunist countries. World Dev. 1993;21:1355–69.
Rotberg RI, editor. When states fail: causes and consequences. Princeton: Princeton University Press;
2004.
Scott JC. Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New
Haven: Yale University Press; 1998.
Shue V. The reach of the state: sketches of the Chinese body politic. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University
Press; 1988.
Skocpol T. States and social revolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1979.
Snider LW. Identifying the elements of state power: where do we begin. Comp Polit Stud. 1987;20
(3):314–56. October.
Snyder R. Scaling down: the subnational comparative method. Stud Comp Int Dev. 2001;36(1):93–
110.
Soifer HD. Authority over distance: explaining variation in state infrastructural power in Latin America.
Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University; 2006.
Soifer HD. State power and the redistributive threat: rethinking the effects of inequality on regime type.
Paper presented at Midwest Political Science Association Meetings, April 2008; 2008.
Straus S. The order of genocide. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; 2006.
Tilly C, editor. The formation of national states in Western Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press;
1975.
Tilly C. Coercion, capital, and European states AD 990–1992. Oxford: Blackwell; 1992.
Vaughan MK. Cultural politics in revolution: teachers, peasants, and schools in Mexico, 1930–1940.
Tuscon, AZ: University of Arizona Press; 1997.
Waldner D. State building and late development. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; 1999.
Walker CF. Smoldering ashes: Cuzco and the creation of Republican Peru, 1780–1840. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press; 1999.
St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:231–251 251

Weber E. Peasants into Frenchmen. Stanford: Stanford University Press; 1976.

Yashar D. Democracy, indigenous movements, and the postliberal challenge in Latin America. World
Polit. 1999;52(1):76–104.
Yashar D. Constructing citizenship in Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2005.
Ziblatt DF. Structuring the state. Princeton: Princeton University Press; 2006.

Hillel David Soifer is a lecturer in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School at
Princeton University. He earned his Ph.D. from the Government Department at Harvard University in
2006, and previously served as assistant professor of politics at Bates College. His book manuscript,
“Authority Over Distance,” investigates the origins and persistence of variation in state infrastructural
power among four Latin American countries: Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.