Economic development promotes governance, a relationship usually attributed to improved institutional quality. I challenge this interpretation and argue that democratic performance is a function of the fiscal and administrative capacity of the state rather than the design of its political institutions. Where state capacity is low, and especially where public revenues are scarce, even well-intentioned elected officials are unable to deliver adequately to citizens. As a result, they generally fail to gain reelection.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Miriam Golden is a Visiting Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law in the Freeman Spogli Institute. Between 2019 and 2024, Golden held the Peter Mair Chair of Comparative Politics in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute. Prior to her 2019 move to the EUI, she taught at the University of California at Los Angeles. Golden was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Cornell University.  Golden's research is in the area of political economy, and she is currently engaged in a large-scale cross-national study of why reelection rates of national legislators rise with economic development. The book manuscript in preparation is provisionally entitled Capacity Gap: Electoral Failure in Weak States. A first publication from this project, co-authored with Eugenia Nazrullaeva, appeared in 2023 as "The Puzzle of Clientelism: Political Discretion and Elections Around the World" in Cambridge University Press' Elements in Political Economy series.