Taking the State (Back) Out? Statehood and the Delivery of Collective Goods

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Lee, Melissa M.; Walter-Drop, Gregor; Wiesel, John
• 署名单位: Stanford University; Free University of Berlin
• 刊物名称: GOVERNANCE-AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF POLICY ADMINISTRATION AND INSTITUTIONS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0952-1895
• DOI: 10.1111/gove.12069
• 发表日期: 2014
• 关键词: Democracy; HEALTH; dictatorship; INEQUALITY; provision; countries; security; GROWTH

摘要

State-building is a central tenet of many current development efforts. This primacy of the state rests on a global normative script that emphasizes the role of the modern state in providing collective goods and services from security to education to health. We analyze state performance in six dimensions of service delivery in a cross-sectional sample of more than 150 countries. In addition to exploring the explanatory power of statehood, we examine various control variables and also analyze whether external actors affect the delivery of collective goods and services. The core finding of this article is that there is remarkably little evidence of a consistent relationship between statehood and service delivery. This result casts doubt on the conventional wisdom about the centrality of the state for the provision collective goods and services, and suggests that other factors may explain the observed variation.