War and State-Making in Premodern Political Systems

The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.Edgar Kiser (PhD University of Arizona, 1987) is Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. His interests include the study of state-building and war, comparative/historical sociology, premodern states, and rational choice theory applied to institution-building. His recent publications include articles in the American Sociological Review and American Journal of Sociology on tax-farming, agency theory, war and bureaucratization in Qin China, early modern tax revolts in France, and taxation and voting rights struggles in medieval England and France. He is currently working on a book on state-building in premodern states and empires, and a second examining ideas drawn from evolutionary biology to the development of historical/comparative methods in the social sciences.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studiesweb page announcemen

Different paths to the modern state in Europe: the interaction between domestic political economy and interstate competition

Theoretical work on state formation and capacity has focused mostly on early modern Europe and on the experience of western European states during this period. While a number of European states monopolized domestic tax collection and achieved gains in state capacity during the early modern era, for others revenues stagnated or even declined, and these variations motivated alternative hypotheses for determinants of fiscal and state capacity. In this study we test the basic hypotheses in the existing literature making use of the large date set we have compiled for all of the leading states across the continent. We find strong empirical support for two prevailing threads in the literature, arguing respectively that interstate wars and changes in economic structure towards an urbanized economy had positive fiscal impact. Regarding the main point of contention in the theoretical literature, whether it was representative or authoritarian political regimes that facilitated the gains in fiscal capacity, we do not find conclusive evidence that one performed better than the other. Instead, the empirical evidence we have gathered lends supports to the hypothesis that when under pressure of war, the fiscal performance of representative regimes was better in the more urbanized-commercial economies and the fiscal performance of authoritarian regimes was better in rural-agrarian economie

KINGS AND CLASSES: CROWN AUTONOMY, STATE POLICIES, AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN WESTERN EUROPEAN ABSOLUTISMS (ENGLAND, FRANCE, SWEDEN, SPAIN).

This dissertation explores the role of Absolutist states in the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe. Three general questions are addressed: (1) what are the determinants of variations in the autonomy of rulers? (2) what are the consequences of variations in autonomy for states policies? and (3) what are the effects of various state policies on economic development? A new theoretical framework, based on a synthesis of the neoclassical economic literature on principal-agent relations and current organizational theory in sociology, is developed to answer these three questions. Case studies of Absolutism in England, France, Sweden, and Spain are used to illustrate the explanatory power of the theory

Supplemental_Material_-_R1 – Supplemental material for Legitimate authorities and rational taxpayers: An investigation of voluntary compliance and method effects in a survey experiment of income tax evasion

<p>Supplemental material, Supplemental_Material_-_R1 for Legitimate authorities and rational taxpayers: An investigation of voluntary compliance and method effects in a survey experiment of income tax evasion by Blaine Robbins and Edgar Kiser in Rationality and Society</p