Research

During the first wave of democratization, authoritarian elites expanded the franchise while imposing or maintaining stringent officeholding requirements, limiting access to top state positions to the affluent and educated. Although definitions of democracy assume citizens can vote and stand for election, the right to seek office is rarely considered in measures of democracy. This paper emphasizes this omission and examines its implications for the political economy of democracy. Leveraging historical government spending data from 27 countries in Western Europe and the Americas (1800-1975), I find that suffrage expansion consistently predicts redistributive spending only when broad eligibility rules are present. I also provide evidence for the political selection mechanism underlying this relationship. Taking officeholding requirements seriously offers a new perspective on elite capture and underscores the partial nature of first-wave democratization.

This chapter traces the trajectory of state power in Argentina since its formation, revealing a paradox of high-capacity moments overshadowed by chronic fragility. Despite periods of robust governance—evident in sophisticated tax systems, public health initiatives, and industrial policies—the Argentine state has failed to sustain prosperity and inclusion. The chapter argues that this stems from the intractability of Argentina’s economy and territory, where abundant resources prove insufficient to govern a fragmented mosaic of regions and social classes. This dynamic explains the state’s mixed record: bursts of brilliance eclipsed by persistent powerlessness. Dissecting debates on state power, the analysis shows that Argentine weakness derives more from a lack of autonomy—constrained by powerful classes and regional elites—than from deficient capacity, such as an undereducated bureaucracy or inadequate fiscal resources. 

Critical juncture (CJ) scholarship views cross-sectional differences in outcomes as the product of agency during concentrated periods in which structural constraints are temporarily relaxed, with such agency triggering mechanisms that place units on divergent trajectories. Despite the centrality of critical junctures in historical analysis, scholars have devoted limited attention to issues of causal identification. This paper argues that causal reasoning in CJ research can both benefit from and contribute to recent developments in the difference-in-differences (DiD) literature. While rooted in distinct intellectual traditions, both approaches share a historical notion of causation and rely on comparisons of within-unit change over time to support their claims. Specifically, I show that CJ scholars can improve causal identification by replacing the logic of controlled comparison with that of parallel trends in potential outcomes. In turn, CJ scholarship focus on causal process observations, specially during the aftermath phase, can contribute to the study of dynamic treatment effects.

This paper examines how unequal representation shaped the regional allocation of public employment in nineteenth-century Argentina, a federation characterized by stark territorial inequalities and exceptionally high levels of malapportionment. We argue that overrepresented provinces disproportionately captured positions within the federal civil service. To test this claim, we construct an original micro-level dataset covering 8,818 civil servants who served between 1862 and 1893. Using information on employee tenure, we reconstruct annual hiring flows and assemble a province-year panel linking civil service recruitment to Electoral College malapportionment. We document substantial growth in the territorial reach and functional scope of the federal bureaucracy, alongside sizeable wage premia relative to local public and private employment. Results show that a one-standard-deviation increase in malapportionment is associated with a 24-percent increase in hiring rates. Effects are concentrated in clerical positions within the Department of the Interior.

This paper examines the elite capture and economic consequences of the Desert Conquest (1878-1885), a military campaign through which Argentina established effective control over fourteen million hectares previously held by indigenous populations in the country's most productive region:~the fertile Pampas. To finance the operation, the government issued bonds equivalent to approximately eight percent of federal spending, redeemable for large tracts of unconquered land, subject to a statutory limit of 30,000 hectares per subscriber. Combining original land survey, fiscal valuation, and census data, I show that powerful landlords, representing eighteen percent of bond subscribers, violated this statutory limit to realize capital gains, resulting in high levels of landholding concentration. I further demonstrate that counties with greater landholding inequality, as measured in the 1885 land survey, exhibited substantially lower investment in agricultural machinery, land improvements, and livestock by 1914, suggesting that land speculation delayed the productive use of the land.