** Please note: Those planning to attend events in this
series should read the paper that will be posted on the CES website
before the seminar.**
This paper reviews the growing literature on “state capacity” and proposes a new conceptualization of it. The paper argues that most existing definitions and theories of state capacity are too closely tailored to explaining a specific set of outcomes. The idea behind our own conceptualization is that state capacity can be defined as the strength of the causal relationship between the policies that governments adopt and the outcomes that they intend to achieve.
