Table Of ContentT
J
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Political Order and Inequality
The fundamental question of politics, one that precedes all other
questions about the nature of political life, is why there is a state at all.
Is human cooperation feasible without a political authority enforcing
it? Or do we need a state to live together? This problem opens up two
further questions. If a state is necessary to establish order, how does
it come into place? And, when it does, what are the consequences for
the political status and economic welfare of its citizens? Combining
a wealth of ethnographical materials, historical cases, and statistical
analysis, Political Order and Inequality describes the foundations of
stateless societies, why and how states emerge, and the basis of politi
cal obligation. As a result, it explains the economic and political roots
of inequality, describes the causes of the stagnation of the preindustrial
world, and explores what led to the West's prosperity of the past two
centuries.
Carles Boix is the Robert Garrett Professor of Politics and Public
Affairs in the department of politics and at the Woodrow Wilson
School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and
the Director of the Institute of Political Economy and Governance
in Barcelona. His first book, Political Parties, Growth and Equality
(Cambridge, 1998), examines the different means through which par
tisan governments manage the economy in a globalized world. In his
more recent work, Democracy and Redistribution (Cambridge, 2003),
Boix describes the economic and institutional conditions that lead to
democratization. Both books received the William Riker award for the
best book on political economy. Boix coedited The Oxford Handbook
of Comparative Politics (2007), which has quickly become one of
the main works of reference in political science, and has published in
the top journals of the discipline, such as the American Political Science
Review and World Politics. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a member
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Political Order and Inequality
Their Foundations and Their Consequences
for Human Welfare
CARLES BOIX
Princeton University
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
,
CAMBRIDGE A /'Alicia
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©Carles Boix 2015
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
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no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2015
Printed in the United States of America
A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Boix, Carles, author.
Political order and inequality : their foundations and their consequences
for human welfare I Carles Boix.
pages em.-(Cambridge studies in comparative politics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-08943-3 (hardback)-ISBN 978-1-107-46107-9 (paperback)
1. State, The. 2. Common good. 3. Equality. I. Title.
JC131.B65 2015
320.1-dc23 2014030813
ISBN 978-1-107-08943-3 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-107-46107-9 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs
for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not
guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
,
Contents
Acknowledgments page xiii
Introduction 1
The Terms of the Debate 2
Theory 6
Spontaneous Cooperation 8
Growth, Inequality, and the State 9
Types of State Institutions 10
Inequality under the State 12
The Problem of Development 12
Empirical Method and the Use of Historical Material 15
Plan of the Book 18
1. Tabula Rasa 22
Initial Conditions 23
Spontaneous Cooperation under a Condition of Equality 26
The Shadow of the Future 28
The Technology of Predation 29
The Exit Option 30
Dynamics of Population Growth and Migration in a
Stateless World 30
The Nature of Cooperation 31
Equality in Risk Sharing 32
Production Complementarities and Equality 33
A Nested Model of Cooperation 34
Empirical Evidence on Stateless Societies 35
Equality of Material Conditions 37
Political Life 44
IX
X Contents Contents xi
Equality and Social Conformity 46 Geographical Limits to the Military Effectiveness
The Effects of Equality and Social Conformity 51 of Heavy Cavalry 155
Stability and Violence 51 Medieval Urban Growth and a Downward Shift in the
Stagnation and Discontinuous Growth 54 Military Effectiveness of Heavy Cavalry 157
Appendix. Equality and Cooperation: A Numerical Example 55 Gunpowder and Firearms 159
Monarchical and Aristocratic Elites versus Cities 160
2. Political Order 60 Nobles versus Peasants 166
Learning-by-Doing, Inequality, and Sorting 61 Beyond Europe 169
From Conflict to Political Order 63
Monarchical Solution 66 5. Inequality 171
The Republican Compact 71 Height Dispersion and Income Inequality 174
Producers Doubling as Exploiters: Patronage Systems and Income, Nutrition, and Height 174
Imperial Republics 74 Evidence 177
Mixed Regimes 75 The Evolution of Height 178
Monarchies or Republics? The Role of Warfare 76 The Boas Data Set: Nineteenth-Century Native Americans 180
Extraction Rate 77 The Impact of War Making in Agrarian Societies 185
Relative Military Capacity 77 The Zuni Pueblo 186
Opportunity Costs 78 Mayan Cities 186
Warfare and the Number and Territorial Size of Mycenae and Egypt 188
Political Regimes 79 Medieval and Modern Europe 191
Economic Inequality 83 Japan 195
Growth 87 The Impact of Factor Endowment and Production
The State as an Optimal Solution to Anarchy 89 Regimes on Height 197
Midwest Farming Economies 197
3. Technological Progress 92 Slave Economies 199
Technological Change and the Territorial Clustering Conclusions 199
of Production 94
Technological Innovation and Institutional Change among 6. Modern Breakthrough 202
Maritime Foragers 96 The Terms of the Debate 205
Cross-Sectional Evidence 101 Endogenous Growth 209
Biogeography and the Introduction of Agriculture 110 Biogeographical Foundations of Population Growth 209
The Formation of Political Authority 116 The Formation of Urban Clusters 213
Violence and Population Migrations 124 Proto-industrialization in Europe 214
A Discussion of Alternative Explanations 124 Urban Growth and Nineteenth-Century Income 216
The West and the Rest 218
4. Warfare 128 The Role of Parliamentarism 219
The Metal Revolution 131 Political Fragmentation and War Technologies
Copper and Bronze 131 in Western Europe 222
The Introduction of Iron 134 The Embourgeoisement of Old Elites 230
The Horse 140 Declining Inequalities 232
Introduction of the Horse 140 Political Inequality 232
Military Effects of the Horse 143 Economic Inequalities 235
The Horse and the War Chariot 147
Stirrup and Heavy Cavalry 148
Contents
Xll
243
7. Conclusions
244
Classical Political Theorists
,
248
Anarchy and Cooperation
251
Political Institutions
Acknowledgments
Growth and Inequality after the First Transition 258
261
Transition to a Modern World
264
Inequality Today
269
References
295
Name Index
307
Subject Index
Parts of this book, which has been on the making since Margaret Levi sug
gested back in 2007 that I think about the origins of inequality, have been
presented in seminars and workshops at the University of Virginia, the
Santa Fe Institute, Duke University, Yale University, Stanford University,
the University of Chicago, the London School of Economics, the John
F. Kennedy School of Government, Cornell University, University of
Maryland, Centro de Estudios Sociales Avanzados in Madrid, the
HiCN Workshop in Barcelona, the University of Michigan, Georgetown
University, University of Zurich, and Princeton University. I am grate
ful to all the participants for their comments and in particular to Alicia
Adsera, Sam Bowles, Ernesto Calvo, Philip Hoffman, Amaney Jamal,
Stathis Kalyvas, Robert Keohane, Andy Moravcsik, Elena Nikolova,
Frances Rosenbluth, and Milan Svolik. In May 20I3 I discussed the first
complete version of the manuscript in a book workshop sponsored by the
Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice at Princeton University
and attended by Angus Deaton, Alberto Dfaz-Cayeros, Branko Milanovic,
Ron Rogowski, and Thomas Romer: I am extremely indebted for all their
(extremely thorough) comments and suggestions. I would also like to
thank Mehvesh Ahmed, Ahsan Barkatullah, Catherine Che, Kathy Chow,
Britta Emmrich, Margo Nostein, Tom Pavone, and Jennifer Zhao for
their research assistance. I wish to acknowledge the financial support of
the Institute of Political Economy and Governance in Barcelona, which
allowed me to complete the book manuscript. Parts of Chapter 5 have
been published in the American Political Science Review under the title
"Bones of Contention: The Political Economy of Height Inequality" and
are here reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.
xiii
,
Introduction
Human life is unfeasible in the absence of some minimal political order.
Without stable rules governing their social interactions, men and women
live under a condition, at best, of generalized mistrust and, more often, of
exploitation and open war. Deploying and pursuing any consistent and
rational life plan becomes impossible to them. Freedom of action and a
sphere of private life cannot exist. Innovation, investment, and growth
do not take place.
And yet, despite the fundamental advantages that flow from having a
stable social and political order, securing it is neither automatic nor cost
free. The creation and maintenance of a set of either formal or infor
mal rules to sustain cooperation in a given human community require
the deliberate efforts and actions of its members. Because the final struc
ture of political authority may have different consequences on the wel
fare of different people, political order may not take place at all: under
certain circumstances some or all individuals may prefer to plunder oth
ers instead of subjecting themselves to some shared rules of behavior and
to a common authority. When it happens, the internal configuration of
political order responds to the economic and military capabilities of the
actors that established it - shaping the political and social status as well
as the wealth and life chances of everyone.
In this book I offer a theory of the conditions under which politi
cal order is possible. Accordingly, I describe the foundations of state
less societies or, in other words, the mechanisms that allow humans to
cooperate with each other in the absence of a formal authority with the
capacity to punish them-a state of affairs that prevailed everywhere at
least until the Neolithic and that still covered wide parts of the world
1
Introduction 3
Introduction
2
existing work on these questions, mapping out its contributions as well as
at the beginning of the European colonial expansion. Next I e~plain
its major weaknesses, to justify the need for this book.1
why and how states, that is, formal organizations with th~ ca~ac1ty to
Setting aside fundamental but ultimatelf philosophical analyses in
enforce order over their subjects, emerge - for the first ume m a few
the field of political thought, ranging from Aristotle and Machiavelli to
places about five thousand to six thousand y~ars a~o -.an~ spread across
Locke and Rousseau, the literature on the causes and consequences of
the globe. In the process, I outline the particular mst1tutwnal ~arms or
political order can be divided into three broadly defined camps: function
regimes, ranging from dictatorial and monarchical syst~ms.to clty-~tates
alism, institutionalism, and, in a certainly less influential position today
and imperial republics, through which political authonty 1s established
than the former two, Marxism.2
and exercised. I discuss the foundations of political obligation of each
Functionalist approaches see political institutions (and particularly the
political regime- that is, why their citizens obey the sta~e -.and finally
state) as a natural response to the "market failure" or collective action
I describe the corresponding political inequalities that anse m each spe-
problem that leads to conflict, war, and poverty. Confronted with the pos
cific institutional solution.
sibility of violence, disorder, or simply lack of social cooperation, indi
Such a theory then speaks to two inextricably related questions. In the
viduals put themselves, deliberately or not, under a common agent or
first place, it sheds light on the combination of economic and. po~i~ical
authority that has the capacity to coordinate them around certain norms
factors that shape the distribution of income and wealth among md1v1du
of conduct, punish them whenever they refuse to comply with the legal
als. In particular, it explains why stateless communities tend to disp~ay
order, and supply them with some public goods. The way in which these
relatively equal distributions of income and wealth, why that relat1':'e
institutions emerge takes several forms and is often left unclear in this
equality gave way to much wider distributions of income and wealth-m
intellectual tradition. For some researchers, they appear spontaneously,
terms of patterns of habitation, accumulation of valuable assets, and e:en
in a deus ex machina fashion. For others, mostly coming from the field
health and height - after the agricultural revolution and the formatiOn
of evolutionary biology, institutions rise and remain in place through a
of states and what accounts for the relative variation in the extent of
economi~ inequality in state-ruled societies across regions and historical process of natural selection that weeds out suboptimal outcomes. Mainly
among neoclassical economists, individuals engage in a process of polit
periods. This discussion includes an examinatio~ of the m?stly equal
ical bargaining, similar to the one that happens in markets, that results
izing consequences of the coming of the Industnal Revolut1?n and .the
in the construction of rules and institutions to solve those collective fail
diffusion of representative democracy. In the second place, 1t descnbes
ures. In all three cases, political institutions develop because they benefit
the root causes of the general economic stagnation that characterizes pre
the society they govern. In other words, it is the function they fulfill that
industrial societies - in other words, why the agricultural revolution led
eventually explains their existence.
to the construction of political structures that, in turn, froze economic
development for a few millennia. It then explores the econo~ic ~e~ha Functionalist explanations face a logical conundrum. If institutions
emerge or are established to discipline those individuals that have the
nisms that led to what, given the internal dynamics of the anCien reg1me,
incentives (and capabilities) to free ride on others, why should those
was the unexpected prosperity experienced by the West in the last two
exploitative agents agree in the first place to surrender themselves to
centuries.
those institutions and lose the opportunity to plunder the rest of society?
And, conversely, if, recognizing the gains that come from a cooperative
The Terms of the Debate
There is certainly a long and important tradition of research in the social 1 At this point, the reader uninterested in an overview of the current research in the social
sciences on the nature and foundations of political order as well as on sciences may skip the rest of this section and start reading the section under the heading
of "Theory."
its economic and distributional consequences. Hence, before describing
2 In th: concluding chapter I discuss the main traditions of political philosophy (on the
the theory and the empirical findings of the book, which I do in the fol questwns of cooperation, political obligation and institutions, and inequality) in light of
lowing section of this introduction, it seems appropriate to overview the the results of this book.
Introduction Introduction 5
4
of standard ancien regime countries) (North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009;
outcome, they agree to do so, why should anyone need to set up a state
Acemoglu and Robinson 2012).
(which implies creating a sovereign agent with strong enforcement pow
Arguably, the main problem of institution<t'l.ism is that it lacks a theory
ers) to start with? In short, contrary to functionalism, the fact that a
of political and institutional change. Beyond referring in a general way
particular institutional solution may be socially optimal does not guar
to the transformation of bandits into monarchs, institutionalists do not
antee that it will be adopted by everyone. Those individuals for which it
dwell on the particular conditions that triggered the emergence of bandits
is suboptimal will resist its introduction - and they will only accept it if
and the formation of the state - in particular areas of the world and at a
they are forced to. Naturally, as soon as force comes into play, the key
specific historical moment. A similar point can be made about contempo
functionalist assumption of an optimization process (undertaken by a
rary institutions and the Industrial Revolution. Independently of the fact
human collectivity) collapses.
that before 1800 there were pluralistic polities, such as classical Greece
Taking a step forward, institutionalism acknowledges power and vio-
and late medieval Europe, that never experienced the kind of growth we
lence as central features of human nature and human relations. Although
have witnessed during the last two hundred years, institutionalists do not
individuals certainly benefit from cooperating with each other, they may
explain why and how the state set up by bandits-turned-into-monarchs
equally choose to exploit their neighbor or their contractual party. In
evolved to the point of making industrial growth feasible. They either tie
small communities, where everyone knows each other, the daily flow of
the origin of modern, progrowth institutions to some unidentified critical
personal interactions is enough to discipline everyone into socially accept
historical juncture or, in the most precise accounts, relate it to a singular
able behavior, minimize any instance of free riding, and sustain a coopera
historical event such England's Glorious Revolution without explaining
tive equilibrium. In large communities, however, where personal relations
the causes of the triumph of parliamentary forces in 1688.
are too thin to suffice to control violence, the creation of a state is the
Once we examine the emergence of political institutions (one of the
only available solution to guarantee some peace. Yet, instead of emerging
main tasks of this book), however, we find that technological change and
automatically or in a costless manner (as in functionalist approaches), the
economic growth preceded (rather than followed) the formation of the
state comes to life when those individuals with the incentives and power
state and the development of parliamentary structures. In other words,
to loot others, and to whom part of the specialized literature refers as
economic and military factors (of either a technological or biogeograph
"bandits," prefer to enforce a peaceful order and to protect a given com
ical nature) turned out to play a fundamental role in shaping the nature
munity permanently - in exchange for some stable transfer of resources
of political order, growth, and inequality. By contrast, institutions had, at
from the latter to themselves - over plundering it.
most, a partial and indirect effect (described in a more precise way in the
The political story of institutionalism has major implications for eco
book) on those outcomes.
nomic growth. Technological innovation and economic development
Because it is mostly a theory of economic growth and, above all, because
are seen as following from having a particular institutional configura
it has not developed a theory of change, institutionalism is confronted by
tion in place. By allowing producers to work and invest undisturbed by
two additional problems. In the first place, it offers a very incomplete
the threat of war and destruction, the monarchical states that emerged
theory of political institutions and their social foundations: it focuses on
a few thousand years ago in particular regions of the world, such as
monarchical structures even though historically there have been other
the Middle East and China, are said to have led to the kind of agrar
political regimes in place-from stateless communities to city-states and
ian economies that prevailed everywhere until two hundred years ago.
imperial republics; it does not describe the conditions that led to their
Likewise, institutionalists trace the Industrial Revolution back to the
formation, duration, and size and it does not have a theory of political
particular institutional setup of North Atlantic modern societies: con
obligation. In the second place, it has not laid out an integrated account
temporary growth depended, they claim, on either constitutional checks
of the consequences of both growth and institutions on inequality.
and balances that constrained state rulers and curbed their incentives
Before neoinstitutionalism spread among economists and social scien
to exploit economic agents (North and Weingast 1989; DeLong and
tists in general, Marxism had already offered a quite influential response
Shleifer 1993) or, in a more expansive definition of institutions, the
to the question of how both economic growth and institutional change
presence of a productive ruling elite (as opposed to the extractive elites
