The protestant road to state bureaucracy
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- After the seventeenth century, rulers across Europe attempted reforms to replace amateur administrators with professional bureaucrats. The success of administrative reforms hinged on whether rulers could compensate entrenched patrimonial office-holders and recruit talented employees for a wage. I show that the degree to which these two administrative conditions were met at the time of state reforms depended on whether states experienced a Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. I argue that the Reformation, which involved the expropriation of the Catholic Church's assets, set in motion two processes. First, to finance their wars, Protestant rulers used confiscated assets instead of selling offices, leading to smaller stocks of venal office-holders who resisted administrative reforms. Second, expropriations made churches poorer and reduced the number of plum jobs in the clergy, and this incentivized a reallocation of educational investments from religious to "secular" skills that were more useful for state administration. This distinctive Protestant developmental path hastened the demise of the patrimonial state, and by 1789 the only major territorial states that were bureaucratic were Protestant, while all Catholic states remained patrimonial.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Figueroa Alvarez, Valentin Ivan |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Cox, Gary W |
| Thesis advisor | Cox, Gary W |
| Thesis advisor | Acharya, Avidit |
| Thesis advisor | Fouka, Vasiliki |
| Degree committee member | Acharya, Avidit |
| Degree committee member | Fouka, Vasiliki |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Political Science |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Valentín Figueroa. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Political Science. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/ws849rz4331 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Valentin Ivan Figueroa Alvarez
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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