Contemporary weak-state democracies cannot rely on two prominent forces for state-building in the literature: the threat of war and long-time horizons. More informative are historical examples of economic interests that support costly investments in formal state-building: constituencies for programmatism. This motivates the focus on widespread informality in weak-state democracies, which I argue limits prospects for the emergence of such a constituency. In addition to summarizing the theory and empirical approach, the chapter outlines the book’s contributions. It extends insights from literature on programmatic transitions in the Global North to the Global South, with attention to a key difference in context – widespread informality. It brings disparate views about the politics of informality into conversation, recognizing that informal sector workers can more successfully mobilize to make particularistic demands than programmatic ones. And, it situates the book within the growing literature on endogenous state capacity, arguing that there is a political cost to state-building in democracies: It shifts the dimension along which voters evaluate politicians from a clientelistic to a programmatic one.