Weak states—in which corruption supplants the rule of law, state agencies have limited regulatory capacity, the state cannot fund itself through its own taxation efforts, and public officials provide few public goods—are associated with poor economic growth, a higher propensity for internal violence, and, in democracies, institutions that neither represent the public interest nor hold powerful officeholders accountable. Many political scientists and policymakers draw on a superficial understanding of the postwar reconstruction of Germany and Japan to urge external intervention to build weak states and install the rule of law, either indirectly, via expert assistance and foreign aid conditionality, or directly, via large-scale intervention, as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Scholars working on the seemingly obscure topic of “state building” have not been public participants in this policy debate. Yet their findings are crucial, for despite their many methodological and theoretical differences, their scholarship has established that state building is an inordinately long and arduous process marked by bloody conflicts and frequent failures. Most scholars agree that European state building was rooted in nonreplicable initial conditions, that conditions prevalent in the developing world are fall less conducive to successful state building, and that external intervention is a risky venture with little prospect of success.

Marcus J. Kurtz's Latin American State Building in Comparative Perspective echoes these findings, but with an innovative approach that differs from existing theories in three important ways. First, rather than focusing on the contrast between strong European states and weak states in the postcolonial world, Kurtz analyzes the determinants of relative degrees of state strength within Latin America. Second, he vigorously rejects reigning approaches based on the catalytic role of warfare or the institutionally infirming role of natural-resource endowments. In their place, he constructs an insightful story of political coalitions rooted in agrarian structures, intraelite political competition, and middle-class politics. Third, he adapts ideas about path dependency to explain why the prospects for building a strong state have diminished over time: Not only are some Latin American states more effective than others, but this hierarchy of state strength is likely to persist over time.

Kurtz demonstrates that Chile and Uruguay are relatively effective states with the administrative and regulatory capacity to shape the behavior of individuals and organizations; that despite its wealth, the Argentine state has been constrained by the country's volatile politics; and that Peru represents a case of persistently weak state institutions. The research design couples paired comparisons—Chile/Peru and Argentina/Uruguay—and historical analysis. The paired comparisons are effective for eliminating rival hypotheses based on war or natural-resource endowments; the historical analysis provides evidence for the key causal variables and their sequencing.

Kurtz proposes two critical junctures in Latin American state building: a postindependence period of initial state building, when formative state agencies were established in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, but not in Peru; and a second critical juncture during the Great Depression when the scale and scope of the state was expanded in Chile and Uruguay and subjected to volatile periods of reform and retrenchment in Argentina, and when the initial failure of state building was repeated in Peru.

Two factors determine the success of initial state building: whether the agrarian labor system is based on free or servile labor and the degree of interelite cooperation. Local landlords who exploit servile labor oppose state building because a centralized state might threaten their local control over the labor force. Peruvian landlords thus blocked even rudimentary state building. A free labor force is thus a necessary but not sufficient condition for initial state building. Given free labor, state building ensues when all major factions of the elite coordinate on it while excluding popular sectors. Chile took this route early, while Argentina and Uruguay switched from divided to unified elites in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

The political behavior of middle-class parties forms the second critical juncture. Where middle-class parties emerged after the onset of the Great Depression, their constituents were public-sector workers willing to ally with working-class parties in a statist consensus for the expansion of the state apparatus and its regulatory functions. Chile and Uruguay followed this path to relatively strong states. Where middle classes emerged prior to the Great Depression, middle classes were tied to the private-export sector, opposed state intervention, and therefore could not ally with working-class parties around a statist program. In this case, initial state formation could be subject to populist/antipopulist cycles, as in Argentina, or initial failures could become endemic, as in Peru.

Each country thus takes on one of two binary values on three variables: labor system, elite conflict, and middle-class preferences over statism. The four empirical chapters substantiate the coding of each country on each of the three variables. Kurtz is particularly good at wading through the thicket of details about systems of labor recruitment. His discussion of middle-class politics as stemming from an attachment to the private export economy versus the expanding public sector and the implications of these origins for alliances with working-class parties, and hence the formation of state coalitions supporting state building, is original, insightful, and generally excellent. Finally, the author is to be congratulated for providing a novel theoretical perspective on the sources of intraregional variation, in place of the stale debates about strong states in Europe versus weak states almost everywhere else.

Still, parts of the argument require greater scrutiny. For example, Kurtz argues that labor-repressive landlords will fear state building that could leave them vulnerable to the usurpation of their local control over the labor force. But threats to local elite control over their labor force can come from multiple directions, and local elites might just as easily view the state as a critical ally providing coercive resources at a scale not available to local elites. That Peruvian landlords faced ongoing unrest from Indian communities while the Chilean countryside was quickly pacified reinforces suspicion that Kurtz has not fully specified landlords' utility functions.

Let us next consider how to conceptualize state building. We can measure outcomes in terms of scale, scope, or effectiveness. Scale refers to the size of the state, scope to the range of its regulatory activities, and effectiveness to the capacity of state agents to implement policies. It seems to me that the first critical juncture defines initial scale while the second critical juncture defines scope—the creation of a political consensus around statist economic policies. These sections are convicing. But Kurtz says too little about effectiveness; the lavish details of elite competition and middle-class politics are not matched by a depiction of the nuts and bolts of state building, especially how state builders confront and resolve principal-agent problems that threaten the dilution of state power.

Finally, while defending path dependency, Kurtz does not fully consider the effect of constant causes. Consider failed state building in Peru. It may be the case that actors coordinate expectations around existing institutions such that over time, the probability of state building declines. Yet if key political actors do not agree on the need for a state and the division of the costs of state building, and if their disputes persist over time, then we would see the same outcomes. One wishes that the author had dealt more directly with this problem of observational equivalence.

Still, there is no discounting the importance of this book, both as a contribution to the academic study of state building and as a critical resource for those members of the public willing to think hard about the feasibility of externally supplied state building.