Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The subfield of American Political Development has concerned itself with explaining how the United States moved from being the "state of courts and parties" to the form associated with the modern state. However in the course of examining this shift little attention has been paid to one of the most overt developments of state capacity in America - the creation in the first half of the Twentieth century of a state police force in every state bar Hawaii. This rapid and intense creation of a police capability by the states has been largely overlooked by the subfield, with only one serious attempt to provide an explanation for this trend in terms of American political development, which itself predates much recent APD literature. This paper seeks to review the creation of one force, New York, with the intention of showing that state police development can offer scholars an important site for assessing the manner in which state capacity grows. Drawing on the work of Carpenter, the paper argues that in some instances institutional development can be most effectively explained not in terms of the demonstrated capacity of a bureaucracy itself, but paradoxically as a consequence of another bureaucracy's demonstration of capacity.