Featured Graduate Student Research: Valentin Figueroa
Valentin Figueroa
Protestantism and State Bureaucracy
Effective states with the capacity to collect taxes, implement policy, and enforce the law are crucial for economic development and to maintain political order. How they were established in Europe, where they emerged between the middle ages and the nineteenth century, is a central puzzle in political science, sociology, and economic history. Of the many dimensions of the state-building process, my dissertation seeks to explain the reappearance, after many centuries of abeyance due to the disintegration of the Roman and Carolingian Empires, of a special way of conducting the business of state administration: state bureaucracy.
Bureaucracies were state administrations staffed by salaried, full-time, professional employees that followed standardized guidelines and could be dismissed by rulers at will. Today it may seem obvious that this is how public administrations should be organized. Indeed, bureaucracy is the gold-standard of efficient state administration world-wide. Yet, in historical perspective, bureaucracies were rarely established. The opposite of modern bureaucracies were patrimonial state administrations. These were staffed by amateur, proprietary officeholders who conducted the business of administration for private profit, and often wielded power by virtue of their ability to independently elicit the obedience of those whom they ruled. This type of administration is common in some parts of the developing world but inexistent in Europe. In the middle ages and the early modern period, however, state administrations in Europe were uniformly patrimonial.
My dissertation research tackles the following question: Why did some states, like England and Prussia, begin to transition into bureaucracy relatively early while others, like France and Castile, did so only in the nineteenth century? I am particularly interested in the extent to which the changes introduced by the Protestant Reformation facilitated the transition from patrimonial state administrations into bureaucracies.
Before the Reformation, some countries that eventually became Protestant had hundreds of monasteries. Figure 1 shows the distribution of monastic houses across England. Monasteries were important employers and wealthy landowners. The Reformation led to the confiscation of monastic houses and their assets, greatly decreasing the monetary returns to careers in the clergy. One way in which the Reformation contributed to the rise of bureaucracies, therefore, was by affecting the composition of human capital. While in Catholic states the intellectual elite invested heavily in religion-specific skills, like theology, Protestant states became more prone to rewarding secular skills, like law and the arts.
Figure 1. Monastic houses in England in 1535
Even though state formation and patterns of human capital accumulation have been studied by historians, the value added that I provide as a political scientist is a social scientific approach. My goal is to document precisely the causal mechanisms that underlie my theory using micro-data. For instance, Figure 2 shows that the proportion of Oxford graduates who pursued careers in law rather than the clergy increased after the English Reformation; and Figure 3 shows that this change was more pronounced when students were from counties with wealthier monastic houses.
Figure 2. Secular and religious careers of Oxford graduates
Figure 3. Reallocation of human capital by county
To what extent do the patterns detected for Oxford graduates apply more generally to the upper tail of the human capital distribution? Did the intellectual elite in Catholic states also make a similar reallocation of human capital investment? The COVID-19 crisis made field-work and archival research in Europe impossible this summer. With a small grant from The Europe Center at Stanford University, I purchased access to a number of data sources, among which are two rich databases of individual-level information on members of the political, economic, and intellectual elite. First, I acquired access to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a source that includes information on over 60,000 historical figures in the British Isles. Second, I obtained access to the Diccionario Biografico of the Spanish Real Academia de Historia, which contains data on 50,000 historical figures in Peninsular and Imperial Spain. This narrative biographical information will allow me to track, at a very granular level, the temporal evolution of investments in human capital in a Protestant (i.e. England) and a Catholic (i.e. Spain) state.
So far, the available quantitative information on comparative human capital investments in Protestant and Catholic states before and after the Reformation has mostly covered statelets in the Holy Roman Empire and in a relatively short temporal window between the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The data that I acquired with support from The Europe Center will allow me to examine changes in the types of human capital investments in England and Castile in the period 1300-1800, thereby expanding the spatial and temporal coverage of the available information on human capital accumulation in modern Europe. These data will inform a central chapter of my dissertation.