Steve Kim
Working Papers
Contemporary research on East Asia's economic transformation in the postwar era has demonstrated the critical role of the state in driving economic development. Yet it has failed to articulate why such developmental states emerged in East Asia and what political conditions enable or compel a state to adopt developmental policies. In this paper, I develop a model of developmental states as political actors and establish a novel causal link from regime type to policy choice to economic growth. A highly democratic regime produces an idle state, politically constrained from distortionary yet pro-growth interventions in the economy. An overly autocratic regime produces a predatory state, politically compelled toward interventions that are maximally extractive and stymie growth. An intermediate regime that is moderately democratic or autocratic enables growth-enhancing interventions while curbing purely extractive interventions.
The existence of a state capable of public goods provision cannot be taken for granted. For many low and middle-income economies today, such capacity is absent or in short supply. While some argue that narrow political representation is optimal for building state capacity, which subsequently enables economic growth, some point to a broad distribution of political power as key to long run state development. This paper develops a framework that integrates the two arguments and finds that the optimal breadth of political representation for state capacity growth widens at later stages of state capacity growth.
Works in Progress
Markets, Morals, and Democracy
On markets and democratic institutions, some scholars argue mutual reinforcement, others posit a fundamental incompatibility, and still others observe a contingent compatibility. I develop an argument that the compatibility in part hinges on the salience of moral norms in economic life. Political actors are always competing to redefine moral norms, and these norms in turn regulate markets by shaping which capital–labor relations are viewed as morally legitimate. What varies is not the presence of this political struggle, but the strength of citizens’ moral expectations on capital-labor relations, which in turn determines how much leverage political entrepreneurs gain when they seek to elevate or delegitimize particular production practices. When moral norms dominate public judgment of capital–labor relations, moral framing can drastically reshape economic activity, creating outsized returns to securing political hegemony and threatening pluralism. When moral considerations have limited salience in these relations, economic actors wield political influence without moral checks, eroding democratic responsiveness. When neither moral norms nor market forces fully subsume the other, democratic institutions and markets can reinforce each other.
Welfare Benefits of Patrimonial Politics
Patrimonialism is a form of governance in which public office is used by a patron to distribute benefits to their clients. Conventional wisdom states that patrimonial practices are at the root of "underdevelopment" across the Global South. States in South India such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu show, however, patrimonial politics can facilitate public goods provision and improve social welfare. In this paper, I develop a model of electoral competition and public goods provision and examine the conditions under which patrimonial practices produce welfare gains. When government revenue is low and patrimonial expectations are high (i.e. patrons in public office are expected to deliver substantial benefits to their clients), public goods provision collapses. When government revenue is sufficient to provide a baseline of public goods and can withstand patrimonial pressure, the political legitimacy of patrimonial practices enables the selective provision of public goods that would otherwise be entirely absent.