Arms Technology and the Coercive Imbalance Outside Western Europe

Many scholars consider the bargaining power between ruler and society to be one of the most important determinants of a country’s political regime and institutions. The relative bargaining power, in turn, is shaped by arms technology and societal modernization: arms tend to strengthen rulers, and modernization tends to strengthen society. We document that rulers outside of Western Europe were strengthened by advanced arms technology at a time when societies were weakly modernized and political demands limited. We dub this the “coercive imbalance” and argue that it has shaped the state-society bargain outside Western Europe since at least 1850. We show that the coercive imbalance arose because arms diffuse faster than civilian technology. We then use ordinary least squares, system GMM, and two-stage least squares to document that the adoption of advanced arms technology at an early stage of societal modernization is strongly associated with limited democracy, poor bureaucracy, and corruption.