| Summary: | It goes without saying that a well-functioning state is crucial for a government to successfully implement its political will. Indeed, more capable states can discourage rogue agents from committing unauthorised violations of human rights by providing them with greater incentives to abide by the central government’s orders. For democracies, this leads to more human rights protection; in autocracies, more capacity presents the dictator with the tools to efficiently implement intentional rights abuses. Importantly, however, the state’s ability to deliver the government’s intended policy outcomes can also affect the strategic behaviours of political agents. A domestic terrorist organisation, for instance, could accomplish more with its attacks when the state capacity of an intermediate regime is low: because the regime cannot effectively curtail the democratic freedom of its citizens, it suffers from higher audience costs, incentivising the terrorists. In the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, higher capacity means that governments could target health restrictions upon small sections of society – as opposed to imposing population-wide measures. The state, then, can be much more than a mere executor of the executive’s will. Instead, state capacity may be a key strategic consideration in many contexts. Therefore, while the dissertation only presents state capacity’s moderating effects for studies of human rights, terrorism, and COVID-19, state capacity is full of explanatory potential. And even though there are notable issues with conceptualising and measuring state capacity in a theoretically relevant manner, the dissertation hopes to encourage more researchers to explore the moderating effects of state capacity.
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