The Protestant influence on the emergence of modern bureaucracy
Around 1650, a radical political transformation began to take place. As war became more expensive, rulers across Europe started to attempt to modernize their administrations to make tax collection mor
This is an interesting essay, discussing the Protestant influence that lead to modern bureaucracy. This is related to an essay I’ve been wanting to write about Martin Luther’s influence on our modern ideas of professionalism, so I’m posting this here so I’ll remember to come back and quote this later.
By Valentin Figueroa.
Most state employees, like police officers, are rewarded with salaries, offered a career ladder of graded appointments with progressively higher remuneration, and follow standardized guidelines while being monitored by other employees above them in the public sector hierarchy. But there are exceptions to this. Sometimes states do not directly hire and monitor employees and instead operate indirectly via private contractors. In the United States, for instance, businesses contract with the state for the management and operation of some prisons.
Private contractors are only in charge of a tiny fraction of government duties today, yet the privatization of state duties was extremely common just a few centuries ago. In 1500, all the state administrations in Europe were organized this way. Let’s call this type of state organization “patrimonial.” Patrimonial administration was particularly ubiquitous in the tax administration. Monarchs sold tax farms —the prerogative to collect specific taxes— to private companies in return for a down payment in cash. Imagine if Amazon, not the IRS, collected taxes. Any revenue above the down payment and the administrative cost of collecting the tax was the company’s profit from the tax farm. The privatization of tax collection had a major disadvantage: tax farming meant that rulers had to surrender some degree of control over public policy because the assent of tax farmers was necessary to implement fiscal policies.
Around 1650, a radical political transformation began to take place. As war became more expensive, rulers across Europe started to attempt to modernize their administrations to make tax collection more efficient. Rulers sought to replace patrimonial officeholders with professional, centrally appointed, and salaried bureaucrats. In some places, like England, early administrative reforms succeeded. The Excise Office, in charge of collecting indirect taxes, was the most bureaucratic organization in Europe. In other countries, like France, reforms failed, and the state remained patrimonial at least until 1789. Before the Revolution, state offices were almost all for sale, and most state employees were independent agents contracting with the monarch on equal terms. Why did early administrative reforms succeed in England and not in France
Why did some administrative reforms succeed while most failed?
The success of bureaucratic reforms demanded a set of permissive conditions be met (as demonstrated by Ertman’s comparative historical analysis). For state bureaucracies to be viable, rulers needed: (i) the ability to compensate or defeat, during administrative reforms, entrenched officeholders with a vested interest in the survival of patrimonialism, and (ii) a high supply of human capital to recruit into the state administration for a wage.
In a book project, The Protestant Road to State Bureaucracy, I explain the asymmetrical historical development of these administrative conditions. I show that the extent to which these conditions were met by the seventeenth century depended on whether states experienced a Protestant Reformation in the early sixteenth century.
The Reformation was a complex and widely studied process (for example, here and here). For present purposes, let’s consider it a package of reforms that included the confiscation of the Catholic Church’s assets and the establishment of state-religions. Through these policies, the Reformation acted as a catalyst that magnified tiny initial differences across polities and accelerated the bifurcation of Catholic and Protestant polities along two different political development paths. The Protestant path promoted the blossoming of administrative conditions that facilitated bureaucratization more than a century later.