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The contemporary literature on authoritarian durability focuses more on democratic-looking institutions such as parties, elections and parliaments than the institution in which authoritarian regimes are most importantly embedded: the state itself. This article argues that state power is the most powerful weapon in the authoritarian arsenal. After clarifying the regime-state distinction and explaining why regime durability involves more than just duration, we discuss four "infrastructural mechanisms" through which authoritarian regimes stabilize and sustain their rule: (1) coercing rivals, (2) extracting revenues, (3) registering citizens and (4) cultivating dependence. Since state apparatuses are the institutions best geared for performing these tasks, their effectiveness underpins authoritarian durability in a way that no other institution can duplicate. And since state power is shaped by long-term historical forces, future studies should adopt the kind of historical perspective more often seen in leading studies of postcolonial economic development than of authoritarian durability.
"You should no more confuse the state with its government than you would confuse a fine Jaguar automobile with the person who drives it."
Professor Robert Frykenberg'
States and regimes are perennial yet largely parallel obsessions in political science.2 When scholars study the state, they commit to exploring the extent rather than the form of government.3 Specialists on regimes undertake the inverse commitment, asking how and why the state's power is constrained rather than extended and expanded. One conversation centers on whether and why regimes are democratic or authoritarian, while the other asks whether and why states are capable or incapable of effective governance. In this article we aim to bridge these parallel conversations by arguing that state power is the strongest institutional foundation for authoritarian regimes' staying power.4
The intellectual division of labor between studies of regimes and states is both essential and unfortunate. Professor Frykenberg's pithy formulation distinguishing states from the governments that run them (or in authoritarian settings, the regimes that run them) proves useful for understanding why.5 The separation is essential because states and regimes are analytically distinct, but unfortunate because states and regimes are empirically intertwined. Though all metaphors have their limits, we find the notion of the state as a kind of machinery that is linked but not reducible to the actors who operate it helpful in three respects.
First, states...