BlueSky Thinking Summary

While bureaucratic states seem to be emerging in current times, their sequential historical development is rather recent.

Edoardo Teso and Nicola Mastrorocco explore this development through an empirical analysis focused on the U.S.

federal bureaucracy in the nineteenth century.

They show how there is a turn from personalistic governance toward bureaucratic efficiency with technological breakthroughs in railroads and telegraphs.

These innovations reduced the cost of monitoring, and the federal government was thereby able to expand both geographically as well as functionally, with a more stable workforce.

Early reliance on personal networks gave way to merit-based hiring, improving supervision of performance and significantly reducing turnover.

The Civil War further contributed to stimulating federal growth by centralizing power and demanding financial administration.

This historical analysis underlines how crucial infrastructure—both physical and communicative—has been for state development.

These insights are quite relevant to the modern developing nations struggling to extend governance to peripheral regions for Teso.

In the final analysis, the paper clearly depicts an understanding of how states transform along with technological capabilities in the rise of contemporary bureaucratic governance worldwide.