Successful governments throughout history have taken many diverse forms, showing that effective statehood does not follow a single linear evolutionary path but instead depends on how societies organise themselves to provide public goods and mobilise their people.
Editor's note: This episode of VoxDevTalks is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
Rethinking how states form and function
In this episode of VoxDevTalks, Leander Heldring explores how governments emerge, evolve, and succeed. The conversation centres around his forthcoming chapter in the Handbook of Political Economy, which re-examines long-held theories of state formation using historical, anthropological and economic evidence.
We usually take for granted a linear story of political development: small groups become tribes, tribes centralise into chiefdoms, and eventually societies evolve into modern states with professional bureaucracies, clear borders and a monopoly of violence.
But Heldring’s research suggests that this traditional model does not match historical reality – instead, state formation has been wildly diverse, non-linear, and often deliberately reversible.
Why modern definitions of government fall short
Most economists rely, often implicitly, on a Weberian model of the state: a central authority that controls a territory and holds a monopoly on legitimate violence.
But applying these criteria globally hides an enormous range of successful political arrangements. Many effective pre-modern polities lacked any monopoly on violence due to its high costs and because many societies simply rejected concentrations of coercive authority.
At the same time, many societies did not define themselves by territory. Nomadic states, non-territorial polities, and affiliation-based political communities were common. Heldring highlights the Alur Kingdom in Uganda and the DRC:
“The borders are completely unclear because the state’s boundaries are by personal, individual affiliation, rather than territorial claim.”
The physical trappings of the modern state – buildings, bureaucracies, officials – also do not generalise.
“You show up and there isn’t a government building and there isn’t a border and there isn’t anyone who can tell anyone what to do. But it’s very clear that there’s a coherent political system here and public goods are being provided.”
A new way of defining a state
Heldring proposes an alternative definition grounded in welfare economics rather than European history. A political community, in anthropological terms, is a group sharing norms and governance structures. A state, he argues, should be defined simply as a political community that provides public goods beyond what individuals or small groups can supply themselves. The government is the subset of actors facilitating that provision.
This perspective moves beyond misleading requirements such as clear territory or monopoly of violence and instead focuses on what governments do. Under this lens, conflict mediation in the Alur Kingdom or the irrigation networks of ancient Mesopotamia are recognisable as state functions, even without bureaucrats or police.
This definition better fits the full historical record and focuses on what economists consider the primary role of government: providing public goods.
Historical evidence for diverse and successful non-modern states
The episode provides rich historical examples showing that states can be effective without conforming to contemporary Western models.
Ancient Mesopotamia, often regarded as the earliest example of statehood, turns out not to have been centralised in a Weberian sense. Villages were controlled by family groups that cooperated through councils, rather than through a hierarchical bureaucracy.
“The languages that people spoke had no words for government or state or bureaucrat or bureaucracy or officer... Even though, looking at it from the outside, it's totally evident that these places provide public goods.”
Likewise, early modern England – arguably one of the most successful states in history – did not have a monopoly of violence until around 1600. For centuries, the king relied entirely on local nobility for enforcement and defence. And even deep into the nineteenth century, only 4% of English state employees were salaried; the rest were unpaid part-timers.
Such cases demonstrate that “successful polities historically have been organised differently”, challenging assumptions that Western models are either universal or necessary.
Why evolution is not a linear path towards modern governance
The idea that societies naturally move from “bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states” is deeply entrenched, appearing in school textbooks, development discourse, and even modern policy advice. But empirical data contradicts this neat progression.
Heldring constructs a longitudinal sample of historical societies and tracks transitions between degrees of centralisation. The results show no consistent upward movement:
“The central directional prediction that you evolve up is just not there. You’re just as likely to go down or up.”
Some societies oscillate rapidly. Many North American indigenous confederacies, for instance, created highly centralised political structures during certain seasons, only to dissolve them months later.
“It depends on which months of the year you show up, then you observe different levels of development.”
This flexibility shows that absence of state-like institutions is not always due to constraints; often, it is a deliberate choice.
Implications for modern development and public policy
These insights challenge the assumption – common among international organisations – that developing countries should emulate wealthy Western states. As Heldring notes:
“The ambition is to get to Denmark… whatever you are doing as a developing country, you should do much less of it, and you should do much more of what we do in Denmark.”
But the research suggests that many effective governments look nothing like Denmark. For example, Rwanda runs an extremely lean state apparatus but has achieved rapid expansion of education, electrification, and healthcare by mobilising citizen participation through imihigo pledges. In Somaliland, citizens voluntarily defend borders but will not build schools – illustrating how different societies mobilise participation in different ways.
The common thread across successful yet diverse cases – from Botswana to South Korea to historical Prussia – is that they found “a way to bring in the population in their development project”, extending the state’s implementation capacity far beyond its fiscal resources.
This perspective opens a new research agenda: identifying the multiple paths to effective governance rather than assuming a single model.
A new agenda for understanding government
Heldring acknowledges that economists do not yet have a full theoretical framework to guide policymakers through this more complex terrain. But recognising the diversity of successful state forms is a critical first step. Rather than forcing countries into ill-fitting institutional templates, a better approach is to understand how local social structures, norms and political entrepreneurship can support distinct forms of public-good provision.
As he concludes, this line of inquiry is “equal parts dissatisfying and exciting, because it means that there is a lot to do.”