{"title":"The Protestant Road to Bureaucracy","authors":"Valentín Figueroa","doi":"10.1353/wp.2023.0006","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"After the seventeenth century, rulers across Europe attempted reforms to replace amateur administrators with professional bureaucrats. The success of administrative reforms hinged on whether rulers could compensate entrenched officeholders and recruit salaried employees. The author demonstrates that the extent to which these conditions were met at the time of reforms depended on whether states had experienced a Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. This article shows how the Reformation, which involved the expropriation of the Catholic Church’s assets, set in motion two processes. First, to finance their wars, Protestant rulers used revenue from confiscated assets instead of selling proprietary offices, leading to fewer venal officeholders who resisted administrative reforms. Second, expropriations made churches poorer and reduced the number of plum jobs in the clergy, incentivizing a reallocation of educational investments from religious knowledge to secular skills more useful for state administration. This distinctive Protestant developmental path hastened the demise of the patrimonial state. By 1789, the only major territorial states that were bureaucratic were Protestant.","PeriodicalId":48266,"journal":{"name":"World Politics","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":4.5000,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"World Politics","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wp.2023.0006","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
After the seventeenth century, rulers across Europe attempted reforms to replace amateur administrators with professional bureaucrats. The success of administrative reforms hinged on whether rulers could compensate entrenched officeholders and recruit salaried employees. The author demonstrates that the extent to which these conditions were met at the time of reforms depended on whether states had experienced a Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. This article shows how the Reformation, which involved the expropriation of the Catholic Church’s assets, set in motion two processes. First, to finance their wars, Protestant rulers used revenue from confiscated assets instead of selling proprietary offices, leading to fewer venal officeholders who resisted administrative reforms. Second, expropriations made churches poorer and reduced the number of plum jobs in the clergy, incentivizing a reallocation of educational investments from religious knowledge to secular skills more useful for state administration. This distinctive Protestant developmental path hastened the demise of the patrimonial state. By 1789, the only major territorial states that were bureaucratic were Protestant.
期刊介绍:
World Politics, founded in 1948, is an internationally renowned quarterly journal of political science published in both print and online versions. Open to contributions by scholars, World Politics invites submission of research articles that make theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature, review articles, and research notes bearing on problems in international relations and comparative politics. The journal does not publish articles on current affairs, policy pieces, or narratives of a journalistic nature. Articles submitted for consideration are unsolicited, except for review articles, which are usually commissioned. Published for the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Affairs