century B.C., when Chinese emperors began investing in meritocratic recruitment of professional bureaucrats to administer state agencies. Dell, Lane, and Querubin (2018) provide evidence, drawing upon data from Vietnam, that a history of strong states in East Asia has persistent effects to present time, long after the disappearance of those historical institutions, through norms that support local cooperation in the provision of public goods. This literature on state capacity in East Asia thus highlights _norms_ within state agencies as the key. But it raises the question: if strong bureaucracies in East Asia, whose effectiveness goes all the way down to village-levels, is due to inheritance of institutions and norms developed over centuries, how can countries in other regions replicate the success now, and urgently?

- Politics and bureaucracy in the United States in the 19th century looked very similar to conditions in many developing countries today. Bensel (2004) writes that for many men (women did not have the right to vote) at that time in the United States, “the act of voting was a social transaction in which they handed in a party ticket in return for a shot of whiskey, a pair of boots, or a small amount of money” (Bensel 2004, ix). Politics was dominated by clientelism and vote-buying; corruption was rife; state bureaucracies and city halls were captured by political leaders and their party machines (Fukuyama, 2018). Things began to change towards the turn into the 20th century, with a large literature examining the so-called Progressive Era in the United States during which bureaucracies were de-politicized. Rauch (1994) describes the reforms in this era that resulted in the professionalization of the bureaucracy in American cities, and the ensuing reduction in the political power to intervene in city management. Glaeser and Goldin (2006), Fukuyama (2018) and World Bank (2016) argue that the confluence of several conditions facilitated this era of bureaucratic reforms: rise in demand among elites for urban public goods, greater political engagement by non-elite citizens and their dissatisfaction with machine politics; and, greater transparency about corruption in politics through the emergence of a cheap and independent press. That is, favorable political conditions were fundamental to the establishment of professional, autonomous bureaucracies in the history of the United States.

- In Brazil, a series of reform-minded governors came into office in the state of Ceara, over 1987-1994, and confronted a situation of poverty recently made worse by a drought; some of the highest rates of infant mortality (102 deaths per 1,000) in the world; and no functioning public health system. Tendler and Freedheim (1994) provide a case study of how these reformers built state capacity to deliver health services and dramatically turned around health outcomes in the state within a span of a few years. Infant mortality fell by 36 percent and vaccination coverage increased from 25 to 90 percent. Perhaps even more importantly, the Ceara model was scaled-up across Brazil as the country’s Family Health Program (now called Family Health Strategy), relying on state-recruited community

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