Ideology, Elite Cohesion, and Authoritarian State Building: Evidence in Southern Song China

Abstract

How do authoritarian states foster elite cohesion and loyalty, and in turn, state capacity? Existing scholarship emphasizes material co-optation or war preparation, but often overlooks the role of ideology as an endogenous mechanism of state building. This paper develops a formal model and applies network dependency theory to compare purges and ideology as alternative strategies of elite integration. Using original datasets of 1,488 elites coded from primary historical sources with reference to HBDB dataset across three historical episodes of the Song dynasty, I conduct Social Network Analysis and regression analysis to evaluate the mechanisms' effects. The results show that purges fail to enhance elite cohesion, while the institutionalization of Neo-Confucianism significantly strengthened elite networks and increased wartime loyalty. The study contributes to Historical Political Economy by demonstrating that durable state capacity depends not only on coercion and institutions, but also on the symbolic infrastructures of ideology.