Shepherds From Among the Enemy: Essays on the Political Economy of Cooptation

Abstract

How do states construct political order and generate voluntary compliance from the population? A prominent strategy is the cooptation of influential social institutions like religious bodies or traditional authorities. By securing the cooperation of these "legitimating agents," rulers hope to bolster their own legitimacy and authority. However, the mechanisms through which cooptation operates remain undertheorized. This dissertation provides a theoretical framework for understanding how political elites attempt to secure their political control through social manipulation and tests its implications using evidence from the political development of Scotland in the 17th-19th centuries.I argue that the ability of rulers to generate compliance via cooptation faces important constraints arising from the divergence of interests between the ruler, the legitimating agent, and the target population. Developing a formal model of delegation and persuasion, I show that captured elites can only credibly signal to the population when their interests are partially unaligned with the ruled. As a result, optimal ``loyalty'' among coopted agents decreases as the ruler's baseline popularity declines and the feasibility of cooptation depends on the existence of a bargaining range between the ruler and masses. The empirical analysis focuses on how these dynamics played out during critical political and economic junctures in British political and economic development: the Glorious Revolution, commonly considered a constitutional watershed in which a protestant Whiggish regime headed by William of Orange replaced the outgoing James II/VII on the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1689; and the Highland Clearances, a period of land-use change and social transformation in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the wake of the Glorious Revolution, I show that the new governing regime was limited in its ability to control religious legitimating agents, purging and appointing ministers where the regime was relatively popular but exercising forbearance elsewhere. However, I show that in the Highlands, excessive cooptation that did not adjust to economic conditions was ultimately self-undermining, generating long-run institutional change and resistance.The dissertation contributes to theories of state formation, political order, and legitimacy by providing microfoundations for the authority of social elites and identifying the key constraints that limit cooptation as a strategy of control. It also provides new empirical evidence on an underexplored case during a critical period of political development. More broadly, it highlights the value of studying how states interact with and shape the societies they govern.