by Julieanna Burke and Allison Berland
This is the second essay in The State — Seen and Unseen, the opening exploration in our new First Principles series. Here, we turn from what the state is to where we encounter it in everyday life.
In the United States, turning sixteen marks a significant milestone of adolescence: obtaining your driver’s license. With the buzz of elevated freedom and responsibility, it’s no wonder individuals yearn for that privilege as soon as possible. But what happens when an unprecedented global event shuts down the governmental agency that not only supplies this liberation, but also supplies countless services to everyone across the country?
In March of 2020, I was set to take my driver’s test at the end of the month and finally earn my first real taste of independence. However, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, this would not transpire for another year and four months. With shutdowns, quarantines, and subsequent state procedures and policies, the DMV would not open its doors for another three months, with a phased re-opening plan by appointment only. As a result, people came flooding in for appointments and, for quite a while, it seemed virtually impossible to get into the DMV, let alone take my test. Once I finally was able to schedule my appointment, it still took six hours upon arrival to enter the driving course. Once I finished my test, it took an additional two hours to receive the necessary paperwork required to obtain my license.
As a result, this experience made me more aware of how much we rely on systems that we rarely think about until something goes wrong. It also raises a set of broader questions: In what ways do we encounter the state in our everyday lives? When does it feel supportive, and when does it become a source of frustration? And how does the state respond when those systems are pushed to their limits, including large-scale challenges?
These are the kinds of questions we will explore in this essay as we consider how the state shapes our everyday life.
The State as Invisible Problem Solver
Much of the time, the state operates in the background, coordinating aspects of collective life that we rarely stop to think about. We don’t always notice it, but it is often addressing what political scientists call collective action problems. These are situations, like coordinating traffic at a busy intersection, where individual effort alone is not enough, and some form of coordination is required. They are also difficult to solve through private action alone, since no single individual or organization has both the incentive and the authority to coordinate everyone involved.
We can see this in ordinary but essential systems that rely on coordination: infrastructure such as roads and transit systems that enable transportation, or postal systems that ensure communication across vast distances. When these systems function smoothly, they tend to fade into the background of everyday life. We experience them less as institutions and more as part of the conditions that make everyday life possible.
“Before asking what kind of state we want, it helps to understand how people encounter the one we already have.”
Our encounters with the state are shaped not only by what it provides, but also by what it asks of us. Public services often require us to complete forms, prove our identity, meet eligibility requirements, or follow established procedures. These requests can sometimes feel frustrating or time-consuming. Yet they also reflect one of the central features of the modern state: it does not simply distribute public goods; it coordinates them according to shared rules intended to balance access, accountability, and fairness.
It is often when something breaks down that the state becomes visible. A delayed package. A traffic light that won’t change. A longer wait for a public service. At other times, the breakdown is more severe, revealing deeper problems in coordination, capacity, or responsiveness. In both cases, what we are experiencing is not just an inconvenience, but a moment when the underlying work of the state comes into view.
Importantly, both our everyday interactions with the state and the moments when its systems break down are not experienced evenly. These differences help shape how individuals experience the state and begin to point us toward why those differences matter.
One State – Different Encounters
What do these differences look like in practice? Take public transportation as an example. For someone with access to a car or alternative options, a late bus may be frustrating but manageable. For someone who depends on that system to get to work, school, or medical care, the same delay can carry much greater consequences.
Or consider what is involved in starting a job or entering a profession. For some, the process of obtaining identification, completing paperwork, or meeting licensing requirements may feel like a set of manageable steps. For others, those same requirements can feel like obstacles: time-consuming, difficult to navigate, or even out of reach depending on one’s circumstances. For still others, access to these systems may open up opportunities that would not otherwise be available.
These different experiences do more than shape how easy or difficult it feels to navigate the state. They also shape how people come to understand what the state is doing, whether it is seen primarily as a source of support, a set of constraints, or a structure that creates and distributes opportunity.
When the State is Put to the Test
The examples we have discussed so far largely involve the routines of everyday life. But what happens when the state itself is confronted with extraordinary challenges? The situation described in the introduction combined something ordinary, obtaining a driver’s license, with something extraordinary: a global pandemic. For a time, many of the public systems people normally relied upon were pushed well beyond their usual limits.
Under ordinary circumstances, many of the systems we rely on appear stable and predictable. But during periods of crisis—whether a pandemic, natural disaster, or economic shock—those same systems can become severely strained, testing the state’s administrative capacity.
These moments reveal both the possibilities and the limits of preparation. States can develop emergency plans and build administrative capacity intended to respond to unexpected events. On the other hand, unprecedented challenges are, by definition, difficult to anticipate fully. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated how quickly demand for public services can surge, and how policies often must be created and adapted in real time. In situations like these, the state is no longer simply coordinating the routines of everyday life. It is responding to rapidly changing conditions with limited information, finite resources, and difficult tradeoffs.
How Crises Reveal the State
Large-scale crises do not erase the uneven ways people encounter the state. If anything, they often become more pronounced in these situations and more widely felt. When public systems come under strain, those with fewer resources or less flexibility may face longer delays, greater uncertainty, or higher stakes in accessing essential services. At the same time, moments of crisis often make the role of the state more widely visible, as more people find themselves directly interacting with public systems through healthcare, unemployment support, vaccination efforts, or other forms of assistance. These shared experiences can generate a broader awareness of how the state operates, but they can also produce very different interpretations of its effectiveness.
In this way, large-scale challenges bring together both the shared and uneven aspects of encountering the state. Nearly everyone may be affected, but not everyone is affected in the same way. These moments often prompt strong opinions about what the state should do and how well it is performing. They also raise difficult questions about capacity, responsiveness, and preparedness. While these questions do not have straightforward or easy answers, they do shape how people come to understand their relationship with the state.
Understanding how people experience the state in everyday life helps explain why conversations about it often begin from very different places. Before asking what kind of state we want, it helps to understand how people encounter the one we already have. In the next essay in this series, we turn to those broader questions: Is the state the problem, the solution, or both? And what kind of state is capable of earning public trust?
© 2026 Julieanna Burke and Allison Berland