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Lane, Ch. 4: Comparative Politics Reconsiders the State.

Lane, Ch. 4: Comparative Politics Reconsiders the State. South East Asia. The explosive economic growth in South East Asia at the beginning of the 1980s was considered by most scholars the demise of the dependency theory. Argument: dependency theory cannot explain such a process of growth.

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Lane, Ch. 4: Comparative Politics Reconsiders the State.

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  1. Lane, Ch. 4: Comparative Politics Reconsiders the State.

  2. South East Asia... • The explosive economic growth in South East Asia at the beginning of the 1980s was considered by most scholars the demise of the dependency theory. • Argument: dependency theory cannot explain such a process of growth Who or what can explain it instead?

  3. ?

  4. Dependency theorists showed the decisive role of the State in the expansion of capital and industrialization • The State always somehow intervenes • Development is neither natural nor spontaneous (State regulation)

  5. Dependency Theory leads to the State

  6. Dependency theorists Cardoso & Faletto identified three main strategies to break the vicious circle of dependency(target: the State) • Guerrilla movements organized against military dictatorships (ex: Argentina 1969-1975) • The Democratic Path: Salvador Allende’s government (1970-1973) • Military Reformism (ex: Perú) Importance of politics.

  7. Cardoso & Faletto: “The possibility of alternatives depends upon the resolution of this question of the state.”

  8. Main Paths • Followers of dependency theory proposed to break bonds with the center. • Critics of dependency see the State instead as an instrument to overcome underdevelopment WITHIN the system (ex: Evans)

  9. The State • Behavioralists dissolved the State in a multiplicity of agencies and institutions, or presented it as a “black box” (structural-functionalism). • Developmentalists referred to the State as if we all knew exactly what it is and how it works. • (Many) Dependency Theorists presented the state as subordinate to the flows of capital

  10. Lane: New (?) Debate • “…issue of whether the state was merely the ‘executive committee’ of the capitalist class, doing its will, or whether the state had some degree of independence from forces in the surrounding society.” (80)

  11. New consensus: Politics is not a mere “reflection” of economics. • Structuralism of Marxian and Weberian roots • Marx: the State is an instrument of domination of the ruling classes. • Weber: the State is fundamentally a bureaucracy which develops according to an internal logic

  12. Bringing the State Back In (1985) • “Back In”? • Actually, comparative politics had not focused on the study of the State before. • “It is one thing to argue that a deeper study of the state is needed, however, and quite another to know in what terms or concepts the state is to be studied.” (Lane, 80) • Hegel’s ghost (State = Universal, Progressive force)

  13. Main Approaches. • O’Donnell’s “Bureaucratic Authoritarian State.” • Theda Skocpol’s “autonomy” of the State. • Evans’ emphasis on the entrepeneurial aspects of the State. • The centrality of the State in Transitions to Democracy (Schmitter & O’Donnell, Linz & Stepan) • The Postmodern Critique: the State as a “metaphysical effect” of social practices (Mitchell).

  14. Guillermo O’Donnell: the Bureaucratic-Authoritarian State. • Context: countries of the Southern Cone (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile) during the 1960s and the 1970s. Then also Greece, Mexico and Spain. • Mistake of previous theories (developmentalism): assuming that “the future of all political systems was inevitably, if not immediately, something resembling Anglo-Saxon democracy.” (4) • “Bureaucratic-authoritarian” pattern of state domination associated to a particular form of (dependent) capitalist development. (p.5)

  15. O’Donnell: the characteristics of the BA are... • High governmental positions are performed by private and public bureaucrats • Political exclusion (closing channels to the political participation of the popular sectors) • Economic exclusion (of the popular sector) • Depoliticization (political problems are transformed into “technical” issues) • Important transformation in the mechanisms of capital accumulation (increasing transnationalization and dependency)

  16. The BA emerged in... • Highly modernized and industrialized societies that were far from traditional. • Urban • Large industrial working class • Modern (and transnationalized) industries (corporations favored by “desarrollista” governments) • But... There are limits of growth proper of peripheral and dependent settings. • Crises (of economic growth and inclusion) • Mobilization of the popular sectors • Repression by the state (alliance of modern state bureaucrats, corporations, and businessmen/middle-classes related to corporations). Military coups (ex: Chile in 1973)

  17. O’Donnell: Origins of the BA • “The BA state is... A reaction to extended political activation of the urban popular sector” (p. 6) (popular sector = industrial working class + a part of the middle class). • The dominant sectors feel threatened by the popular sector’s political participation. • “The greater the threat level, the greater the polarization and visibility of the class content of the conflicts that precede the implantation of the BA.” (7)

  18. Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions. • “Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below. (...) What is unique to social revolutions is that basic changes in social structure and in political structure occur together in a mutually reinforcing fashion.” (4-5)

  19. Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions • Problem: “Social-scientific theories derived their explanations of revolution from models of how political protest and change were ideally supposed to occur in liberal-democratic or capitalist societies.” (xiii) • (both Marxist theories and theories of modernization)

  20. Skocpol: • Problem: to explain revolutions occurred in “predominantly agrarian countries with absolutist-monarchical states and peasant-based social orders.” (xiv) • French Revolution (1789) • Russian (Soviet) Revolution (1917) • Chinese Revolution (1911-16) • All of these revolutions occurred in Imperial, proto-bureaucratic states (Bourbon France, Romanov Russia, Manchu China)

  21. Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions “We can make sense of social-revolutionary transformations only if we take the state seriously as a macro-structure. The state properly conceived is no mere arena in which socioeconomic struggles are fought out. It is, rather, a set of administrative, policing, and military organizations headed, and more or less well coordinated by, an executive authority. Any state first and fundamentally extracts resources from society and deploys these to create and support coercive and administrative organizations.” (29)

  22. Skocpol: • Where they exist, these fundamental state organizations are at least potentially autonomous from direct dominant-class control. The extent to which they actually are autonomous, and to what effect, varies from case to case.” (29-30)

  23. Problem: What is the State?Where does it begin, and where does it end?How should we study the State empirically? (unit/s of analysis, variables?)Dissolution

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