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

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

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Dependency Theory leads to the State
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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 Allendes
  government (1970-1973)
• Military Reformism (ex Perú)
• Importance of politics.

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Cardoso Faletto The possibility of
alternatives depends upon the resolution of this
question of the state.
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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)

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The State

• Behavioralists dissolved the State in a
  multiplicity of agencies and institutions, or
  presented it as a black box (structural-function
  alism).
• 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

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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)

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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

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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)
• Hegels ghost (State Universal, Progressive
  force)

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Main Approaches.

• ODonnells Bureaucratic Authoritarian State.
• Theda Skocpols autonomy of the State.
• Evans emphasis on the entrepeneurial aspects of
  the State.
• The centrality of the State in Transitions to
  Democracy (Schmitter ODonnell, Linz Stepan)
• The Postmodern Critique the State as a
  metaphysical effect of social practices
  (Mitchell).

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Guillermo ODonnell the Bureaucratic-Authoritaria
n 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)

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ODonnell 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)

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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)

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ODonnell 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 sectors 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)

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Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions.

• Social revolutions are rapid, basic
  transformations of a societys 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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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