The State

During the 1980s and 1990s, state theorists influenced by the new institutionalism in political science and sociology elucidated yet another post-Marxist approach to the state called organizational realism. Organizational realists define the state as an organization that attempts to extend coercive control and political authority over particular territories and the people residing within them. A fundamental thesis of organizational realism is that in pursuing this political objective state elites are self-interested maximizers whose main interest is to enhance their own institutional power, prestige, and wealth. Consequently, Theda Skocpol has suggested that during exceptional periods of domestic or international crisis state elites may be impelled to implement social policies, economic reforms, and institutional changes that concede subordinate class demands while violating the interests of those classes that benefit from the existing economic arrangements within a state's jurisdiction. Under certain circumstances, Skocpol argues that state elites might deploy state power to act against the long-run interests of a dominant class or even act to create a new mode of production. However, Skocpol cautions that the extent to which states actually are autonomous, and to what effect, varies from case to case, which means "the actual extent and consequences of state autonomy can only be analyzed and explained in terms specific to particular types of sociopolitical systems and to particular sets of historical international relations" (p. 30). Therefore, the aim of this research strategy has been to focus on the theoretically limited task of constructing empirical generalizations by using comparative historical case studies of policy formation and state institutional development.