The state as institutional contextualization

As later chapters will testify, theories of the state vary significantly in terms of the assumptions about the state that they reflect. Yet, almost without exception the state is seen, by those who deploy it as a concept, in structural and/or institutional terms.

As this perhaps serves to suggest, the appeal to the concept of the state tends to draw the political analyst’s attention to - and to sharpen the analyst’s purchase on - the opportunities and, more often than not, the constraints that political actors face in realizing their intentions. A political analysis informed by a theory of the state is less likely to see political actors in voluntarist terms - as free-willed subjects in almost complete control of their destiny, able to shape political realities in the image of their preferences and volitions. For, in contrast to voluntarism and more agent-centred accounts, theorists of the state tend to see the ability of actors to realize their intentions as conditional upon often complex strategic choices made in densely structured institutional contexts which impose their own strategic selectivity (the pattern of opportunities and constraints they present).

Such considerations are important and have the potential to provide a valuable and much-needed corrective to the tendency of an at times behaviouralist-dominated political science mainstream to see actors’ prefer­ences alone as the key to explaining political outcomes. State theory reminds us that the access to political power associated with a landslide electoral triumph does not necessarily bring with it the institutional and/or strategic capacity to translate such a mandate into lasting social, political and economic change. If political will and the access to positions of power and influence were all that were required (as, for instance, in some pluralist and elitist conceptions), wholesale political change would be endemic. That this is not the case suggests the value of institutionally contextualizing abstractions like the state. And these, in turn, encourage a rather more sanguine and realistic assessment of ‘political opportunity structures’ (Tarrow 1998).

Yet such valuable insights do not come without their own dangers. State theory, as many of the chapters in this volume demonstrate, has at times been characterized by a tendency to structuralism. Indeed, this would seem to be the pathology to which it is most prone. In at least some of their many variants, Marxism, institutionalism, green theory, feminism and even public choice theory, have all legitimately been accused of structuralism. For each has, at times and in certain forms, appealed to essential and non- negotiable characteristics of the state (its capitalism, its patriarchy, its complicity in the destruction of the natural environment, and so forth) reproduced independently of political actors. Such essentialism is both fatalistic and apolitical; it does nothing to enhance the analyst’s purchase on political reality. Indeed, in a sense it denies that there is a political reality to be interrogated (on politics as the antithesis of fate, see also Gamble 2000).

Yet whilst structuralism has proved an almost perennial target for critics of state theory, contemporary theories of the state would seem more acutely aware of its dangers today than at any point in the past. Indeed, the recent development of state theory can at least in part be read as a retreat from structuralism.