Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Politician's Dilemma

University of California Press

The state has been brought back in. It now lumbers through the halls of academe, a great clumsy creature that no one quite knows what to do with. Some have suggested putting it back out, but that, as often happens with strays let in from the cold, has proved difficult to do. Theoretically unwieldy as "the state" has proved to be, the role states1 play in influencing, managing, and sometimes transforming economies and societies compels the attention of social scientists. Increasingly, researchers have endeavored to take into account the use by national leaders of the unparalleled resources and power of the state to change society; to foster economic development; to provide citizens with education, medical care, sanitation, roads, and other amenities of modernity; and even to alter age-old social structures and cultural patterns.

Such state-led development has rendered inadequate old theories, both those that assumed an automatic diffusion of modernization via markets and spontaneous cultural change, and those that viewed political outcomes as the result of class struggle. At one time, comparativists looked primarily to traits of the domestic society and culture or to

The word "state" is used here to refer to regimes, governments, specific administrative agencies, and even individuals who act on behalf of governments. This usage is, I think, consistent with that in much of the literature, despite many efforts to define the state in a more precise manner. Talking about "the state" is a shorthand way of talking about the actions of individuals whose power derives from their positions in government. When dealing with the state as a political actor, one must refer to actions carried out by human beings. Even the state conceived as an expression of class interests "requires an organization which, since it cannot be other than a social network of people, exists in its own right and possesses interests of its own" (Cardoso 1979, 51).

characteristics of the international environment for explanations of economic development and change. They tended to view the state as simply reflecting outcomes caused by the struggle among private interests to secure policies beneficial to themselves. Now, however, most scholars working on these issues, no matter what their theoretical and ideological commitments, believe that governments can and often do act independently of underlying socioeconomic forces. In consequence, observers have recognized the need for theories to explain the state's role in bringing about change.

Scholars working on a remarkably wide spectrum of questions2 have concluded that states are loci of power, resources, and interests. They have shown that state officials sometimes have policy preferences independent of those of major social and economic groups in society, and that these officials can sometimes, by virtue of their positions in government, use state power and resources to pursue their own ideas and interests. In other words, government policies often reflect the interests and economic ideologies of state officials, rather than those of domestic or foreign economic elites or powerful organized middle- and working-class groups. These policies in turn create the incentives that shape the day-to-day choices of individuals in society. And these choices then affect the rate of growth, the distribution of the benefits of growth, and, in sum, the way political, economic, and social systems work.

In the study of developing countries, much of the recent interest in the role of the state has arisen from observations that governments sometimes effect radical shifts in economic policy without the support of important interest groups. Observers see such "state" or government autonomy in the most successful new industrializing countries and also in what used to be considered successful post-revolutionary regimes.

The notion of state autonomy, which draws on theoretical constructs developed in structuralist Marxist and realist international relations theory, emerged in the study of developing countries as part of the effort

For example, on social revolution, Skocpol 1979; on nonrevolutionary socioeconomic transformation, Trimberger 1978; on economic development in Europe, Gerschenkron 1966, North 1979, Eckstein 1958; on development strategies in the Latin American and Asian newly industrializing countries (NICs), Haggard and Cheng 1987, Haggard 1990, Evans 1979, Rueschemeyer and Evans 1986; on squatter settlements, Collier 1976, Ames 1973; on labor, Goldberg 1986, Collier and Collier 1977, 1979, Katznelson 1986; on the failure of agricultural policy in Africa, Bates 1981.

to understand situations in which a conflict paradigmb that is, an assumption that political outcomes are determined by a clash of interests, with the most powerful interest winningb could not explain major policy shifts. In these situations, the interests injured by the new policies were often those that, shortly before a shift, had appeared to be economically and politically dominant in the country (Trimberger 1977, 1978; Hamilton 1982). In any unmediated struggle among interests, standard political theories, whether Marxist or pluralist, would have expected them to win. And yet they lost.

In Latin America, for example, most governments began to implement industrialization policies that systematically disadvantaged the producers of primary product exports at a time when agriculture and mining remained economically dominant.3 The more recent history of the region offers numerous additional instances of policy changes that have injured powerful economic groups. Domestic industries, foreign industries, and the organized working class have all failed on various occasions to protect their own interests, despite their considerable political, organizational, and economic resources. No one believes that these groups are weak or uninfluential, but those who propose a focus on the state point out that they have not proved insurmountable obstacles to governments bent on pursuing policies damaging to them.

The interests that benefited from these policy shifts, in contrast to those that lost, were often unorganized, economically weak, and sometimes even weak in terms of sheer numbers of people. If they subsequently developed into powerful interest groups, it was because of the policy shifts initially undertaken by state elites on their own initiative. Manufacturers of inputs for the auto industry in Brazil, for example, have become politically influential since the 1960s. Prior to the state-sponsored implantation of the auto industry and the passage of strict

Except for Argentina, the more economically advanced Latin American countries had begun to abandon laissez-faire policies and experiment with state intervention in the economy by the 1930s. Conscious, integrated policies to foster industrialization began in Argentina and Chile in the 1940s, in the other more developed countries during the 1950s, and in most of the poorer countries during the 1960s. Measuring sectoral dominance is extremely problematic, but contribution of the industrial sector to GDP gives a crude indication. Of the nineteen Latin American countries for which data are available, only in Uruguay had industrial...