State (polity)

About: State (polity) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 36954 publications have been published within this topic receiving 719822 citations. The topic is also known as: state (polity).

Political Settlements: Issues paper

Abstract: Why do similar sets of formal institutions often have such divergent outcomes? An analysis of political settlements goes some way to answering this question by bringing into focus the contending interests that exist within any state, which constrain and facilitate institutional and developmental change. It provides a framework to analyse how the state is linked to society and what lies behind the formal representation of politics in a state. The political settlement and the elite bargains from which it emerges are central to patterns of state fragility and resilience. The role of political organisation within the political settlement is crucial to both the stability of the settlement and the direction in which it evolves over time. The elite bargains that may lead to the establishment of what might be considered a resilient political settlement may also act as a barrier to progressive developmental change. Analysis of political settlements suggests that state-building is far from a set of technical formulas, but is a highly political process. Creating capacity within a state to consolidate and expand taxation is fundamentally determined by the shape of the political settlement underlying the state. This is true as well for the development of service delivery or any other function of the state. This analytical framework provides a window for donors to grasp the politics of a place in order to design more effective interventions.

Congressional distributive politics and state economic performance

Abstract: States that were represented by very senior Democratic congressmen grew more quickly during the 1953-1990 period than states that were represented by more junior con- gressional delegations. States with a large fraction of politically competitive House districts also grew faster than average. The first finding is consistent with traditional legislator-based models of distributive politics, the second with partisan models. We cannot detect any substan- tively important association between seniority, state political competition, and the geographic distribution of federal funds, so higher district-specific federal spending does not appear to be the source of the link between state economic growth and congressional representation.

The political economy of state-formation in the Arab Middle East: Rentier states, economic reform, and democratization

Abstract: This article argues that rentier states stand in contrast to states that have to rely on domestic resource extraction. They display a particular path to state-formation that by and large defies the European path of state-formation: natural resource dependence (mainly oil dependence) has created weak states that are autonomous from societal demands and that do not rely on domestic taxation. State-formation has not been accompanied by political accountability, transparency, or what Charles Tilly has termed the ‘civilianisation of government’. In rentier states the expenditure side of public revenues is most clearly linked to a state-building agenda of creating societal peace and political acquiescence. On a theoretical level, this article offers a new reading of state-formation based on the form and the performance of the state. Focusing on a functional understanding of statehood, it thereby highlight where Arab states are strong (security function and in times of oil booms, welfare function) and w...

Back to the Future: Neomedievalism and the Postmodern Digital World Economy

Abstract: We are entering a period of turbulent, systemic change in the organization of the world economic and political order--a period comparable to the transition from the feudal to the modern era in the 16th and 17th centuries. As Hobsbawm observes, the late 20th century world economy appears temporally confused, involving a "curious combination of the technology of the late twentieth century, the free trade of the 19th and the rebirth of the sort of interstitial centres characteristic of world trade in the Middle Ages."(1) I have argued elsewhere that globalization represents a systemic transformation of the world economy that will result in new structures and new modes of functioning.(2) Globalization entails two interrelated, technologically driven phenomena. First, dramatic increases in the cost, risk and complexity of technology in many industries render even the largest national markets too small to serve as meaningful economic units. Second, and more important here, the emerging global world economy is electronic, integrated through information systems and technology rather than organizational hierarchies. We are in the midst of what Cerney and others have called the third industrial revolution, "characterized by the intensive application of information and communications technology, flexible production systems and organizational structures, market segmentation and globalization."(3) The digital revolution has "dematerialized" manufacturing and commerce; all firms, regardless of sector, have become information processors.(4) One result of the information revolution is the "deintegration" of the large, vertically integrated "Fordist" firms which organize a significant portion of international economic transactions within their administrative hierarchies.(5) In their place, a complex system of networks and alliances is emerging in which information technology facilitates the integration and coordination of geographically dispersed operations. An international system of production is being replaced by a complex web of interlaced global electronic networks.(6) The scale and complexity of technology and the emergence of electronically integrated global networks render geographic borders and, more fundamentally, the basic construct of territorial sovereignty problematic. A critical issue raised by globalization is the lack of meaning of geographically rooted jurisdiction when markets are constructed in electronic space. There is a basic disconnect between geographic space and cyberspace. THE NEOMEDIEVAL ANALOGY The Peace of Westphalia (1648) is taken conventionally as marking the end of medieval universalism and the origin of the modern state system. The medieval to modern transition entailed the territorialization of politics, the replacement of overlapping, vertical hierarchies by horizontal, geographically defined sovereign states.(7) The modern state system is organized in terms of territorial sovereignty: the division of the globe's surface into fixed, mutually exclusive, geographically defined jurisdictions enclosed by discrete and meaningful borders.(8) Nation states and national markets are defined spatially. Geographic jurisdiction implies that each state's laws, rules and regulations apply within its territory--within the space encompassed by its borders.(9) As Carr noted many years ago, it is difficult for contemporaries to even imagine a world in which political power is organized on a basis other than territory.(10) Geographically rooted, sovereign nation states and the international state system, however, are relatively recent creations which comprise but one of a number of historical modes of organizing political activity.(11) Furthermore, the current state system may well be unique, a product of a very specific historical context. Agnew reminds us that "the spatial scope of political organization has not been set for all time in a particular mode. …

Origins of the Modern Chinese State

Abstract: What is "Chinese" about China's modern state? This book proposes that the state we see today has developed over the past two centuries largely as a response to internal challenges emerging from the late empire. Well before the Opium War, Chinese confronted such constitutional questions as: How does the scope of political participation affect state power? How is the state to secure a share of society's wealth? In response to the changing demands of the age, this agenda has been expressed in changing language. Yet, because the underlying pattern remains recognizable, the modernization of the state in response to foreign aggression can be studied in longer perspective. The author offers three concrete studies to illustrate the constitutional agenda in action: how the early nineteenth-century scholar-activist Wei Yuan confronted the relation between broadened political participation and authoritarian state power; how the reformist proposals of the influential scholar Feng Guifen were received by mainstream bureaucrats during the 1898 reform movement; and how fiscal problems of the late empire formed a backdrop to agricultural collectivization in the 1950s. In each case, the author presents the "modern" constitutional solution as only the most recent answer to old Chinese questions. The book concludes by describing the transformation of the constitutional agenda over the course of the modern period.