State autonomy

At bottom, the idea of state autonomy refers to a capacity of the state to act in­dependently of social forces (particularly economic forces). This does not mean society is irrelevant.

The conception of autonomy as freedom from “external” influences has three corollary viewpoints. The first relates to a conception of the state “ex­erting leverage” or “winning out” over the pressures emanating from society. The basic idea is that state leaders have their own ends and societal interest groups have theirs. In the political battle that ensues, state leaders resist pressures from private interests and translate their will into public policy. The second viewpoint refers to state action not dictated or controlled by any one group or coalition of groups. Here it is not so much that the state is opposed to economic interests as that no clear reading of those interests is forthcoming.

The third viewpoint turns on the capacity of the state to resist pressures and is very popular among those dealing with policymaking. This view of state au­tonomy is closely tied to the “strong state-weak state” literature. Strong states are those simultaneously capable of resisting pressures and generating public policy initiatives on their own. Weak states are those that “cave in” to pres­sures from economic interests. Implicit in this third view is the idea that the structure of interest representation may be inadequate and may systematically exclude many who have a genuine interest (in the sense of stake) in the political process. In part, this is the view of E. E. Schattschneider in The Semisovereign People (1960). It is only the state that stands apart from the interest group pro­cess and takes the “aerial view,” assessing the interests of society as a whole. In these circumstances the state may use its privileged position to speak for ex­cluded groups or to mobilize bias in the system.

What has made state action based on its own agenda an anomaly has to do with the way we think of political agendas deriving from social forces. Ap­proaches that ground politics in private interests identify agendas with inter­ests and in turn identify interests with the private circumstances of actors. To be sure, these frameworks identify the private circumstances and the actors along profoundly different dimensions. Nonetheless, the links between agen­das and action, interests and agendas, and interests and private circumstances, remain tight. The theories (Marxian, pluralist, public choice, and so on) treat private circumstances of actors as their circumstances in society. In Marxism these circumstances are material and objective; in the utilitarian theories they are essentially subjective. In both cases social interaction, social institutions, and social order must be explained by action driven by private interest. It is this quality of the theory that assures that “state autonomy” appears as (1) a form of state action not determined by economic interest and (2) an anomaly for the theory. Yet, even in these “society-centered” approaches, the problem of state agenda-setting cannot be entirely avoided, and elements of a more state-centered approach emerge, if in a limited way. We begin with these inti­mations of the state as they appear in theories centering on economy.