Trade deficit with Taiwan
Chapter 2. Theoretical Considerations:
2.1. Institutionalism and the Centrality of the State
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2.1. Institutionalism and the Centrality of the State
Modern Political Science was initially associated with the study of institutions during the 1920s-1930s, particularly with those related to the government, motivating many universities in Europe and North America to develop the first academic departments on Government Studies or, simply Government, right after the end of World War I. After a few decades, other schools of thought were proposed to approach the complex political and economic phenomena around the world which tried to be more innovative and go beyond the classic institutionalism. As a result, those approaches emphasized both the agents’ behavior and the structures, forming theoretical bodies known as Behaviorism and Structuralism respectively.
Nonetheless, it was in the late 1970s and mid-1980s that a new generation of scholars developed the idea that political scientists needed to pay attention once again to institutions, recovering the importance of their study, without denying the utility of alternative theories developed after World War II.41
For the purpose of this study, and for many scholars following this type of analyses, institutions are understood as norms, rules and other mechanisms that affect, govern or influence the individual behavior, and are expressed or carried through diverse forms, mainly organizations. This definition has become a central key for those researchers interested in comparative politics during the past two decades. As noted by Karen Remmer in 1997, the role of institutions on the process of development, particularly institutional stability, was first remarked by Samuel Huntington back in 1968, when he offered several explanations for the political evolution and the changing systems in different countries around the world.42 However, the prevalence of other concepts such as development and dependence, which were considered as crucial by political scientists when comparing the political and economic development in different countries, especially those in the Third World, impeded scholars to pay enough attention to institutional factors.43
41 Peter A. Hall & Rosemary C.R. Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms,” in Political Studies, 44, no. 4, (December 1996), 936-957.
42 Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).
43 Karen Remmer, “Theoretical Decay and Theoretical Development: The Resurgence of Institutional Analysis,”
in World Politics, 50, (October 1997), 34-61.
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As noted before, this situation began to change in the 1980s, when intellectual circles in the West and other parts of the world viewed the renewed institutional approach as a complementary move to other approaches that overemphasized the importance of social structures and cultural values as major explanatory variables. The resurgence of the study of political institutions as the dominant analytical tendency has been conceptualized by Peter Hall and Rosemary Taylor. In their work, which later become a central piece for those interested in institutional development in political science, they categorized three distinct types of institutionalism that, although developed around the same time, are very different on their interpretations about institution-building, as well as the assumptions they make on issues such as the functions of institutions, and their relations with individual and group behavior.44
The first type identified by the authors is Historical Institutionalism (HI), which is more concerned about historical processes influencing the formation, as well as the permanence and/or transformation of institutions. In fact, institutional stability and change would be continuous concerns among many specialists in later years, who tried to describe the characteristics that allow institutions to persist or mutate. Such is the case of Kathleen Thelen and her argument of institutional change and evolution, which depends on reproduction and feedback mechanisms, as well as path dependency.45 The latter, was also an element identified by Paul Pierson, along with that of increasing returns, to show how small or contingent events can have a huge impact on institutional development, as well as critical moments or junctures can shape the basic contours of social life.46 This type of institutionalism has been successful in identifying some of the most important causes of institutional transformation, but also durability, being valid not only for those institutions in the industrial developed world, but also in other emerging or developing regions. It has been usually in these regions that institutional dynamics might look different, and the adoption of
44 Peter A. Hall & Rosemary C.R. Taylor, op. cit., 936-957.
45 Kathleen Thelen, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” in Annual Review of Political Science, 2, no. 1, (June 1999), 369-404.
46 Paul Pierson, “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics,” in The American Political Science Review, 94, no. 2, (June 2000), 251-267.
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Western institutions has not guarantee its correct functioning, as it was sharply noted by Levistki and Murillo.47
The second type is rational choice institutionalism (RCI), which links the formation and survival of an institution to the benefits it is intended to provide to relevant actors, and are usually embedded in a framework concerned with transaction costs, efficiency, rent-seeking, property rights, among other issues closely related to the classical economy rational choice approach. The classical model typically used to reinforce these arguments is the functioning of politics in the US Congress, where Representatives discuss, vote and enact bills following a path that ultimately leads to equilibrium. Therefore, this type of institutionalism helps us to understand the motivations behind the formation of a particular institution, particularly for the cases of the Western capitalist democracies; though it still has some difficulties adopting some of the ideas that work perfectly for the study of markets in the field of comparative politics, as noted by Pierson.48 In the same fashion, RCI has been weak in going beyond institutional formation and explaining change, though there have been some bridges with other theories, which have offered a powerful explanation as the one given by Mahoney and Thelen. The latter is a good attempt to theorize institutional change, linking both path dependence with the individual motivation of certain actors (identified as insurrectionaries, symbionts, subversives and opportunists), which, when combined, they can produce the survival, gradual change or disappearance of those institutions (labeled as layering, drift, displacement and conversion).49
Finally, the third type is sociological institutionalism (SI), and is mainly concerned with cultural practices and environments that are influential in the formation and subsistence of certain institutions, as well as the impact these have on individual behavior. This school takes the definition of institutions beyond that of procedures, routines, norms and conventions, by including “symbol systems, cognitive scripts, moral templates,” and so on.
In this study, I agree with one of the main arguments of Hall and Taylor regarding the complementarity of the three different types of institutionalism, encouraging a relaxation of
47 Steven Levitski & Maria Victoria Murillo, “Variation in Institutional Strength,” in Annual Review of Political Science, 12, (June 2009), 115-133.
48 Paul Pierson, op. cit., 251-267.
49 James Mahoney & Kathleen Thelen, “A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change,” in J. Mahoney and K.
Thelen (eds.), Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency and Power. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1-37.
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several of their competing assumptions in order to maintain a flowing dialogue between them, expanding their common ground, not to form a sole theoretical approach, but to increase the options and accuracy when studying institutional development in countries across the globe.50
A good and sound example that established strong connections between the distinct types of institutionalism is that of Greif and Laitin, who merged the game-theory perspective, mostly identified with the RCI, with the traditional postulates of HI, in order to better explain the endogenous change in institutions through the quasi-parameters and institutional reinforcement dynamics. Theirs is a sophisticated idea about how marginal changes in quasi-parameters might not be relevant in the short-run, but turn to be extremely important for institutional transformation in the long-run. However, the comparisons they performed (the cases of the type of political regime in Venice and Genoa; and the ethnic politics in Estonia and Nigeria) do not fully reflect the real utility of the concept.51 On the other hand, the last years have seen an evolution in the studies of institutions, as stated by Levitsky and Murillo.
The latter’s work focuses on the strengths, more than simply remaining in the formative stages of institutions, as a key to develop a truly comprehensive institutionalism, one that can be equally applied to developed and developing countries.52 It is therefore reasonable that most of the recent works on the importance of institutions pay increasing attention to this issue, as in the case of the influential book by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.53
The comparison of institutions between countries is a deep-rooted practice in political science, and it allows us to understand more about ourselves, as well as the past, present and future of our societies. For those reasons, scholars turned their eyes back to a fundamental institution which had been overlooked by other thinkers during the decades marked by the rise of Behaviorism and the study of individual personalities in politics: the state. Starting from the classic writings of Michael Mann and Charles Tilly, who mounted on the wave proposed by distinguished scholars as Dieter Rueschemeyer, Peter B. Evans and Theda
50 Peter A. Hall & Rosemary C.R. Taylor, op. cit., 953-957.
51 Avner Greif & David Laitin, “A Theory of Endogenous Institutional Change,” in American Political Science Review, 98, no.4, (November 2004), 633-652.
52 Steven Levitski & Maria Victoria Murillo, op. cit., 115-133.
53 Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.
(New York: Crown Business, 2012).
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Skocpol, and intended to rescue the centrality of the state when studying political science, many works from the past three decades reflect on the idea of going beyond the reductionist visions of the state, by reconsidering some of the Weberian notions as well as a set of multiple functions performed by the state itself.54 The need to identify the sources that gave origin to modern states, and to classify them according to certain features such as autonomy, territoriality and centrality, led Mann to differentiate between a despotic state, where the power is exercised by the state elite itself over civil society; and an infrastructural state, characterized by the power of the state to centrally coordinate the activities of civil society through its own infrastructure.55
This approach was complemented by the Tilly’s Eurocentric depiction of the state, as a result of a set of dynamics involving war-making, extraction and protection, and which was later deepened by Spruyt, to include more elements such as economic transitions, security environment, legitimation, societal crises and cultural factors, in order to explain the differences between the states built in 17th Century Western Europe and their regimes, and those formed after colonial experiences in the developing world and the former socialist states in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.56 By the 1990s, the predominant perspective when studying the state was already centered on its relation with society. Not only does Spruyt approximated the different types of regimes and economic developmental states considering the weaknesses and strengths of the state vis-à-vis society;
Miguel Ángel Centeno and Cameron G. Thies also placed an important emphasis in this kind of relationships when dealing with experiences of Latin American states during their formation and consolidation stages in the 19th and 20th centuries respectively.57
As Centeno has argued, Latin American countries followed a radically different path from the one walked by the Western European states centuries before, particularly because of the conflicting relation between the state and some significant social sectors. Noting an
54 Michael Mann, “The autonomous power of the state: its origins, mechanism, and results”, in European Journal of Sociology, 25, no. 2, (April 1984), 185-213; Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making s Organized Crime,” in Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Peter B. Evans, and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 169-191.
55 Michael Mann, op. cit., 185-213
56 Hendrik Spruyt, “War, Trade and State Formation,” in Charles Boix and Susan Stokes (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 211-235.
57 Miguel Ángel Centeno “Blood and Debt: War and Taxation in Nineteenth Century Latin America,” in American Journal of Sociology, 102, no. 6, (May 1997), 1565-1605; Cameron G. Thies, “War, Rivalry and State Building in Latin America,” in American Journal of Political Science, 49, no. 3, (July 2005), 451-465.
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influence from important previous studies, framed in the Dependency Theory and other relevant contributions, such as the monumental work by Eduardo Galeano, The Open Veins of Latin America, Centeno argues that the inability of the state to collect taxes from the upper elites, and the easy availability of natural resources and external credit became obstacles for the development of a strong and efficient state, as well as of a bureaucratic apparatus able to perform the key functions previously identified by Tilly, and reinforced by the classification made by Ertman, where the countries in Latin or Southern Europe have been considered as administrative-patrimonial absolutist states. In fact, both Ertman and Centeno, and later Thies, seemed to have underestimated the role of the Catholic Church for the states in Latin Europe and Latin America respectively, when trying to explain the factors that impeded the formation of a strong participatory-bureaucratic constitutionalist state, as that developed in Britain and the Netherlands.58
The religious movements known as Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe during the 16th century, and their collateral effects in the European colonies in the Americas, certainly influenced the path between those proto-states that were formed under Spanish and Portuguese rule on the one hand, and those under British rule on the other. At the same time, Thies made an effort to perfect the thesis proposed by Centeno, arguing that even when other factors such as foreign debt, the sale of commodities, and the revenues from customs, all influenced in the delay of state capacity-building in Latin America, the region eventually followed a more generalized bellicose model during the 20th century, making it impossible to exclude taxation and extraction out of the equation.59 This explanation seems a little forced to some extent, due to the almost exclusive reliance on quantitative methods, paying attention only to regional rivalries that supposedly were able to cause war between neighboring countries, without going deeper into the main causes of these enmities; and not looking to other phenomena in the region —and in the world—, that enabled states to collect higher duties that went beyond those related to war-making, as in the case of those taxes raised with the sole purpose of creating a universal welfare system, and were popularized after the 1940s.
58 Miguel Ángel Centeno, op. cit., 1565-1605; Thomas Ertman, T “Introduction,” in Birth of Leviathan:
Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1-34; Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973); Cameron G. Thies, op. cit., 451-465; Charles Tilly, op. cit., 165-191.
59 Miguel Ángel Centeno, op. cit., 1565-1605; Cameron G. Thies, op. cit., 451-465.
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More recently, influenced by the decline of Europe in the world polity and the emergence of new regional powers around the globe, social scientists have tried to move beyond the Eurocentric framework that was dominant in the past; and state-building theorists were not the exception. What Centeno and Thies did for the case of Latin America, other authors like Robert Bates took it like a base, next to classic approaches as those of Mann and Tilly, to study the state-making process and the consolidation or erosion of the state in late-20th century Africa.60 Also centering his analysis in state-society relations, and proposing a fable which can help explain the response of a state facing numerous challenges that continuously erode its credibility vis-à-vis society, Bates identifies the different types of states in the region, and explains what makes them so different from those states in other parts of the world. His explanation about state failure in Africa is a very powerful one, especially when dealing with the state’s bureaucrats that decide to turn to the exploitation of society once the state is unable to fulfil their basic needs. 61
However, the Bates analysis lacks a formal consideration of the legacies of colonialism in the African continent, through institutions of hereditary chieftaincy, which were highly extractive and undemocratic in nature; and the creation and development of the military, which differed greatly from those in Western Europe. While the army was formed in the latter as the ultimate mean of war-making, reinforcing the state-building process; in Africa and other parts of the developing world, the army was a creation of the metropolis to maintain order within the colonies, and not to make war outside their domains. Therefore, it was not surprising that in many of those countries, once they obtained their independence, the military was a more capable institution than the civil servants to run the state apparatus, and insert itself at the tip of the pyramid.
After analyzing the different institutionalist approaches to study the state, typically from a Weberian notion, other scholars have made efforts to find the flaws in those visions, and made a call not to forget that the state is an important part of society and is not a separate, locked and autonomous entity. State-society relations, hence understood as the interaction between the state institutions and representatives within society, and other social groups and interests competing with the state over influence, control and the providing of order, should
60 Robert Bates, When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3-29.
61 Ibid, 97-139.
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be an important element when studying state-related topics. One of the main proponents of this type of methodology, Joel S. Migdal, has written extensive essays about the strength and weakness of states, and has offered a comprehensive explanation about why some states are stronger than others, and why it is important to pay attention to their relations with other groups in society.62
Therefore, for the purposes of this dissertation, different components from the three institutionalist approaches previously exposed will be used, particularly those associated with the Historical Institutionalism, to explain the impact of institutional evolution in the political economy of Mexico-Taiwan relations, and emphasizing the role of the state and its interactions with other groups in society, including those identified with the functioning of the market. We proceed now to identify the institutional formation and evolution of a developmental type of state.