CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW
2.2.4 Measurement of state capabilities
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challenges, and the capacities might wax or wane’. She therefore suggests that when examining the question of state capacity to take autonomous actions, scholars should focus on ‘sets of officials who might (or might not) be able to act coherently, pursuing lines of policy making’ (Skocpol 2008, p. 110).
As illustrated above, the proliferation of theories containing state capacity as an
‘independent variable’ has produced divergence in how the concept can be employed.
Little systematic evaluation of the ways in which state capacity is conceptualised is focused until now in the literature (Hanson and Sigman 2013).
2.2.4 Measurement of state capabilities
In the existing literature, many World Bank Institute’s Worldwide Governance Indicators purport suggests the following aspects when measuring state capacity:
government effectiveness, regulatory quality, political stability and absence of voice, and control of corruption (Fukuyama 2013). In the study of Measuring State Capacity:
Theoretical and Empirical Implications for the Study of Civil Conflict, Hendrix (2010) points out some key conceptual and measurement issues raised by measures of state capacity in the studies of civil conflict. His main points lie in the three theoretical definitions of state capacity, namely military power; bureaucratic/administrative capacity, and the quality and coherence of political intuitions. Hendrix also demonstrates 15 different and also widely recognised operationalizations of state capacity to the following three dimensions: rational legality, rentier-autocraticness, and neopatrimoniality. He highlights the ‘sometimes-tenuous’ theoretical logic and the difficulty adjudicating between competing casual mechanisms in the 19 operationalizations of state capacity presented in his article.
From this, it is clear that to identify the object of measurement is not quite so straightforward especially when it comes to a concept that is not ‘well-conceptualised’
(Fukuyama 2013). Savoia and Sen, in the attempt to understand the concept of what state capacity means in literature, aggregate the following categories and authors who put emphasis on the explanation of their ideas. The map of state capacities according to the functions that the state performs are listed below (extracted from Savoia and Sen 2012, p. 4):
- Bureaucratic and administrative capacity. Whatever it is to maintain a state in fostering development. The state needs a bureaucratic apparatus to design and implement policies. This dimension is central to all areas of research on state and
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development. Traditionally, state capacity indicators would focus on the competence and ability of bureaucracy (e.g., Evans and Rauch 1999, Rauch and Evans 2000), and generally include the ability of spending the tax proceeds efficiently on public goods.
- Legal capacity: (a) the capability of enforcing contracts and property rights (i.e., a judicial system for settling disputes, rule of law); and (b) security (i.e., protection of national borders, rule of law). The consensus is that, at the very least, the state has to provide such public goods, as they are ill-suited to private provision (Besley and Persson 2009 and 2011; Lin and Nugent 1995; Collier 2009).
- Infrastructural capacity. This refers to the territorial reach of the state, the extent to which control can be exercised over the territory, i.e., the geographical area within which policies can be enforced (see Soifer 2008).
- Fiscal capacity is the state’s ability to raise revenues from taxes (Besley and Persson 2009 and 2011).
- Military capacity. This refers to external security and has mainly concerned civil conflict scholars, who argue that an increase in police and military forces can repress insurgent groups (Hendrix 2010).
Fukuyama (2013) points out the poor state of empirical measures of the quality of states. According to him, much of the problem is conceptual as there is very little agreement on what constitutes high-quality government. He suggests four approaches to evaluating the quality of governance (1) procedural measures; (2) capacity measures; (3) output measures; and (4) measures of bureaucratic autonomy. Although he himself rejects output measures, he argues that by using a two-dimensional framework of analysis researchers can explains well why low-income countries are advised to reduce bureaucratic autonomy while high-income ones are advised to increase it.
Indeed, there have been articles which emphasise role of the state in higher education development (see Mok, 2012; Mok and Wang, 2011; Yeo, 2009). The emphasis lies more on what the state should play its role in higher education development, and yet they do not discover the complex relations between the state and HEIs in different nations, nor does the literature point out how state capacity and state autonomy may affect higher education insituttions’ capacity and autonomous operation, which in the end call for the changes of relations between the state and society.
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Although institutions make up the core of the state, their relationship with the state and society may be uncertain at large, which depends on the social formation and the nation-state’s historical experiences (Chilcote 2000). Nowadays, there are external factors as well as internal ones to affect a state’s development. External factors, such as the phenomenon of globalisation have enforced the states to reform and make changes in its policy so as to respond to the impact. Internal factors, such as social unrest, economic crises also push the states to ‘change the way it used to run’ in order to face the fast-changing societies. In the studies of globalisation, there are generally three broad schools of thoughts on globalisation regarding what kind of impact that globalisation has brought upon the states around the world. Held et al. (1999) summarise as follows:
1. The hyperglobalists define contemporary globalisation as a new era in which people everywhere are subjected to the disciplines of the global marketplace.
Emphasizing economic forces, this view argues that globalisation is bringing about ‘decentralisation’ of economies through the establishment of transnational networks of production, trade and finance. In this ‘borderless’
economy, national governments are ‘regulated to little more than transmission belts for global capital or, ultimately, simple intermediate institutions sandwiched between increasingly powerful local, regional and global mechanisms of governance’. (p. 3)
2. The sceptics, by contrast, maintain that contemporary levels of economic interdependence are not historically unprecedented. The 19th century era of the classical Gold Standard, they note, was also a period of economic integration.
The sceptics consider the hyperglobalists thesis to be fundamentally flawed and politically naïve since it underestimates the enduring power of national governments to regulate international economic activity. The sceptics recognise the economic power of regionalisation in the world economy, but assert that by comparison with the age of world empires the international economy has become considerably less global in its geographical embrace.
3. The transformationalists, like the hyperglobalists, consider globalisation to be a central driving force behind the rapid social, political and economic changes that are reshaping societies. However, they are less certain of the direction in
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which trends are leading and about the kind of world order which it might prefigure. For transformationalists, the existence of a single global system is not taken as evidence of global convergence or of the arrival of a single world society. Rather, they argue, ‘globalisation is associated with new patterns of global stratification in which some states, societies, and communities are becoming increasingly enmeshed in the global order while others are becoming increasingly marginalised’ (p. 7-8). The new patterns require reformulation of vocabulary from North/South and First/Third World, recognising that new hierarchies cut across and penetrate all societies and regions of the world.
In section 2.1, discussions on the advent of globalisation have been made. Here, reviews of literature will focus on how globalisation affects states and state policies.
2.2.5.1 Neoliberalism v.s. Neo-Marxism
Neoliberalism has spread rapidly from a theory of economic behaviour to framework for governing all aspects of society (Peters 2001). Unlike Marxists who trace their root of ideas from Karl Marx, neoliberalism has its philosophical roots in the libertarian ideas of thinkers such as F. A. Hayek, M. Friedman and K. Popper.
Either neoliberals or neo-liberalism emphasise the least intervening of the states, and therefore, neoliberals are guided by a vision of the weak state (Apple 2000).
Neoliberal forms of governance include deregulation, competitiveness and privatisation and marketisation. Unlike classical liberalism with a central philosophy of the freedom from the individual from state interference, neoliberalism, according to Naidoo, envisions a ‘positive role for the state in facilitating the workings of a market and in developing institutions and individuals that are responsive to market forces’
(Naidoo 2010). For neoliberals, economic rationality is one form of rationality more powerful than any other. In other words, they believe that what is private is necessarily good and what is public is necessarily bad (Apple 2000). Under the influences of neoliberalism, the state develops into the ‘competitive state’ which sees its primary objective as one of fostering a competitive national economy by promoting returns from market forces in international settings. What the neoliberals truly believe is that ‘there is a greater functionality between the state and the market with the state establishing conditions for the quasi-market but also actively mobilising market mechanisms to attain political goals’ (Naidoo 2010, p.70). While challenges
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occur that contributed to a crisis in the field of, for instance, higher education, in many low-income countries, a neoliberal framework has usually been taken by the states to solve those crises usually highly related to globalisation.
Clearly, with the advent of neoliberalism emerging from the 1980s, globalisation is placing pressures upon nation states. The states are called upon to regulate the activities of corporate capital in the national interests at the same time it is ‘forced’ to act as an inducement to transnational and global finance capital. As Sbragia argue, the role of the government/nation state has changed fundamentally from a ‘provider of welfare benefits’ to a builder of ‘markets’, where by the state start to build markets and shape them in different way in order to regulates them (Sbragia 2000). Some neoliberal scholars argue that the new role of the state, liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade, precisely implies that state has changed its policies of protecting national business firms and started actively promoting globalisation policies by opening up the national economy (Stiglitz 2002).
However, global finance capital would diminish and constraints freedom of the nation-state, especially in developing states, makes the states unable to play any major interventionist role by making substantial uses of diverse economic and financial pressure tactics. The thinking and dominance of neoliberalism in the help of globalisation has made those developing states difficult to step out of the neo-liberal regime in order to pursue an alternative agenda (Sugunakararaju 2008). Such view is what the Marxists has disagreed with the neoliberalism’s perspective.
Marxists perceive globalisation as an implication of imperialism. According to Patras and Veltmeyar, globalisation is ‘a class project of the emerging class of transnational capitalists seeking to promote their economic interests’ (Patras and Veltmeyar 2001, p.8). Clearly, Marxists scholars perceive a fundamental contradiction between the adoption of neoliberal policies and the preservation of democratic institutions. They have emphasized the existence of nation-state in the globalised era and argue that the structure of the nation-state remains the same but its nature as well as character transformed substantially as nation state has played an active role in structuring political economic arrangements and institutions that help the globalisation
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process (Sugunakararaju 2008). Therefore, the Marxists are usually guided by a vision of the strong state.19
2.2.5.2 State and Higher Education Policies
Inevitably, higher education policies which are formulated by states are driven by neoliberal forces. With the impact of globalisation, more strategies which in
accordance with the implications of neoliberalism are adopted by the states and higher education institutions, among which are the emergence of ‘marketisation’,
‘privatisation’ and ‘decentralisation’ in higher education reforms (Massey 1997; Mok 1996, 2001, 2002; Tai 2000; Whitty 1997). There is a major shift of national politics from maximising welfare to promoting entrepreneurial culture, innovation, and profitability in both private and public sectors. Such paradigm shift is manifested by individualist, competitive and entrepreneurial approaches central to public
management (Mok 2003). All of these approached are believed to be largely driven by globalisation.
There has been a growing significance of engaging in state-centred comparative educational research today (Kazamias 2009). This means that when discussing education in a comparative perspective, the state should be looked at as a real actor because (Carnoy 2006):
…most education in most countries is provided by the state. Second, even when education is partly private and partly ‘public’, it is the state that defines the
meaning of public and private education. In most countries private school teachers are paid by the state. Third, because the state is the supplier and definer of
education, the way changes take place in educational systems is largely defined by the political leadership of the nation’s citizenry to the state and the way that the state has organized the educational system politically (p. 555).
All in all, the relationship between state and higher education should be examined and include the variable of globalisation in such examination.
2.3COMPARATIVE RESEARCH ON POLITICS AND EDUCATION
A ‘revolution’ in comparative research was initiated in the 1960s mainly grounded in the positivist tradition. Be it by using qualitative or quantitative approach, the amount of comparative research on higher education has been growing steadily in the
19 The Marxists perspectives on globalisation can also be seen in the neo-Marxists, neo-constructivism and neo-conservatism discussions.
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past 2 decades (Kosmützky and Krücken 2014). Literature on methodological debates in comparative research in politics and (higher) education as well as challenges lying in current comparative research are both presented and discussed in this section.