EDSS 4 Final Exam Summary 2024 PDF

EDSS 4 FINAL EXAM SUMMARY (2024) 1. States are central to our understanding of what a society is. Where states are strong, societies are relatively territorialized and centralized. That is the most general statement we can make about the autonomous power of the state 2. Four main elements contai...

EDSS 4 FINAL EXAM SUMMARY (2024) 1. States are central to our understanding of what a society is. Where states are strong, societies are relatively territorialized and centralized. That is the most general statement we can make about the autonomous power of the state 2. Four main elements contained in the predominant view of the state: A state is a differentiated set of institutions and personnel embodying centrality in the sense that political relations radiate outwards from a center to cover a territorially demarcated area, over which it exercises a monopoly of authoritative binding rule- making, backed up by a monopoly of the means of physical violence 3. There are two quite different senses in which states and their elites might be considered powerful: (a) The first sense concerns what we might term the despotic power of the state elite, the range of actions which the elite is empowered to undertake without routine, institutionalized negotiation with civil society groups. Despotic power is also usually what is meant in the literature by ‘autonomy of power’. This denotes power by the state elite itself over civil society. (b) The second sense is ‘the power of the state’, especially in today’s capitalist democracies. We might term this infrastructural power, the capacity of the state to actually penetrate civil society, and to implement logistically political decisions throughout the realm. It is powerfully developed in all industrial societies. This denotes the power of the state to penetrate and centrally coordinate the activities of civil society through its own infrastructure, and still allows the possibility that the state itself is a mere instrument of forces within civil society. 4. What are the origins of the autonomous power of the state? (a) The necessity of the state Most societies seem to have required that some rules, particularly those relevant to the protection of life and property, be set monopolistically, and this has been the province of the state (b) The multiplicity of state functions: the maintenance of internal order, military defense/aggression, directed against foreign foes, the maintenance of communications infrastructures, economic redistribution. These four tasks are necessary, either to society as a whole or to interest groups within it. They are undertaken most efficiently by the personnel of a central state who become indispensable. (c) The territorial centrality of the state The definition of the state concentrates upon its institutional, territorial, centralized nature. This is the third, and most important, precondition of state power. 5. As noted, the state does not possess a distinctive means of power independent of, and analogous to, economic, military and ideological power. But unlike economic, ideological or military groups in civil society, the state elite’s resources radiate 2 authoritatively outwards from a center but stop at defined territorial boundaries. The state is a place—both a central place and a unified territorial reach. 6. Territorial centralization provides the state with a potentially independent basis of power mobilization being necessary to social development and uniquely in the possession of the state itself. 7. If we add together the necessity, multiplicity and territorial centrality of the state, we can in principle explain its autonomous power 8. Lipset’s observation that democracy is related to economic development, first advanced in 1959, has generated the largest body of research on any topic on comparative politics, but the theories and the facts aren’t clear. 9. Two distinct reasons (endogenous and exogenous) that the relation between levels of development and the incidence of democratic regimes may hold: Endogenous: democracies may be more likely to emerge as countries develop economically, OR Exogenous: democracies may be established independently of economic development but may be more likely to survive in developed countries. 10. Developmental states are organizational complexes in which expert and coherent bureaucratic agencies collaborate with organized private sectors to spur national economic transformation. Developmental states have pursued interventionist policies These countries combined export promotion with industrial deepening. 11. The political origins of developmental states can be located in conditions of ‘systemic vulnerability’, or the simultaneous interplay of three separate constraints: (1) broad coalitional commitments, (2) scarce resource endowments, and (3) severe security threats a) Whenever elite or social conflict are perceived by political elites as intense or imminent during the early stages of state formation, coalitions tend to be broadened; sustaining a broad coalition typically requires that elites provide side payments. Broad coalitions are those in which ruling elites provide tangible benefits to popular sectors in exchange for political support or acquiescence. Example of popular sectors are businesses, education, rural infrastructure. b) Research suggests that a state's ease of access to revenue influences institutional development. c) Strong states arise in response to security threats, as asserted in Tilly's famous dictum: ‘War made the state, and the state made war.’ External threats compelled leaders to create strong institutions to promote growth and implement wealth- sharing mechanisms for popular sectors (Campos and Root)—except in the Middle East and Latin America. 12. When elites face high levels of systemic vulnerability, they necessarily confront the challenge of simultaneously improving living standards and promoting growth by continuously upgrading local resources. 13. Systemic vulnerability makes the reconciliation of coalitional, geopolitical, and fiscal constraints a matter of ruling elites' political survival. 3 14. Singapore: Instead of following the then-politically correct approach of being anti- American and anti-multinational corporations (MNCs) in the 1960s and 1970s, Lee and Singapore went against the grain and ‘assiduously courted MNCs’ because ‘they had the technology, know-how, techniques, expertise and the markets’ and ‘it was a fast way of learning on the job working for them and with them.’ 15. Singapore succeeded because it ‘rejected conventional wisdom when it did not accord with rational analysis and its own experience.’ 16. The Dutch economist, Albert Winsemius, to formulate an industrialization program for Singapore. The Winsemius team recommended a crash program to reduce unemployment and a ten-year program to attract foreign investment to Singapore with appropriate incentives. Winsemius advised Lee that the two preconditions for Singapore’s success in industrialization were: (a) Get rid of the Communists; how you get rid of them does not interest me as an economist, but get them out of the government, get them out of the unions, get them off the streets. How you do it, is your job. (b) Let [the statue of Stamford] Raffles [who founded Singapore] stand where he stands today; say publicly that you accept the heavy ties with the West because you will very much need them in your economic program. 17. The reason for the political reticence of Singapore’s middle class, according to Lam (1999), is that they are skeptical of democracy. He argues that ‘the majority of the middle class prefers the PAP to stay in power despite its authoritarian tendencies insofar as the party continues to satisfy their material needs. 18. China has had no supreme leader since the death of Deng Xiaoping in 1997. The seven men who sit on the country’s most senior decision-making body, the Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee (PSC), form a collective leadership in which each man has a rank, from one to seven, and shoulders primary responsibility for a specific portfolio. 19. The collective leadership feature of the Chinese political system is designed to guard against a repeat of the excesses of the era of the PRC’s founding father, Mao Zedong, when a single outsized leader was able to convulse the nation with a series of mass political campaigns. It is also meant to guard against the emergence in China of a figure like Mikhail Gorbachev, whose decisions are widely blamed in China for the collapse of the Soviet Union. 20. The Politburo Standing Committee is the Most Powerful Decision-Making Body. 21. China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), is not a national army belonging to the state. Rather, it is an armed wing of the Communist Party, with the Party’s exercise of ‘absolute leadership’ over the military a fundamental guarantee of Communist Party rule. 22. China’s 1982 state constitution, adopted six years after the death of Mao Zedong, describes the country’s unicameral legislature, the National People’s Congress, as ‘the highest organ of state power.’ 23. One major reason for the NPC’s weakness is the Communist Party’s insistence that it serve as little more than a rubber stamp for Party decisions. 4 24. While the constitution gives the NPC the right to ‘elect’ such top state officials as the President, Vice President, and Chairman of the State Central Military Commission, for example, in practice, the Party decides who will fill those positions. The NPC’s role is simply to ratify the Party’s decisions. 25. As a guarantee of Party control of the legislature, a member of the Party’s seven-man Politburo Standing Committee serves concurrently as chairman of the NPC Standing Committee. 26. The second major institution of the Chinese political structure is the State 27. While powerful Communist Party bodies that exist in parallel to the State bodies set policy at all levels and make major decisions, the State system implements and executes policy. In recent decades, State leaders have been particularly focused on managing China’s economy, leaving ‘political’ matters, such as ideology, personnel, and security, to the Party. 28. There are three baskets of basic institutions that make up a modern political system: the state, the rule of law, and mechanisms of democratic accountability. a) The state was properly defined by Max Weber as a legitimate monopoly of force over a defined territory. States in their essence are hierarchical institutions that generate and concentrate power, and use that power to protect the community from external enemies, ensure domestic peace, enforce laws, provide necessary public goods from education to public health to infrastructure. b) Rule of law exists only when the sovereign himself—meaning, in effect, the most powerful political figures in the system—is subject to the same laws as ordinary citizens. c) The third institutional pillar is democratic accountability. State power needs to reflect the wishes of the broad community it serves, rather than the narrow interests of the elites running the state. In modern liberal democracies, accountability is understood in procedural terms, that is, as periodic, free and fair multiparty elections that give citizens an opportunity to turn governments out of power if they feel they are not performing properly.