polsic

POLSCI 202

UMASS Boston

What is State

· The “State” concept is one of the most important building blocks of comparative politics.

· “State” is a relatively recent political invention, but it has triumphed as a form of political organization. Practically the whole world is divided into states.

Defining the State

Some common definitions:

· The state “is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” (Max Weber)

· “A state is an organization with a comparative advantage in violence, extending over a geographic area whose boundaries are determined by its power to tax constituents.” (Douglas North)

· States are “relatively centralized, differentiated organizations, the officials of which, more or less, successfully claim control over the chief concentrated means of violence within a population inhabiting a large, contiguous territory.” (Charles Tilly)

Defining the State

· The state is a political-legal unit with sovereignty over a particular geographic territory and the population that resides in that territory.

What is sovereignty:

· Internal sovereignty: within its own territory every state can act as it wishes (internal affairs: ultimate authority)

· External sovereignty: state is recognized as an independent state by other states and is not under the authority of another state (external affairs: autonomy and independence)

Defining the State

The state is a political-legal unit with sovereignty over a particular geographic territory and the population that resides in that territory.

· It takes in resources.

· It establishes the fundamental rules by which society is governed and enforces those rules. (ultimate responsibility for and legal authority over internal affairs)

· It has a special capacity for violence and claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

· It claims the right to control interactions with other states.

“Nation”, “State” and “Nation-state”

· A nation is a group of people who share some sort of common identity like a language, a religion, or an ethnicity.

· A state requires a “given territory”, while a nation does not.

· Membership in a state is an objective, legal fact; the feeling of identification with a nation is a subjective sentiment.

· A nation-state is a state in which a single nation predominates and the legal, social, demographic, and geographic boundaries of the state are connected in important ways to that nation.

· Nation-state has become by far the most predominant political entity in the world, but there are still “state-less nations” such as the Kurds in Iraq, Iran and Turkey.

“Government” vs. “State”

Government:

· Governments are the temporary caretakers of the state.

· As Kurzer writes: “In democratic regimes, governments are elected by voters and governments change after an election. In fact, even in authoritarian regimes, governments come and go. However, the state remains.”

· A government can be embodied in a chief executive, a set of ministers, and their chosen aides (“political appointees”), who run the state while the government is in office, then leave.

State: the permanent governing apparatus

· Embodied in, for instance, the head of the state: the king in UK.

· Thus, for a government to “fall” (e.g., after a negative vote in a parliamentary system) is normal democratic practice. For a state to collapse or fail is generally cataclysmic.

Other related terms

· “Regime”: the basic form of a state’s government. There are democratic, authoritarian, totalitarian regimes.

· “Country”: an imprecise synonym or short-hand term for state or nation-state. sometimes underline the geographical area.

· “Society”: a term for all organized groups, social movements, interest groups, and individuals who attempt to remain autonomous from the influence and authority of the state.

State Capacity

States possess varied capacities to govern and bring about developmental progress.

For example, states vary in their ability to:

· Penetrate and organize society

· Extract resources (natural resources, taxes)

· Enforce laws, maintain bureaucratic coherence

· Encourage economic growth and other forms of development, such as health and education

· Win loyalty from their citizens, build national identity

· Obtain autonomy from their citizens; not be “captured” by narrow interest groups

Measure state capacity: effectiveness and legitimacy

The Fragile States Index by the think tank The Fund for Peace:

https://fragilestatesindex.org/

Fragile States Index

12 indicators to measure the condition of a state at any given moment. Each is scored between 0 and 10, with a higher number indicating a higher level of fragility.

4 categories of states: Alert, Warning, Stable, Sustainable

Why there are states

Two views of the state:

· Contractarian view of the state.

· Predatory view of the state.

Contractarian View

State of Nature.

How would people behave if they did not need to worry about being punished by a state for killing and stealing?

State of Nature

· The state of nature is a term used to describe situations in which there is no state (anarchy).

· Hobbes described life in the state of nature as a “war of every man against every man” in which life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

People in the state of nature face a dilemma.

· Given a certain degree of equality in the state of nature, every citizen could gain by attacking his neighbor in a moment of vulnerability.

· The problem is that citizens know that they will frequently be vulnerable themselves.

· Clearly, everyone would be better off if they could all agree not to take advantage of each other.

· But if an act of violence or theft were to happen, it would be better to be the attacker rather than the victim.

Claim: Without a “common power to keep them all in awe,” the people will choose to steal and kill.

State of Nature

Game theory can help us understand the interaction between people in the state of nature.

Imagine that we have two individuals (A and B) in the state of nature who have to decide whether or not to steal from each other.

Solving the Game

Step 1: Put yourself in the shoes of individual A.

What would you do—what is your best reply—if individual B chooses to refrain?

What would you do—what is your best reply—if individual B chooses to steal?

Solving the Game

Step 2: Put yourself in the shoes of individual B.

What would you do—what is your best reply—if individual A chooses to refrain?

What would you do—what is your best reply—if individual A chooses to steal?

Solving the Game

We solve the game for Nash equilibria.

· A “Nash equilibrium”(NE) is a set of strategies (one for each player) such that no player has an incentive to unilaterally switch to another strategy.

· Both players must be playing “best replies.”

· A best reply is the action that yields the highest payoff given what the other player is doing.

· A strategy is a complete plan of action that specifies what a player would do under every possible circumstance that might arise in the game

Outcome: Both individuals steal.

Solving the Game

· A player is said to have a “dominant strategy” if that strategy is a best reply to all of the other players’ strategies.

· A “dominant strategy NE” occurs when both players have a dominant strategy.

· There is a dominant strategy NE in our State of Nature Game.

State of Nature Game

· What’s weird is that the NE is the second worst outcome for both players.

· Both individuals would be better off if they just chose to refrain!

State of Nature Game

· Individuals have a dominant strategy to cheat, steal, kill, and the like.

· Both players get their second worst outcome, even though they could get their second best outcome if they could just agree to refrain.

· The absence of cooperation represents a sort of dilemma—individual rationality leads actors to an outcome that is inferior in the sense that BOTH players agree that the same alternative outcome is better.

The Social Contract and the State

· Hobbes’s solution to the state of nature was to create a sovereign with sufficient control of force that individuals would stand in “awe”: the Leviathan.

· He believed that the state of nature was so bad that individuals would be willing to transfer power and so on to the sovereign in exchange for protection.

· This would be achieved with the help of a social contract.

The Social Contract and the State

· A social contract is an implicit agreement among individuals in the state of nature to create and empower the state. In doing so, it outlines the rights and responsibilities of the state and citizens in regard to each other.

· The social contract should produce a sovereign that is strong enough to dole out punishments to individuals who “steal.”

· These punishments should be sufficiently large that individuals would no longer have a dominant strategy to steal.

Introducing the State

· BUT who is going to be the sovereign and why would he do us all a favor by acting as our policeman?

· One common story is that members of civil society are engaged in an exchange relationship with the state. The sovereign agrees to act as a policeman in exchange for taxes that the citizens pay.

State of Nature or Civil Society

· Given that the state will demand tax revenue to carry out its job, it is not immediately obvious that the citizen will choose to leave the state of nature for civil society.

· Much will depend on the tax rate.

The State

· The state may be a solution to the state of nature. For this to occur, though, it must be the case that:

· The punishment imposed by the state for stealing is sufficiently large that individuals prefer to refrain rather than steal.

· The taxation rate charged by the state for acting as the policeman must not be so large that individuals prefer the state of nature (no state) to civil society (state).

With the particular payoffs we have chosen, this requires that

p > 1 (punishment must be sufficiently large).

t < 1 (taxation must be sufficiently small).

Some Thoughts

· Political theorists such as Hobbes, who see the state of nature as particularly dire expect citizens to accept a draconian set of responsibilities in exchange for the “protection” provided by the state.

· In contrast, political theorists such as Thomas Jefferson believed that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was possible in the state of nature and that our commitment to the state was so conditional that we should probably engage in revolution every couple of decades.

· Contemporary disputes over whether we should reduce civil liberties by giving more power to the state in an attempt to better protect ourselves against terrorist threats directly echo this historical debate between scholars such as Hobbes and Jefferson.

· Although the creation of the state may solve the political problem we have with each other, it creates a problem between us and the state.

· If we surrender control over violence to the state, what is to prevent the state from using this power against us?

· “Who will guard the guardian?”

Predatory View of the State

· the contractarian view of the state focuses on the conflicts of interests between individuals;

· the predatory view of the state focuses on potential conflicts of interest between citizens and the state.

· States are like individuals in the state of nature.

· They face their own security dilemma in the sense that they have potential rivals always vying to take their place.

· The concern for security leads states to use their power to extract resources from others, that is, to predate.

· The sociologist Charles Tilly claims that states resemble a form of organized crime and that they should be viewed as extortion or protection rackets.

· As with the contractarian view of the state, the predatory approach sees the state as an organization that trades security for revenue.

· BUT, the difference is that the seller of security in the predatory approach happens to represent the key threat to the buyer’s continued security (such as mafias).

How did we become a world of modern states?

“War makes the state . . . States make war.”

· After the decline of the Roman Empire, Europe comprised a hodgepodge of local lords who offered protection to peasants in exchange for rents.

· The feudal lords were constantly trying to put rivals down, including external competitors and internal challengers.

· The need to compete with external rivals creates the pressure for rulers to raise revenues to fight wars.

· The need to extract a lot of revenues poses a problem for rulers.

· One solution to this problem is to eliminate internal rivals.

· The elimination of internal rivals and the development of the capacity to extract resources is the process of state making.

· In time, feudal lands were consolidated into larger holdings under the control of feudal kings.

· The lands controlled by the feudal kings gradually became the political geography of contemporary Europe.

· The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648: recognized the rights of states and states sovereignty

· State formation is not the intent of rulers, but the result.

· Rulers are just trying to grasp power.

The Predatory View of the State

Rulers wanted to survive in wars, so they extracted resources, enhanced their capacity to collect taxes -> sovereignty over clearly defined territory

Two ways of extracting resources:

· Seize the assets of their subjects outright

· Through “quasi-voluntary compliance”: states limit the level of predation, subjects might feel freer to invest and innovate -> economy develops -> rulers expand their tax base -> the net extractive capacity increases by reducing the costs of extracting and by taking a smaller portion of a larger pie

· Legitimacy: the degree to which citizens willingly accept the state’s sovereign authority to use power.

How Late States Formed?

· Political interests

· Military context

· Economic context

· Culture identity context

· The natural environment

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