POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS AND ECONOMIC IMPERATIVES: BRINGING AGENCY BACK IN

Abstract

Over the last decades, the social sciences have become increasingly concerned with the role of the state and the politics of institutional restructuring. Within mainstream political science this has led to the development of a “state-centered” research program that emphasizes the autonomy of institutions. Marxist theory, however, has continued to adhere to a “society-centered” perspective, seeking to combine an ability to account for institutional change with the analysis of more structural social and economic forces. After some introductory comments that frame the problematic within which the paper is situated (Section 1), I discuss in Section 2 three of the most important recent Marxist attempts to construe the relation between socio-economic imperatives and political institutions. My argument is that Marxists’ attempts to relativize the autonomy of state institutions are too often still based on the postulation of an unexplained structural moment. This leaves them vulnerable to institutionalist claims concerning the autonomous nature of institutions. Section 3 proposes a different way of thinking the role of institutions in capitalist society. This approach breaks with a causalist, structuralist mode of explanation and relies on a more hermeneutic understanding of the role of institutions. I will shift the problematic to the relation between institutions and agency, arguing for a more pragmatist understanding of the role of institutions and an agency-based understanding of the formation of socio-economic imperatives. Section 4 concludes with some thoughts on the prospects held out, as well as the challenges faced, by the approach proposed in this paper.

Citation

Konings, M. (2005), "POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS AND ECONOMIC IMPERATIVES: BRINGING AGENCY BACK IN", Zarembka, P. (Ed.) The Capitalist State and Its Economy: Democracy in Socialism (Research in Political Economy, Vol. 22), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 85-130. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0161-7230(04)22004-1