E VALUACIÓN EN E NSEÑANZA S ECUNDARIA DE A DULTOS

Another set of theories that has emerged to explain the role of institutions in economic growth over the last few decades has focused on the role of state power broadly from a Weberian perspective. The most influential of these seek to explain the success of the

‘developmental states’ of East Asia. The theoretical starting point for these theories is the Weberian understanding of state power. Weber considered that state power is the critical factor in explaining different economic outcomes (Weber 1978). He argued that certain characteristics of state power are critical to explaining how effective the state is at bringing about economic growth. He provided a historical analysis of two contrasting models of the state: the bureaucratic state and the patrimonial state. The bureaucratic state is a legal-rational state based on the establishment of normative rules and the right of those in power within the state, on the basis of these rules, to establish legal authority.

The state in this model is run by a professional bureaucratic civil service. Weber argued that this ‘efficient’ state is required for successful capitalism.

Weber contrasted this with the model of the patrimonial state where authority is based on personal loyalty to the leader. In a patrimonial state, authority is maintained through personal connections, favours and promises (Weber 1978). This leads to personalistic state policies rather than policies that would benefit wider society. Patron-client ties undermine a rational-legal framework of government and hamper its ability to promote growth. Weber thought that rational-bureaucratic states would eventually replace patrimonial states. However recent analysis has indicated that many developing countries are run as neo-patrimonial states where a bureaucratic framework for the state exists but is superimposed upon an enduring system of patrimonial power (Chabal and Daloz 1999).

The dominant view today is that patrimonialism is the central problem that constrains the ability of the state in many developing countries from promoting growth. Economic performance improves as states are able to constrain patrimonialism and move towards the bureaucratic state ideal. Within this debate, African clientelism is often presented as a particular problem for state effectiveness (Chabal and Daloz 1999), (Bayart 1993). Chabal and Daloz (1999) argue that what is common to all African states is an institutionalization of disorder based on a generalized system of patrimonialism and an acute degree of turmoil. They argue that this is evident from the high level of governmental and administrative inefficiency, lack of institutionalization, disregard for

the formal rules as well as the resort to personalised solutions to societal problems. In an extension to the idea that the state is less effective where personalised relations dominate, Goran Hyden (1980) argued that in Tanzania the predominant peasant culture has created an ‘economy of affection’ where people invest in reciprocal relations that are inimical to capitalist, or for that matter socialist, development.

Interestingly, this argument is very similar to James Scott’s thesis in The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1977) concerning the Vietnamese peasantry (Khan and Gray 2006). He argued that during the 1960s agrarian change in the area was constrained by peasant social relations and their ability to defy the control of the nation state. The similarity between the cultural norms generated by peasant social relations in both countries undermines the idea that such informal institutions are the primary explanation for different patterns of social and economic transformation. More broadly, clientelism is a characteristic of both rapidly growing and poorly growing developing countries. As with the NIE models, the Weberian inspired state-centric models therefore do not provide an adequate framework for explaining why clientelism in different contexts has such varying impacts on economic performance.

The literature on ‘developmental states’ that emerged from studies on the process of rapid economic growth in Asian economies, such as Chalmers Johnson (1982), Amsden (1989), Wade (1990), Evans (1995) and Aoki et al (1997), identified certain features of the state as critical for explaining success in managing the process of technology acquisition.

Such states promoted rapid economic transition, not because they provided and maintained the ground rules of the market, as argued by mainstream economics, for example World Bank, (1993), but because they could effectively intervene in the market and create rents that provided incentives for entrepreneurs to acquire technology and engage in technological learning processes. These states were able to use interventions such as subsidies and tax breaks as incentive devices, as well as having sufficient control over these rents to ensure that rent recipients were subject to performance standards that could be monitored. If the rent recipients did not achieve the targets set by the state, there were credible threats that their rent would be removed (Wade 1990). Aspects of the

‘developmental states’ analysis can be used to explain the comparative growth experience in Tanzania and Vietnam. Yet an important limitation of the ‘developmental state’

on just one of the processes that is important for rapid economic growth in developing countries. In both countries over the period of liberalisation, there were other critical processes of economic transition (such as those relating to the collapse of traditional property rights and managing the demands of political redistribution within the party) that cannot be captured by the developmental states analytical framework.

A further limitation on the ‘developmental state’ theories is that they provide a state-centric analysis that cannot account for the informal nature of the distribution of power in developing countries. The ‘developmental state’ approach assumes that effective management of the complex rent process relating to technology learning depends on a strong centralised state with some autonomy from competing demands for redistribution to enable it to manage these complex rent processes. Evans (1995) and Migdal (1988) look at the conditions under which states can support a process of late industrialisation.

They argue that this depends on a set of characteristics of the state including the degree of autonomy of the state from society and institutionalized channels that bind together state and society. They identify successful developmental state institutions as being sufficiently centralised while having autonomy from redistributive pressures. Yet while the state may adopt formal industrial policies, the effectiveness of these policies may be constrained by patterns of power outside formal state institutions and thus only superficially related to formal characteristics of the state such its degree of centralisation.

Another concept from within this school of thought that has become important in analysing the impact of institutions on growth in developing countries is the concept of the ‘infrastructural’ power of the state. Michael Mann (1984, 1993) developed this concept to explain economic change as a process of bureaucratisation of political institutions. In line with Weber, societies are conceived as manifestations of different forms of social power where transition is a process of progression from one form of domination to another. The drivers of social and economic transition in this framework are plural and depend on the prevailing forms of power that the society embodies. Mann argued that there are four distinct forms of social power: economic, political, ideological and military, each of which, in different epochs, held sway over the process of social change. Mann contended that economic change has to be explained by looking at the consolidation of state power over time. He argued that there are two types of state power. The first of these is despotic power. He defined this as the range of actions which

the elite is empowered to undertake without routine, institutionalized negotiation with civil society groups. The second form of state power for Mann is infrastructural power.

Infrastructural power is the power of the state to penetrate civil society and to implement political decisions throughout the realm. It allows the state to co-ordinate society through its own infrastructure (Mann 1993). According to his argument, the process of economic transition will be determined by the extent to which the power of the state moves from forms of coercion to increasing infrastructural power exercised by a centralised state.

Weiss (1998) built on Mann’s concept of infrastructural power to argue that a more important aspect of state power is the capacity of the state to be effective. Weiss argued that the infrastructural power of the state will vary across policy areas and that ‘the capacity to ‘get one’s way in spite of opposition’ shares little with the capacity to mobilize consent or to institutionalize co-operation’ (1998, 4). This follows Skocpol’s (1985) view that the unevenness of state capacity is most significant for understanding behaviour in certain spheres.

Weiss is correct in so far as all states, including Tanzania and Vietnam, exhibit significant variability in terms of their effective capacities across different areas, and that this is important for understanding the extent to which political institutions can influence economic outcomes. Yet she does not identify the underlying reasons for the unevenness of state capacities and why some states lack the capability to enforce or implement particular types of decisions. While an analysis of the structure of the state and the degree to which the state has penetrated everyday life may capture some important features of the role of institutions in developing country growth, these state-centric approaches miss the importance of the social distribution of power outside formal state institutions.

Mann’s ambitious theory of the classification of societies on the basis of the ‘mode’ of power is insufficient. The impact on society of the forms that power takes (for example, coercive, military, ideological, political, bureaucratic or infrastructural) needs to be fully understood within a context of how a society sustains and reproduces itself. In reality, there is probably more plurality in the modes of power that all types of states use all the time. States use both infrastructural and coercive power simultaneously rather than dichotomously. Further, identifying the type of power that a political institution uses to

achieving the ends that it seeks or why it seeks certain ends over others. These heterodox state-centric approaches are correct in identifying power as critical to the understanding of the impact of institutions on growth. However, the institutional framework they provide for analysis is not sufficient in itself to explain the nature of the distribution of power in society and in developing countries in particular.