The Return of the State in Comparative Politics during the 1980s

For much of the mid-twentieth century, political scientists studying government largely looked past the state itself. They focused instead on society-interest groups, voters, classes, and public opinion-treating the state as little more than a neutral arena where these forces competed. By the 1980s, this assumption began to crack. Scholars across continents started arguing that the state was not a passive referee but an active player with its own interests, capacities, and power. This shift, often called “the return of the state,” reshaped comparative politics and continues to influence how we analyse governments today.

Why the state disappeared from political analysis
The cracks appear: studying the developing world
Bureaucratic-authoritarianism and the work of O’Donnell
The Marxist debate over the capitalist state
Miliband and the instrumentalist view
The challenge from Poulantzas
Bringing the state back in
State autonomy and state capacity
The neoliberal paradox
Why the return of the state matters for comparative politics

Why the state disappeared from political analysis

To understand the return of the state, you first need to understand why it left. During the 1950s and 1960s, two dominant approaches shaped political science in the United States and influenced scholarship worldwide: pluralism and structural-functionalism. These society-centred theories assumed that political outcomes could be explained almost entirely by what happened in society.

The logic was straightforward. If you understood the inputs-what citizens demanded, how interest groups organised, how votes were cast-you could predict the outputs in the form of policies and decisions. The state was treated as a kind of conversion machine that turned societal preferences into governmental action. The term “state” itself was rarely used in mainstream comparative work; scholars preferred to talk about “the political system” or “government.”

This approach worked reasonably well when studying established Western democracies. But it ran into serious trouble when applied elsewhere.

The cracks appear: studying the developing world

The first major challenge to society-centred analysis came from scholars studying Latin America, Asia, and Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. How could you explain a sudden military coup, an entrenched authoritarian regime, or a rapid state-led economic transformation purely through interest groups and voting patterns? These phenomena demanded attention to the state as an independent force.

Bureaucratic-authoritarianism and the work of O’Donnell

One of the most influential contributions came from the Argentine political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell. His 1973 book Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism analysed why democracies in the more economically advanced countries of South America were breaking down rather than consolidating.

O’Donnell argued that the authoritarianism appearing in countries like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay was a genuinely new type of rule. Unlike the populist strongmen or traditional dictators of earlier eras, this new form rested on modern technocrats and a professionalised military organisation. He named it bureaucratic-authoritarianism.

The defining features of these regimes were striking: strong bureaucratic organisation, technocratic decision-making, the demobilisation of ordinary citizens from political life, and the repression of dissent. Crucially, O’Donnell suggested an “elective affinity” between higher levels of modernisation and the rise of this kind of regime-an argument that anticipated the military takeovers of the 1970s in the region. His work forced comparative politics to take the state’s coercive and administrative apparatus seriously as a subject of study in its own right.

By the 1980s, O’Donnell had shifted his focus to a new question that defined the decade in Latin America: how do countries move from dictatorship back to democracy? His co-authored 1986 work Transitions from Authoritarian Rule became foundational for the study of democratisation.

The Marxist debate over the capitalist state

While O’Donnell examined authoritarian regimes, a parallel debate was raging within Marxist political theory about the nature of the state in capitalist democracies. This conversation also pushed the state back to the centre of analysis.

Miliband and the instrumentalist view

The British sociologist Ralph Miliband published The State in Capitalist Society in 1969, a work that directly challenged the dominant pluralist theories. Miliband argued from what became known as an instrumentalist position. In his view, the state functioned as a direct tool of the ruling capitalist class.

Miliband supported this claim with detailed empirical analysis. He examined who actually staffed the senior positions in government, the civil service, the military, and the judiciary, showing how these state elites tended to share the social backgrounds, education, and worldview of the business class. The state, in this reading, was primarily the guardian of dominant economic interests.

The challenge from Poulantzas

Miliband’s argument provoked a famous exchange with the Greek-French theorist Nicos Poulantzas, conducted in the pages of the New Left Review between 1969 and 1976. Poulantzas argued from a structuralist perspective. He maintained that the state could not be reduced to a simple instrument controlled by individuals; instead, it was a structure that worked to ensure the long-term survival of capitalism as a system.

This led Poulantzas to one of the most important concepts in state theory: relative autonomy. He argued that the state needed a degree of independence from the direct control of any single class or business interest precisely so that it could manage conflicts among capitalists and maintain social cohesion over the long run. Poulantzas criticised Miliband for focusing too heavily on the interpersonal relationships of the state elite rather than treating classes and the state as objective structures.

The Miliband-Poulantzas debate mattered for comparative politics because, regardless of who “won,” both thinkers placed the state and its relationship to economic power at the heart of political analysis. The very idea of relative autonomy implied that the state had interests and logic that could not be read off directly from society-exactly the kind of thinking the return of the state encouraged. It is worth noting that scholars later argued the rigid “instrumentalist” label was something of a polemical simplification of Miliband’s more nuanced position.

Bringing the state back in

The various strands of state-focused research were given a name and a programme in 1985, when Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol published the landmark edited collection Bringing the State Back In. The title itself became a slogan for the whole intellectual movement.

The book argued that dominant theoretical paradigms in the comparative social sciences had failed to treat states as organisational structures or as potentially autonomous actors. The contributors drew together a wide range of comparative and historical research-on the formation of national states, on social revolutions, on the impact of states on class formation and ethnic relations-to build better tools for analysing how states actually operate.

State autonomy and state capacity

Two concepts became central to this approach. The first was state autonomy: the capacity of the state to formulate and pursue goals that are not simply a reflection of the demands or interests of social groups. The second was state capacity: the ability of a state to actually implement its goals, especially against resistance from powerful groups or in the face of difficult circumstances.

These ideas had real explanatory power. Countries with strong, coherent state institutions could implement reforms far more effectively than those with weak or fragmented states. This insight helped explain why some developing economies surged ahead while others stagnated, and it laid the groundwork for later studies of the East Asian “developmental state” in countries like South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. The intellectual work of this period was so influential that the Social Science Research Council ran a dedicated Committee on States and Social Structures from 1983 to 1990.

The neoliberal paradox

One of the most interesting features of the 1980s is that the return of the state in academic theory coincided with a powerful political movement that claimed to want less state. The decade was dominated by the rise of neoliberalism, most visibly through the policies of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States.

Thatcher gave voice to a politics of free-market economics that aimed to end the postwar era of state-managed capitalism, calling for privatisation of state-owned enterprises, deregulation, and greater independence of the individual from government. Reagan pursued a parallel agenda of deregulation, privatisation, and tax cuts.

Yet here lies the paradox. Even as neoliberal leaders promised to “roll back” the state, their projects actually depended heavily on state power. Both Reagan and Thatcher increased spending on the military and the police, strengthened the state’s role in protecting property rights, and used the coercive apparatus of government to push through their economic vision. Rather than disappearing, the state was being repurposed. This made the question of what the state does, and on whose behalf, more urgent than ever-reinforcing rather than weakening the academic case for studying the state directly.

Why the return of the state matters for comparative politics

The renewed attention to state power in the 1980s permanently changed how comparative politics is practised. Several lasting effects stand out.

First, it established that the state must be treated as a variable to be explained and a force that explains, not as a neutral background. Differences in state structure, autonomy, and capacity became central to comparing political and economic outcomes across countries.

Second, it bridged the gap between studying the developed and developing world. The same conceptual vocabulary-autonomy, capacity, coercion, bureaucracy-could now be applied to a military regime in South America, a welfare state in Western Europe, and a developmental state in East Asia.

Third, it set the stage for the institutionalist approaches that would dominate political science from the 1990s onward, which examine how the design of state institutions shapes political behaviour and outcomes. For students of comparative government, the return of the state is therefore not just a historical episode but the foundation of much contemporary analysis.

What do you think? If neoliberal governments in the 1980s claimed to want less state but in practice relied on strong state power, does this suggest that the real political question is never “more state versus less state” but rather “whose interests the state serves”? And how useful do you find concepts like state autonomy and state capacity for explaining the strengths and weaknesses of governance in developing countries today?

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Table of Contents

Why the state disappeared from political analysis 🔗

The cracks appear: studying the developing world 🔗

Bureaucratic-authoritarianism and the work of O’Donnell 🔗

The Marxist debate over the capitalist state 🔗

Miliband and the instrumentalist view 🔗

The challenge from Poulantzas 🔗

Bringing the state back in 🔗

State autonomy and state capacity 🔗

The neoliberal paradox 🔗

Why the return of the state matters for comparative politics 🔗