Measuring State Power: Capacity vs Autonomy

Ever since a new state building agenda has conquered central stage in politological literature, the primary comparative measures of “state power” have been based on concepts and indicators of “capacity”. This paper argues instead that stateness involves two interrelated dimensions: the state’s governmental capacity, or the ability to achieve its goals; and the state’s political autonomy in formulating these very goals. Although largely neglected, the autonomy dimension is of paramount importance as it deals with the concept of state sovereignity. A state capable to implement and enforce decisions it did not autonomously formulate, is not a sovereign sate, but a heterodirected political entity. Independently of its military strength, economic performance or coercive-administrative capability, one such ‘entity’ is characterized by a weak stateness. Thus, measures based on capacity alone reveal a minimalist vision of the ‘state’. The state should be rather understood as the interplay of measures of both capacity and autonomy. How do we measure autonomy? Forces that limit it are of different kinds. Excluding objective limitations (natural resources, population) and juridical and cultural constraints (constitutions, international laws and treaties, and political culture) we are left with a twofold distinction between external and internal forces. External forces include other states, international organizations, private firms and multinational corporations. On the domestic side, we find various types of societal forces and groups, party machines and patronage and clientele networks and, again, private firms and powers of economic nature. Though all of this should be considered within a holistic index of state autonomy, we focus here on the domestic side and the public/private dichotomy—the political autonomy of “the modern state” is, first and foremost, the autonomy of public power from private power. We then present a statistical elaboration by drawing on five indicators of corruption and the ‘power of the wealthy’ derived from the Varieties of Democracy dataset. We show how a large sample of countries fits into a matrix obtained by the interplay of ‘petty corruption’ and ‘grand corruption’, giving birth to four categories that combine different levels of state strength (integrity) and weakness (corruption/capture). In conclusion, we go back to the original point, emphasizing that this framework does not apply to “corruption” studies alone, nor just to the study of the public/private nexus; the main finding of our research is that stateness itself should be understood as the interplay between the two dimensions outlined above: the state’s coercive-administrative capacity to implement and enforce, and the state’s political autonomy to decide and formulate what has to be enforced and implemented.