Contemporary articles citing Tilly C (1992) Coercion Capital Eur

state, european, history, states, historical, modern, capacity, alternative, four, institutional

Li, RSK. 2002. "Alternative Routes to State Breakdown: Toward an Integrated Model of Territorial Disintegration." Sociological Theory. 20:1 1-23. Link

A theoretical strategy is proposed to integrate competing models of state breakdown by conceptualizing key concepts in these models at a more abstract level. The demographic model, which asserts that rapid population growth can bring about state breakdown when economic and political institutions are too rigid, is extracted from Goldstone's work. The geopolitical model, which argues that deteriorating geopolitical condition can bring about state breakdown if the state is too weak and the economy too unproductive, is extracted from Skoepols and Collins's works. The competing models are conceptualized as alternative and interacting routes to state breakdown where changing population pressure and geopolitical condition may generate integrative or disintegrative tendency depending on state power and productivity. A model describing four dimensions of state power-economic, military, political, and administrative-is constructed to incorporate various conceptualizations of the state in the state breakdown literature. Also integrated in the model is a third alternative route suggesting that rapid market development can generate disintegrative tendency if state power is too low. The synthesized model allows us to see that disintegrative/integrative tendency produced by one route mail intensify or alleviate that generated by another route.

Jepperson, RL. 2002. "Political Modernities: Disentangling Two Underlying Dimensions of Institutional Differentiation." Sociological Theory. 20:1 61-85. Link

This article recommends that we recover two old contrasts from the history of social thought in order to facilitate the recently renewed discussion of multiple variants of European political modernity. Recovering them greatly aids in clarifying the different ``modernizing'' paths that the European-system polities took during the state-consolidation and nation-building periods of the ``long nineteenth century.'' Specifically, the basic polity forms delineated in this article capture strikingly well the distinctive ``institutional logics'' and political cultures of the Anglo, Nordic, Germanic, and French orbits, legacies enduring through the 1960s and beyond. Clarifying these polity forms also helps in isolating underlying institutional changes occurring in the contemporary (post-World War II) period (current institutional convergence, for example).

Hopcroft, RL. 2001. "Theoretical Implications of Regional Effects." Sociological Theory. 19:2 145-164. Link

Local economic institutions (systems of property rights and rules of land use) influenced the course of economic change in European history, as well as state formation and religious change. In this paper, I outline the theoretical implications of these regional effects. None of our existing macrolevel theories and explanations of the ``rise of the West'' can adequately incorporate them, so I present an alternative theory, based on rational choice premises. Yet the existence of these regional effects also highlights the deficiencies of a rational choice theoretical approach. First, the approach is unable to explain historical contexts, institutional legacies, or the effects of timing, which were vital for outcomes of social change but that lie outside the model itself. Second, although it can be very useful, the model of the actor motivated by material self-interest often proved inadequate in historical situations. Solutions are suggested.

Meyer, JW & RL Jepperson. 2000. "The ``actors'' of Modern Society: the Cultural Construction of Social Agency." Sociological Theory. 18:1 100-120. Link

Much social theory takes for gr anted the core conceit of modern culture, chat modern actors-individuals, organizations, nation states-are authochthonous and natural entities, no longer really embedded ill culture. Accordingly while there is much abstract metatheory about ``actors `` and their ``agency, `` there is arguably little theory about the topic. This article offers direct arguments about how the modern (European, now global) cultural system constructs the modern actor as an authorized agent for various interests via an ongoing relocation into society of agency originally located in transcendental authority or in natural forces environing the social system. We see this authorized agentic capability as an essential feature of what modern theory and culture call an ``actor,'' and one that, when analyzed, helps greatly in explaining a number of otherwise anomalous ol little analyzed features of modern individuals, organizations, and slates. These features include their isomorphism and standardization, their internal decoupling, their extraordinarily complex structuration, and their capacity for prolific collective action.

Davis, DE. 1999. "The Power of Distance: Re-theorizing Social Movements in Latin America." Theory and Society. 28:4 585-638. Link

Carroll-Burke, P. 2002. "Material Designs: Engineering Cultures and Engineering States - Ireland 1650-1900." Theory and Society. 31:1 75-114. Link

Mclean, PD. 2004. "Widening Access While Tightening Control: Office-holding, Marriages, and Elite Consolidation in Early Modern Poland." Theory and Society. 33:2 167-212. Link

Elites are dynamically emergent and evolving groups, yet their organization at any given time has tremendous implications for the tenor of social life and the probability of historical change. Using data on more than 3,000 Senatorial office-holders and over 3,100 elite marriages in early modern Poland, this article systematically documents changes over time in the structure of the Polish elite between 1500 and 1795 from a ``multiple-networks'' perspective. It measures timing of entry into senatorial ranks, regional integration of the elite, degree of elite dominance, and patterns of overlap between office-holding and marriage networks across four distinct eras in Polish history. Aggregate network patterns reveal a system in the eighteenth century characterized simultaneously by widening political access and increasing super-elite political control. Highlighting these patterns makes better sense of the Polish nobility's distinct cultural practices than do other historical sociological accounts and illuminates the structural basis for Poland's remarkable constitutional moment in the late eighteenth century.

Tarrow, S. 2004. "From Comparative Historical Analysis to ``local Theory'': the Italian City-state Route to the Modern State." Theory and Society. 33:3-4 443-471. Link

Many explanations have been offered for why the dominant city-states of Italy declined, giving way to the larger, national states of Western Europe. Some, like World Systems theorists, have seen the decline of the Italian city-states as the result of the shift of trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, while others, like Richard Lachmann, have focused on institutional arrangements that rendered these systems less resilient when faced by external threats. This article focuses on the relations of local institutions with the interests of capital, and on the role of contentious politics within the city-state that developed as a result of this interaction. Taking as my starting point the comparative historical analysis of statebuilding in the work of Charles Tilly, in Coercion, Capital and European States, the article places contentious politics as a bridge between the Tillian categories of capital-domination and statebuilding, using the case of Florence in the late 14th and early 15th centuries to etch the skeleton of that bridge. With Tilly, I argue that the class interests of the urban elites that were built directly into the mechanisms of city-state politics worked at cross-purposes to the collective requirements of statebuilding. Next, I argue that Tilly pays too little attention to the specificities of the Italian case and gives short shrift to its internal political processes. Finally, I argue that class domination working through institutional conflicts led to periodic outbursts of conflict and built a lack of trust into the structure of governance. I conclude by suggesting why the Italian city-states, at least, were inhibited from taking the nation-state route to the modern world until quite late in their histories.

Kim, Jaeeun. 2009. "The Making and Unmaking of a ``transborder Nation'': South Korea During and After the Cold War." Theory and Society. 38:2 133-164. Link

The burgeoning literature on transborder membership, largely focused on the thickening relationship between emigration states in the South and the postwar labor migrant populations and their descendants in North America or Western Europe, has not paid due attention to the long-term macroregional transformations that shape transborder national membership politics or to the bureaucratic practices of the state that undergird transborder claims-making. By comparing contentious transborder national membership politics in South Korea during the Cold War and Post-Cold War eras, this article seeks to overcome these limitations. In both periods, the membership status of colonial-era ethnic Korean migrants in Japan and northeast China and their descendants was the focus of contestation. The distinctiveness of the case-involving both a sustained period of colonial rule and a period of belated and divided nation-state building interwoven with the Cold War-highlights the crucial importance of three factors: (1) the dynamically evolving macro-regional context, which has shaped transborder national membership politics in the region in distinctive ways; (2) the essentially political, performative, and constitutive nature of transborder nation-building; and (3) the role of state registration and documentation practices in shaping the contours of transborder national membership politics in the long run. By incorporating Korea-and East Asia more broadly-into the comparative study of transborder nation-building, this article also lays the groundwork for future cross-regional comparative historical studies.

Kumar, Krishan. 2010. "Nation-states as Empires, Empires as Nation-states: Two Principles, One Practice?." Theory and Society. 39:2 119-143. Link

Empires and nation-states are generally opposed to each other, as contrasting and antithetical forms. Nationalism is widely held to have been the solvent that dissolved the historic European empires. This paper argues that there are in fact, in practice at least, significant similarities between nation-states and empires. Many nation-states are in effect empires in miniature. Similarly, many empires can be seen as nation-states ``writ large.'' Moreover, empires were not, as is usually held, superseded by nation-states but continued alongside them. Empires and nation-states may in fact best be thought of as alternative political projects, both of which are available for elites to pursue depending on the circumstances of the moment. Ultimately empires and nation-states do point in different directions, but it is not clear that the future is a future of nation-states. Empires, as large-scale and long-lasting multiethnic and ``multicultural'' experiments, may have much to teach us in the current historical phase of globalization and increasingly heterogeneous societies.

Tilly, Charles. 2010. "Cities, States, and Trust Networks: Chapter 1 of Cities and States in World History." Theory and Society. 39:3-4, SI 265-280. Link

An introduction to a vast but uncompleted survey of world history, this article argues that the study of the changing relationships among cities, states and trust networks can help us understand key elements of the emergence of our modern world. Beginning in ancient Uruk in modern-day Iraq, roughly five thousand years ago, the essay defines each of its central categories: city, state and trust network. It poses four questions to be pursued throughout the rest of the study. What determines the degree of segregation or integration of cities and states? What determines the relative dominance of cities and states? What determines the extent of separation or integration between cities or states, on one side, and trust networks on the other? What difference do these variable configurations make to the quality of ordinary people's lives?.

Centeno, Miguel & Elaine Enriquez. 2010. "Legacies of Empire?." Theory and Society. 39:3-4, SI 343-360. Link

Using methods and themes from Charles Tilly's work, this paper presents a number of propositions related to empire-to-state transformation. We argue that variations in national state development from imperial metropole origins can be explained, at least in part, by variations in imperial administration, finance, development, identity, and inequality. Capacity is a critical determinant of the results of state transformation, while decisions about finance and investment are both economic and political. Identity and inequality are inextricably linked to empire, and our exploration of these concepts demonstrates that they are the outcomes of variable processes linked to concrete, if inadvertent, lines of imperial decisions.

Clemens, Elisabeth. 2010. "From City Club to Nation State: Business Networks in American Political Development." Theory and Society. 39:3-4, SI 377-396. Link

Although cities were given no role in the constitutional order of the United States, the new nation posed the same potential threats to the accumulation of capital and wealth as European monarchs posed to long-powerful urban centers. In mobilizing for self-protection and advancement, American business developed new practices and discourses of citizenship that sustained a central role for the community as the locus of social provision. The strategy combined opportunity-hoarding through restricted membership in civic groups and obligation-hoarding through the alignment of diverse networks of voluntarism with this civic core. The linkage of business interests to this hybrid charitable-civic configuration constituted a source of resistance to nationalizing tendencies driven by demands for social protection. This alternative model of social provision and civic organization sustained a distinctive pattern of political membership and state development. By fiercely defending the capacity of privately governed civic networks to provide substantial social support, this history of business influence through community organizations lives on in the partial and fragmented character of the American welfare state.

Saylor, Ryan. 2012. "Sources of State Capacity in Latin America: Commodity Booms and State Building Motives in Chile." Theory and Society. 41:3 301-324. Link

The pursuits of private profit and distributional political advantage can be powerful state building motives. This article describes how each motive can trigger a distinct causal sequence amid commodity booms, which can result in the growth of state capacity. First, when pursuing profit during booms, export-oriented actors regularly seek new state-supplied public goods, the provision of which promotes the expansion of state capacity. Second, when booms enrich rivals to the ruling coalition, coalition members may respond with institution building to preserve their existing political advantages. A case study of Chile (1848-1883) and supplementary evidence from Argentina, Central America, Colombia, and Peru indicate that these causal sequences may have been central to state building in Latin America historically.