The state, regulation, and global restructuring: reasserting the political in political economy

Abstract

This paper offers a critique of the recent work on global economic and state restructuring in the broader political economy literature. It argues that much of this work, because of its theoretical reliance on regulation theory, offers only a partial account of the state and state restructuring. The paper offers a framework for understanding state restructuring and the state's role in economic regulation that adds more explicitly political imperatives to the existing regulation account. The methodological goals of the regulationist literature have led it to focus too heavily on the reproduction of capitalist relations as the primary object of state policies and institutions. That focus should be enlarged to include an explicit analysis of the important element of state-citizen relations. In addition to helping reproduce capitalist relations, state policies must also reproduce a condition of political legitimacy between state and citizen in order to ensure the continued reproduction of state institutions and state sovereignty. While the state-citizen relation is closely bound up with economic relations, it also includes non-economic, more purely political aspects. I argue that the imperative of state-citizen legitimacy will play an important role in how the state is restructured in the present crisis. The paper ends by offering a case study of the local state in Los Angeles in order to illustrate how state-citizen political legitimacy can play an important role in state restructuring.