The hypothesis of this article is that the changing role of the state can best be explained
in terms of the growth of government. The growth of the state and its importance in
Western society can be measured in the following areas: (1) growth of government
agencies; (2) growth of state officials; (3) growth of taxation and the states share of the
national product; (4) growth of legislation and programs; (5) growth of government
control over the economy. These aspects are reviewed and analyzed. Proceeding from the
observation that even in those fields where the state is growing, the problems grow faster
than the agencies that should tackle them, two basic strategies are recommended for the
predicaments of Western democracy: fighting rising expectations to reduce overloads of
the state and ungovernability; and creating new expectations via mobilization of new
productive forces.
11
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12
many who have shaped the economic policy of the whole era of
Adenauer and Erhard, is alien to many other countries. In Britain, the
metaphysics of the state introduced by Hegelians, Bosanquet, and
Green was heavily attacked by liberals such as Spencer (1960) or L. T.
Hobhouse (1951), and linguistic analysis ranked the concept of the state
among those notions that create confusion without being definable
(Weldon, 1953: 46 ff.). Indeed even on the continent, in its origins the
state was a kind of metaphor derived from analogies to the &dquo;estate&dquo;
(Oakeshott, 1975: 197).
The pluralist paradigm in the United States overshadowed the &dquo;idea
of the state,&dquo; which was ridiculed by Bentley (1949: 263):
The &dquo;idea of the state&dquo; has been very prominent, no doubt, among the
intellectual amusements of the past, and at particular places and times it
has served to help give coherent and pretentious expression to some
particular groups activity. But in either case it is too minute a factor to
deserve place in a work covering as broad a range as this.
typology of the subsystems of the social system on the one hand, and the
classification of basis and superstructure functions among many
Marxist writers, on the other hand.
Thus there is less need than in the days of the old antimetaphysicians
to wipe out the notion of state altogether. For analytical reasons, it is
largely synonymous with the term &dquo;political-administrative system,&dquo; a
clumsy neologism of the late 1960s and 1970s resulting from a merger of
systems theory and neo-Marxist approaches. In recent policy analysis,
the traditional gap between the very abstract notion of state and the
term government, which suffers from too many institutional conno-
tations, has been bridged by the revitalization of the old term
governance, in use from Sir John Fortescue down to the founding
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13
fathers, and later discarded by the liberal and positivist theories of the
state.
In the leading policy-analysis literature, the state as a notion is hardly
even mentioned, not even as a catchword in the index. It functions only
in epithets such as welfare state or police state. The predominant credo
of liberal-democratic science in the West does not see a tension between
the two organizing principles in the political and the economic sphere.
Market society and parliamentary democracy are compatible; frictions
between the two principles are looked upon as being temporary ones
and not fundamental ones. It is therefore unnecessary to rely on the state
as an arena for mediation between the two principles. It is sufficient to
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14
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15
policy arenas. Even Marxism has come fairly close to Lowis ( 1978: 178)
assumption that distinctive arenas of power develop their own charac-
teristic political processes and power structures. Their analysis seems to
be more rewarding than a study of the global class struggles that are
allegedly going on in bourgeois societies.
The analytic approach to the abstract notion of the state can
therefore use the concept of the state predominantly as an umbrella for
describing the various activities of government, or as Richard Rose
( 1984: 4) has put it: &dquo;To speak of government is a bit like speaking of an
elephant, for each can be identified by any one of a large number
different-size characteristics.&dquo; This bon mot shows the limitations of
empiricism because it hints at the joke of the blind men, who, with
limited experience, describe an elephant without having a vision of the
whole. The state-elephant has another characteristic: not even its size is
constant. In most societies-capitalist as well as socialist-it is growing.
The hypothesis of this article is that the changing role of the state can
best be explained in terms of the growth of government.
The growth of the state and its meaning in Western society can be
measured in the following areas:
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16
TABLE 1
The Growth in Central Government Departments, 1849-1982
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17
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18
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19
TABLE 2
The Growth of Public Employment
SOURCE: Die Zeit: B~schaftigte beim Staat, No. 16 (1983: 32); second column
Rose (1984: 132).
upward trend in government borrowing in the late 1970s has been partly
reduced, independent of the composition of governments. The Thatcher-
ists and Reaganomists were-in spite of their credos-not the most
efficient governments in this respect. The growth of public debt is, in the
long run, one of those trends that more deeply affects the individual
citizen than other forms of the growth of the state because they
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20
determine more rigorously the room for financial maneuver for future
generations.
GROWTH OF LEGISLATION AND JUDICIALIZATION
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CL
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23
TABLE 5
The Growth of Legislation
countries, the number of government acts enacted each year has been
higher where government was smaller.
The growth of the state is a fairly indirect process, hardly open to
quantification. The whole debate on Verrechtlichung (the process of
justice) shows that legislation is only part of the problem. The English
translation of judicialization is not a complete equivalent for the
German word because there are two different processess at work:
Vergesetzlichung (judicialization by law) and Justizialisierung (judi-
cialization via court sentences) (Voigt, 1980: 18). The critical Frankfurt
school was inclined to look favorably at the first waves of juridification,
initiated by the liberal constitutional state (Rechtsstaat) to guarantee
human rights and by the early welfare state to put certain social rights on
the statute book. The new tendencies for judicialization, however, that
interfere in the most intimate relations of families and other face-to-face
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24
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25
TABLE 6
State Industries and Their Share of National Employment
SOURCE: Lindblom (1977: 114); Kuhne (1976: 66); Himmelstrand et al. (1981: 62).
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26
research has taught us that voters reward only those socialist proposals
that carry immediate benefits. For example, redistributive measures,
equal rights, or comprehensive schooling (Budge and Farlie, 1983: 160).
Surveys among trade unionists also reveal that more abstract issues
dealing with property and co-determination are not as popular among
the masses as among the union leaders.
The property share of the state in the means of production is probably
not a good indicator for the growth of government. Only Britain has a
long experience of nationalization and reprivatization that allows an
evaluation of the efficiency of public utilities. Profitable sectors, such as
automobile production-in some countries as much as 25% (Britain,
Germany) or 50% (France) state-owned (see Table 7)-are positively
evaluated even by authors who, on the whole, come to pessimistic
conclusions about nationalized industries in Britain (Pryke, 1981: 257
ff.). But in countries with a small public sector in manufacturing, public
utilities have to be considered as an aspect of infrastructual services
rather than by the efficiency standards of the private nonmonopolistic
economy.
The British left still thinks that nationalization should tackle larger
problems than the efficiency of individual factories, such as multi-
national corporations and the improvement of sectoral and regional
economic policies (Sloman, 1978: 124). Less ideological authors on the
continent have laid greater stress on efficiency because of the impor-
tance of the public sector for investment (Kuhne, 1976: 66). West
German trade-union ideologues launched this idea because of the large
role of the trade unions in capital ownership, subsumed under the
catchword Gemeinwirtschaft, to avoid connotations of the national-
ization of socialist countries in revolutionary periods.
At the other end of the spectrum, theories like that propagated by
Mancur Olson (1982: 81), deduce the decline of nations from the
pressure and inertia of big organized groups. These illuminate the
&dquo;British disease,&dquo; frequently explained by the unusually large role that
British government has played in economic life, as the result of group
pressures. But even in contributions to the literature that are less global
in their judgments, an increase in public ownership is not seen to
increase efficiency. On the other hand, the leftist literature now scarcely
recognizes nationalization as an efficient lever for the transition to
socialism. Critics from socialist countries usually see &dquo;state capitalism&dquo;
as just another form of exploitation by monopolies (Vinogradov, 1973:
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27
TABLE 7
Government Ownership by Sector
SOURCE: Heidenheimer et al. (1983: 134); Housing, p. 102; Andrain (1980: 23).
NOTE: 1 = complete government control; 0 =
complete private ownership.
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28
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29
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30
ty (for details see von Beyme, 1984b). Rose (1979), who did much to
launch the debate on government overload, finally came to the conclu-
sion that there is little fire behind the smoke. The discussion on overload
usually ends with the vague demand that governments have to stop
trying &dquo;to play God&dquo; (King, 1975: 174).
Survey results that show the subjective factor of growing demands
combined with scant trust in the problem-solving capacity of the state
should be not overrated. If we look at the figures of popular confidence
in major institutions of society, there are national differences, but in all
the Western democracies, modern citizens trust government institutions
(except for Ireland in the case of the Church) much more than private
sector institutions (see Table 8). Oddly enough, Germany ranks lowest
in trust in the bureaucracy. This verbal response is not confirmed by the
observed behavior of most German citizens compared to that of citizens
of other countries.
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31
TABLE 8
Popular Confidence in Major Institutions of Society (in percentages)
that of Carl Schmitt during the Weimar period, which believed that a
strong state can cope with crisis. Neoconservatism-although demand-
ing more regulation in spheres like internal and external security and
economic and social policies-advocates deregulation, but does not
effectively implement it. These contradictions underlie the fact that
many conservative governments in the early 1980s, from Reagan to
Kohl, have a fairly good ability to steer society, but end up implement-
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32
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Klaus von Beyme is Professor of Political Science at the University of Heidelberg and
President of IPSA. He has written, among other relevant books, Interessengruppen in der
Demokratie (1980), Challenge to Power, Trade Unions and Industrial Relations in
Capitalist Countries (1980), and Die politischen Theorien der Gegenwart (5th ed., 1984).
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