Tracking the State in a Liberal Economy: Empirical Indicators and Irish Experiences

The ‘resilience’ of neoliberal ideas about the role of the state has posed new questions about the persistence of as well as variability in the functions states carry out. Actual states often evince more complex combinations of policy commitments than are easily captured by the dominant typologies, such as the varieties of capitalism. Capitalist societies are frequently an amalgam of types of state activity, pockets of activist state intervention, zones of market-governed conduct, domains of regulation. The complex coexistence of types of state activity needs to be captured in a more nuanced manner than is often seen. The purpose of this paper is to explore the insights that can be gleaned from adopting an organizational approach to understanding the role of the state, taking the Irish state as a case study. It profiles three key themes in the evolution of the Irish state, and points toward the potential of organizational analysis of the state for comparative political science.