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How do we explain the relationship between the state and society that produces the main social organizing principles of race, class, gender, and sexuality? Theorists of the state have explored this question for decades, producing a lively debate among proponents of contrasting models, most of which have, however, remained embedded in an exploration of class-based issues. Business dominance state theorists, for example, have consistently focused on the relationship between the state and economic or class actors that reproduces largely capitalist class relations through the state's authority to create policy and the huge dominance of capital interests over the state (Akard, 1992; Burris, 1992; Clawson, Neustadtl, and Weller, 1998; Hooks, 1990; Prechel, 2000; Skidmore and Glasberg, 1996).Capitalist state structuralists, in contrast, have emphasized the notion that the state is not simply situated in a capitalist society, but is instead a capitalist state. State policies are forged by the structure of the state itself and its position within the larger capitalist economy. State managers are constrained by the imperatives of the capitalist political economy to create and implement policies that reproduce the conditions of capital accumulation and to manage the conditions that create accumulation crises. State managers have no choice but to legislate this way: were the state to somehow operate outside of these structural parameters, it would court economic crises, which in turn would create political legitimacy crises that state managers can ill afford (Poulantzas, 1969; Mandel, 1975; Wright, 1978; Valocchi, 1989; Block, 1987; Glasberg, 1989). Moreover, because the state is the structural unification of contradictory class relationships, it remains free from direct control by class-based organizations. Pro-capitalist state economic intervention is not, therefore, produced by the participation of business organizations and corporate actors in the policy formation process. Rather, policy is a product of the contradictory relations of power embedded within state structures themselves. It is an expression of the state's underlying, capitalist structural bias.In contrast to both business dominance and capitalist state structuralist theories, state-centered structuralist theories argue that the state is the site of bureaucratic political power. The state is neither necessarily capitalist in nature nor subject to capitalists' demands. As an institution, the state has interests separate from the demands of external groups or economic pressures. Thus, it is possible for state managers to create policy to which all interest groups might actually object. State policy is shaped neither by the class backgrounds of its personnel nor by the nature of the capitalist political economy, but rather by the imperatives of bureaucracies. The state, as a bureaucratic and political structure, is separate from the economy. As such, state policy is shaped by past policy precedents, political and party needs, and state managers' interest in expanding their administrative domain and autonomy. In sum, the state is impervious to mechanisms of intraclass unity identified by business dominance theory and unaffected by the "capitalist nature" of state structures assumed by capitalist state structuralists (Skocpol and Ikenberry, 1983; Skocpol, 1985; 1992; Amenta and Skocpol, 1988; Hooks, 1990; 1991; Amenta and Parikh, 1991; Amenta and Halfmann, 2000; Chorev, 2007). It is also, according to this perspective, impervious to pressures from below.Proponents of the class dialectic perspective disagree with this last assertion. Instead, they complicate the analysis of state policy formation by examining the role of labor in addition to the state and capitalists in the decision-making process. In this model, class struggle processes affect the state and its policy making. As such, social movements through organized resistance can in fact apply substantial pressure on the state to legislate in their interests or otherwise address their needs, even if these needs are not entirely consistent with those of capital accumulation interests (Zeitlin, Ewen, and Ratcliff, 1974; Zeitlin and Ratcliff, 1975; Whitt, 1979; 1982; Esping-Anderson, Friedland, and Wright, 1976; Levine, 1988; Eckstein, 1997; Jackson, 2008). …

Some Things Borrowed, Some Things New: Toward a Multi-Sites of Power Approach to State Theory