Beyond Weak and Strong: Rethinking the State in Comparative Policy History

Most public problems can be approached in many ways.¹ Urban noise, the honking of car horns, for example, could be tackled by building effective mass transit and discouraging automobile use, by forbidding the use of horns within city limits and fining violators, by encouraging harmonious social circumstances, or at least stress-reduction education programs, to make drivers less aggressive, by developing horns that target sound waves only at offending motorists, or by encouraging everyone to wear noise-reduction earphones. The problem of sexually transmitted diseases can be solved by encouraging chastity and fidelity as virtues, by strictly criminalizing transmission, or by prescribing antibiotics after the fact. Such varying approaches are qualitatively different. They do not just reflect distinct degrees of statutory intervention. States that adopt divergent solutions may, in a similar fashion, be fundamentally different from one another, not just stronger or weaker versions of an abstract ideal of public authority.

Some solutions involve massive investment in infrastructure or extensive social reform. Some involve punctilious enforcement of legal strictures; others, nothing more than a relatively minor technical breakthrough. Which approach wins favor is a political choice. Build a perfect society, says the utopian social reformer or the revolutionary, and the citizens will follow suit. Forbid what is unwanted and it will not happen, claims the autocrat. Even in the midst of inevitably bad circumstances, hopes the moralist, the ethical person will fare well. Name the problem and eventually we will find a solution, insists the technocrat.

Not every problem has the same palette of possible solutions. Some can best be tackled collectively. We could all wear respirators, but clean air laws are probably the better approach. Sometimes, a technical fix spares us heroic interventions. We could exhort children never to go near the medicine cabinet, but childproof bottle caps are much simpler. Still other problems require an individual solution. Municipal bike paths, however desirable, will probably never tackle obesity as effectively as individual eating habits.

Yet many problems can be solved equally well in an array of different ways. Does one allow a heroin addict maintenance doses of his accustomed poison, switch him to legal methadone, as in Britain, or insist that he abstain altogether, as in France? Is prostitution rendered yet another profession—taxable and insurable—among others, as in Germany and the Netherlands, or regarded as a crime to be punished, as in Sweden. Are criminals locked up and harshly punished, or rehabilitated?² Are the disabled given pensions or do quotas require employers to hire them? Is culture subsidized, directly through government grants, as in most of Europe, or indirectly via tax deductions, as in the United States? Is safety encouraged by direct regulation, as in Europe, or via courts holding manufacturers liable for damages, as in the United States?³ Does one have informal social trust to encourage and cement economic relations, as in the United States, Germany, and Japan, or does the state need to intervene in cultures where such social capital is lacking?⁴ Is air pollution tackled by encouraging mass transit, as in most of Europe, or strict emissions controls, as in the United States? Is redistribution achieved through the tax (U.S.) or the welfare (Sweden) system?⁵

States are often thought to differ mainly in having stronger or weaker abilities and desires to intervene. They all do much the same thing, in other words, but do it more or less. Recent comparative scholarship across a variety of public policies has demonstrated, however, that such a simple two-dimensional view of what states do fails to account for the full range of their activities. In fact, states make choices among a variety of solutions that are not merely more or less interventionist but are simply different. Comparative policy history has helped uncover the extent to which similar problems are dealt with among nations via different statutory tools. The time has come to modify our overall conception of the state in accord with this ever more nuanced historical understanding of what public authorities actually do at the coalface. States are, in this sense, qualitatively different...