Abstract:

Does the causal relationship between economic crisis and greater state autonomy so widely accepted in the advanced capitalist context hold for Latin America and, in particular, for Mexico? Despite ongoing debates over the bases of state autonomy and its political or theoretical implications, the claim that fiscal crisis facilitates greater autonomy is one of the few propositions to generate relative consensus from both state-centered and classcentered theorists of the advanced capitalist world. In the literature on Latin America, however, there is much less consensus about state autonomy, a concept which generally refers to the policy capacity of state bureaucrats to act independently of class pressures, especially the demands of the capitalist class.