Beyond Structure versus Agency, Context versus Conduct

Abstract

In Chapter 2 we dealt with what might be regarded as the two most fundamental questions of political analysis — how we define the ‘political’ and how we might adjudicate between contending accounts of what occurs within that domain. In this chapter we descend one rung on the ladder of conceptual abstraction to deal with a scarcely less significant issue — that of structure and agency (or context and conduct). Essentially, what we are concerned with here is the relationship between the political actors we identify (having decided upon our specification of the sphere of the political) and the environment in which they find themselves; in short, with the extent to which political conduct shapes and is shaped by political context. Clearly on such a fundamental issue as this we are likely to find a considerable variety of opinions. Some authors (notably pluralists and elite theorists) place their emphasis upon the capacity of decision-makers to shape the course of events. By contrast, other more structuralist authors (notably many institutionalists and neo-Marxists) emphasise instead the limited autonomy of the state’s personnel and the extent to which they are constrained by the form, function and structure of the state itself.