Analysts of comparative politics share some fundamental assumptions about political economy. One is that states on the periphery of the world economy strive to promote capitalist development. Liberal scholars study the “developing” world, equate economic development with growth, and identify investment of capital in production as the driving force. Underdevelopment and dependency theorists analyzed emergent forms of capitalism. They took the integration of the Third World into the world capitalist economy as their object of study. Marxist scholars have concentrated on the related emergence of capitalist class relations in these societies. In the 1980s political economists turned to the study of entrepreneurial states and dependent development. For better or worse, “the late developing world” is assumed to be on the road of capitalist transformation.

We tend to take for granted that governments are playing a central role in this process. States strive to accelerate economic growth, industrialize, and promote “green revolutions.” Their motives seem to be obvious: Governments are either promoting the national interest or the interests of powerful social groups. Because the developmentalist impulse is assumed to be universal, analysts proceed to compare states in terms of their success. Some have argued that the capacity of rulers to promote development is a function of modernizing ideologies and growing institutional capacities of the state.