Introduction

More than four decades ago, Oscar Oszlak and Guillermo O’Donnell wrote: “Estado y políticas estatales en América Latina: hacia una estrategia de investigación” (“State and policies in Latin America: Towards a research strategy”), which became a classic reference for the analysis of public policies from a social science perspective. The text, published in 1976 in a Latin American context characterized by the irruption of civil-military dictatorships, laid solid foundations for articulating an empirical research strategy on public policies, based on a theoretical understanding of the characteristics of Latin American capitalist states and their modalities of intervention within the framework of broader historical-social processes. It is from this place that the authors think of public – or, more precisely, state – policies as a privileged point for observing the “state in action” in a given social process. This meant that they implicitly disputed the orientation of the evolution of the discipline in the region by establishing a series of dialogical ruptures with both the historical-structural approaches (whether Marxist or Weberian) and the empiricist analyses derived from the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Such ruptures questioned the hegemonic premises in the field of state and public administration studies in which the authors inscribed their analyses and, thus, opened up the possibility of a critical reappropriation from other conceptual perspectives, not without identifying some limitations and blind spots.

In this chapter, we propose to ponder the validity of the most significant contributions of the “proto-model” for the study of state policies developed by Oszlak and O’Donnell, which constitutes an unavoidable text when undertaking empirical research from critical perspectives. Our starting point is a Marxist conception of the capitalist state, which assumes the existence of numerous and very rich debates within this perspective. The general coordinates of this conception are based on understanding the state as a social relation, guarantor of the capitalist mode of accumulation, and, in this sense, as an articulator of hegemony. We also critically recover the concept of “relative autonomy” of the state developed by Nicos Poulantzas (1968–1978), which allows us to investigate in a more precise way how the state guarantees the conditions for class domination, such as the autonomization of the state apparatus itself.