Governance and State Structures

‘Governance’ denotes the various ways in which economic and social coordination is secured to implement rules and to produce collective goods. As this involves actors engaging within institutional contexts, it has a structural as well as an actor-centred dimension. State structures matter for analysis of governance because government itself matters. The analysis of governance in this sense converges wi th core preoccupations of comparative political economy, involving engagement between organized interests in a specific domestic and international institutional context. This chapter takes a more selective approach and focuses specifically on the significance of state structures for explaining cross-national variations in processes of securing coordination and implementing rules within the domestic political context , where the underlying concern is with the provision of collective goods in the form of stable administrative systems and effective government.