THE ROLE OF THE

STATE AND THE GROWTH

OF GOVERNMENT
KLAUS VON BEYME

The hypothesis of this article is that the changing role of the state can best be explained
in terms of the growth of government. The growth of the state and its importance in
Western society can be measured in the following areas: (1) growth of government
agencies; (2) growth of state officials; (3) growth of taxation and the states share of the
national product; (4) growth of legislation and programs; (5) growth of government
control over the economy. These aspects are reviewed and analyzed. Proceeding from the
observation that even in those fields where the state is growing, the problems grow faster
than the agencies that should tackle them, two basic strategies are recommended for the
predicaments of Western democracy: fighting rising expectations to reduce overloads of
the state and ungovernability; and creating new expectations via mobilization of new
productive forces.

INTRODUCTION: THEORY OF THE STATE

AND POLICY ANALYSIS

The state as a concept in its own right is closely linked to a tradition of

holistic political thought that has been dubbed by Johan Galtung ( 1983)
as &dquo;teutonic.&dquo; The expression &dquo;teutonic&dquo; was chosen to avoid the

impression that this tradition is exclusively German. Indeed, it was

emphasized that the teutonic tradition was very influential in eastern
Europe via influences of Hegelian and Marxist thought. Said the British
liberal, Hobhouse (1951: 134) in 1918: &dquo;There is no double dose of
original sin which established this worship in Germany.&dquo; British and
American tradition preferred the concept of government, restricted to
men in executive authority or to legal institutions and the political

machinery. State as a concept was seen to have a universal nature that

endows public power with a unique mission (Dyson, 1980: 209). Soziale
Gestaltung (the shaping of society) via actively pursued policies of
reform, or Ordnungspolitik (law and order politics), which has been a
strong idea even among those fairly conservative neoliberals in Ger-

11

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12

many who have shaped the economic policy of the whole era of
Adenauer and Erhard, is alien to many other countries. In Britain, the
metaphysics of the state introduced by Hegelians, Bosanquet, and
Green was heavily attacked by liberals such as Spencer (1960) or L. T.
Hobhouse (1951), and linguistic analysis ranked the concept of the state
among those notions that create confusion without being definable
(Weldon, 1953: 46 ff.). Indeed even on the continent, in its origins the
state was a kind of metaphor derived from analogies to the &dquo;estate&dquo;
(Oakeshott, 1975: 197).
The pluralist paradigm in the United States overshadowed the &dquo;idea
of the state,&dquo; which was ridiculed by Bentley (1949: 263):

The &dquo;idea of the state&dquo; has been very prominent, no doubt, among the
intellectual amusements of the past, and at particular places and times it
has served to help give coherent and pretentious expression to some
particular groups activity. But in either case it is too minute a factor to
deserve place in a work covering as broad a range as this.

The behavioral revolution in political science went a step further than

the older pluralists by fragmenting the idea of the state into a number
of different functional categories (Rose cited in Taylor, 1983: 158). But
systems theory reintegrated those into a new holistic idea, the idea of the
political system. Torchbearers of German systems theory, like
Luhmann, have argued that the state is analytically indefinite and
useless. Government, on the other hand, is subject to the opposite
weakness in the sense that it is focused on institutional and organiza-
tional aspects and hence not understandable on the basis of its own
categories (Luhmann, 1974: 3). The term political system, however,
serves much the same function as the concept that state does in a

typology of the subsystems of the social system on the one hand, and the
classification of basis and superstructure functions among many
Marxist writers, on the other hand.
Thus there is less need than in the days of the old antimetaphysicians
to wipe out the notion of state altogether. For analytical reasons, it is
largely synonymous with the term &dquo;political-administrative system,&dquo; a
clumsy neologism of the late 1960s and 1970s resulting from a merger of
systems theory and neo-Marxist approaches. In recent policy analysis,
the traditional gap between the very abstract notion of state and the
term government, which suffers from too many institutional conno-
tations, has been bridged by the revitalization of the old term
governance, in use from Sir John Fortescue down to the founding

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 13

fathers, and later discarded by the liberal and positivist theories of the
state.
In the leading policy-analysis literature, the state as a notion is hardly
even mentioned, not even as a catchword in the index. It functions only
in epithets such as welfare state or police state. The predominant credo
of liberal-democratic science in the West does not see a tension between
the two organizing principles in the political and the economic sphere.
Market society and parliamentary democracy are compatible; frictions
between the two principles are looked upon as being temporary ones
and not fundamental ones. It is therefore unnecessary to rely on the state
as an arena for mediation between the two principles. It is sufficient to

name the actors, arenas, and institutions where partial temporary

conflicts between the two principles are negotiated. Only two schools
have had some use for the concept of the state: the Marxists and the
neo-corporatists, though for different reasons.
Marxist writers of different schools were inclined to use the concept
of state because of a belief in the prestablized harmony of the rule of
capital and bourgeois democratic forms (Offe, 1983: 227), especially in
those theories of state monopoly capitalism that have tended to see the
bourgeois state as an agent of the ruling class that has been transformed-
under conditions of imperialism-more and more from serving as
ideeller Gesamtkapitalist (ideal capitalist class) [F. Engels] into a kind
of realer Gesamtkapitalist (practical capitalist class) that does not only
secure the conditions of production, but also is the &dquo;executor of the law
of values&dquo; [Vollzugsorgan des Wertgesetzes] (Habermas, 1973: 75).
Neo-Marxists in the West have increasingly asked why the bourgeois
state is seen to serve the public interest by the vast majority of Western
citizens instead of as the &dquo;state of the ruling class&dquo; (Altvater et al., 1976:
90 ff.). The neo-Marxists have refrained from superficial theories in
ideological manipulation. They have therefore emphasized-earlier
than theories of state monolopy capitalism in socialist countries-the
relative autonomy of the state going back to Marxs analysis in the
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte where the role of the state was
more heavily emphasized than in his earlier writings. Marx argued that
the state had vicariously created a general capitalist will that no longer
was formed through competition. The closer these theories were to

empirical research, such as in the school of Altvater and others, the

further they developed in the direction of a classification of the functions
of the state-close to what non-Marxist scholars did whether they used
the term state or not, and the theory of the state became an appendix of

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14

empirical research. As other Marxist analysts put it: &dquo;the functions of

the state enter analysis only as empirical facts, no longer via logical
derivation&dquo; (Esser, 1975: 148). This criticism motivates positivists to
take the neo-Marxists more seriously because they expect more
empirical work and fewer abstract derivations of the state from
economic conditions (Staatsableitung). Typical of this development is
an anecdote concerning the late Poulantzas, who was attacked by the
German neo-Marxists for his empiricism during a lecture in West
Berlin. His mocking response was: &dquo;I dont care for your German
Staatsableitung.&dquo;
Neo-corporatists are the other group who have needed a somewhat
restricted notion of the state. The locus of public policymaking was seen
as moving from parties and parliament into the corporative-functional
arena (Olsen, 1983: 199). Most neo-corporatists exaggerated the
mediatisation of parties (see von Beyme, 1983a), but the state remained
at least an actor channelling demands in the triangle of administration,
capital owners and trade unions organized as a system of interest
intermediation.
Nevertheless, these arrangements are proof of the crisis of the state-
as organized capitalism during the first world war and the first neo-

corporatist arrangements of the interwar period and after World War II

have shown. Comprehensive neo-corporatist arrangements have,
however, not been the result of the willful calculation of some
autonomous state actor but rather the unintended outcome of a series of
disparate interest conflicts and policy crises (Schmitter, 1984: 7 f.). In
the late 1970s, neo-Marxists, neo-corporatists, and other schools
became increasingly tired of the grand debates. It is not by chance that
their common meeting ground was policy analysis on the basis of some
typologies of state functions rather than deductive theories of the state.
The state was increasingly brought back into analysis (Skocpol, 1982),
but it became fruitful for empirical research only as a disaggregated
concept. Goals of the state, widely discussed in normative political
theories as well as in cameralistic treatises of the early absolutist
patrimonial state, were abandoned in the nineteenth century. Liberal
theories did not accept any goals for the state (except guaranteeing
external and domestic security), and authoritarian state theories from
Hegel and Schelling to Carl Schmitt did not find it necessary to define
goals for the state because the state itself was a kind of ultimate goal
(Bull, 1977: 26 ff). State functions derived from systems theories or
Marxism have tended to develop into typologies of policy programs or

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 15

policy arenas. Even Marxism has come fairly close to Lowis ( 1978: 178)
assumption that distinctive arenas of power develop their own charac-
teristic political processes and power structures. Their analysis seems to
be more rewarding than a study of the global class struggles that are
allegedly going on in bourgeois societies.
The analytic approach to the abstract notion of the state can
therefore use the concept of the state predominantly as an umbrella for
describing the various activities of government, or as Richard Rose
( 1984: 4) has put it: &dquo;To speak of government is a bit like speaking of an
elephant, for each can be identified by any one of a large number
different-size characteristics.&dquo; This bon mot shows the limitations of
empiricism because it hints at the joke of the blind men, who, with
limited experience, describe an elephant without having a vision of the
whole. The state-elephant has another characteristic: not even its size is
constant. In most societies-capitalist as well as socialist-it is growing.
The hypothesis of this article is that the changing role of the state can
best be explained in terms of the growth of government.
The growth of the state and its meaning in Western society can be
measured in the following areas:

growth of government agencies,

. growth of state officials,
. growth of taxation and the states share of the national product,

growth of legislation and programs,

. growth of government control over the economy.

THE GROWTH OF THE STATE

THE GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT AGENCIES

The growth of the state measured in numbers of employees and share

of GNP has no equivalent in the growth of central government
ministries. In the early days, for example in Cromwells &dquo;Instrument of
Government&dquo; (1653), there were constitutional restrictions, as there were
in Norway and in Sweden. These have since been amended. The
organizational power in most modern constitutions has been handed
over to government. Parliaments have been able to stop the prolif-
eration of new offices by using their power of the purse (von Beyme,
1969: 279 f.). Technological progress (post and telegraph) and the
establishment of new policy areas (technology, energy, refugees,

ecology departments) lead to an increase in offices. Patronage in a more

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 16

TABLE 1
The Growth in Central Government Departments, 1849-1982

SOURCE: Rose (1984: 157).

complicated political process and pressure from new powerful interest

groups have led to an increasing number of departments (e.g., atomic
power department in the FRG).
Nevertheless, there are functional limits to the size of cabinets, and
where many offices have developed, as in Britain, there has been a
tendency to create an inner circle of a cabinet proper and to exclude the
bulk of office holders from important meetings. If we look at the figures
compiled by Rose (1984: 157), only a few countries (e.g., France,
Canada, and Italy) have made excessive use of the organizational
prerogatives of government (see Table 1). Most Western countries-
Switzerland is in a top position because of its special tradition of
collegial government-show a moderate growth.
The comparison of ministries, however, is only the tip of the iceberg:
State-owned, quasi-governmental, parastatal agencies grow every-
where. Whereas the average government contains about nineteen
departments, hundreds of independent quagos and quangos (boards
and agencies) with a semi-official legal status (in Germany called

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 17

Anstalten des 6ffentlichen Rechts [appointees to quasi-judicial bodies])

have developed in most Western countries. Precisely because the
modern state suffers from the contradiction that is has to intervene in
more spheres than it can really penetrate and administrate with its
limited powers, government by contract develops even in countries
where deregulation is not an explicit goal of government programs.
In the United States, there are thousands of these agencies, some-
times not authorized by law, as committees of inquiry have stated. In
West Germany, about 100 agencies of this kind have been listed (Becker,
1978; Schuppert, 1981: 165 ff.). Britain is somewhere in between. In the
United States, cabinet size is relatively inflexible and every new
direction in policymaking leads to new institutions, whereas Germany is
characterized by the opposite extreme: New policies lead to only
&dquo;marginal changes to existing organizations&dquo;(Levine, 1981: 32). In spite
of so much political discontinuity in the twentieth century (and four
different regimes), foreign observers frequently wonder how in some
policy fields it has been possible to preserve the old institutions since
Bismarck.
In addition to quagos and quangos, there are numerous advisory and
consultative committees that should not be counted because they
predominantly serve only as policy advisers. In Britain, their number
has been estimated at as many as 1,000, although official figures indicate
only about 300 (Rose, 1984: 163). The same applies to West Germany. In
1977, the government indicated that there were 358 such bodies. Some
&dquo;experts on experts&dquo; estimate that their number is much higher (von
Beyme, 1983b: 145). Some of the quagos and quangos are far more
important than ministries. The largest quagos in Germany have 10 times
more employees than the smaller departments. The political influence of

agencies such as the Federal Bank or the Federal Labour Office is

certainly superior to many of the less important ministries.
The growth of the state affects the executive above all. The size of
parliaments has remained remarkably stable (Loewenberg and Patter-
son, 1979: 28 ff.). The output of laws is thus still only to a small extent
correlated with the number of actors in the institutions.

THE GROWTH OF PUBLIC EMPLOYMENT

In most Western countries, public employment has been growing

simply because the employment rate as such has increased. In many
countries-for example, West Germany-it remained in tune with the
growth of the proportion of the total working population (von Beyme,

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18

1983b: 150). In a crossnational perspective, Germany traditionally has

had a higher proportion of civil servants than the Anglo-Saxon
countries because of its authoritarian and early welfare-state traditions.
After World War II, the German rates of development of state
employees leveled down to the average of countries with a comparable
level of development and organizational complexity (Cullity, 1967).
This is all the more remarkable as countries, like Germany--with a
highly authoritarian past and a traditional mystification of the state and
the special loyalty of civil servants to the state-tend to include more
activities in the civil service, for example the jobs of professors and high
school teachers. More liberal-oriented societies, based on their tradition
of the nineteenth century, have excluded these. Recent debates about
loyalty and Berufsverbot (professional ethics) have led to proposals to
decrease the number of civil servants proper to avoid the excessive
loyalty demands-compared to most other liberal democracies--that
Germany imposes (see Tomuschat, 1981: 647 ff.).
If global comparisons of figures seem to suggest that parties do not
matter-as in other spheres of government output (see von Beyme,
1984a)-a more careful examination of individual policies shows that
party ideologies do matter with regard to questions of public employ-
ment. It is not by chance that the Scandinavian welfare states and
Britain-which have experienced long periods of Labour Party rule-
are on top of the list (see Table 2). The existence of powerful trade

unions is also of importance. Both factors show that public employment

in these states has also been widely used as an instrument of labor
market policy that has a higher rank among the goals of Labor govern-
ments than among the goals of Conservative or Christian-Democratic
administrations. Compared to European countries, the United States is
low on the scale of public employees as a percentage of national employ-
ment. Nevertheless it has a comparatively high ratio of public employees
to the population because of a deviant pattern of enrollment of the
population (and especially women) in the labor market (see Table 2).
THE GROWTH OF THE
TAX-BURDEN AND THE STATES SHARE
OF THE NATIONAL PRODUCT

Adolf Wagners law concerning the growth of state expenditures has

been quoted time and again, but its consequences have also been
exaggerated: A good deal of growth was concomitant on the growth of
the national product. Nevertheless, there is a tendency for taxes to grow.

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 19

TABLE 2
The Growth of Public Employment

SOURCE: Die Zeit: B~schaftigte beim Staat, No. 16 (1983: 32); second column
Rose (1984: 132).

An indicator widely used to illustrate this is total tax revenue as a

percentage of the GDP. Because of the different systems of social
insurance and the various degrees of fiscal federalism and extraction of
fees via parafisci, it is advisable to rely more on the indicator of taxes
and social insurance fees as percentage of the GNP (Table 3). Again
Japan and the United States have a minimum of state; the welfare states
of northern Europe are high on the list. If we include, however, the
indicator of public debt per capita (Table 4) then the United States is
high, too-right behind the welfare states-because of its worldwide
obligations, particularly in security policies. The causes of growth have
to be differentiated: inflation is more important in explaining increases
in income, whereas economic growth is more important in explaining
changes in expenditure taxes (Rose, 1984: 115). Invisible taxes and
evasion from taxation (Taylor, 1983: 52) through a growing economia
samtnersa (second economy) distort some of these figures. The secular

upward trend in government borrowing in the late 1970s has been partly
reduced, independent of the composition of governments. The Thatcher-
ists and Reaganomists were-in spite of their credos-not the most
efficient governments in this respect. The growth of public debt is, in the
long run, one of those trends that more deeply affects the individual
citizen than other forms of the growth of the state because they

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20

determine more rigorously the room for financial maneuver for future
generations.
GROWTH OF LEGISLATION AND JUDICIALIZATION

Although parliamentary personnel has remained constant over many

years, the output of laws has increased drastically. Old liberals, like
Spencer ( 1960: 174), suspected in the nineteenth century that the &dquo;divine
right of parliaments&dquo; was the contemporary substitute for the supersti-
tious belief in the &dquo;divine right of the kings&dquo; with consequences of
overregulation. The average number of laws is about 190 to 200 per year.
The United States has the highest number. This should warn us against
taking the number of laws per se as an indicator of the growth of the
state. Peculiarities of the political system of the United States, based on a
division of powers where private bills and private member bills have a
greater likelihood of passage than under conditions of prime ministerial
government with a high degree of party discipline, play a role. The fact
that we find Switzerland at the bottom of Table 5 may be taken as a hint
of the existence of comparatively little influence of the state in that
country. The position of other low-rankers, like France, is explained by
the use of French equivalents to laws, such as decree-laws. A high-
scorer, like Italy, has institutional variables, especially legislation by
committees. The high scores of countries like Italy, Austria, and
Germany after World War II are explained by their temporary need for
reregulation because most of the fascist legislation had to be amended.
Again, excessive legislation in those countries in certain years is no
indicator of an enduring trend toward a growing state. For federal
systems, the figures are altogether misleading because many laws are
passed on the state level. Moreover the very mechanism of vertical
checks and balances in federalism needs more regulation and increases
legislation.
Traditions in legislation may also explain the variance. French
statutes reflect Rousseaus desire for few and short laws regulating
general matters, whereas the common law tradition and pragmatism-
which do not subject legislation to a rigid exercise in Cartesianism--
produce long acts, treating a variety of points at relatively great length
(see Rose, 1984: 70). A realistic study will therefore weigh the density of
regulations in various policy arenas rather than count the overall output
of regulatory statutes, a method that does not reflect the quality of the
respective norms. Longitudinal studies have shown that legislation is
unable to provide evidence for the growth of the state. In many

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Downloaded from ips.sagepub.com at NORTH DAKOTA STATE UNIV LIB on June 10, 2015
 23

TABLE 5
The Growth of Legislation

SOURCE: Rose (1984: 69).

countries, the number of government acts enacted each year has been
higher where government was smaller.
The growth of the state is a fairly indirect process, hardly open to
quantification. The whole debate on Verrechtlichung (the process of
justice) shows that legislation is only part of the problem. The English
translation of judicialization is not a complete equivalent for the
German word because there are two different processess at work:
Vergesetzlichung (judicialization by law) and Justizialisierung (judi-
cialization via court sentences) (Voigt, 1980: 18). The critical Frankfurt
school was inclined to look favorably at the first waves of juridification,
initiated by the liberal constitutional state (Rechtsstaat) to guarantee
human rights and by the early welfare state to put certain social rights on
the statute book. The new tendencies for judicialization, however, that
interfere in the most intimate relations of families and other face-to-face

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24

groups (e.g., schools) are criticized as another proof of the increasing

Kolonialisierung der Lebenswelt (colonization of the world of private
life)(Habermas, 1981: v. 2, 531). This form of &dquo;growth of the state&dquo;
cannot be counted, only weighed. It has, however, provoked a counter-
reaction toward deregulation in the social sphere. In labor relations,
too, a certain nostalgia for conflict-oriented over discourse-oriented
modes of nonstatal interest intermediation has prevailed even in
Germany where the labor relations have been regulated most excessively
(Erd, 1978).
Counter-strategies against judicialization are discussed in many
social spheres. The problem of legal regulations to prevent discrimi-
nation against women has shown, however, that in many spheres, more
judicialization is needed for a certain while and not the opposite (Voigt,
1983: 54).

NATIONALIZATION AND STATE CONTROL

OVER THE ECONOMY

Most of the crisis theories dealing with Western democracies assume

that there is a basic gap between the principles supporting the market
economy and those on which political democracy is built. Leninist
socialism has tried to overcome this gap through nationalization of all
major means of production. But in Western democracies, too, the state
owns a wide variety of means of production. If public utilities only are

counted, West Germany ranks high because of its long tradition of

municipal ownership of public utilities (see Rose, 1984: 161). In a
comparison of the overall public ownership pattern, however, Germany
ranks rather low in spite of a strong social democratic tradition. As in
Sweden-where only 6% of the industry is publicly owned
(Himmelstrand, 1981: 5)-German plans for nationalization were
abandoned fairly early in favor of Keynesian-type countercyclical
spending and taxation policies (Heidenheimer et al., 1983: 147). In the
Latin countries, the mystique of nationalization has survived longer. In
this respect, the French left proved to be the most traditional political
current, though the list of nationalizations implemented after 1981 was
shorter than the one demanded by its former joint programs. In Italy-
as the 1975 analysis of the Chiarelli Committee (Guizzetti, 1977: 146 ff.)
has shown-even the Communists were more interested in increasing
efficiency in and parliamentary control over the &dquo;partecipaziani statali&dquo;
(state participation) in Italy. Before its access to power, the Spanish left
had lost confidence in the &dquo;classical force&dquo; of nationalization (Marzal,
1980: 171). In France only the CGT stuck to the old idea of

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 25

TABLE 6
State Industries and Their Share of National Employment

SOURCE: Lindblom (1977: 114); Kuhne (1976: 66); Himmelstrand et al. (1981: 62).

nationalization. The CFDT and many of the socialists preferred

&dquo;socialization&dquo; combined with &dquo;autogestion&dquo; to nationalization in the
interpretation the Communist Party gave to it (Matouk, 1977). It was
feared that a new mandarin class would be the consequence of further
nationalization (Gallais-Hammono, 1977: 204), or that in its drive
toward nationalization, the left would function only as a tool of those
capitalists attempting to get rid of unprofitable parts of the economy
(Gallus and Brachet, 1973: 11).
As shown in Table 6, West Germany and Sweden are thus ranked
among Italy, France, Britain, and the United States. Sweden especially
was apt to develop a rather distinct view on nationalization. Swedish
scholars believed that functional socialism, that is, nationalizing only
certain functions of private property, provokes less public resistance
(Adler-Karlsson, 1973: 46). Abroad, Sweden is frequently seen as a
model because its procedures arouse little suspicion in the nonsocialist
parties. These have solved a major problem of nationalization because
they do not need new financial obligations from the government but
even provide new sources of capital formation if Meidners and the trade
unions plans for capital formation in workers hands are carried out
(Stephen, 1979: 205). Nevertheless, one should not be too optimistic
about the implementation of these theories and programs. So far, even
Sweden has not been able to carry them out. Comparative electoral

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26

research has taught us that voters reward only those socialist proposals
that carry immediate benefits. For example, redistributive measures,
equal rights, or comprehensive schooling (Budge and Farlie, 1983: 160).
Surveys among trade unionists also reveal that more abstract issues
dealing with property and co-determination are not as popular among
the masses as among the union leaders.
The property share of the state in the means of production is probably
not a good indicator for the growth of government. Only Britain has a
long experience of nationalization and reprivatization that allows an
evaluation of the efficiency of public utilities. Profitable sectors, such as
automobile production-in some countries as much as 25% (Britain,
Germany) or 50% (France) state-owned (see Table 7)-are positively
evaluated even by authors who, on the whole, come to pessimistic
conclusions about nationalized industries in Britain (Pryke, 1981: 257
ff.). But in countries with a small public sector in manufacturing, public
utilities have to be considered as an aspect of infrastructual services
rather than by the efficiency standards of the private nonmonopolistic
economy.
The British left still thinks that nationalization should tackle larger
problems than the efficiency of individual factories, such as multi-
national corporations and the improvement of sectoral and regional
economic policies (Sloman, 1978: 124). Less ideological authors on the
continent have laid greater stress on efficiency because of the impor-
tance of the public sector for investment (Kuhne, 1976: 66). West
German trade-union ideologues launched this idea because of the large
role of the trade unions in capital ownership, subsumed under the
catchword Gemeinwirtschaft, to avoid connotations of the national-
ization of socialist countries in revolutionary periods.
At the other end of the spectrum, theories like that propagated by
Mancur Olson (1982: 81), deduce the decline of nations from the
pressure and inertia of big organized groups. These illuminate the
&dquo;British disease,&dquo; frequently explained by the unusually large role that
British government has played in economic life, as the result of group
pressures. But even in contributions to the literature that are less global
in their judgments, an increase in public ownership is not seen to
increase efficiency. On the other hand, the leftist literature now scarcely
recognizes nationalization as an efficient lever for the transition to
socialism. Critics from socialist countries usually see &dquo;state capitalism&dquo;
as just another form of exploitation by monopolies (Vinogradov, 1973:

8) precisely because they assess efficiency of state enterprises in the West

more favorably than many Western economists.

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 27

TABLE 7
Government Ownership by Sector

SOURCE: Heidenheimer et al. (1983: 134); Housing, p. 102; Andrain (1980: 23).
NOTE: 1 = complete government control; 0 =
complete private ownership.

On the whole, public ownership is not a persuasive indicator of the

growth of government. It flourishes in few sectors; in some countries as
in Germany and Britain, there are tendencies toward deregulation. The
closer a public enterprise has been to a sector that produces meritorious
goods, the more likely the state was to withdraw after initial engagement
during and after World War II. This can be shown in housing
construction (see Table 7). Even in Britain where traditionally the state,

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28

or in Sweden where cooperatives were the strongest investors in housing

construction, there has recently been a tendency toward the pre-

dominance of private housing construction.
The growth of the role of the state in the economy has certainly not
been brought about by public ownership. Today, there is much less
euphoria for direct intervention in the economy through economic
planning than there was in many countries in the early 1970s. Steering
the economy by industrial policies and subsidizing branches and regions
remain indirect influences, in many countries highly inefficient ones. In
Germany, there is not even the equivalent of the notion of industrial
policy (Heidenheimer, 1983: 142). Aggregate money supply manage-
ment is a preferred instrument of economic policy, and this is removed
from the influence of the government of the day. It lies with the
autonomous Federal Bank. There is no comprehensive sectoral policy

in West Germany, there is only a multitude of promotional programs for

certain branches of industry (von Beyme and Schmidt, 1985). Never-
theless, the Federal Republics political steering of the economy has
been ranked fairly high; only Norway and Austria ranked higher
(Schmidt, 1982: 218).
The capacity of Western democracies to steer their economies is
limited and the optimism of former periods is largely lost, even in those
countries where a more leftist shade of Eurosocialism came into power
in the early 1980s (France, Greece, Spain). Growth of the state in this
field is hardly visible. Even in some socialist countries like Hungary,
decentralization and deregulation have gone into similar directions
(Taylor, 1983: 117).
CONCLUSIONS: UNGOVERNABILITY AND A DECLINE OF THE STATE?

After disaggregating the concept of the state, five important factors

that play a role in demonstrating the allegedly growing influence of the
state have been chosen. Government agencies and public employment
have certainly been growing, though hardly in proportion to the tasks of
governments. The growth of the tax burden was heavy while social
democrats prevailed and dependence on foreign trade was relatively
high (Schmidt, 1982: 137). But on the whole, the Steuerstaat hit its
limits. Above a certain level, taxes no longer increase the income of the
state but contribute to a growing second economy and decreasing
growth in the private sector (Norway is an exception; see Schmidt, 1982:
150). In times of financial restriction, some states are following cynical
advice, as in the following rule of thumb: &dquo;Reduce the number of

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 29

pensioners and shift the bulk of social security financing to indirect

taxes&dquo; (Scharf, 1981: 70). Tax protest movements, like those in France
and Denmark, can become dangerous if the state grows in this sector.
Latent neopopulist undercurrents, even in the established parties, have
been growing in Western countries, from the United States to Scan-
dinavia. But there is hardly any correlation between the growth of
taxation and an instability of democracy, except in Denmark since 1973.
The predictions of doom have failed, from Clarks warning in 1945
about the consequences of government spending going beyond 25% of
the GNP to the same doomsday picture by Milton Friedman if it should
happen that public expenditure exceeds 60% of the GNP (see Richardson,
1982: 205).
The growth of legislation, on the other hand, can no longer be
perceived as an indicator of a secular trend. There is, however, a danger
of a creeping judicialization of all spheres of life. In the economy, the
direct impact of the state has actually declined and its indirect steering
capacity in most market societies has proven to be rather limited.
Even in areas where the state is growing, the problems grow faster
than the agencies that should tackle them. There are two basic strategies
recommended for the predicaments of Western democracy:

~ Fight rising expectations to reduce overloads of the state and

ungovernability.
~ Create new expectations by mobilizing new productive forces.

GOVERNMENT OVERLOAD AND UNGOVERNABILITY

An initial reaction to the growth of government is that not growth as

such but its psychological consequences on citizens have caused the
predicaments of Western democracy. The growing state is seen as a
&dquo;general agency for the distribution of life chances&dquo; (Klages, 1981: 82).
The literature on ungovernability is highly contradictory. Ungovern-
ability is not an analytically useful concept because thresholds of
governability are rarely indicated. Moreover the source of ungovern-
ability in each country is found in a different cause. In Italy it is said to be
the failure of the parties, in Germany the excessive demands of interest
groups-giving rise to discussion of a law on interest groups, mainly
directed against the trade unions. In the Anglo Saxon countries, rising
expectations and the mechanisms of alternating government reinforcing
expectations prevail as hypotheses to explain the evils of ungovernabili-

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30

ty (for details see von Beyme, 1984b). Rose (1979), who did much to
launch the debate on government overload, finally came to the conclu-
sion that there is little fire behind the smoke. The discussion on overload
usually ends with the vague demand that governments have to stop
trying &dquo;to play God&dquo; (King, 1975: 174).
Survey results that show the subjective factor of growing demands
combined with scant trust in the problem-solving capacity of the state
should be not overrated. If we look at the figures of popular confidence
in major institutions of society, there are national differences, but in all
the Western democracies, modern citizens trust government institutions
(except for Ireland in the case of the Church) much more than private
sector institutions (see Table 8). Oddly enough, Germany ranks lowest
in trust in the bureaucracy. This verbal response is not confirmed by the
observed behavior of most German citizens compared to that of citizens
of other countries.

CREATING NEW EXPECTATIONS

BY MOBILIZING NEW
PRODUCTIVE FORCES

Whereas neoconservative proposals advocate &dquo;dare less democracy,&dquo;

radical proposals of the left stress the need for more democracy and
mobilization. The Trilateral Commission was rather skeptical about the
potential of these leftist forces. It came to the conclusion that their
potential is much higher at the level of restoring order in unions and
universities than at the electoral or the revolutionary level (Crozier et al.,
1975: S 1 ). A nationalization strategy is rarely recommended, even by the
nonorthodox left. The hope to steer the private economy through a
strong state is not shared by the new left, and the steering of invest-
ment-a minimal consensus alternative to comprehensive socialist plan-
ning-is seen as doomed to failure and dangerous because it requires
new superbureaucracies. Mobilization, the distribution of new incen-

tives on the basis of a more responsible Keynesianism and the deliberate

use of state programs for employment are proposed. The model for postcapi-
talist development as proposed by the German alternative &dquo;Council of
Economic Advisers&dquo; is reunification of politics and economics, which
means de-ettisation of the political sphere (via mass participation) and

decapitalization of the economic sphere via greater emphasis on the

productive forces: labor, science, and-most recently-participation
(Grauhan and Hickel, 1978: 33).

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 31

TABLE 8
Popular Confidence in Major Institutions of Society (in percentages)

SOURCE: Rose (1984: 180).

On the continent, OConnors (1973: Chap. 4) analysis of the social-

industrial complex frequently has been transformed into a positive
participatory, nonviolent revolutionary concept. Even more moderate
advocates of active reformatory policies who do not count on deliberate
mobilization anticipate that innovation will entail conflicts and
therefore new mobilization processes (see Offe, 1975: 46).
Oddly enough, both forces influential in bringing about changes in
Western democracies theoretically do not rely on the increasing role of
the state and the growth of government. For the first time in the history
of conservatism, neoconservative theory is in a serious dilemma. On one
hand, it has preserved some of its traditional inclinations, like the
reliance on a &dquo;strong state.&dquo; On the other-at least in West Germany-it
no longer shares the optimism of the older authoritarian schools, such as

that of Carl Schmitt during the Weimar period, which believed that a
strong state can cope with crisis. Neoconservatism-although demand-
ing more regulation in spheres like internal and external security and
economic and social policies-advocates deregulation, but does not
effectively implement it. These contradictions underlie the fact that
many conservative governments in the early 1980s, from Reagan to
Kohl, have a fairly good ability to steer society, but end up implement-

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32

ing the opposite of what they have advocated: Instead of deregulation

they create more state.
Neosocialism in the West no longer has its traditional Marxist trust in
the tools of the state, nationalization, and planning. Small-group
libertarian socialism is lauded, even when it is naive about the effects of
fragmentation. Experiments in smallness, deregulation, participation
without central planning, and dejudicialization may intentionally help
to preserve conservative rule.
The leftist mobilization concept has largely failed in most European
democracies after the economic crisis of 1973. It was not used by the
Eurosocialists when they came to power in the early 1980s. Those who
are skeptical of this model argue that citizens do not behave as predicted

by the rationality models of the mature citizen developed by the

Frankfurt school of social philosophy. They behave instead like
impatient clients whose tolerance for frustrations is diminishing
(Klages, 1981: 82). The change of values, indirectly nourished by the
counter-reaction against growing etatisation, bureaucratization and
judicialization is an accelerating process. There is a new, possibly unique
situation in Western democracies that is difficult for observers from
socialist countries of the East to understand. It is a situation in which
almost no one-from the right or the left-advocates reliance on the
state for the creation and planning of new values as a way out of the
crisis of government. The &dquo;alientated interest of the state in itself&dquo; (Offe,
1975: 15) imputed to the bourgeois state per se, is not growing in
historical perspective even under nonsocialist conditions.

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Klaus von Beyme is Professor of Political Science at the University of Heidelberg and
President of IPSA. He has written, among other relevant books, Interessengruppen in der
Demokratie (1980), Challenge to Power, Trade Unions and Industrial Relations in
Capitalist Countries (1980), and Die politischen Theorien der Gegenwart (5th ed., 1984).

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