مرکز منطقه ای اطلاع رساني علوم و فناوري - STATE CAPACITY: HYPOTHETICALFRAME OF THE CONCEPT, ITS COMPONENTS AND APPEARANCE OF TURKEY

Abstract :

In recent years, it has been observed that states in both rooted democratic and newly democratizing countries encounter with legitimacyproblems. States have difficulties in protection of the stability and providing social civil peace. Social protests increase and become widespread gradually. Even states’ trying to prevent or suppress the social reactions by force achieves success in short period, it gives harm to relationship of state and society in long term seriously. States’ continuation of their stability and providing social civil peace is closely related with the concept of state capacity. There is not any consensus on the conceptual definition and analysis of state capacity in the current literature yet.Approaches of Michael Mann have been frequently referred to in the struggle of describing state capacity in recent years. Michael Mann (1984) divides state power into two as despoticand infrastructural power.Despotic poweris equal to Max Weber’s (1964) concept of power, while infrastructural poweris described as capacity of community penetration (source generation and distribution) and capacity of application political decisions. Together with the fact that theory of power of Michael Mannis used as based here to develop an analytical state capacityconcept, it shall be supported with other thoughts. The role of the relationship of state and society is not taken into consideration sufficiently in the hypothesis of Mann. In this sense,it is considered that power type of Mann is required to be extended with a new type. In this manner, the meaning and dimensions of the concept of state capacityand contents of these are determined. State capacity in Turkey is tried to be analyzed in the last section with the main lines.