Compare methods

	Rent-Seeking Analysis	State Autonomy Analysis
Field	Political Economy	Political Economy
Family	MCDM	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1967	1984
Originator	Gordon Tullock & Anne Krueger	Theda Skocpol, Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer & Michael Mann
Type	Formal model of political-economic waste	State-centered analytical framework
Seminal source	Tullock, G. (1967). The Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopolies, and Theft. Western Economic Journal, 5(3), 224-232.	Evans, P. B., Rueschemeyer, D., & Skocpol, T. (Eds.). (1985). Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521313131
Aliases	Rent-Seeking Theory, Tullock Rent-Seeking Analysis, Rent-Seeking Contest Model, Directly Unproductive Profit-Seeking	State-Centered Analysis, Relative Autonomy Analysis, Infrastructural Power Analysis, Bringing the State Back In Approach
Related	4	3
Summary	Rent-seeking analysis is the political-economy framework for measuring the social waste created when individuals and firms spend real resources competing for artificially created rents — the extra income generated by monopoly grants, tariffs, licenses, quotas, and other government-conferred privileges — rather than producing new wealth. Gordon Tullock's 1967 article showed that the conventional Harberger triangle drastically understates the cost of monopoly and protection, because the rectangle of monopoly profit, far from being a mere transfer, becomes a prize that competitors will expend resources to capture. Anne Krueger named the activity 'rent-seeking' in 1974 and demonstrated its macroeconomic scale in regulated developing economies. The analysis models the competition for a rent as a contest and asks how much of the prize is dissipated in the struggle to win it.	State autonomy analysis treats the state not as a neutral arena or a simple instrument of the dominant class but as an organization with interests, capacities, and powers of its own. Crystallized in the 1985 volume Bringing the State Back In edited by Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol, and given a sharp conceptual edge by Michael Mann's 1984 distinction between despotic and infrastructural power, the framework asks two linked questions: how far can a state formulate goals independent of the preferences of dominant social classes (autonomy), and how effectively can it actually implement those goals across its territory (capacity)? The approach reoriented comparative political economy away from purely society-centered explanations.