Compare methods

	State Autonomy Analysis	Comparative Political Economy
Field	Political Economy	Political Economy
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1984	2001
Originator	Theda Skocpol, Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer & Michael Mann	Comparative politics & political economy tradition (Shonfield, Katzenstein, Hall, Soskice)
Type	State-centered analytical framework	Macro-comparative research framework
Seminal source	Evans, P. B., Rueschemeyer, D., & Skocpol, T. (Eds.). (1985). Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521313131	Hall, P. A., & Soskice, D. (Eds.). (2001). Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199247752
Aliases	State-Centered Analysis, Relative Autonomy Analysis, Infrastructural Power Analysis, Bringing the State Back In Approach	CPE, Comparative Capitalisms Approach, Macro-Comparative Political Economy, Institutional Political Economy
Related	3	3
Summary	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.	Comparative political economy (CPE) is the subfield that asks how political institutions and markets interact to produce different economic outcomes across capitalist democracies, and the macro-comparative research strategy that subfield employs. Rather than treating the economy as a self-contained system, CPE treats production regimes, labor markets, finance, welfare states, and innovation as politically constructed and institutionally embedded, then compares how distinct national configurations — for instance the liberal market economies and coordinated market economies of Hall and Soskice's varieties-of-capitalism framework — generate systematically different patterns of wages, growth, inequality, and adjustment. The approach combines small-N case comparison and large-N cross-national analysis under a shared institutionalist logic.