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5) have critiqued the notion
that policies are largely determined by the balance of forces and interests that
lie outside of state institutions, arguing that 'the formation ... [and] political
capacities of interest groups and classes depend in significant measure on the
structures and activities of the very states the social actors, in turn, seek to
influence' (Skocpol, 1985, p. 27). Such approaches address the problem of
what Dunleavy and O'Leary (1987) have termed the cipher i~izage of public
policy, where policy development is largely seen as the reflection of outcomes
already achieved through elite bargaining between powerful corporate and
government interests. In such approaches, the institutional specificities of
policy formation and implementation are largely erased, and policy outcomes
are typically seen as the consequence of structural imperatives derived independently
of the policy process. The result is that we are left with 'the uncomfortable
inference that the study of state institutions is something of an
irrelevance' (Johnston, 1986, p. 69). In a critique of neo-~Marxisti nterpretations
of Australian broadcasting policy, that engages with questions of how to
best understand the relationship between structilre and agency, Pearce (2000)
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Theories of Global Media 47
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observed that such accounts 'paid no attention ... to what the many interest
groups involved in broadcasting policy at the tirlze thought was in their interest',
but rather 'assigned interests based on its own external, ideological
understandings of the "public interest" and "business interest"' (Pearce,
2000, p. 371).
Pontusson (1995) has observed that institutionalism is commonly understood
as a nzidcile-m~zge theory, problematizing relationships between agency
and structure, or between methodological individualism and various forms of
structuralism. The nature of being a 'middle-range' theory in the social
sciences raises the question of what analyses outside of this framework it is
anchored to. Pontusson argues that institutionalism should be aligned to the
macro-social approach associated with critical political economy, in order to
develop 'the comparative study of advanced capitalism' (Pontusson, 1995, p.
143). This is akin to Sayer's argument that regulation theory has emerged as
'a middle-range theory or analysis of capitalisnl which examines the different
kinds of social embedding of macro-economic processes' (Sayer, 1995, p. 24),
and is reflective of dialogues between institutionalism and Marxism that have
taken place within the field of critical political econorny (Dugger and
Sherman, 1994; Stilwell, 2002).
Rethinking State Capacities: Cultural Policy Studies
State theory has been an important arena for debates between liberal-pluralist
and critical theories of global media. There has been in recent years an
important rethinking of how to understand state agencies in relation to global
media, influenced by institutionalist theories and cultural policy studies. The
political economy approa