The largest, overarching finding claimed by Migdal is that regardless of where a state ends up on the scale of strong state – weak state, the state will have landed on either end of the scale due to the reach of social control in the society.
Three Levels of Leadership Central to Maintaining Power and Social Control:
- The Level of Central Executive Leadership
- Mobilization of support
- Execution of state policy agendas
- Organized labor and industrialized capital
- Creating effective bureaucracies and agencies to carry out wants, needs, and ambitions
- The Level of Leadership being Central Agencies of the Organization of the State
- Maintain their own personal policy agendas they want to see executed and carried out
- Have their own agencies they can use power of appointment and patronage to bring an overarching organizational view of the state’s policy goals and priorities.
- State Officials at the Regional and Local Levels
Strong States are able to guide society, the rules that exist for society, and the behavior of those who participate and live under that society. There are distinct political and economic institutions built up around the goal of shaping and maintain that strong societal control.
Weak States do not have the ability to mobilize the population in ways that allows for societal control. Under this governing structure, there is a much lesser ability to mobilize the citizens, an inability to systematically maintain strong holds of power at a centralized location. Thus, weak states show strong evidences of fragmentation and the employment of politics of survival such as ‘big shuffle,’ ‘non-merit appointments,’ and ‘dirty-tricks.’