State-society relations have long been central to comparative politics. Huntington’s work on political order, Skocpol’s call to “bring the state back in,” and Migdal’s “state-in-society” approach established frameworks that have shaped generations of scholarship. Yet the world in which these theories were forged has changed profoundly. Intensifying great power competition is redrawing the boundaries between national security and social life; artificial intelligence, big data, and digital platforms are reconfiguring how states see, regulate, and mobilize their societies; and the resurgence of industrial policy and state-led planning signals a new era of state activism.
This panel asks: how do classic theories of state-society relations travel into this changing era? Do they retain their explanatory power, require revision, or demand replacement? We invite papers engaging these canonical frameworks with fresh empirical evidence, and we welcome methodological pluralism—case studies, cross-national regression, surveys, ethnography, experiments, and computational methods.
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
How does great power competition reshape state capacity, autonomy, and the state's penetration of society?
Do new technologies strengthen the state’s infrastructural power, or empower societal actors to resist or negotiate with the state?
How does the revival of industrial policy transform state-business relations, labor politics, and social welfare?
How do societies across regime types respond to expanding state ambitions in security, technology, and the economy?
What do comparisons across the Global North and South reveal about the continued relevance of classic frameworks?
We look forward to discussions that reassess the classics and advance new agendas for understanding state-society relations in a changing era.
Chair: Xiao Ma (Associate Professor, Peking University, China)
Discussant: Chun-chih Chang (Associate Professor, Xiamen University, China)
