Process institutionalism: toward an action-centric approach to state extraction

What is the relationship between actions and institutions in state extraction? State extraction is the process whereby revenue is extracted from constituents to the state. Studies on state extraction in the early modern era mostly adopt the institution-centric approach, which perceives actions as manifestations of institutional and structural characteristics in a social context. However, it does not explain the varying actions and the resultant diversified institutional changes beyond the behavioral and institutional repertoires determined by these characteristics. This article proposes the process institutionalism model as a new paradigm for understanding the relationship between actions and institutions in state extraction. This model employs an action-centric approach, which maintains that actions lead to changes in institutions and the actors’ consciousness. It also demonstrates the qualitative contradictions among the incentives in the efficiency and legitimacy dimensions of an action and adopts an eventful explanation of actors’ understandings of and selections among the contradictory incentives during the temporal process of actions. Process institutionalism engages theoretical and empirical research on the relationship between actions and institutions by reviewing existing literature on state extraction in history, especially the history of the early modern period, the critical juncture whereby states and other related institutions experienced dramatic changes and displayed regional diversity.