State autonomy is often viewed as the result of the culture, ideological coherence, or class background of the state bureaucracies, and of institutional characteristics that ensure state effectiveness. This view has several problems: it assumes what has to be explained, makes it difficult to understand changes in state autonomy, and tends to make autonomy the characteristic of strong, core states. This paper calls for a new approach to study state autonomy, one in which power is a characteristic of a relationship, not of actors or organizations (Emerson 1962), and uses this approach to examine changes in state-class relationships based on taxation during the mid 1930s in Bolivia. The paper then argues that state autonomy depends on the relative costs of state policies and on the availability of political allies to the state vis-a-vis the opposing economic elite. This approach allows us to specify the power dependence of the state on a given class, the conditions under which that relative dependence changes in favor of the state, and is applicable to both weak and strong states.
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