Archaeological and Historical Contexts for the Coded Societies

Abstract

The degree to which a state will have collective properties is hypothesized to reflect, in part, how revenues are constituted,especially the degree to which revenues are taxpayer-produced (Levi 1988). Below we describe a systematic method for cross-culturalcomparison to evaluate ideas about social processes in political evolution stemming from rational choice theory. However,this kind of broadlystated hypothesis cannot be a detailed recipe for how a collective polity might be constructed in a particularsituation, or whether, in fact, one would develop at all. We fully expect that even where there are social forces favoringcollective action, the form of collectivity will have some unique properties in each case resulting from the opportunitiesand constraints afforded by local culture and other local factors. While we are interested in the degree to which theoreticalpredictions provide explanations for social process, we developed a research design that demands that we address theory andgeneralization alongside a consideration of area particulars. We designed these procedures to enable us to transcend the argumentsbetween processualists, on the one hand, and the local area studies researchers, on the other (Lichbach [2003] summarizesthe debate as it has raged in political science). For one thing, we wanted area specialists to have sufficient informationavailable to permit the evaluation of our coding decisions.