The political system and the state

North American pluralist theories have provided a definition of the political system which supersedes the simplistic assertion of a direct point-by-point correspondence between the system of domination and the political system. At the same time, however, these theories have their basis on distinct ideological assumptions: the classic idea of a system in which all the active and legitimate groups can make their voice heard at any stage during the decision-making process, the idea of a disparate plurality of social groups capable of exerting influence in diverse sectors and all endowed with a generalized capacity, if not to determine decisions, at least to reject those that are undesirable. This idea seems to be associated closely with the ideological image that the system seeks to produce of itself, and to under-evaluate the force of the limits of the representative mechanisms and decision-making processes in reality.

In the Marxist tradition, on the other hand, there has been a tendency to ratify an image of a closed and monolithic political system in which the state performs the role of the direct executor of the dominant class's interest, as an agent of domination with no genuine autonomy of its own.