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We can identify nine, more specific features of this state form:
1) power is transferred from the legislature to the executive and the concentration of power within the latter - typically within the office of prime minister or executive president with the resultant appearance of personalistic rule;
2) the fusion between the three branches of the state - legislature, executive, and judiciary - accelerates and is accompanied by a decline in the rule of law in favour of particularistic and discretionary regulation;
3) as their ties to the power bloc and the popular masses are weakened, political parties tend to lose their functions as the privileged interlocutors of the administration and as the leading forces in organizing hegemony;
4) this is reflected in a shift in the political significance of parties away from their traditional functions in elaborating policy through compromise and alliances around a party programme and in legitimating state power through electoral competition towards a more restricted role as the transmission belts for executive decisions as the administration itself assumes the legitimation functions traditionally performed by political parties;
5) dominance within the ideological state apparatuses is displaced from the school, university, and publishing house to the mass media, which now play a key role in political legitimation and mobilization and, indeed, increasingly draw both their agenda and symbolism from the administration and also experience a growing and multiform control at its hands;
6) linked to these shifts is the growth of new plebiscitary and populist forms of consent alongside new technocratic and/or neoliberal forms of legitimation;
7) parallel power networks cross-cutting the formal organization of the state have also grown - networks which exercise a decisive share in its activities, promote a growing material and ideological community of interest between key civil servants and the dominant mass party, and consolidate policy communities which cement dominant interests outside the state apparatus with forces inside at the expense of popular forces;
8) a reserve repressive para-state apparatus has grown too, parallel to the main organs of the state and serving in a preemptive capacity to police popular struggles and other
threats to bourgeois hegemony; and
9) the dominant ideology has been reorganised by integrating certain liberal and libertarian themes from the sixties as well as displacing notions such as the general will and democracy in favour of instrumental rationality and technocratic logic.
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(Bob Jessop - On the Originality, Legacy and Actuality of Nicos Poulantzas)
