The strengths of the political economy approach are many, not the least of which being
its sensitivity to conflict and change and attention to the underlying dynamics of political
power and domination. Its focus on a broad range of extra-bureaucratic actors constitutes
an important advance beyond the structural-functionalist approach of Riggs, which confined
its attention to a narrow stratum of the bureaucracy. However, political economists
have also furthered our understanding of the nature of the state through the development
of useful models of the bureaucracy that go well beyond the fusion of the civilian and
military components of the state that Riggs originally theorised (Hewison 1993; Ockey
2004b).