Dreiling, MichaelLabuza, Andrew2024-03-252024-03-252024-03-25https://hdl.handle.net/1794/29294Most contemporary political theories argue that the state is autonomous from the hegemony of the capitalist class. This project tackles the question of the relative autonomy of the state through a novel approach of converting political action committee (PAC) data into a co-donation network and applying community detection algorithms to identify class based collective political action. The project finds that PACs tend to cluster according to economic interests as defined by their location in the network of production. Such an approach identifies campaign contributions as a ‘mechanism of relative autonomy’ and enables researchers to take snap shots of the horizontal and vertical class struggle. The results reject political theories organized around state autonomy in favor of Marx and Engels’ historical materialism and political theories advocating for the relative autonomy of the state.en-USAll Rights Reserved.Electronic Thesis or Dissertation