This study investigates how the structure and activities of states shape societies in different ways during processes of economic development. The analysis explores how the particular institutional configurations of developmental states in South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore shaped trajectories of social change in ways which impacted processes of political change at later points in time. Using a path dependency approach, the study argues that a critical juncture took place in these three countries at various points in their early post-colonial periods, during which time state elites undertook a comprehensive program of reorganizing the state, society, and the organizational and institutional connections between the two, for the purpose of pursuing a strategy of rapid export-oriented industrialization. Differences in the way this critical juncture took place across these cases shaped important variations in institutional patterns of state-society relations. These differences, in turn, conditioned subsequent variation in the mode and type of political change in these countries.