Corporatism, Public Policy and the Labour Movement: A Comparative Study

This article identifies two dimensions which distinguish corporatism, especially as defined by Philippe Schmitter, from pluralism. Noting that most discussions of corporatism have emphasized one dimension and neglected the second, the article seeks to determine, empirically, whether the two dimensions are as closely associated as the concept suggests. The finding, for the cases studied, is that they are inversely rather than positively correlated. The search for an explanation of why this might be the case leads to two conclusions. First, that the management of labour-capital conflict in advanced capitalist countries has relied less on inter-group and group–state interaction than corporatist theory would suggest. Second, that Schmitter's conceptualization of corporatism is seriously flawed and that other corporatist writers avoid these flaws only at the cost of drastically reducing the concept's distinctiveness from pluralism.