The Political Origins of Coordinated Capitalism: Business Organizations, Party Systems, and State Structure in the Age of Innocence (original) (raw)
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Business History Review, 2013
Does the organization of business matter for redistribution and labor market equality in post-industrial democratic capitalism? Conventional welfare state analysis has given this significant question scant attention. We argue, however, that high levels of employer organization, as well as the persistence of centralized bargaining and national policy formation between these well organized employers and comparably organized labor (or macrocorporatism), are likely to foster employer support for progressive policies, strengthen labor support for egalitarian policies that encompass the interests of labor market outsiders, and otherwise promote redistributive policies and outcomes. We test our arguments with quantitative analysis of early 1980s-to-2000s pooled time-series data from 18 nations as well as brief, illustrative case analysis of policy change in Denmark and Germany We find that highly organized employers as well as macrocorporatism are consistently, strongly, and positively related to overall government redistribution among working-age families, social protection for workers, and active labor market policies. They are also strongly and negatively related to the prevalence of low-wage labor, market income inequality, and other features of labor market dualism such as involuntary part-time work, temporary contract jobs, and long-term unemployment. These quantitative results emerge in models that account for electoral and partisan politics, features of postindustrialization and economic performance, and other forces highlighted in recent work on redistribution and inequality in contemporary capitalist democracies.
American Political Science Review, 2004
D oes the organization of business matter for social policy development in the advanced capitalist democracies? Conventional welfare state analysis has given this significant question scant attention. We argue, however, that the representational power of business, coordination across business interest units, and integration of associations in corporatist policy-making forums, or what we call the social corporatist organization of business, should result in greater support and participation by employers in social policy formation and implementation. We test our arguments with models both of 1980-98 pooled time-series data on within-and across-country variation in spending on active labor market programs and of extensive firm-level survey data from Denmark and the United Kingdom. We find that the centralization and coordination of employers as well as the integration of employer organizations in corporatist policy-making forums are strongly associated with shares of national income devoted to active labor market policy. We find, moreover, that the degree of employer organization conditions active labor market policy responses to "de-industrialization" and increases in general unemployment. At the firm level, membership in an employer association has a significant positive effect on employer participation in active labor market programs in corporatist Denmark but not in the pluralist United Kingdom.
In M. Bevir (ed.), Modern Pluralism: Anglo-American Debates Since 1880 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 105-28
The mid-twentieth century is often seen as the period in which the left learned to love the state, as earlier pluralist ideas – federalism, syndicalism, guild socialism – were relegated to the margins of socialist and liberal ideologies by new state-centred reform projects organized around the welfare state, nationalization, and economic planning. But this brief social democratic moment was itself delegitimized shortly thereafter and replaced by a neo-liberal discourse grounded on the sovereignty of the individual and an abiding hostility to the state. This chapter argues that this is in fact a misleading account of the fate of the socialist pluralist tradition, for two reasons. First, socialists and progressive liberals explicitly theorized the mid-century social settlement as a pluralist enterprise, albeit one that was much less ambitious than the equivalent projects envisaged by guild socialists and syndicalists earlier in the century. Second, the neo-liberal critique of social democracy was articulated as an attack on the existence of certain associations in civil society that were held to threaten both individual liberty and the state.
Often it has been argued that we can find a Danish 'model'. Often this model is characterized as consensualist and corporatist but so are the Swedish, Dutch and others. We shall argue that consensualism and corporatism can be applied to characterize certain features of the institutions, institutional practices including decision-making processes in these and other countries. There are similarities and differences between these different national systems. It is beyond the scope of this paper to investigate and compare these varieties. It is difficult if not impossible to give a clear-cut definition of the concept of consensualism, which indicates that it maybe should be abandoned. However, we will use it here as a broad term for certain forms of institutional practices and behaviour among agents. When we argue that the Danish system tends to be consensualist we do not mean that various agents in different settings always reach a consensus or that the system provides a consensus. The Danish system is not a system without conflicts. The institutional structures reduce the level of conflicts and facilitate that agents are forced to talk and negotiate. The institutional structure has a character, which 'brings people together'. Agents are involved in many institutions. They have invested interests and it is not entirely wrong to say that Denmark is a stakeholder society. Such a society has a fairly strong level of social cohesion because people have a stake in many societal institutions and they have to participate in order to defend their invested interests. This can be done because the various institutions facilitate participation whether it is in the local school, trade union, or the local company. This participation and representations in different organizations do not guarantee consensus but it gives the opportunity to express opinions and exercise power whether it's strong or weak. If you are embedded in a social relation power is present. If you are not taking part in social relations you cannot exercise power. Therefore many citizens in Denmark have a say and influence and shape the institutions. Most often they are not very powerful but they influence the exercise of power by the elite. The elite are the best educated and most articulated. They heavily influence the content of policies and the shape of institutions but they cannot do it without taking into account opinions, interests, and pressure from the counter part.
Coevolution of Capitalism and Political Representation: The Choice of Electoral Systems
American Political Science Review, 2010
P rotocorporatist West European countries in which economic interests were collectively organized adopted PR in the first quarter of the twentieth century, whereas liberal countries in which economic interests were not collectively organized did not. Political parties, as Marcus Kreuzer points out, choose electoral systems. So how do economic interests translate into party political incentives to adopt electoral reform? We argue that parties in protocorporatist countries were "representative" of and closely linked to economic interests. As electoral competition in single member districts increased sharply up to World War I, great difficulties resulted for the representative parties whose leaders were seen as interest committed. They could not credibly compete for votes outside their interest without leadership changes or reductions in interest influence. Proportional representation offered an obvious solution, allowing parties to target their own voters and their organized interest to continue effective influence in the legislature. In each respect, the opposite was true of liberal countries. Data on party preferences strongly confirm this model. (Kreuzer's historical criticisms are largely incorrect, as shown in detail in the online supplementary Appendix.)
American Political Science Review, 2010
P rotocorporatist West European countries in which economic interests were collectively organized adopted PR in the first quarter of the twentieth century, whereas liberal countries in which economic interests were not collectively organized did not. Political parties, as Marcus Kreuzer points out, choose electoral systems. So how do economic interests translate into party political incentives to adopt electoral reform? We argue that parties in protocorporatist countries were "representative" of and closely linked to economic interests. As electoral competition in single member districts increased sharply up to World War I, great difficulties resulted for the representative parties whose leaders were seen as interest committed. They could not credibly compete for votes outside their interest without leadership changes or reductions in interest influence. Proportional representation offered an obvious solution, allowing parties to target their own voters and their organized interest to continue effective influence in the legislature. In each respect, the opposite was true of liberal countries. Data on party preferences strongly confirm this model. (Kreuzer's historical criticisms are largely incorrect, as shown in detail in the online supplementary Appendix.)
Civil Society in the Shadow of the State, 2020
This chapter examines a neglected aspect of the development of Danish civil society, namely Arbejderkooperationen (The Workers’ Cooperation), i.e. a network of democratically governed enterprises established by the Social Democratic Labor Movement (SDLM). We track the historical development of the workers’ cooperation from a phase of rapid growth (ca. 1880s-1920s) to a prolonged phase of slow decline thereafter. We argue that the changing fortunes of the Workers’ Cooperation can be explained as a consequence of the growing importance of welfare state-building for the SDLM, to the detriment of economic self-organization in civil society: The welfare state project gradually came to eclipse the original emphasis among Social Democratic thinkers like Frederik Borgbjerg on cooperativism as a crucial element of socialism. Followng Gregory Bateson's, we describe early Social Democracy's cooperative strategy, which responded to the class character of bourgeois civil society by producing a partially autonomous working class civil society, as schismogenetic, i.e. participating in a positive feedback loop driving social division. We then propose the concept of synthogenesis to conceptualize the shift in the early 1920s towards the building of the welfare state, which produced a positive feedback loop resulting in the integration of civil society. The historically rooted concepts of schismogenesis and synthogenesis offer civil society studies a way to theorize and historize the formation of an integrated "national civil society", and descibe it as an outcome of contested social processes.
Regulatory Regimes and Employer Organization: The Analysis of Postcommunist Business-State Relations
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
ABSTRACT The interest group theories that link regulations and activities of special interest groups, predict higher levels of collective action to coincide with more extensive regulations. The fact that economic regulations and enforcement mechanisms may impose the costs on interest organization and thus diminish instances of collective action, however, has not been explored systematically. The evidence form twenty-six postcommunist countries over the time period spanning from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s indicates that state regulatory institutions have a surprising effect on the formation of business associations. Conterintuitively, harsh regulations discourage the development of business associations, but lax enforcement of regulations, often linked to bureaucratic corruption, stimulates collective action. Contrary to the long-standing tradition of viewing industry associations as rent-seeking vehicles of protectionism and collusion, this suggests that the self-organization of business community is often driven by the need for non-state market-promoting institutions rather than primarily by rent-seeking.