STPA- WEEK4 NOTES- DR SUNNY CHAN

Week 4, stpa, dr sunny chan, 17-9-2012.

Review
Good governance ， but what are the values and perspectives？
自由、民主、尊重人權、公義、法治、問責性、回應性、公共利益（自由主義、功利主義、正義論、社群主義）

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Governance models
Laissez faire state 自由放任型政府
Neo-classical model 新古典模型
Keynesian model 凱恩斯模型
Welfare state 福利國家型
The third way 第三條路模式

Developmental state 發展型國家

Plural state 多元主義模式
Elitist state 精英主義模式
Corporatist state 統合主義\ 社團主義模式

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Laissez-faire
Oxford Dictionary of Politics:

'Laissez-faire' means 'leave to do'; a more colloquial translation might be 'let them get on with it'. Since the late eighteenth century such phrases as 'a laissez-faire policy' and 'laissez-faire economics' have suggested a belief in the virtues of allowing individuals to pursue their interests through market transactions with minimal government interference.

However, laissez-faire in a broad sense, as opposed to the use of the phrase in particular contexts with respect to particular sections of production, is vague and its historical location elusive. Laissez-faire economics is not normally based on libertarian ethics but rather on the utilitarian calculation that absence of interference functions better than interference. But nearly all market theories are also theories of market failure and it is difficult to identify any leading economic thinker who thought that laissez-faire was the best solution to all problems. Adam Smith, for example, did not believe that unregulated markets could provide the kind of educational system which a commercial society needed.
— Lincoln Allison
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Oxford Dictionary of British History:
Laissez-faire
The transition from the medieval to the modern economy was characterized by the progressive removal of restrictions on individuals and groups in favour of the operation of market forces. The balance between complete un-restriction and some control is still strenuously debated. In reality the state of complete laissez-faire has never existed. John Stuart Mill defined what has become accepted as the minimum level of state intervention. Amongst such interventions for the greater good, he included the power to enforce contracts and secure property rights, the administration of justice, the right to tax in order to provide public goods such as transport systems, sanitation and public health, and state-supported education.

While the notion of laissez-faire is usually associated with the decline of the medieval and mercantilist economic regimes, it has an enduring modern counterpart in the views of the neoclassical and new classical economists, who may use different terminology, but whose essential view is that individual freedom to function within un-trammeled markets, with little involvement from government, represents the best type of economic organization. All these strands of thought assert the right of the individual and depict state involvement in the economy as ineffectual or malign.

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Oxford Dictionary of Politics:
Keynesian model --

J M Keynes, (1883-1946) British economist, who made a leading contribution to economic theory, particularly through The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), to economic policy, and to international economic negotiations. The use of the word 'Keynesian' to describe a particular mix of economic and social policy is a reflection of the success of his attempt to provide an intellectual justification for a form of government intervention that would save capitalism and liberal democracy, a task which appeared to be a compelling and urgent one in the 1930s. In a chapter entitled 'Concluding Notes on the Social Philosophy towards which the General Theory might Lead', Keynes admits that his theory is moderately conservative in its implications. The state would intervene in some areas, including the use of the tax system to influence the propensity to consume, but wide fields of activity would be unaffected. A comprehensive socialization of investment would be necessary to achieve full employment, but this could be achieved by what would later be called public-private partnerships. There was no obvious case for a comprehensive system of state socialism, and most of the necessary measures could be introduced gradually, and without a general break in the traditions of society.

Keynes was a product of an essentially Victorian milieu which had set aside religious belief, but maintained a strong interest in moral rules of conduct, underpinned by rational justification rather than faith in the existence of a deity. From Eton he went to King's College where he graduated in mathematics and then spent a fourth year reading economics, then dominated by Alfred Marshall and his Principles of Economics. While at Cambridge, Keynes wrote a long prize essay on Burke which gives a good indication of Keynes's developing political beliefs. He emphasized Burke's advocacy of expediency against abstract rights, and, like Burke, he was uncertain about the value of basing action on absolute principles. Keynes supported Burke's view that war should be approached with prudence, and in the First World War he attempted to register as a conscientious objector, but was exempted because of his work at the Treasury. 1919 he published a critique of the Versailles settlement entitled The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which achieved substantial worldwide sales and had a considerable influence on political opinion. Keynes argued that the Versailles settlement would impoverish Europe.

In the early 1920s, Keynes became involved with the Liberal Party. 1926 he became a member of a Liberal Industrial Inquiry, drafting substantial parts of the report on Britain's Industrial Future, better known as the Yellow Book. One of the proposals was that the investment funds of all public concerns should be put into a separate capital budget under the direction of a national investment board. The disappointing performance of the Liberals in 1929, and their reactions to the depression, lessened his enthusiasm for the party. He gave some financial support to individual Labour candidates in the 1930s, and made some favourable comments about Labour policies. When he became a peer 1942 he sat as an independent, although he continued to express some sympathy for the Liberals and gave them a small donation in 1945. As one of Keynes's biographers, Robert Skidelsky, has pointed out, Keynes was a political economist rather than a political animal, someone who was interested in influencing public policy, but who believed that the intellectual argument had to be won before the political argument. Although Keynes wrote extensively for the popular press in the middle period of his life, he was of a generation that believed that rational decision-making could be left to a well-informed elite based in London and the ancient universities. Keynes had the economist's habit of referring to political difficulties as second-order problems for which economists had no professional responsibility to provide solutions. He recognized that full employment could lead to upward pressures on wages, a problem which eventually led economists working in the Keynesian tradition to advocate incomes policies. He argued that the task of keeping wages reasonably stable was a 'political rather than an economic problem', and that the combination of collective bargaining and full employment was an 'essentially political problem' where analytical methods were of little assistance. His involvement in important economic negotiations with the Americans during and immediately after the Second World War showed that he had good negotiating skills, and an awareness of political realities and the need for mutual accommodation. Keynes's advocacy of macroecomic economic management did not provide an enduring solution to the problem of maintaining full employment, even less that of curbing inflation, but no discussion of the politics of economic management in the latter half of the twentieth century can proceed very far without reference to Keynes and his influential, if often ambiguous, ideas.

Wyn Grant
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Investopedia
Neo-classical Model --

An approach to economics that relates supply and demand to an individual's rationality and his or her ability to maximize utility or profit. Neoclassical economics also increased the use of mathematical equations in the study of various aspects of the economy. This approach was developed in the late-nineteenth century, based on books by William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger and Leon Walras.

Since its inception, neoclassical economics has grown to become the primary take on modern-day economics. Although it is now the most widely taught form of economics, this school of thought still has its detractors. Most criticism points out that neoclassical economics makes many unfounded and unrealistic assumptions that do not represent real situations. For example, the assumption that all parties will behave rationally overlooks the fact that human nature is vulnerable to other forces, which cause people to make irrational choices. Therefore, many critics believe that this approach cannot be used to describe actual economies.

Neoclassical economics is also sometimes blamed for inequalities in global debt and trade relations because the theory holds that such matters as labor rights will improve naturally, as a result of economic conditions

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Welfare state
[Oxford dictionary of politics]

A system in which the government undertakes the main responsibility for providing for the social and economic security of the state's population by means of pensions, social security benefits, free health care, and so forth. 1942 the Beveridge Report in the United Kingdom proposed a far-reaching 'settlement', as part of a wider social and economic reconstruction, once victory in the Second World War was secured, and became the blueprint for the British welfare state.

By 1944 a White Paper made full employment the first goal of government economic policy, and the Butler Act provided for universal secondary education. Labour, however, won the 1945 general election, to a considerable extent because they appeared more wholeheartedly in favour of the Beveridge plan. The key measures which followed, largely implementing the plan's essential features, were the National Insurance Act 1946, the National Health Service Act 1946, and the National Assistance Act 1948. An ambitious programme to build a million homes was also launched. By 1948 The Times newspaper proclaimed in an editorial that these measures had created 'security from the cradle to the grave' for every citizen.

These measures were the foundation of the 'welfare state', which was seen as synonymous with 'social security'. In a specific sense this meant entitlements to benefits under the newly established national insurance and assistance schemes. In a wider sense it referred to the other reforms implemented at the time, particularly the guarantees of full employment and access to a national health service free at the point of use. Underlying all this, however, was a new conception of the relationship between the state and the individual within a market-based society. This was based on an acceptance of the need for extensive intervention to ensure that its worst effects were mitigated, on the grounds that their causes were systemic rather than the fault or responsibility of individuals.

Nevertheless, behind the apparent consensus on the need for a welfare state, there was political conflict on its meaning between 'reluctant collectivists' in the liberal tradition (such as Beveridge himself) who saw the reforms of the 1940s as a high-water mark, and reformist socialists who saw it as a framework for developing a more concerted shift towards a planned and egalitarian society. A small minority of commentators, such as Hayek, were never convinced of the need for the welfare state in the first place and remained resolutely 'anti-collectivist'.

The growing 'crisis' of the welfare state since the 1970s can be seen as due to changed economic and social circumstances, a disintegration of the post-war consensus, or both of these. Undoubtedly, growing economic pressures were making it harder to meet more insistent demands for improved services, and increased social needs due to changes in family patterns, more older people, and growing numbers of unemployed people. On the other hand, the 'welfare state' had been increasingly criticized within a more polarized political culture. Critics from the right argued that by removing responsibility from the individual, the welfare state stifled people's initiative to solve their own problems. Critics from the left agreed in part that the welfare state as it currently stood was often 'oppressive', but attributed this to a failure to attack the root causes of class, gender, and 'race' inequalities.

Even before 1979 there were discernible shifts by the 1974-9 Labour government after the expenditure crisis of 1976 towards retrenchment and 'restructuring' of welfare in ways that responded most to right-wing rather than left-wing critics. However, after the Conservative election victory of 1979, this shift occurred in a more concerted way and there have been substantial reforms in all of the services established as a result of the Beveridge Report, though only in one, housing, could there be said to have been significant retrenchment in provision. In other areas, there have been a tightening of eligibility rules and shifts to decentralization of managerial responsibility within tighter centralized control of finance. Perhaps most controversial of all has been the reform of the National Health Service in 1990, against widespread opposition, to create an 'internal' market within a socialized system.

In a wider sense, there has been a significant shift from Beveridge's assumptions. Most importantly, there was a shift in economic priorities from maintaining full employment to controlling inflation. The modest redistribution of income and wealth achieved up to the 1970s, was reversed by cuts in income tax and a shift to more regressive forms of indirect taxation like value added tax (VAT). Despite all this, by the end of the 1980s the welfare state had been 'restructured' rather than abolished. It was suggested that a new 'welfare pluralist' consensus had emerged in which it was accepted that private, state, and voluntary sectors could exist side by side. In the 1990s the growing internationalization of the global economy, which has undermined the autonomy of national governments, led to pressure to reduce wage and social security costs in order to attract highly mobile investment.

It is probably most helpful to situate the British variant analytically and comparatively as a 'welfare state regime'. These, G. Esping-Anderson argues in The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, fall into three main types within market societies: 'conservative', 'social democratic', and 'liberal', depending on the extent to which they seek to work with, or to counter the effects of, the market on social inequalities. An example of a conservative regime is Germany, characterized by high welfare provision within a hierarchical and ordered society, while Sweden is closest to an egalitarian 'social democratic' regime. Though 1948 the British welfare state was among the most developed, by the 1970s provision had become more extensive in conservative and social democratic regimes, and the British welfare state looked closest to the 'liberal' model, with only limited attempts to use welfare to mitigate social inequalities. Though all welfare state regimes have been under pressure, in Britain and the United States the shift towards liberalism has been particularly pronounced, nor was it reversed on Labour coming to power in 1997.
— Mick Carpenter

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Oxford Dictionary of Politics:
THE THIRD WAY

Generally, any ideology that claims that it lies in between two traditional approaches that the writer believes are too limited. Specifically, the ideology claimed to underlie the actions of New Labour in Britain after the succession of Tony Blair to the leadership of the Labour Party in 1994. In this case, the two old ways are often understood to be socialism and capitalism. However, both its main ideologue in the UK (Anthony Giddens) and Prime Minister Blair emphasize that it is supposed to be a modernized form of social democracy, rather than an alternative to it.

Although critics of the New Labour Third Way claim that it has no empirical content, its defenders see it as a route between what was seen as the excessive paternalism (and statism) of traditional left policies and the excessive individual personal responsibility of the right. The policy of welfare to work—dubbed 'tough love' by British thirdwayers—was an early example: a combination of a greater emphasis on personal responsibility to find work backed with the threat of withdrawal of benefits, but at the same time a reinforcing of a framework of public support. For a while in the late 1990s, the German Social Democratic Party imitated New Labour with a claim to pursue die neue Mitte, but that claim too disappeared in the 2000s. The concept has a modest salience in the USA where it has become central to the philosophy of the Democratic Leadership Council, the centrist pressure group in the Democrats. See also social exclusion; social market.
— Iain McLean

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Developmental State
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0907/0907.2019.pdf

A developmental state is a state where government is intimately involved in the macro and micro-economic planning in order to grow the economy (Onis, 1991). It has generally been observed that successful developmental states are able to advance their economies much faster than regulatory states that use regulations to manage the economy.

Characteristics of a Developmental State
In order to understand the concept of a developmental state, it is important to highlight some of the characteristics of a developmental state (Thompson, 1996; Woo-Cumings, 1999).

Developmental states generally put strong emphasis on technical education and the development of numeracy and computer skills within the population. This technically oriented education is strategically used to capacitate government structures particularly the bureaucracy. What emerges out of this strategy is that the political and bureaucratic layers are populated by extremely educated people who have sufficient tools of analysis to be able to take leadership initiatives, based on sound scientific basis, at every level of decision making nodes within the government structure.

Developmental states have been observed to be able to efficiently distribute and allocate resources and, therefore, invest optimally in critical areas that are the basis of industrialisation such as education. The complexity of the transformation agenda in South Africa makes the task of efficiently distributing and allocating resources difficult to achieve (Marwala, 2005c).

The other characteristic that has been observed in successful developmental states is economic nationalism. This characteristic is also observed in developed states such as the USA during tough economic times. The characteristic of the national question in South Africa, which makes the notion of "South Africaness" a highly complex concept given the vast diversity of the South African population, makes economic nationalism not a viable option in South Africa.

The other characteristic of a developmental state is its emphasis on market share over profit. The developed segment of the South African capitalist system is sophisticated and it has a huge component of short term investments also known as "hot money". This makes profit, particularly short term profit, a significant factor in the investment decision making process.

Developmental states have been observed for their protection of their embryonic domestic industries and have also been observed to focus on aggressive acquisition of foreign technology. This they achieve by deploying their most talented students to overseas universities located in strategic and major centres of the innovation world and also by effectively utilizing their foreign missions (Marwala, 2005c; Marwala, 2006).

Furthermore, they encourage and reward foreign companies that invest in building productive capacity such as manufacturing plants with the aim that the local industrial sector will in time be able to learn vital success factors from these companies. On constructing a harmonious social-industrial complex, developmental states strike a strategic alliance between the state, labour and industry in order to increase critical measures such as productivity, job security and industrial expansion. Even though developmental states do not create enemies unnecessarily and do not participate in the unnecessary criticism of countries with strategic technologies that they would like to acquire, they are, however, skeptical of copying foreign values without translating and infusing them with local characteristics.

Developmental states generally believe that they will attain state legitimacy through delivery of services to citizens rather than through the ballot. In South Africa, state legitimacy is achieved through the ballot however the main shortcoming is that the society has not reached an equilibrium stage where the feedback mechanism between voting pattern and service delivering reinforce each other. Now that the characteristics of a developmental state have been highlighted it is important to briefly describe industrialisation because it is an important component of a developmental state.

The vital driver for success in developmental states is industrialisation. The goal of industrialisation is to create a country that produces goods and services with high added values. For example, instead of exporting minerals unprocessed, people can be employed to beneficiate these minerals and manufacture goods such as watches and thus add economic value to the final products. The process by which countries add aggregate economic values to the products and services they offer is directly dependant on the level of industrialisation in the country's economy.

Keys to success -- Education, scientific and technological development, e.g. Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan.

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Oxford Dictionary of Politics:
pluralism
Literally, a belief in more than one entity or a tendency to be, hold, or do more than one thing. This literal meaning is common to all the political and social applications of the word, but it has applied in contexts so varied that the uses seem like separate meanings. The most established of these is pluralism as the tendency of people to hold more than one job or benefice, most specifically in the context of the pre-Reformation Catholic Church. In the late nineteenth century, pluralism was applied to philosophical theories or systems of thought which recognized more than one ultimate principle, as opposed to those which were 'monist'. At the same time, the word came to be applied in the United States to the view that the country could legitimately continue to be formed of distinct ethnic groups, the Jewish-Americans, Irish-Americans, and so on, rather than that all differences should dissolve into a 'melting-pot' (see also multiculturalism).
All of these uses have had at least a slight influence on the primary contemporary meaning in which the pluralist model of society is one in which the existence of groups is the political essence of society. Pluralists in this sense contrast with elitists because they see the membership of village and neighbourhood communities, trade unions, voluntary societies, churches, and similar organizations as being more important than distinctions between a ruling class and a class that is ruled: vertical distinctions in society are less important than horizontal.

The forerunner of this kind of pluralism was F. R. de Lammenais who edited the journal L'Avenir in France in the early nineteenth century. Lammenais attacked both the individualism and the universalism of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. The individual, he said, was 'a mere shadow', who could not be said to exist at all socially except in so far as he was part of one or more groups. Both Lammenais and modern pluralists, including such notable American writers as Robert Dahl and Nelson Polsby, tend to believe both that society consists essentially of groups, with its political life a competition for group influence, and that this state of affairs is a good thing. Thus pluralism is often a relatively conservative doctrine, at least in relation to Marxism or radical democratic theory, which both tend to portray society as a predominance of an elite over a non-elite rather than a competition between groups

Lincoln Allison

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Gale Encyclopedia of US Foreign Policy:
Elitism
Classical and New Elite Theory
Although the idea probably always has been present in some form, elitism emerged as a recognizable and clearly defined part of Western political thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The leading contributors to the theory were Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels. These writers attacked classical democratic thought and also Aristotle and Karl Marx. Majority rule, they insisted, is impossible. Every society is divided into those who rule and those who are ruled; and the rulers constitute only a small minority of any society. Aristotle's classification, which divided political systems into three types (rule by one, rule by a few, and rule by the many), does not fit reality either, for no man is capable of ruling by himself, and the many, too, lack the ability to govern. It is the few, under any political system, who exercise effective control. And Marx, with his emphasis on a class struggle that in the end (following the victory of the working class) leads to social harmony in a classless society, was also wrong. History features a continuing struggle among elites. That struggle will never end, and a classless society cannot be created. Moreover, to the pioneers in the development of elitist theory, Marx placed too much emphasis on economics and not enough on politics, which could be autonomous.

Classical elitist theory did not maintain merely that the active, socially recognizable people in a country made its important decisions—whether from within offices of government, from somewhere behind the scenes, or from completely outside the state apparatus. It emphatically asserted that the common man, however numerous within a society in absolute or relative terms, did not. Analysts of elites, who generally focus on the distribution of power rather than on the allocation of values, or on property and other wealth forms, differ somewhat over the degree of participation in government or, more generally, the political process that is necessary for a member of the elite accurately to be judged a member of what Mosca characterizes as "the ruling class." A society's elite is usually thought to be a stable entity, self-sustaining and constant over time. Yet the actual group that is in office can change markedly and very quickly. The concept of an elite therefore may need to be understood as encompassing all those who might govern as well as those who in fact do govern.

However "elite" is precisely understood, elitist theory is clear in the basic point that a minority, rather than the masses, controls things. The general population of a country—the common man—is ineffective. Even in societies with elections and other democratic mechanisms, it is posited, the ruling elite functions in a way that is largely independent of control by a popular majority. However, it made need a justifying doctrine. That the elite ordinarily functions according to a "political formula," in Mosca's term, is what makes its rule effective and acceptable to the masses. Thus, in theory, there can be a democratic elitism, however paradoxical that may seem.

A "new elite paradigm," building on the work of Mosca and other classical theorists, emerged in the 1980s and 1990s among comparative political sociologists. It drew attention to the occurrence, and the important effects, of divisions that may arise within the elite of a society. Its central proposition, as stated by John Higley and Michael Burton (1989), is as follows: "A disunified national elite, which is the most common type, produces a series of unstable regimes that tend to oscillate between authoritarian and democratic forms over varying intervals. A consensually unified national elite, which is historically much rarer, produces a stable regime that may evolve into a modern democracy, as in Sweden, or Britain, or the United States, if economic and other facilitative conditions permit."

In the United States, normally, internal and external conditions have favored consensual unity within the nation's elite. Of course, the American Revolution and, later, the Civil War, are the major exceptions to this generalization. During those periods, divisions ran so deep as to produce counter-elites. As the political sociologist Barrington Moore, Jr., and the political historian C. Vann Woodward have shown, the reconciliation between North and South that occurred following post–Civil War Reconstruction was in significant part a result of a complex bargain between the elites in formerly opposed geographical sections. After the late nineteenth century, issues of foreign policy have on occasion divided the American elite as well. A by-product of this has been a widening of participation in the national debate over foreign policy. That this amounts to a "democratization" of American foreign policymaking, however, is highly disputable.

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Oxford Dictionary of Politics:
Corporatism

The central core of corporatism is the notion of a system of interest intermediation linking producer interests and the state, in which explicitly recognized interest organizations are incorporated into the policy-making process, both in terms of the negotiation of policy and of securing compliance from their members with the agreed policy. However, one of the characteristics of the debate in the social sciences from the mid-1970s onwards about corporatism was the failure of the participants to agree about the meaning of the term. There was agreement that the area being studied was that of relations between organized interests and the state. There was some agreement that the discussion was particularly concerned with interests that arose from the division of labour in society, and particularly attempts to reconcile conflicts between capital and labour. However, while some analysts insisted that corporatist arrangements had to be tripartite, involving the state, organized employers, and organized labour, others insisted that they could be bipartite between the state and one of the other 'social partners', or between the 'social partners' themselves. There was a measure of agreement that whereas conventional pressure groups made representations about the content of public policy, corporatism involved a mixture of representation and control. In return for being involved in the formulation of public policy, corporatist interest groups were expected to assist in its implementation. This was sometimes captured through the idea of 'intermediation' which some analysts saw as central to the idea of corporatism (A. Cawson), although others doubted whether intermediation was unique to corporatism and therefore could be regarded as its distinguishing feature.

Although the modern debate started in the mid-1970s, the idea of corporatism has a long history. Guilds or corporations were important institutions in mediaeval life, but attracted little attention from political theorists. Conscious reflection about the potential prescriptive value of corporatist arrangements really started in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), Leo XIII tackled the problems of the poverty of the working classes, the development of trade unions, and the prevalent 'spirit of revolutionary change'. It was argued that class conflict was not inevitable, but that capital and labour were mutually dependent. Noting the general growth of associative action, Leo XIII argued that problems such as working conditions and health and safety could be dealt with by specially established organizations or boards, with the state sanctioning and protecting such arrangements. The object of proceeding in this way was 'in order to supersede undue interference on the part of the State'. This concern with limiting direct state intervention, and finding alternative forms of state-sanctioned associative action, has remained a central theme of the corporatist debate. The association between corporatism and Catholic social theory has also remained a strong one.

After the First World War, the idea of corporatism was taken up by the radical right, in particular by Mussolini, who placed it at the centre of the fascist regime in Italy. As a consequence, corporatism suffered from guilt by association. It came to be regarded as a synonym for fascism and disappeared from most political discussion, although it survived in Spain and especially Portugal.

There was, nevertheless, an alternative liberal version of corporatism which was clearly distinct from the surviving remnants of authoritarian corporatism. Samuel Beer made use of the term in his Modern British Politics (1965), forecasting that 'The further development of corporatism is surely to be expected'. Andrew Shonfield's Modern Capitalism, published in the same year and one of the most influential mid-century works on political economy, discussed the concept in terms of a corporatist management of economic planning in which the main interest groups were brought together to conclude bargains about their future behaviour.

The index entry for 'corporatism' in Shonfield's book reads 'see also Fascism', and it was the objective of the new generation of neocorporatist writers, led by Philippe Schmitter, to strip corporatism of its fascist associations, and to reinvent the concept as a means of analysing observable changes in a number of Western democracies. In 1974, Schmitter published Still the Century of Corporatism?, the title referring to Mihail Manoilesco's 1934 prediction that, just as the nineteenth century was that of liberalism, the twentieth century would be that of corporatism. Schmitter wished to escape from what he saw as an unhelpful dominance of pluralist analysis in American political science.

Schmitter triggered off an academic 'growth industry' on corporatism. In part, this was because it helped the understanding of long-term political phenomena such as the social pacts in Sweden and Switzerland, or the Parity Commission in Austria. Corporatism's appeal was wider, however, than explaining the politics of some of the more prosperous smaller European democracies where it was always difficult to decide whether corporatism promoted prosperity, or prosperity made corporatism possible because everyone came away from the bargaining table with something. Modern neocorporatism can best be understood as part of the breakdown of neo-Keynesianism. In the post-war period, Western governments had attempted to maintain full employment through techniques of aggregate demand management. This had, however, led to inflationary pressures, which became much worse after the first oil shock in 1973. Hence, governments increasingly turned to incomes policies as a means of restraining inflation while maintaining a demand management policy. This inevitably led them into agreements with the large producer groups, even in countries like Britain which had a predisposition for liberal solutions to economic problems. In particular, the unions were often offered concessions on social issues (employment law, taxation, social benefits) in return for agreeing to assist in the restraint of wage increases. The organized employers were also brought into the bargaining picture, in part because their assistance might be required in relation to price restraint, but also to act as a counterweight to the unions. The link between incomes policy and corporatism is illustrated in a study by Helander of the development of incomes policy in Finland which required the creation of new institutions and alterations in the functions of some existing ones. The Finnish political system changed into a two-tier one with parliamentary and corporatist subsystems

Although the debate on corporatism produced a considerable volume of research output, it is often regarded as flawed for a number of reasons. First, there was the failure to agree on what was actually being discussed. Second, although corporatism claimed to be distinctive from pluralism, it shared many of pluralism's assumptions, and could be presented by its opponents as little more than a subtype of pluralism. Third, the debate really developed just as the phenomena it was examining became less central to the political process. More liberal solutions to problems of economic policy became favoured in a number of European countries in the 1980s as social democratic parties lost power. Moreover the focus of debate moved away from the politics of production to the politics of collective consumption, as issues such as environmental problems moved higher up the political agenda. They are less amenable to corporatist solutions, and the relevance of a modernist concept like corporatism to more post-modernist forms of politics is open to question. Fourth, the debate was characterized by a failure to separate analysis and prescription. Many, although not all, of the writers on corporatism were either openly (C. Crouch) or covertly sympathetic to its use as a means of providing a 'middle way' that would satisfy the legitimate aspirations of organized labour whilst maintaining a capitalist mode of production. Corporatism was often defended in terms of its effectiveness in securing desired economic goals (high growth, low inflation, low unemployment), but there was a recognition that it could have undesirable political consequences. It lacked legitimacy as a mode of governance, emphasizing functional rather than territorial representation. It tended to bypass legislatures by creating new unelected bodies, such as economic councils of various kinds, and while it included some interests, it excluded others (smaller businesses, consumers). Fifth, as the debate developed in the 1980s, it focused increasingly on examples of sectoral or meso corporatism rather than at the macro level. Although many examples of corporatism were uncovered in particular policy areas (such as training policy and in many areas of agricultural policy), the explanatory value of corporatism as a model of the polity as a whole was thereby diminished.

Schmitter's article made a clear distinction between societal corporatism to be found in countries such as Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, and state corporatism to be found in countries such as Spain, Portugal, and Mexico, as well as Fascist Italy and Pétinist France. Much of the subsequent debate focused on societal (or 'liberal') corporatism, although Coleman showed that the concept of state corporatism could be applied in a liberal democracy through his analysis of Quebec.

The concept of corporatism has been applied to the European Community, which certainly has been influenced by the Catholic tradition of 'social partnership', exemplified by the 'val Duchesse' discussions between the Community, employers, and labour initiated in 1985. The protocol on social policy in the Maastricht treaty includes provisions both for consultation with management and labour, and arrangements for the joint implementation of directives by management and labour. This is an unambiguously corporatist arrangement, but if the Community had generally followed a corporatist path, the Economic and Social Committee would have been a central institution, instead of being marginalized.

The corporatist debate stimulated comparative empirical research on pressure groups as, for example, in the Organization of Business interests project co-ordinated by Schmitter and Wolfgang Streeck. Whether it provided theoretical 'value added' beyond the insights provided by pluralism remains contentious.

Wyn Grant
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