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Corporatism in 24 industrial democracies: Meaning and measurement
Author(s) -
Siaroff Alan
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
european journal of political research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.267
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1475-6765
pISSN - 0304-4130
DOI - 10.1111/1475-6765.00467
Subject(s) - corporatism , meaning (existential) , economics , term (time) , economic system , political science , political economy , politics , epistemology , law , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics
The ongoing use of the concept of ‘corporatism’ in industrial democracies has been stretched to include overlapping but still distinctive realities, which in turn often produce different ‘lists’of corporatist economies. Consequently, this analysis sets out to disentangle the concept of corporatism and to suggest a replacement. It includes a comparative classification of 24 long–term industrial democracies in terms of the corporatism scores given by 23 different scholarly analyses. The divisions in scoring certain important but problematic cases (such as Japan) can be explained by noting differing emphases in the term. I then propose an alternative, more focused summary measure of economic integration which is clearly linear and which has no ‘problem cases’. Precise scores on economic integration are given for four time periods from the late 1960s through the mid–1990s. It will be seen that the industrial democracies have always been dichotomised between integrated and non–integrated (or ‘pluralist’) economies.