Introduction

Writing in the mid 1990s in “Trajectory of a Concept,” Collier observes that the concept of corporatism would possibly be less relevant moving into the twenty-first century for a number of reasons, including its empirical decline in the region, the dominance of other more relevant concepts in the democratic neoliberal context, and the fact that scholars had already analyzed it in depth (Reference Collier and Smith1995: 153).Footnote ¹

Indeed, we must ask whether “corporatism” as a concept has gone the way of bureaucratic authoritarianism, largely used to describe a finite period of Latin American political history. Toward the end of the twentieth century into the early twenty-first century, scholars and observers of Latin America widely remarked that corporatism, or the widespread incorporation of civil society groups into state bodies and state processes, was largely incompatible with the neoliberal political economies and democratic regime types that had come to dominate the region. Scholarly works with titles such as “After Corporatism” (Palmer-Rubin Reference Palmer-Rubin, Kapiszewski, Levitsky and Yashar2021) and observations about a delimited corporatist period of the past (e.g., Yashar Reference Yashar2005; Lucero Reference Lucero2008), as opposed to a contemporary “post-corporatist period” (Rossi Reference Rossi2015), were telling in this regard. They suggested that, indeed, the empirical state–society relationship of corporatism was disappearing, and the concept would no longer be relevant to contemporary analysis. Such analyses drew attention to the fact that paradigmatic cases of labor organization and incorporation into the state, such as those associated with Presidents Juan Perón in Argentina and Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, had given way to wide-scale labor exclusion and disempowerment as evidence of the faded phenomenon.

I argue that, in fact, corporatism is not dead empirically, conceptually, or theoretically. Rather, I contend that political-economic, regime, and civil-society changes have often led to new forms of corporatism, and with them, the need for conceptual innovation on the part of scholars studying the region. To be sure, I am not arguing that corporatism is the modal way that states currently relate to social groups, as it was in mid-twentieth-century Latin America, but rather that it constitutes one form of state–societal intermediation at play in the range of contemporary institutional arrangements.

Another contention here is that corporatism has expanded from centrally bringing economic or class-based social forces into particular structural relationships with and within the state. We now see a pattern in which salient social groups and organizations from a more diverse set of social domains are a part of such systems. This chapter thus helps elucidate the fact that there can be, and in fact are, multiple modes of interest intermediation that have existed often simultaneously in the same countries since the late twentieth century, that the concept of corporatism ultimately helps make sense of some of these modes, and that often we need to look beyond labor groups to see those multiple modes of interest intermediation.Footnote ²

In this chapter, I illustrate various ways that the concept of corporatism is still quite relevant, even if it exists alongside other forms of interest intermediation that were not present during the mid twentieth century. To begin, I briefly review the creation of diminished subtypes and discuss how their use helps us understand the landscape of contemporary interest intermediation, particularly given the reduced toolbox of post-Third Wave democratic regimes, involving their more limited options in terms of repression. In the following section, I examine two diminished subtypes with illustrative cases where the empirical evidence comes close to fulfilling all characteristics of the root concept of corporatism, albeit still with some divergences.Footnote ³ I discuss what I call liberal sectoral corporatism with the illustrative case of Indigenous movement incorporation in Ecuador, and what Sebastián Etchemendy and Ruth Berins Collier (Reference Etchemendy and Berins Collier2007) have called “segmented neo-corporatism,” with the illustrative case of Argentina’s wage policy (Etchemendy Reference Etchemendy2019). Following the discussion of these diminished subtypes and their illustrative cases, in the third section I suggest several other contemporary subtypes, including societal party corporatism, state party corporatism, and local societal corporatism, and briefly present empirical examples of these subtypes and the way their formation adds distinctive analytical leverage in the study of interest intermediation. The final section places the diminished subtypes of corporatism in the context of the emerging literature on new modes of incorporation in the region, where I discuss the need to (1) look to the changing political, social, and economic context to understand this conceptual innovation; (2) notice multiple modes of state–society linkages existing simultaneously; and (3) look beyond economic class incorporation to find these various modes.

Table 6.1 provides an overview of the cases and comparisons that are the foundations of this analysis. The table enumerates the noteworthy spectrum of contexts in which the idea of corporatism has proved to be a valuable analytic tool.

Table 6.1Cases, contexts, and concepts

a Terms without quotation marks are mine or come from studies on the root concept/phenomenon in mid-twentieth-century Latin America (à la Schmitter Reference Schmitter1974; D. Collier Reference Collier and Smith1995). Terms with quotation marks are associated with contemporary observations that corporatism is an ongoing phenomenon.

b While most of the literature on classic corporatism in Latin America highlights the way that the state structured, subsidized, and controlled labor groups, others have pointed out the way that peak business associations and peasant federations were sometimes part of these relationships (see, e.g., Shadlen Reference Shadlen2004; Wuhs Reference Wuhs2010).

c While corporatism remains a contested concept, much of the literature on Latin American politics has accepted this definition. Those working in the European politics literature, however, often include in the definition both the actual social sectors this model generally applies to as well as ideological underpinnings and policy-making processes.

d Collier and Handlin’s (Reference Collier and Handlin2009) description of their concept of “Statal Web” bears some resemblance to this concept, even if not given a corporatist moniker.

e I created this term for this chapter, whereas the works cited here discuss applicable phenomena as a form of corporatism without the “liberal sectoral” label attached.

f Roper (Reference Roper2003) shows evidence of this diminished subtype of corporatism without naming it as such.

g Schmitter (Reference Schmitter1974) and D. Collier (Reference Collier and Smith1995) discuss concertation as belonging to a different root concept than corporatism – policy making. This contrasts with Katzenstein (Reference Katzenstein1984, Reference Katzenstein1985) and others observing corporatism in Europe in the later twentieth century, who incorporate concertation into their very definition of “democratic corporatism.”

Conceptualizing Diminished Forms of Corporatism

Among the central contentions of this chapter is that using corporatism to recognize contemporary dynamics between state and society helps us understand what we have observed even after the era of paradigmatic corporatism, even if what currently exists does not exactly mirror phenomena to which the term was applied in previous historical periods. I thus agree with a key argument of Collier’s “Trajectory of a Concept”: that creating diminished subtypes can make the use of corporatism as a concept more elucidating than harmful. As Collier discusses, diminished subtypes fundamentally differ from classical subtypes of a root concept (see also D. Collier and Levitsky Reference Collier and Levitsky1997).Footnote ⁴ Whereas in classical subtypes, the use of adjectives adds specificity to the root concept with all of its definitional dimensions, the added adjectives of diminished subtypes show where it does not conform to the original set of dimensions of the classical subtype (D. Collier Reference Collier and Smith1995: 149). Indeed, with most of the adjectives I (and the other scholars who use them) add to contemporary forms of corporatism, I claim not that these represent corporatism plus some more specific dimensions; rather, they represent corporatism minus some indicators of the root concept.Footnote ⁵ Using the root concept of corporatism to illustrate some of the linkages between states and civil society in Latin America can nevertheless help us understand these relationships more fully, both descriptively and analytically.

Thus, throughout the beginning of the twenty-first century, there remain (and we have seen new forms of) linkages between state and society that conform for the most part to Schmitter’s widely used definition of corporatism whereby “Constituent units are organized into a number of singular, compulsory, noncompetitive, hierarchically ordered and functionally differentiated categories, recognized or licensed (if not created) by the state and granted a deliberate representational monopoly within their respective categories in exchange for observing certain controls on their selection of leaders and articulation of demands and supports” (Reference Schmitter1974: 93–94). Or, as R. Collier and D. Collier (Reference Collier and Collier1979) summarize,Footnote ⁶ there exist relationships between the state and civil society that include structuring of interest groups, subsidies to those groups, and a degree of control by the state of those groups.

The creation of diminished subtypes of corporatism here draws attention first to the fact that the structuring, subsidy, and control differ in strength and formality from earlier paradigmatic cases of corporatism in Latin America (particularly in the degree and form of control by the state over societal groups). Their creation secondly points to the fact that many, but not all, scholars find corporatism’s use as a concept more enlightening than the creation of wholly new concepts to understand various existing state–society arrangements. Indeed, other concepts have been created to understand the “post-corporatist” landscape of state–society relations, as in the creation of concepts such as the associational network, or “A-Net,” which Handlin and R. Collier (Reference Handlin, Berins Collier, Berins Collier and Handlin2009) use to understand more informal contemporary interest representation formations. However, again, many scholars argue that using corporatism “with adjectives” provides more analytical leverage than starting the conceptualization of contemporary forms of interest intermediation from scratch.

Liberal Sectoral Corporatism in Ecuador

Perhaps the closest contemporary subtype of corporatism to both the root concept and to the empirically modal form of interest intermediation of twentieth-century Latin America comes in what I call liberal sectoral corporatism.Footnote ⁷ While the adjective “liberal” as applied to corporatist relationships is itself contested,Footnote ⁸ here I follow the tradition of using the term to refer to civil liberties as a defining attribute of democracy and to denote the fact that post-Third Wave electoral democracies are largely limited in the types of control that they can and do use to limit the activities of societal groups that are part of corporatist relationships. Indeed, in cases of this diminished form of corporatism, structuring and subsidy often coexist with protest against the state by the very federations that have been brought in to exercise quasi-state functions (Handlin and R. Collier Reference Handlin, Berins Collier, Berins Collier and Handlin2009; Chartock Reference Chartock2011, Reference Chartock2013; Rich Reference Rich2020). Adding the adjective “sectoral” draws attention here to the fact that across the region, corporatist forms of interest intermediation have expanded to include sectors that reflect the most salient contemporary social cleavages, in addition to, and sometimes rather than, organized labor and the various forces of the economy (see Table 6.1).Footnote ⁹

In the case that most clearly illustrates the addition of both adjectives “sectoral” and “liberal” – Indigenous incorporation in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Ecuador – the structuring and subsidizing of these groups came quite close to that seen in mid-twentieth-century Latin American state–labor relations, while the control the state was able to exercise over the groups was far more limited and, when it existed, informal in nature.Footnote ¹⁰ Specifically, liberal sectoral corporatism in the case of Ecuador was particularly in evidence when it came to the creation, and especially the implementation, of policies that targeted Indigenous community marginalization, that did so with a recognition of culture, and that mandated oversight and participation on the part of Indigenous communities themselves, or so-called ethnodevelopment policy (Chartock Reference Chartock2011, Reference Chartock2013).Footnote ¹¹

The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) came together “from below” over decades, far before any formal relationships it would eventually come to have with the Ecuadorian state (Yashar Reference Yashar2005). By the late 1980s, CONAIE helped to create the most significant laws impacting Indigenous communities, aiding in the establishment of two ministry-level bureaucratic agencies that oversaw all intercultural bilingual education and ethnically targeted development funds in the country (Chartock Reference Chartock2011, Reference Chartock2013). Credibly claiming to represent approximately 75 percent of Indigenous communities in the country at the time, CONAIE was formally codified as having a leadership role over these bureaucratic agencies within the policies that established these new arms of the state (Brysk Reference Brysk2000: 73n14; Van Cott Reference Van Cott2005: 99; Chartock Reference Chartock2013). By the time the agencies were implementing the law, Indigenous communities had to be a part of CONAIE in order to work with these state agencies and receive the benefits and services they provided.Footnote ¹² In definitional corporatist fashion, the relationship saw the social movement organization become a quasi-state entity.

Thus, CONAIE held a virtual monopoly over representation of its stated constituency, controlled multimillion-dollar budgets, and was ensured robust membership by virtue of the fact that all who interacted with these state agencies needed to be part of the Indigenous federation. While, again, liberal corporatism precludes certain types of state repression, Ecuadorian elected officials nevertheless managed to use the relationship to exact more informal types of control over Indigenous groups. For example, when CONAIE leaders vocally opposed President Lucio Gutiérrez’s (2003–05) turn toward neoliberal policy, Gutiérrez used the agencies over which CONAIE had power to split the federation’s leadership, thereby weakening the federation itself.Footnote ¹³

This liberal sectoral corporatist relationship lasted from the late 1980s until the early 2010s, meaning that even under formal democratic rule, and even at the height of neoliberal policy making, Ecuador was not fully pluralist but instead contained various forms of interest intermediation defining its state–societal relationships.

“Segmented Neo-corporatism” in Argentina and Uruguay

Cases such as ethnodevelopment policy implementation in Ecuador forced scholars to recognize that earlier styles of Latin American corporatism were in fact not dead, just coming in a different form and including different groups. Similarly, certain types of more classical state–economic sector relationships in the Southern Cone in the early twenty-first century have shown that European-style “neo-corporatism” or “democratic corporatism” remains relevant, and so too do debates between scholars defining the term “corporatism” based on the European versus Latin American experiences.

In work regarding the inclusion of labor and business sectors in state processes in Argentina (Etchemendy and R. Collier Reference Etchemendy and Berins Collier2007; Etchemendy Reference Etchemendy2019) and Uruguay (Etchemendy Reference Etchemendy2019), Etchemendy and others have argued that there exists “segmented neo-corporatism,” whereby some South American peak labor and business organizations have partnered with the state to establish policies and processes that affect their constituencies. Though not necessarily codified into law as the representatives of their members or constituencies, these peak level organizations nevertheless have effective monopolies of representation, serve on specific councils within these states, and are functionally differentiated, in the sense of being representative of specific sectors.Footnote ¹⁴ Etchemendy (Reference Etchemendy2019) thus describes how these characteristics definitional of corporatism have operated in Argentina and Uruguay, with the most powerful labor and business representatives dealing with trade-offs regarding wage policy and related processes.

Though differing in many ways from the sectoral liberal corporatism described earlier in the case of Ecuador, the two forms nevertheless share various components. Thus, just as in sectoral liberal corporatism, there is far less capacity for states to control these societal organizations and sectors, and Etchemendy and others make explicit the fact that labor and business organizations remain autonomous from the state, enough so that they can and do challenge (including organizing protests against) government processes at times, without repression (Etchemendy Reference Etchemendy2019: 1439).

The work of those studying segmented neo-corporatism not only documents the continued empirical relevance of the concept of corporatism but implicitly revives debates about what is to be included in definitions of the root concept of corporatism itself. Thus, while I follow Schmitter (Reference Schmitter1974), D. Collier (Reference Collier and Smith1995), and R. Collier and D. Collier (Reference Collier and Collier1979), among many others, in limiting the root concept’s definitional characteristics to those describing institutional characteristics of the state–society relationship (i.e., structure, subsidy, and control), those reviving the concept of neo-corporatism (or what others studying twentieth-century northern and western Europe have called “democratic corporatism”) implicitly suggest that political scientists ought to add more than institutional aspects to the root concept. They thus follow Katzenstein’s (Reference Katzenstein1984) classic works on countries such as Austria and Switzerland when he argues that the term corporatism (1) necessarily refers to economic sector inclusion; (2) includes what Schmitter, Collier, and others have instead referred to as “concertation,” or the bringing together of various sectors for the purpose of policy-making; and (3) includes an ideology or culture of cooperation between sectors. Collier in “Trajectory” explicitly argues that at least 2 and 3 should in fact not be considered part of the root definition of corporatism. Regardless of the conceptual debate that recent work on segmented neo-corporatism revives, most importantly for this chapter, it shows the continuing relevance of the concept.

Varieties of Corporatism in Twenty-first-century Latin America: A Further Look at Table 6.1

The liberal sectoral corporatism of Ecuador and segmented neo-corporatism of Argentina and Uruguay from 2005 to 2015 perhaps come closest to the root concept(s) of corporatism that helped analyze the empirical reality of Latin America and parts of Europe’s twentieth-century-modal type of interest intermediation. Yet scholars observing contemporary Latin America have noticed and/or documented diminished subtypes in other contexts as well.Footnote ¹⁵ While this short chapter precludes a full exploration of these other subtypes, I include several of these in Table 6.1.

As Table 6.1 shows, the incorporation of interest groups into governing parties has meant that both Venezuela under Chavista rule and Bolivia under MAS leadership have been the sites of corporatism. The Venezuelan subtype comes closer to the paradigmatic “state” corporatism, whereby the state has a heavy hand in shaping, if not creating, civil society groups. By contrast, the Bolivian subtype comes closer to “societal” corporatism, where such groups exist prior to their incorporation into the state (Handlin and R. Collier Reference Handlin, Berins Collier, Berins Collier and Handlin2009; Silva Reference Silva2017; Etchemendy Reference Etchemendy, Kapiszewski, Levitsky and Yashar2021a). While much of the twenty-first-century Brazilian council structure fits conceptually within the liberal sectoral corporatist category applied to Indigenous movement incorporation noted earlier, Jessica Rich (Reference Rich2019) has argued that an even more specific label of “civic corporatism” should be applied to similar phenomena when we see the involvement of bureaucratic entrepreneurs in creating such relationships. Finally, decentralization reforms alongside local participatory policies have meant that countries such as Bolivia saw a type of local corporatism taking shape in some sectors, where local councils were sometimes fully constituted by particular interest federations (Roper Reference Roper2003; Chartock Reference Chartock2013).

Table 6.1 also highlights variations that can aid in future research on corporatism and state–society intermediation more broadly. Thus, among the characteristics that differentiate the various subtypes in Table 6.1 are the following:

1. (1) The segment of civil society with the corporatist relationship to the state. This involves newly salient sectors, such as Indigenous movement representatives in Ecuador, versus traditional corporatist sectors, such as labor federations in Uruguay.

2. (2) The setting of the corporatist relationship involving national-level interest intermediation, as in much of Brazil’s council structure, versus local-level interest intermediation, as in Bolivian OTBs.

3. (3) The role of specific political parties. This involves continuous mediation through one political party, as in Venezuelan corporatism, versus lack of formal connection to a particular party, as in ethnodevelopment policy implementation in Ecuador.

While there are other sources of variation among contemporary forms of corporatism in need of future research and analysis, the forms here show that, in almost all cases, earlier authoritarian forms of control are off the table.

It is thus clear that a number of diminished subtypes of corporatism have characterized the relationships between states and societies in Latin America since the turn toward neoliberalism and democracy, making corporatism a trend that should continue to be on the scholarly radar if we want to understand these relationships thoroughly.

Corporatism in the Context of New Modes of Incorporation in Latin America

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, scholars of Latin America have noticed and analyzed the way that states have begun to incorporate new (and old) actors into the political process in new (and old) ways.Footnote ¹⁶ Much of this scholarship has insightfully documented the important observation that alternative modes of interest intermediation are not mutually exclusive within or between countries in the region, a fact that was even true when more structured and regionwide forms of corporatism abounded.Footnote ¹⁷

That said, there is a perhaps natural tendency to assume that because the “century of corporatism” may be over, all forms of interest intermediation must be post-corporatist, an idea belied by the evidence cited earlier. In an effort to juxtapose the “new” forms of incorporation and inclusion to the “old” mode of corporatism, there has also been a tendency to conflate various concepts with corporatism, concepts that do not align with Schmitter’s or Collier’s definitions. Thus, there has been a tendency to (1) discuss corporatism as incorporation into a nongoverning party (a process that has certainly led to corporatism at times, although not itself a form of interest intermediation between state and society); (2) describe corporatism as a form of civil society participation (which by itself it is not); and (3) define twentieth-century corporatism solely as state corporatism, as a nod to states holding power relative to social groups. This is misleading conceptually and empirically. Conceptually, the state/societal distinction concerns the origins and timing of social groups’ organization, not the balance of power. Empirically, many twentieth-century corporatist cases featured groups whose organization predated their ties to the state and are examples of societal corporatism. There has also been a tendency to claim that because the forms of interest intermediation particular scholars are examining are noncorporatist, corporatism must be a thing of the past. The analysis and evidence given here serves as an important reminder that simply because all forms of interest intermediation in the current period are not corporatist, and even if most are not, that does not mean that corporatism has died out as a relevant form of incorporating societal actors into the state.

Conclusion

I have argued that, contrary to the interpretation offered by several scholars, the concept of corporatism is still relevant in discussing states and societies after the turn to neoliberal economies and democratic regimes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Indeed, the chapter documents various subtypes of corporatism that have arisen across various country cases in the region and shows that scholars specializing in quite different countries, interest group areas, and policies have noticed this as well.

Using corporatism as a concept not only helps us understand some of the relationships between states and societies, but it also helps us to locate explanatory factors for the arrival of such relationships, their strength, their continuation, and their disappearance. For example, studies of earlier iterations of corporatism suggested that when social movement organizations were strong vis-à-vis the state, these groups received more subsidies than control and vice versa (R. Collier and D. Collier Reference Collier and Collier1979). The same appears to be true in more contemporary subtypes of the relationship (Chartock Reference Chartock2013).

If one causal connection is clear within this analysis alone, it is that major changes in politics, society, and the economy have meant that the empirical form in which corporatism could arrive would necessarily be different from those that had come before, and that this has also forced scholars to adapt, rather than throw out, the valuable concept of corporatism. Thus, specific changes such as the dominance of democracy (or at least of elections), the appearance of social movements in realms such as ethnicity and gender, and the shift to neoliberal economies have led scholars to use adjectives such as “informal,” “sectoral,” and “civic” to make new use of a classic concept of comparative politics.