This article answers Larry Gerber's (1995) challenge for a renewed
appreciation of the social science literature on corporatism and state theory by
explaining variations in corporatist institutions through the concept of policy
legacies. To understand the variation in corporatist forms of governance, three
policy areas are key: the long-standing trade policies of the England and
Canada, the forms of government intervention during World War I, and prior
political battles within the dairy industries. In their own unique way, these
policies shaped the character of the market failure, the political capacities of
farm organizations, and the institutional response that incorporated private
interest groups within the formulation and implementation of public policy. By
viewing the emergence of corporatist institutions in England and Canada as
examples of governmental responses to economic crisis, this research on
corporatism contributes to the larger theory of the determinants, as well as the
effects, of the state in capitalist democracies.