Small States in World Markets is about political efficacy and legitimation rather than scoring who is ahead in the economic sweepstakes. Its case for democratic corporatism rests on norms, particularly stability, rather than on narrow measures of economic efficiency. But stability, and the efficacious management of the economy and social problems requires a degree of technocracy that undermines the legitimacy of the management process itself by helping to produce populist revolts.

Iceland's neo-liberal laboratory ended in economic crash and political chaos. The business-oriented sectoral corporatist structure in Iceland created an ideal framework for the neo-liberal agenda. A comprehensive democratic corporatist framework, including the conditions for economic flexibility and political stability, was missing. The culture of consensus did not prevail. The paper shows how Iceland does not fit Katzenstein's theory. At the same time, the case of Iceland shows the value of the corporatist model in analyzing the process of change in a small society and its successes and failures.

The existing social pact literature claims that governing parties offer social pact proposals because they anticipate they will receive an electoral benefit from social pact agreements. Yet the available data on social pacts inform us that in a substantial minority of cases social pact proposals fail to become social pact agreements. In an effort to better determine the political calculations made by governments before they propose a social pact, this article examines the effect of implementing reform legislation unilaterally, social pact proposals, social pact proposal failures and social pact agreements on the vote share of government parties in 15 Western European countries between 1981 and 2006. It is found that social pact proposals do not have any electoral consequences for governing parties, unilateral legislation and social pact proposal failures reduce the vote share of governing parties, and social pact agreements provide an electoral benefit to parties in minority governments only. These findings suggest that governing parties propose social pacts in a good faith effort to complete a social pact agreement; and that such an agreement is not a way for these parties to gain votes, but to avoid the electoral punishment associated with enacting unpopular reforms unilaterally.

This article illustrates the development of government–nonprofit collaboration in the Netherlands. It first gives an overview of the scope and structure of the nonprofit sector and voluntary work and then explains the crucial steps in the evolution of the partnership arrangement between the public sector and nonprofit institutions. The article describes the past significance of so-called pillarization on the development of the nonprofit sector and its collaboration with the state. In accommodating a broad diversity of nonprofit organizations with different religious and social backgrounds, the Netherlands created an elaborate mechanism for government–nonprofit collaboration in which nonprofit organizations fulfill functions in service delivery and policy formation. However, the sector is now fundamentally fragmented and has little shared identity left today. Paradoxically, its past success also makes it less likely that the Dutch nonprofit sector will be regarded as a solution to current social problems.

Corporatism may be seen as variety of capitalism in which specific structural prerequisites such as unionization, centralization, and strong states combined with bargaining and concertation produce certain economic outputs. Corporatism may also be seen as a variety of democracy in which interest groups are integrated in the preparation and/or implementation of public policies. Departing in the last position, we measure the strength of Scandinavian corporatism by the involvement of interest groups in public committees, councils, and commissions. Corporatism in relation to the preparation of policy has gone down in all three Scandinavian countries whereas corporatism in implementation processes are more varied among the three countries.

In interpreting the current surge of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in China, scholars have mainly applied western concepts of civil society, corporatism, and the third sector. These perspectives, however, are not sufficient to account for the importance of China’s particular historical and political culture. This paper discusses the development and future of NGOs in the context of current scholarly research as well as the role of China’s historical and current sociopolitical situation.

Are electorally vulnerable politicians really less likely to support controversial legislation, such as pension reforms? While the literature on welfare state retrenchment has increasingly pointed to the role of electoral factors in the dynamics of social policy cutbacks, there are few studies that actually measure the magnitude of electoral pressure and its consequent impact on the politics of reform. To this end, the authors have developed a quantitative measure of the electoral vulnerability of politicians and tested its impact on pension reform outcomes using an original dataset comprising 16 Western European countries from 1980 to 2003. In line with expectations, the results show that the impact of electoral vulnerability on reform depends upon the system of interest intermediation. In corporatist systems, electoral vulnerability indeed impedes reform. But in pluralist systems, increased electoral vulnerability is associated with higher levels of reform. This is because unions in corporatist (but not in pluralist) systems can exploit electoral vulnerability in pre‐legislative bargaining, and thus pressure politicians. Consequently, this study has broader implications for the differential responsiveness of democracies to redistributive issues more generally.

This article explores the theoretical underpinnings of the state-led establishment of quasi-monopolistic Islam Councils in Western Europe. The author argues that national consultations representing the Muslim faith in seven European countries share institutional characteristics with 19th and 20th century corporatist arrangements with Labor and Jewish Communities, and pursue similar goals of rendering faith and group ideology compatible with national citizenship while encouraging the moderation of group demands on the state.

Policy institutes, or “think tanks”, are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our societies. In this article, we conceptualize think tanks explicitly as a civil society phenomenon, linking the proliferation of this relatively new type of actor to the transformation of civil society structures and of systems of interest representation. Using the case of Sweden as an illustration, we argue that the recent decades’ rise of think tanks in institutional settings outside of the USA can only be understood if we take into account the particular features and institutional policy access opportunities of the domestic civil society in each national case, and that think tanks should be analytically understood as the allies of, rather than competitors to, the older, established forces in civil society.

Within the field of international relations, scholarship supports the notion that international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and foundations, as a part of transnational civil society, influence state policy and behaviors, while the causal effects of state influence on INGOs is less researched. By contrast, the co-constitutive roles of states and INGOs are well established in third-sector research. Seeking to extend these literatures and bring them into conversation more with one another, this article explores the process of state influence on INGOs and foundations in the context of China, a strong, resiliently authoritarian state. We argue that three strategic adaptations by INGOs emerge as a pragmatic response to operating within China’s authoritarian institutions, such as (1) learning to focus mostly on policymakers rather than citizens, (2) collaboration with local governments on policy experimentation as the primary advocacy method, and (3) the adoption of strategies to hedge against potential risks of operating without a protected legal status, such as only collaborating with the grassroots NGOs properly registered with state authorities. In some cases, these adaptations catalyzed larger organizational changes. Our findings indicate that socialization processes can affect both INGOs and states, and thus serve to highlight the difficult trade-offs faced by INGOs engaging strong authoritarian governments such as China. Further, they suggest that, in a world of seemingly resurgent authoritarian governance, restricting legal and policy space for INGOs may be moot, since INGOs working inside these states are influenced to comply with domestic rules, norms, and practices.

Corporatism is being reinvented in current theories about global democracy. As I see it, corporatism can be regarded as a practical way out of democracy’s intensity problem: whether those more involved in an issue should have greater say. By the same token, corporatism can be perceived as a response to the all-affected principle: whether those especially affected by a decision should have more influence. In nation-states, corporatism was to a large extent dismantled during the 1980s. In world politics, by contrast, NGOs are now called upon to play an important role in not only articulating intense and affected interests but also, in so doing, realizing a global democracy. The weakness of this argument is that today’s NGOs do not reflect the will of most people—as national organizations once managed to do—and, consequently, cannot fulfill the integrative and representative function associated with this form of interest politics.

This paper attempts to take the first steps toward developing a theory of non-governmental organizations (NGO)–state relations under dictatorship. Drawing on evidence from East Asia, the author argues that dictatorships typically employ one of two strategies in attempting to govern NGOs. First, some dictatorships follow a corporatist strategy, in which business associations, development, and social welfare organizations are co-opted into the state and controlled through a variety of strategies. Second, other dictatorships pursue an exclusionary strategy in which NGOs are marginalized and replaced with state institutions. Variation in the strategy chosen may be explained by differing levels of elite competition and the type of development strategy. Single-party states tend to regulate elite conflicts better and thus often choose corporatist strategies. In personalist regimes dictators tend to fear the organizational and mobilizational potential of NGOs and thus tend to pursue exclusionary strategies. This choice, however, is conditioned by the development strategy employed, as socialist development strategies reduce the incentives to allow NGOs.

Salamon argues strongly in favor of a public-nonprofit partnership model expressing the European flavor of corporatism. Germany provides a textbook example of corporatist arrangements, particularly in the fields of health care and social services. Whereas American nonprofit organizations are suffering from a crisis of legitimacy caused by marketization, German nonprofit organizations have been confronted with a crisis of legitimacy and identity caused by corporatism since the early 1980s. This particular scenario, however, is not covered by Salmon’s analysis.

The article, written from a post-financial crisis vantage point, applies Katzenstein's democratic corporatist model to the case of Iceland, and asks if it overlooks an essential message from theory, namely that small states need an external protector in order to survive, economically and politically. The article claims that the model convincingly made the case for how small states can buffer from within but fails to grasp their need for external shelter to cope with risk. In a financialised world economy, small states need economic and political shelter in order to prevent risk from spiralling out of control and they need support in order to clean up after a crisis.

This article aims to increase understanding of how the institutional model of a (neo) corporative state meets new forms in a changing civil society. This objective is accomplished by analyzing two case studies of Swedish organizations entering into the field of government-subsidized popular education: one youth organization and one Muslim organization. The institutionalist concepts isomorphism, isopraxism, isonymism, packaging and translation are used to analyze these. Empirically the article is based on qualitative analysis of interviews, observations and written documents. It is concluded that the translation of popular education as an organizational concept in these cases is characterized by coercive and mimetic isomorphism, isopraxism and isonymism to an extent that hinders development in the popular education field. There are also examples of emerging packaging changing the relationship between state and civil society. That issue, however, requires further qualitative research, as does the influence of corporatism on civil society organization in general.

This article conceptually and empirically explores the Interwar Era’s variant of the ‘electoral authoritarian’ regime-type, relying on a unique recategorisation of all Central and Eastern European states to systematically classify non-democratic regimes between the two World Wars. Modern electoral authoritarian regimes are notable for combining the ‘standard model’ of electoralist structural features common to contemporary democracy with identifiably authoritarian political orders. Electoralist regimes of the period were distinct from those of today, with a greater emphasis on anti-political dominant parties, the inheritance of 19th century-style parliamentarism in terms of both institutional and political culture, and a reliance on unaccountable apex executives who nevertheless allowed authoritarian forms of multiparty politics. The article also introduces the era’s primary alternative for institutionalized regimes that do not fit the simple label of traditional dictatorship or electoral authoritarianism: the ‘institutional-hierarchical’ model. This characterizes innovations in corporatist-style economic and sectoral representation, as well as explicitly top-down, non-electoralist authoritarian constitutional structures and mobilized, single-party institutions. The article reviews all Interwar regimes in the region, providing alternative regime conceptualizations, exploratory classifications, and an illustrative case-study of Poland’s post-1926 Interwar style electoral authoritarian regime, highlighting both the survival of older electoralist models alongside a growing movement towards both more personalist and institutional-hierarchical formats by the 1930s.

The Publicity Department of the Austrian Fatherland Front served the Ständestaat regime (1933–38). An elaborate organization on paper, the Fatherland Front's actual work was bound up in the performance of para-fascism and the surveillance of opposing parties. Each of these modes of being mutually reinforced the need for the other and created a unique self-awareness of failure within the movement. As such, the Publicity Department offers a microcosm of the larger challenges of the Ständestaat, which faltered in the face of economic collapse, political violence, and a population largely indifferent to its attempt to secure Austrian sovereignty in the 1930s.