Measuring Social Concertation

The methods researchers use in the social sciences should be determined by the empirical problems they seek to explain, rather than the other way around: methodology should be aligned with ontology (Hall 2003). Starting from this, measuring and explaining social concertation implies a number of methodological pitfalls. First, as highlighted by the quote above, compromises between social partners are often struck in closed settings. In day-to-day procedures of social concertation about public policies, opacity is often a constant, and is even sometimes a pre-condition for compromises to emerge, because employers and trade union elites may have an interest in concealing the concessions they make to the other side from their own rank-and-file. Schmitter and Streeck (1981) have pointed this out very accurately when they described the interactions between the logic of membership and the logic of influence. Now, this poses a set of methodological problems as well. In this study, I rely essentially on qualitative methods. I use a rather simple typology to measure concertation, and a combination of process-tracing and comparison of cases to explain it.

The main advantage of qualitative methods and case studies is that they can achieve a higher level of conceptual validity than statistical methods, however over a smaller number of cases.