CORPORATISM IN THEORY AND IN PRACTICE

At a time when political scientists have come to accept that there is no realistic possibility of a general theory of the capitalist State or, more especially, its historical forms, they are still reaching for general statements about contemporary corporatist structures and institutions. In their majority these statements are clearly descriptive rather than theoretical, and are derived from studies of the advanced industrial nations of Western Europe and North America; but this does not prevent them being applied, by induction, to other polities such as those of southern Europe. This procedure belongs to a broadly Weberian methodological paradigm, which sanctions the construction of a corporatist ideal-type to be used in the comparative investigation of different national realities where the various synthetic elements of the type will be found to be ‘more or less present and occasionally absent’ (Weber:1959). While such an approach may yield an interesting description, it runs the danger of subsuming different cases to the type in uncritical fashion, without trying to explain the differences.