What Drives Collaboration in Corporatist Policy Subsystems? Policy Networks of Climate Change in Finland and Sweden

Policy networks have been shown to be an increasingly important form of governance. It has been found, for example, that belief homophily is a central driver of collaboration in policy networks when there is conflict and disagreement over policy. However, most policy network research has been done in the context of the pluralist political system of the US. Pluralist institutions are usually coupled with adversarial politics. This means that it is also likely that there will be two or more coalitions, which differ from each other in terms of policy beliefs and also in who they cooperate with. Even though in principle everybody agrees that more comparative research is needed, most studies still focus on single country cases. Especially systematic research into the factors that drive policy network formation in corporatist countries is still lacking. We compare data from two similar kinds of policy subsystems in two corporatist countries, namely Finland and Sweden. The policy subsystems in question have to do with climate change. What makes these two countries especially stimulating to compare in terms of climate change policy is that Sweden is known for the ambitiousness of its climate change policy, whereas Finland has been labeled a failing eco-state. Thus, these are two neighboring countries with similar political institutions but they show diverging levels of ambitiousness in their climate change policy. Our research question concentrates in finding out to what extent the explanations for collaboration in policy networks differ between our case countries. We compare three different theoretical explanations for collaboration in policy networks: belief similarity or homophily, resources, and the role of the state. While beliefs and resources are often explored and juxtaposed against each other as explanatory frameworks, the possible brokerage role of the state is often only hinted at rather than properly discussed – maybe due to the fact that most policy network research originates in non-corporatist countries, where the often does not play a leading role. However, since the state is usually a central player in corporatist countries – the state traditionally coordinates labor market negotiations between employers and employees – we suggest that special attention should be paid to the ties of the state. Our results show that Swedish response to climate change may be more ambitious than Finland because 1) the state plays a larger role in Sweden, 2) The Swedish state actors are more neutral, and tend not to favor private sector actors, 3) Swedish actors do not have a preference to cooperate with those with whom they share beliefs, 4) Finns prefer to cooperate with those with whom they share beliefs, and 5) Private sector actors likely have more influence over state actors in Finland. These findings imply that future policy network research should pay more attention to the way that actor organizational attributes (in this case, the state) interact with political institutions (corporatism).