Firms and Parties: From the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century

This paper proposes a general framework for the study of the links between firms and parties based on pragmatic, partisan, and social relationships and their interactions. Pragmatic activity is interested activity, focused on increasing profits. Partisan relationships exist when businesses support a particular political party without seeking a definite benefit for themselves. Social relationships between business and parties reflect personal relationships between business leaders and party members. This synthesis works well for the era of the political economy of the nation-state and stable, structured party systems and continues to be useful today. However, the relevance of parties has been attenuated by globalisation in recent decades. Moreover, the decline of twentieth-century parties means that such a framework has to become much more complicated, although the manageability of that complexity depends on whether change is realignment, dealignment, or de-institutionalisation. I finish by considering how new empirical techniques may, or may not, aid the study of newer, more fluid patterns of business-political relations.