Still the Century of Corporatism? A Policy Area Perspective

Corporatism has been a cornerstone of governance in many European countries. However, the scholarly literature has been ambiguous about the extent to which the governance style has declined over the past decades. This paper argues that a policy area perspective can bring new insights to the fate of corporatist institutions. Departing from a historical-institutional perspective, we develop a theoretical framework that distinguishes between three generations of corporatist exchange: Old or classic corporatism, public sector corporatism, and modern corporatism. Empirically, the article traces the inclusion of interest groups to public inquiry commissions in Scandianvia over time. Employing a new data set that contains the full population of commissions in Sweden, Denmark and Norway, we study changes across more than 2500 SOU commissions, 1500 NOU commissions and 1000 Danish commissions, including than 40,000 commission seats, since the 1970s (Norway and Denmark) and 1990 (Sweden). Our results show that while there is weak corporatist involvement in modern corporatist areas like immigration, corporatism has remained relatively strong within policy areas related to the public sector, like health and education. As for the classic corporatist areas like labor, our results is more mixed across the three countries. The paper has important implications for the study of changes and continuity to interest groups access to policy-making.