Pluralism and Corporatism

The Political Evolution of Modern Democracies

Reginald J. Harrison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000706437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1980. In Pluralism and Corporatism the author examines the 'pluralist' conception of democratic advanced industrial societies and shows to what extent an alternative conception the 'corporatist' society is more appropriate today. The book reviews criticisms of standard conceptions of industrial society and draws empirical support for some new approaches from the politics of Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Japan and the United States: an analysis which shows that there are tendencies everywhere towards the fragmentation of government responsibility and its assumption both by governmental and organised group bureaucracies. The author argues that this pattern of policy-making is in fact in conflict with standards of behaviour which are fundamental to the ideal of representative and accountable democratic government.

Both critical review and analysis are organised in a way which will maximise the usefulness of Pluralism and Corporatism as a theoretical complement to those more standard texts in comparative government which already provide a study in-depth of individual countries. It seeks to review changing political culture, political economy, party and interest intermediation, bureaucratic influence, constitutional effects on political behaviour and the international constraints upon government which arise from interdependence. It will become essential reading for courses on the politics of advanced industrial societies and particularly of Western Europe.

I

Introduction

Political change is one of the most elusive of the phenomena which challenge the contemporary social scientist. It is, therefore, a somewhat tentative contention of this work that elements of ‘corporatism’ can be discerned in the political evolution of advanced industrial democratic societies. That is to say, there are tendencies towards the fragmentation of government responsibility and its joint assumption by governmental and organised group bureaucracies making an often dubious claim to exclusive representation of class and other interests in the various functional sectors.

However, in such societies, the complexity of change, its variety, its pace, and the difficulty of producing tangible, measurable evidence of many of its aspects have taxed the analytical ingenuity of scholars. The difficulties emerge as soon as any attempt is made to answer the immediate questions posed by the proposal to examine such societies. What are the advanced industrial societies? Why study them? How shall they be studied?

Some of the possible, varying answers to the first of these three questions are indicated by the significantly different descriptive labels which have been attached to them by recent writers : the technetronic society (Zbigniew Brzezinski), the post-industrial society (David Bell and Christopher Lasch), post-capitalist society (Ralph Dahrendorf), the new industrial state, or the affluent society (J. K. Galbraith), corporate society (Robin Marris, Nigel Harris), industrial technological society (Ghita Ionescu), the post-welfare state (Hancock and Sjoberg). These all indicate a somewhat different perspective and emphasis on the same actual phenomena: the leading states of Western Europe, Japan and the United States.

Succinctly, and with more concern for measurability than obvious political significance, advanced industrial societies might be identified as those which, today, like Britain, have an overwhelmingly urban industrial population. They are countries in which agriculture accounts for 10 per cent or less of the gross domestic product. They are, also, countries in which the value of the product of manufacturing industry plus service industries does not fall below 55 per cent of the value of the gross domestic product. Another marked measurable characteristic of such societies is that they do show a high degree of export diversification.

Taken together, these can serve as concrete defining characteristics. They successfully exclude countries which are outside the general, impressionistic conception of the advanced industrial society of which Britain, from the present author’s standpoint, is the key example.

The identification is expressed entirely in economic terms, but these, in 1978, exclude the countries of Eastern Europe and the Third World and serve to identify a group of countries governed, at least prima facie, by elected representatives.

All the states ‘caught’ by these terms are developments of the modern ‘democratic’ nation-state, a conception which itself requires elaboration. It includes the states in which, to follow a model suggested by Huntington, authority has been rationalised, there has developed functional differentiation and administrative specialisation, and there is widespread participation by the citizenry.¹

Rationalisation means, first, the assertion of the authority of the national state against transnational influences like religion and the authority of the church, or against prevailing concepts like natural law (which also pretends to a universal application) which limit the scope of kings and other kinds of national leaders. It means also the assertion of central authority against local and regional powers and loyalties.

Then, the modern nation-state is characteristically one in which there is differentiation of government functions and increasing specialisation in carrying them out. There is at least a partial separation of administration from policy making, and from the administration of justice – all of which in primitive societies may well be found in the single person of a chief or king. Beyond this basic separation, areas of peculiar administrative competence emerge – financial, military, economic – and are found as semi-autonomous, specialised departments of the bureaucracy.

As a corollary of this specialisation (and another basic attribute of the modern state), office and power is, increasingly, distributed on the basis of achievement or merit, rather than ascription (i.e. family or status).

Finally, there is, in the modern state, increasing participation in politics by social groups throughout society, and the development of structures (like parties and pressure groups or vocational cadres) which organise this.

This abstract, or stereotype of the modern nation-state provides one way of distinguishing between the industrial societies of Europe and the so-called ‘developing’ countries. The developing countries have not fully achieved rationalisation of authority. Religion has a significant influence at both the grass-roots level of individual initiative, and in national policy formation. In many developing countries too, the authority of locally based traditional or military leaders may well compete with that of the central authority. Central administration is riddled with patronage. The army, theoretically a professional specialist body, often plays a highly political role. Large sections of the populations have no involvement in, understanding of, or even awareness of the central political activity and the modernising goals of the elite.

The modern state with its very different character must be seen, however, not as an ultimate or even necessary stage of development to which developing societies must come, but, in the context of environmental adaptation, as a temporary phenomenon. The argument is summed up well by Michel Crozier. We have, he says, ‘to avoid the temptation to describe and celebrate the temporary equilibrium, the harmony of the moment, as the sole possible system’.² He argues an observable process of continuing adaptation to the environment. His thesis is that human groups and societies are able to set new objectives for themselves by continuous organisational innovation, adapted successfully to a changing human and physical environment. Maladaptive innovations perish.

The modern state may be seen as the most recent of many stages of successful adaptation to a particular environment. In this light, the river kingdoms of China, the Greek city states, empires, confederations like the US confederacy and the British commonwealth, all in their time survived temporarily because they were adapted to an environment and obtained its sanction. The Chinese war-lord who could subjugate an area big enough for adequate river control laid the basis for a new, larger dominant form – the river kingdom. The Greek city defended an agricultural hinterland in conditions of poor communication. The Romans by political and military organisational innovation were able to create and maintain an empire. The British commonwealth, when it emerged, was a highly original response to a relative decline in British power in comparison with other actors in international politics, and to a prevailing ideology – liberalism, with its powerful justification of self-determination. These two factors between them made it physically difficult and domestically unpopular to maintain an empire by direct rule. The commonwealth system institutionalised a pattern of international functional co-operation of considerable utility to all its members. It gave some satisfaction to what are now called the ‘patrial’ links and sentiments across the commonwealth. It institutionalised consultation and the handling of the mutually profitable interdependence created by trade and investment. But the commonwealth itself declined as other patterns of cooperation and interdependence developed internationally, and also as, after the Second World War, it became bigger than the original patrial grouping – the first independent states in the association.

The modern state can itself be seen in this context of environmental adaptation: it was an adaptation to industrial and commercial opportunities. First, centralised administration – the establishment of the king’s peace in Britain – provided the conditions in which commerce and industry could flourish. Louis XIV, with his ambitious schemes for industrialisation and commercial development in France, assisted by the great forerunner of modern planners, Colbert, established the same centralised power in France. Bismarck made possible a central administration and, thereby, a nationwide economy for Germany, Napoleon III for Italy, Commodore Perry and the Meiji restoration which followed, for Japan. The centralisation and specialisation of the courts and their divorce from politics had the same effect – the increasing predictability and, therefore, security afforded by the law. In this security there was less of a premium on regional self-sufficiency, an easy reliance on trade over safe routes, and an obvious incentive to investment rather than hoarding.

Law making by a representative specialist body, not subject to check by the courts in the name of divine law or natural law, helped to ensure that new social and economic forces were not unduly frustrated. Thus, in England, the paternalism of the Elizabethan era gave way readily to enclosures and the needs of the factory system, with the blessing of the accommodating parliaments of the time -representative mainly of those who stood to gain by the changes.

Extensions of the franchise and increasingly widespread political participation liberated newly effective sources of economic initiative. It also completed the process of smashing one important part of the anachronistic survivals of the old order – the vestigial economic privileges, under the law, of religion, the aristocracy and the local squirearchy in these states. The privileges survived to some extent but they did not depend on legal monopolies or exclusive political power. They could be breached by newcomers and modified according to the needs of the time.

Considerable importance attaches to the timing of these changes, and the manner in which they were brought about historically in the modern states. This appears to affect their present policies and administration.³ In Britain, the centralising activity and the extension of participation were early developments, and they were limited at first in scope. Initially participation, through parliament, set limits to the centralisation process. Parliaments were ready to have the Crown provide order and security, but not to intervene paternalistically in economic promotions in which many of their members had interests. The eventual industrial leadership of Britain may well be ascribed to the grass-roots economic vitality which evolved in the absence of interference. An elaborate bureaucratic machinery was an unnecessary adjunct and, therefore, emerged very late, after the industrial revolution had been accomplished. France, on the other hand, was deliberately centralised to promote an economic revolution under the direction of the monarchy of Louis XIV. A highly centralised administrative machinery was built up for the purpose and has survived. These developments helped to establish the French lead in industrialisation and commerce until the later eighteenth century, when the individualistic economy of Britain proved much more innovative and adaptable just at the point when French economic life began to stagnate.

In Germany the modern state was largely a creation of Prussia under the management of Bismarck. Centralisation and bureau-cratisation were rapidly achieved. Its industrial revolution followed in the 1890s, fostered by the states and the banks, and regulated by a highly efficient, but very authoritarian central administration. Authoritarianism remained a problematic feature of German government, well into the modern phase. Britain, it may be argued, is, consequently, the least planned and least amenable to planning among these three states.

We have stressed that the characteristics of modernity, abstracted in the Huntington model, do not have any kind of permanent value in operation. Rationalisation, differentiation and specialisation may have been necessary in the militarily insecure, privilege-ridden, Catholic European situation, but in a different environment they may be irrelevant. Huntington, for example, has argued that ‘the American experience … demonstrates [that] a Tudor polity is quite compatible with a modern society’.⁴ America, for her industrial revolution, had no need to disestablish a church, rid itself of class privilege, or develop a large professional army and centralised administration. It could afford inactive government with a large degree of local autonomy in the Tudor style. And yet, the United States has become the most technologically advanced state in the contemporary world.

It is of course true that the powers of American central government have increased, that the United States now has a large professional army and a specialised merit civil service, but the individual states have not lost their identity in the process, and the top ranks of the civil service remain political. The President, like a Tudor king, has legislative and executive power, appoints the judges and represents the whole people against other forms of power in the realm. And the judges draw occasionally on the superior authority of the constitution and natural law in challenging secular authority.

There is therefore nothing sacrosanct in our present model of the modern state. If the sanction of the environment is withdrawn and it fails to adapt to the change, there is every chance that it will decline.

Applied to the advanced industrial societies in which we are interested, the model prompts questions about how far apparent failures of government and constitutional collapse in the recent past of the industrial era have been the result of atavisms, survivals of pre-modern elements in government and society (a failure to approximate to the model), or on the other hand are the result of a failure to adapt to environmental challenge. Transcendental anachronisms like religious claims to authority, organisational ones in administration (like the failure to divorce the army from policy making in prewar Germany), or structural barriers to meaningful participation (like the French electoral system) are possible examples. There is some question also whether the postwar governments of Western Europe are demonstrably better adapted, by reference to the model, than the prewar varieties. Alternatively, and perforce, we may ask whether the environment has changed in ways that make the model, for them too, obsolete.

We shall contend that there has indeed been a developing and a contemporary environmental challenge to the viability of the modern state.⁵ It can be initially summarised in a way which helps to identify somewhat further the advanced industrial society, showing, first, that there are factors affecting the burden on the nation-s...