Investments in education and retraining, or research and development have become essential in today's knowledge‐intensive economies. While private actors often underprovided such knowledge‐based capital due to various market failures, there is also considerable variation in the extent to which governments invest in knowledge‐based capital due to cross‐sectional and intertemporal trade‐offs. I argue that in trying to account for this variation, corporatist institutions are a neglected but crucial factor. By necessitating and facilitating cooperation and compensation, corporatism creates a more collaborative style of policy making and a sense of common ownership of policy problems that helps overcome the trade‐offs associated with investments in knowledge‐based capital. Using within‐between mixed‐effects models on a novel time‐series‐cross‐sectional dataset, I find strong support for this argument. Corporatist countries invest a lot more in knowledge‐based capital, and corporatism also affects how countries react to deindustrialization. This is an important finding given the key role of long‐term policy making in areas like climate change politics, pandemic preparedness or responding to the digital transformation.

A prominent presence in the news media is important for interest groups. This article investigates the development in the diversity of interest group media attention over time. The analysis draws on a dataset of 19,000 group appearances in the Danish news media in the period 1984–2003. It demonstrates how diversity has risen continually over time, leading to a media agenda less dominated by labour and business and more by public interest groups and sectional groups. This development is related to the increasing political importance of the news media and the decline in group integration in public decision‐making processes. The article also shows how the development of group appearances is closely related to changes in media attention towards different policy areas.

Small States in World Markets is about political efficacy and legitimation rather than scoring who is ahead in the economic sweepstakes. Its case for democratic corporatism rests on norms, particularly stability, rather than on narrow measures of economic efficiency. But stability, and the efficacious management of the economy and social problems requires a degree of technocracy that undermines the legitimacy of the management process itself by helping to produce populist revolts.

Iceland's neo-liberal laboratory ended in economic crash and political chaos. The business-oriented sectoral corporatist structure in Iceland created an ideal framework for the neo-liberal agenda. A comprehensive democratic corporatist framework, including the conditions for economic flexibility and political stability, was missing. The culture of consensus did not prevail. The paper shows how Iceland does not fit Katzenstein's theory. At the same time, the case of Iceland shows the value of the corporatist model in analyzing the process of change in a small society and its successes and failures.

The existing social pact literature claims that governing parties offer social pact proposals because they anticipate they will receive an electoral benefit from social pact agreements. Yet the available data on social pacts inform us that in a substantial minority of cases social pact proposals fail to become social pact agreements. In an effort to better determine the political calculations made by governments before they propose a social pact, this article examines the effect of implementing reform legislation unilaterally, social pact proposals, social pact proposal failures and social pact agreements on the vote share of government parties in 15 Western European countries between 1981 and 2006. It is found that social pact proposals do not have any electoral consequences for governing parties, unilateral legislation and social pact proposal failures reduce the vote share of governing parties, and social pact agreements provide an electoral benefit to parties in minority governments only. These findings suggest that governing parties propose social pacts in a good faith effort to complete a social pact agreement; and that such an agreement is not a way for these parties to gain votes, but to avoid the electoral punishment associated with enacting unpopular reforms unilaterally.

This article illustrates the development of government–nonprofit collaboration in the Netherlands. It first gives an overview of the scope and structure of the nonprofit sector and voluntary work and then explains the crucial steps in the evolution of the partnership arrangement between the public sector and nonprofit institutions. The article describes the past significance of so-called pillarization on the development of the nonprofit sector and its collaboration with the state. In accommodating a broad diversity of nonprofit organizations with different religious and social backgrounds, the Netherlands created an elaborate mechanism for government–nonprofit collaboration in which nonprofit organizations fulfill functions in service delivery and policy formation. However, the sector is now fundamentally fragmented and has little shared identity left today. Paradoxically, its past success also makes it less likely that the Dutch nonprofit sector will be regarded as a solution to current social problems.

Corporatism may be seen as variety of capitalism in which specific structural prerequisites such as unionization, centralization, and strong states combined with bargaining and concertation produce certain economic outputs. Corporatism may also be seen as a variety of democracy in which interest groups are integrated in the preparation and/or implementation of public policies. Departing in the last position, we measure the strength of Scandinavian corporatism by the involvement of interest groups in public committees, councils, and commissions. Corporatism in relation to the preparation of policy has gone down in all three Scandinavian countries whereas corporatism in implementation processes are more varied among the three countries.

In interpreting the current surge of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in China, scholars have mainly applied western concepts of civil society, corporatism, and the third sector. These perspectives, however, are not sufficient to account for the importance of China’s particular historical and political culture. This paper discusses the development and future of NGOs in the context of current scholarly research as well as the role of China’s historical and current sociopolitical situation.

Are electorally vulnerable politicians really less likely to support controversial legislation, such as pension reforms? While the literature on welfare state retrenchment has increasingly pointed to the role of electoral factors in the dynamics of social policy cutbacks, there are few studies that actually measure the magnitude of electoral pressure and its consequent impact on the politics of reform. To this end, the authors have developed a quantitative measure of the electoral vulnerability of politicians and tested its impact on pension reform outcomes using an original dataset comprising 16 Western European countries from 1980 to 2003. In line with expectations, the results show that the impact of electoral vulnerability on reform depends upon the system of interest intermediation. In corporatist systems, electoral vulnerability indeed impedes reform. But in pluralist systems, increased electoral vulnerability is associated with higher levels of reform. This is because unions in corporatist (but not in pluralist) systems can exploit electoral vulnerability in pre‐legislative bargaining, and thus pressure politicians. Consequently, this study has broader implications for the differential responsiveness of democracies to redistributive issues more generally.

This article explores the theoretical underpinnings of the state-led establishment of quasi-monopolistic Islam Councils in Western Europe. The author argues that national consultations representing the Muslim faith in seven European countries share institutional characteristics with 19th and 20th century corporatist arrangements with Labor and Jewish Communities, and pursue similar goals of rendering faith and group ideology compatible with national citizenship while encouraging the moderation of group demands on the state.

Policy institutes, or “think tanks”, are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our societies. In this article, we conceptualize think tanks explicitly as a civil society phenomenon, linking the proliferation of this relatively new type of actor to the transformation of civil society structures and of systems of interest representation. Using the case of Sweden as an illustration, we argue that the recent decades’ rise of think tanks in institutional settings outside of the USA can only be understood if we take into account the particular features and institutional policy access opportunities of the domestic civil society in each national case, and that think tanks should be analytically understood as the allies of, rather than competitors to, the older, established forces in civil society.

Within the field of international relations, scholarship supports the notion that international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and foundations, as a part of transnational civil society, influence state policy and behaviors, while the causal effects of state influence on INGOs is less researched. By contrast, the co-constitutive roles of states and INGOs are well established in third-sector research. Seeking to extend these literatures and bring them into conversation more with one another, this article explores the process of state influence on INGOs and foundations in the context of China, a strong, resiliently authoritarian state. We argue that three strategic adaptations by INGOs emerge as a pragmatic response to operating within China’s authoritarian institutions, such as (1) learning to focus mostly on policymakers rather than citizens, (2) collaboration with local governments on policy experimentation as the primary advocacy method, and (3) the adoption of strategies to hedge against potential risks of operating without a protected legal status, such as only collaborating with the grassroots NGOs properly registered with state authorities. In some cases, these adaptations catalyzed larger organizational changes. Our findings indicate that socialization processes can affect both INGOs and states, and thus serve to highlight the difficult trade-offs faced by INGOs engaging strong authoritarian governments such as China. Further, they suggest that, in a world of seemingly resurgent authoritarian governance, restricting legal and policy space for INGOs may be moot, since INGOs working inside these states are influenced to comply with domestic rules, norms, and practices.