State, Market Governance, and Particularistic Interests: The Political Economy of Capture

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the power of particularistic interests in the policy-making processes which govern the overall pattern of distributional conflict in the textile and clothing sector. In this sense it will build on the analysis of the material economic base underpinning these conflicts of interest which was presented in Chapters 1 and 2. To accomplish this, the chapter will examine the political strength of the textile and clothing sector in the UK and the US, and will then look in detail at the pattern of state-industry relations in the French sector. The French case provides evidence of how textile interests were able to dominate and indeed ‘capture’ the policy agenda, a detailed and extended example of the political economy of capture.¹ The employers’ organisations were able to commandeer industrial and trade policy resources and so as to attenuate the impact of rising import competition, a process repeated across a broad range of industrialised economies, demonstrating the ways in which policy processes are part of market structuration. The chapter will then demonstrate how a very different industrial culture and pattern of interest intermediation in Italy led to a dynamic strategy of successful market-led adjustment to the new transnational competitive pressures of the global market. Italian firms organised themselves so as to increase their competitiveness through a collectively sponsored strategy of flexible specialisation and became the leading textile and clothing exporters in the global economy. The associational patterns and mechanisms of state-industry relations were crucial to this outcome.