Organised Interests, Development Strategies and Social Policies

Abstract

The relation between organised interests and the state has been a major theme for research for some time now. It has naturally coalesced around the two major forms of state witnessed in the capitalist world during the twentieth century — the welfare state in advanced industrial countries and developmental state in the global South. The former has largely been an accompaniment to the onset of social democracy during the inter-war period, though earlier steps toward its institutionalisation were taken during the late nineteenth century, most notably in Bismarckian Germany. Starting with the wave of labour radicalism that took off after the Great Depression, and continuing into the immediate post-war period, social democratic parties gained influence in large parts of the Western world. At the heart of their agenda was an extremely ambitious programme of social welfare legislation, which was implemented as a direct response to their main social base, the industrial working class. Developmental states, unlike their wel-farist counterparts, did not arise as a direct response to working-class pressure, though labour did sometimes figure as part of the political coalition supporting them. The most important constituency behind developmentalism was the domestic capitalist class. This difference in political base reflects the quite distinct dilemmas faced by social interests in advanced and developing countries of the world economy — the former being mainly concerned with accelerating the pace of capitalist development, and the latter with managing its social effects.