Organized Interests and their Patterns of Interaction

Abstract

The object of this study is to outline a basic approach and develop some empirically substantiated hypotheses with regard to the role of intermediary structures (excluding political parties) in the survival or collapse of European democracies during the interwar period. A survey of both the case studies on hand and the relevant literature suggests that a comparative evaluation of intermediary structures can best be undertaken with the help of three basic concepts, each of which represents a paradigmatic system of interest intermediation. These paradigms — pluralism, corporatism and clientelism — have often been applied to the analysis of both European and non-European polities but seem never to have been combined into a single conceptual scheme for the purpose of conducting a broadly based, pan-European comparative study. On the contrary, the vast majority of publications on the subject of ‘democratic’ corporatism appear to place much more emphasis on the development and evaluation of the (neo-)corporatist paradigm per se than on the comparative analysis of the individual cases to which reference is made. Moreover, although the relationship between corporatist and pluralist structures has been the subject of much debate in recent decades, the element of clientelism has rarely been introduced into such discussions, since it appears to lie well outside the conceptual, empirical and — often — temporal scope of the neo-corporatist phenomenon.