Corporatism

Historically, corporatism or corporativism (Italian corporativismo) is a political system in which legislative power is given to corporations that represent economic, industrial and professional groups. Unlike pluralism, in which many groups must compete for control of the state, in corporatism, certain unelected bodies take a critical role in the decision-making process. A corporatist state

State corporatism

While classical corporatism and its intellectual successor, neo-corporatism (and their critics) emphasize the role of corporate bodies in influencing government decision-making, corporatism used in the context of the study of autocratic states, particularly within East Asian studies, usually refers instead to a process by which the state uses officially-recognized organizations as a tool for restricting public participation in the political process and limiting the power of civil society.

Related Topics:
Critics - Autocratic - States - East Asian studies - Civil society

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Under such a system, as described by Jonathan Unger and Anita Chan in their essay China, Corporatism, and the East Asian Modelhttp://www.usc.cuhk.edu.hk/wk_wzdetails.asp?id=1544,

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at the national level the state recognizes one and only one organization (say, a national labour union, a business association, a farmers' association) as the sole representative of the sectoral interests of the individuals, enterprises or institutions that comprise that organization's assigned constituency. The state determines which organizations will be recognized as legitimate and forms an unequal partnership of sorts with such organizations. The associations sometimes even get channelled into the policy-making processes and often help implement state policy on the government's behalf.

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By establishing itself as the arbitrator of legitimacy and assigning responsibility for a particular constituency with one sole organization, the state limits the number of players with which it must negotiate its policies and co-opts their leadership into policing their own members. This arrangement is not limited to economic organizations such as business groups or trade unions; examples can also include social or religious groups. Examples abound, but one such would be the People's Republic of China's Islamic Association of China, in which the state actively intervenes in the appointment of imams and controls the educational contents of their seminaries, which must be approved by the government to operate and which feature courses on "patriotic reeducation".http://hrw.org/wr2k2/asia4.html Another example is the phenomenon known as "Japan, Inc.", in which major industrial conglomerates and their dependent workforces were consciously manipulated by the Japanese MITI to maximize post-war economic growth.

Related Topics:
Constituency - People's Republic of China - Islamic Association of China - Imams - Conglomerates - MITI

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In the United States, claim that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs were an unprecedented jump towards a corporate state. Although there is a long history of narrow economic interests controlling the decision-making process in America, the New Deal in general and the National Recovery Administration in particular represented a new and broad experiment in corporatism. Some http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=3054 claim that later US governmental programs represent further state corporatist activity.

Related Topics:
Franklin D. Roosevelt - New Deal - National Recovery Administration

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