The Political Origins of Coordinated Capitalism: Business Organizations, Party Systems, and State Structure in the Age of Innocence

2008 ◽  
Vol 102 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
CATHIE JO MARTIN ◽  
DUANE SWANK

This paper investigates the political determinants of corporatist and pluralist employers' associations and reflects on the origins of the varieties of capitalism in the early decades of the 20th century. We hypothesize that proportional, multiparty systems tend to enable employers' associations to develop into social corporatist organizations, whereas nonproportional, two-party systems are conducive to the formation of pluralist associations. Moreover, we suggest that federalism tends to reinforce incentives for pluralist organization. We assess our hypotheses through quantitative analysis of data from 1900 to the 1930s from 16 nations and case studies of the origins of peak employers' associations in Denmark and the United States. Our statistical analysis suggests that proportional, multiparty systems foster, and federalism works against, social corporatist business organization; employers' organization is also greater where the mobilization of labor, traditions of coordination, and economic development are higher. These factors also largely explain pre-World War II patterns of national coordination of capitalism. Case histories of the origins of employers' associations in Denmark and the United States further confirm the causal importance of political factors. Although Danish and American employers had similar interests in creating cooperative national industrial policies, trajectories of associational development were constrained by the structure of party competition, as well as by preindustrial traditions for coordination.

1953 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-167
Author(s):  
S. Bernard

The advent of a new administration in the United States and the passage of seven years since the end of World War II make it appropriate to review the political situation which has developed in Europe during that period and to ask what choices now are open to the West in its relations with the Soviet Union.The end of World War II found Europe torn between conflicting conceptions of international politics and of the goals that its members should seek. The democratic powers, led by the United States, viewed the world in traditional, Western, terms. The major problem, as they saw it, was one of working out a moral and legal order to which all powers could subscribe, and in which they would live. Quite independently of the environment, they assumed that one political order was both more practicable and more desirable than some other, and that their policies should be directed toward its attainment.


1985 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan W. Cafruny

The political challenge to the post-World War II order in shipping has been issued in the context of the North-South debate, but American power and interest are central to current developments. In the bulk and tanker sector the United States retains a strong interest in stability and successfully defends the existing order. In the liner sector, on the other hand, the United States has participated in recent assaults on the postwar order, producing great tension between Europe and America. There is a strong correlation between this growing maritime conflict and the political processes anticipated by the general theory of hegemonic stability. But “hegemony” and “power” are distinct concepts. Instability in international shipping arises neither from America's loss of power in shipping nor from challenges from Europe and the Third World. Rather, instability reflects American attempts to establish a closer identity between the existing regime and short-term national interest.


Author(s):  
David A. Hollinger

This chapter analyzes the consolidation in 1942 of the two major, religiously defined institutional forces of the entire period from World War II to the present. The Delaware Conference of March 3–5, 1942, was the first moment at which rival groups within the leadership of ecumenical Protestantism came together and agreed upon an agenda for the postwar world. The chapter addresses the following questions: Just what did the Delaware Conference agree upon and proclaim to the world? Which Protestant leaders were present at the conference and/or helped to bring it about and to endow it with the character of a summit meeting? In what respects did the new political orientation established at the conference affect the destiny of ecumenical Protestantism?


Author(s):  
Martin Crotty ◽  
Neil J. Diamant ◽  
Mark Edele

This chapter investigates the cases of victory and defeat and explains what politically influential veterans were able to produce to secure benefits and rights. It focuses on China after its long period of war and civil war that ended in 1949, the United Kingdom after both world wars, the United States after World War I, and the USSR after World War II. It analyses the cases wherein veterans had little or limited success in securing meaningful social and political status. The chapter identifies factors that determine the veterans' status, where it is victory or defeat, or authoritarian versus democratic systems of government. It discusses the political process and the attempts to convert claims into entitlements in order to explain the negative outcomes for the veterans of victorious armies.


1953 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 431-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack N. Behrman

International cooperation through multilateral organizations sharply distinguishes the post-World War II economic policies of the United States from those it employed following World War I. After World War I, the United States eschewed any form of international economic organization, which some governments thought should be continued; early in the more recent conflict, United States officials pressed hard for the acceptance of world-wide institutional cooperation. The purpose of the present article is to review, through an examination of its policy toward multilateral financial arrangements, some of the important discussions and decisions which moved the United States towards internationalism in economic relations; to emphasize the role of political factors in the development of financial organizations, in the retreat from international “democracy,” and in the growth of regional cooperation; and to examine some of the difficulties of international financial cooperation.A primary objective of the United States government's postwar policy preparations was the re-creation of a method of conducting international economic transactions which would not result in economic warfare; the major technique was that of international agreement on accepted rules for conducting transactions. Government officials considered that this approach was not only desirable but also possible, in view of the success of wartime collaboration.


1974 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 682-700 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Elkins

Most measures of party competition were designed for the United States or other two-party systems. The measure proposed here is intended for multiparty as well as two-party systems. It is a formalization of the notion of uncertainty: election outcomes are competitive to the degree we are uncertain who will win. By ascertaining through survey research the degree of party loyalty over time, one can calculate the chances of alternative outcomes in hypothetical replications of any given election. Since the chance that a losing party might have won is one measure of the importance of that party, this approach to party competition also provides a precise indicator of the number of parties in the system (i.e., whether it is two-party, three party, etc.). The method is applied here to data on Canadian federal elections in 1965 and 1968.


2005 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 1076-1077
Author(s):  
Radhika Desai

The Formation of National Party Systems: Federalism and Party Competition in Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United States, Pradeep K. Chhibber and Ken Kollman, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. xvi, 276.Mining electoral data to arrive at theories about the relationship between political party performance and party system determination and electoral and governmental institutions forms the main stream of political science. And one of its most enduring puzzles is the explanation of the patterns and diversities of party systems. With the famous “Duverger's Law” about single-member plurality systems and two-party political systems forming its point of departure, political scientists have attempted to substantiate their discipline's status as a “science” by producing theories about relationships between measurable political variables.


Author(s):  
Daniel Scroop

Antimonopoly, meaning opposition to the exclusive or near-exclusive control of an industry or business by one or a very few businesses, played a relatively muted role in the history of the post-1945 era, certainly compared to some earlier periods in American history. However, the subject of antimonopoly is important because it sheds light on changing attitudes toward concentrated power, corporations, and the federal government in the United States after World War II. Paradoxically, as antimonopoly declined as a grass-roots force in American politics, the technical, expert-driven field of antitrust enjoyed a golden age. From the 1940s to the 1960s, antitrust operated on principles that were broadly in line with those that inspired its creation in the late 19th and early 20th century, acknowledging the special contribution small-business owners made to US democratic culture. In these years, antimonopoly remained sufficiently potent as a political force to sustain the careers of national-level politicians such as congressmen Wright Patman and Estes Kefauver and to inform the opinions of Supreme Court justices such as Hugo Black and William O. Douglas. Antimonopoly and consumer politics overlapped in this period. From the mid-1960s onward, Ralph Nader repeatedly tapped antimonopoly ideas in his writings and consumer activism, skillfully exploiting popular anxieties about concentrated economic power. At the same time, as part of the United States’ rise to global hegemony, officials in the federal government’s Antitrust Division exported antitrust overseas, building it into the political, economic, and legal architecture of the postwar world. Beginning in the 1940s, conservative lawyers and economists launched a counterattack against the conception of antitrust elaborated in the progressive era. By making consumer welfare—understood in terms of low prices and market efficiency—the determining factor in antitrust cases, they made a major intellectual and political contribution to the rightward thrust of US politics in the 1970s and 1980s. Robert Bork’s The Antitrust Paradox, published in 1978, popularized and signaled the ascendency of this new approach. In the 1980s and 1990s antimonopoly drifted to the margin of political debate. Fear of big government now loomed larger in US politics than the specter of monopoly or of corporate domination. In the late 20th century, Americans, more often than not, directed their antipathy toward concentrated power in its public, rather than its private, forms. This fundamental shift in the political landscape accounts in large part for the overall decline of antimonopoly—a venerable American political tradition—in the period 1945 to 2000.


1995 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas W Rae

This is an essay about the use of districting systems to regulate electoral outcomes and the evolution of party systems. By changing the number of seats from each district, a balance can be struck between the often conflicting goals of minority representation and defractionalization. Defractionalization is the process of forming broad-based governing majorities. Special attention is given to the electoral systems of Italy, Spain, and the United States. In the case of the United States, the author recommends a proportional representation system that mixes high-magnitude districts that encourage minority representation and low-magnitude districts that promote defractionalization.


1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Waddell

Since many scholars focus on the New Deal as the foundation for modern U.S. governance, it is widely assumed that the United States is characterized by a weak state as compared to the welfare states of Western Europe. Yet, in the wake of World War II, the United States established a national security “warfare state” that rivaled the welfare states of Western Europe in scope of authority and operations and in its isolation from popular forces. The wartime redirection of U.S. state power also resolved the political stalemate stemming from the executive-congressional and business-government tensions roused during the New Deal. In fact, the course of wartime statebuilding was in many ways a response to the political tensions of the New Deal and to the expectation that the organization of wartime mobilization would indelibly define the postwar organization of U.S. state power. As this article argues, wartime mobilization resolved the New Deal political stalemate in large part by granting various segments of the corporate community the opportunity to influence the shape of U.S. national state power.


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