Studies in American Political Development | 2019
Health Care Business and Historiographical Exchange
Abstract
Before addressing the commentators for their thoughtful input on “Misrepresented Interests,” let me first thank the editors of Studies in American Political Development for providing a forum for an enduring debate about the power of capitalists in capitalist democracies like the United States. As a comparativist, I ventured into that complicated territory after extensive research in Sweden, where I discovered to my great surprise that the Social Democrat labor movement was kicking at open doors as it introduced each piece of Sweden’s famous system of industrial relations and social insurance. Sweden’s undeniably powerful employers stood contentedly aside and had no interest in closing the doors afterward. I was able to come to that conclusion with confidence only because the Swedish Employers’ Confederation had allowed me extraordinary access to their entire archives, confidential minutes, internal and external correspondence, and the diaries of a former chief executive. Because my conclusion about Sweden went against the grain of most thinking about capitalists and the welfare state, I wanted to bolster my archival findings with an analysis of the economic interests of employers that could make sense of it. For that discussion I built on the microeconomics literature about “efficiency wages,” including Michael Wallerstein’s and Kalle Moene’s application of it to highly centralized wage bargaining systems. Their model and analyses explained why many employers would welcome egalitarian outcomes and why economic decline would not result and thereby undermine the broad-based consensus about them. In fact, they argue, economic development was promoted. In anticipation of current debate among political scientists, I also offered some reasoned conjecture and evidence about why Swedish employers did not openly trumpet their enthusiasm, thereby contributing to enduring mythology abroad as well as in Sweden about the extraordinary power of the labor movement at the supposed expense of capital. My findings on Sweden and a prompt from fellow comparativist Peter Lange led to me take a look at the historical and sociological literature on “corporate liberalism” in America, works that Mark Mizruchi mentions in his commentary. They sought to reveal the behind-the-scenes but weighty influence of capitalists in progressive policymaking, but they paid little attention to the economics involved. I decided to see for myself, by looking at America in light of Sweden to see what economically informed comparative historical arguments could be made about business power, government encroachments on business autonomy in general, and the welfare state in particular. At that time, that literature on corporate liberalism had been roundly challenged and largely rejected due to “historical institutionalists” who, for better and worse, “brought the state back in” to the study of comparative social politics. I say worse, because the tendency was to kick capital back out of comparative sociology and political science on the welfare state. Some of it, by Theda Skocpol and her collaborators, Edwin Amenta, John Ikenberry, and others, challenged corporate liberalism head on. Skocpol’s later work on welfare politics in America, Protecting Mothers and Soldiers, on “the political origins of social policy” lost its focus on state institutions, becoming more “society centered,” but skirted Email: [email protected] Acknowledgments: I thank Lina Daly, Isabela Mares, Frances Rosenbluth, and Ian Shapiro for many useful suggestions. Anthony Chen’s superb editorial judgment and sharp eye helped make my contribution to this roundtable much better than it would have been. 1. Peter A. Swenson, “Misrepresented Interests: Business, Medicare, and the Making of the American Health Care State,” Studies in American Political Development 32, no. 1 (2018):1–23. 2. Peter A. Swenson, Capitalists against Markets: The Making of Labor Markets and Welfare States in the United States and Sweden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 3. The latest and best versions of their work appeared after publication of my book in Michael Wallerstein and Karl-Ove Moene, “Does the Logic of Collective Action Explain the Logic of Corporatism?” Journal of Theoretical Politics 15, no. 3 (2003), 271–97; Karl-Ove Moene and Michael Wallerstein, “Social Democracy as a Development Strategy,” in Globalization and Egalitarian Redistribution, ed. Pranab Bardhan, Samuel Bowles, and Michael Wallerstein (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Studies in American Political Development, 33 (April 2019), 36–49. ISSN 0898-588X/19 doi:10.1017/S0898588X19000026 # Cambridge University Press 2019