Philippe C. Schmitter

Still the century of corporatism

Until recently, Manoilescos confident prediction could easily be dismissed as yet another example of the ideological bias, wishful thinking and overinflated rhetoric of the thirties, an evenementielle response to a peculiar environment and period. With the subsequent defeat of fascism and National Socialism, the spectre of corporatism no longer seemed to haunt the European scene so fatalistically. For a while, the concept itself was virtually retired from the active lexicon of politics, although it was left on behavioral exhibit, so to speak, in such museums of atavistic political practice as Portugal and Spain.

What Democracy Is. . . and Is Not

Philippe C. Schmitter is professor of political science and director of the Center for European Studies at Stanford University. Terry Lynn Karl is associate professor of political science and director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the same institution. The original, longer version of this essay was written at the request of the United States Agency for International Development, which is not responsible for its content.

Private interest government : beyond market and state

Market liberalism and state interventionism are both challenged as modes of democratic government by this book. It suggests that the development of private interest governments might be a more viable policy alternative for the future. It also questions whether the state could devolve certain public policy responsibilities to interest associations in specific economic sectors. The book focuses specifically on interest associations in a disaggregated, rather than global, approach to economics and politics. Ten Western industrialized countries are covered, subjects ranging from advertising with self-regulation, private accountancy regulation and the British voluntary sector to four comparative papers on the corporatist arrangements in the governance of the dairy industry.

Three Neo-Functional Hypotheses About International Integration

In an earlier article published in this journal Ernst Haas and this author suggested a set of strategic “background conditions,†“conditions at the time of initiation,†and “process conditions†intended (hypothetically) to assess the political consequences of an initial agreement to lower or remove mutual barriers to the movement of productive factors.

A Revised Theory of Regional Integration

The study of regional integration, of how national units come to share part or all of their decisional authority with an emerging international organization, is one of the areas of political inquiry in which a cumulative research tradition has developed. Previous paradigms are scrutinized critically in new settings; replications are made and even encouraged; new concepts, hypotheses, and measures are suggested and incorporated without obliterating past work. Under these conditions theoretical formalization may play a particularly fruitful role.

Economics and Differential Patterns of Political Integration: Projections About Unity in Latin America

Does the economic integration of a group of nations automatically trigger political unity? Must economic unions be perceived as “successful†in order to lead to political unification? Or are the two processes quite distinct, requiring deliberate political steps because purely economic arrangements are generally inadequate for ushering in political unity?

The Ambiguous Virtues of Accountability

Abstract:In the last ten years there has been a veritable explosion of scholarly concern with the notion of political accountability. Predictably, once a concept has been identified and accorded sufficient theoretical or practical priority, analysts focus more critical attention upon its meaning(s) and begin to try to measure it empirically. In this paper, I first try to elaborate the intrinsically ambiguous, not to say contradictory, elements that are contained within the concept of accountability. Then, I make a few suggestions about measuring it in the broader context of assessing the quality of democracy. Obviously, this entails the (disputable) hypothesis that the more politically accountable that rulers are to citizens, the higher will be the quality (or, better, the qualities) of democracy. It also follows that the better that representatives/politicians are at their ambiguous role in intermediating between citizens and rulers, the higher will be the qualities of democracy.

Neo-corporatism and the state

The ‘state’ has become a bit like the weather. Social scientists in recent years have been talking a great deal about it, but have not been able to do much with it. Articles and books now display the concept prominently in their titles, but no one seems quite sure what it is. We have been exhorted somehow to ‘bring it back’ into our analyses (Skocpol, 1982), but we have not been told where it fits.1

Liberalization, transition and consolidation: measuring the components of democratization

This article measures the process of democratization by subdividing it into three components: the liberalization of autocracy, the mode of transition and the consolidation of democracy. The 30 or so countries included in the study are situated in different world regions, mainly southern and eastern Europe, south and central America and the former Soviet Union – all of which have experienced regime transitions since 1974. The study also includes a sample of countries from the Middle East and northern Africa that are, at best, only in an embryonic stage of liberalization. Measured by scalograms, the data provide comparative indicators of the progress each country has achieved over the period 1974–2000. The study tests this time series for ‘patterns’, guided by the hypothesis that the multiple dimensions of liberalization, transition and consolidation are consistently related to each other, both temporally and spatially. The findings indicate a single underlying dimensional structure to the data. This allows separate scales for liberalization and consolidation to be created and combined into a general indicator of democratization. Contrary to expectations in the literature, most central and eastern European countries perform comparatively better than the southern European and Latin American cases. Not only do they reach the same high levels of liberalization and consolidation, but they also do so in a much shorter time span. Furthermore, there is compelling evidence in the Middle Eastern and North African data that the liberalization of autocratic regimes does not always play a democratization triggering role. Department of Political Science, Central European University, Naderutca 9, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary, E-mail: philippe.schmitter@iue.it

Three Temporal Dimensions to the Consolidation of Democracy

The study of democratization, more than most fields of comparative political inquiry, should be sensitive to the time factor. When something happens, as well as in what order and with what rhythm, can be even more important in determining the outcome than whether something happens or what happens. As “transitologists” and “consolidologists” have moved away from structural determinants of democracy toward a more process- and actor-oriented approach, they have also had to become more explicit about different dimensions of temporality. In this article, we explore three of them: time, timing and tempo.