Corporatist Strategies and the Transition to Democracy in Spain

Abstract

At a time when political scientists have come to accept that there is no realistic possibility of a general theory of the capitalist state or, especially, its historical forms, they are still reaching for general statements about contemporary corporatist structures and institutions. In their majority these statements are clearly descriptive rather than theoretical and are derived from studies of the advanced industrial nations of western Europe and North America, but this does not prevent them being applied, by induction, to other polities such as those of southern Europe. This procedure belongs to a broadly Weberian methodological paradigm, which sanctions the construction of a corporatist ideal-type to be used in the comparative investigation of different national realities where the various synthetic elements of the type will be found to be more or less present and occasionally absent. ' While such approach may yield interesting descriptions, it runs the danger of subsuming different cases to the type in uncritical fashion, without trying to explain the differences. This is a real weakness in a world where different corporatisms are likely to be highly specific, depending on national political culture, the form of state, and the disposition of social forces in particular conjunctures. There is therefore still a need for theory, as long as it is recognized that this will seek to explain not corporatism writ large, but distinct corporatisms and their location in specific political contexts. There is broad agreement that all corporatisms must be located in the field of relations between the capitalist state and civil society and that to talk of corporatism is to talk of the relationships between state and civil society. Descriptively, corporatist arrangements can be seen as blurring the division between the two,2 but theoretically they are better understood as contributing to construct it.3 This supposes a complex approach to the state itself, which is understood not as the instrument of the ruling class, nor as a political arena equally accessible to all class (and nonclass) forces, nor as a unified subject in its own right which floats freely above civil society, but rather as an institutional ensemble of forms of representation, internal organization, and intervention.4 By this definition, corporatism is clearly not coterminous either with the state itself or with the political system (and still less is it a socioeconomic system distinct from both capitalism and socialism). More modestly, it is just one of the representational forms available to the capitalist state and has emerged historically in connection with different state forms. The key question then concerns the extent to which any one corporatism can be explained by its strategic location in the institutional ensemble of its particular state form. In this perspective, corporatism belongs to the field of mediations which are contained politically in the institutions of the state and which act upon the disposition of social forces and the class (and other) practices of civil society.5 More particularly, corporatism