Review of George Ross: Workers and Communism in France; From Popular Front to Eurocommunism

Abstract

Recent years have seen a revival in the study of the political economies of the advanced industrial democracies. While the new catchwords in comparative politics — ungovernability, overload, corporatism — have generally had a theoretical scope extending well beyond the confines of relations between the state and organized and less organized economic interests, much of the empirical work has concentrated on these relations. This shift of themes in the study of the advanced industrial democracies, however, has disclosed a major lauft in the subsoil on which good comparative analysis of political economic relations and performance will have to be built There is no shortage of “data” with which to conduct broad statistical analyses: the library stacks containing the publications of the O.E.C.D., I.L.O. and the like have become a second home for many of those concerned with the new political economy. What have been lacking have been the monographical studies of trade unions and employers associations, their strategies and goals, their internal institutional processes and their relations with political parties and governments in different national) settings. Yet, without such monographs, hopefully informed by broader theoretical concerns, the comparative statistical studies fall prey to the risk of barren abstraction and of providing us with superficially valid, but fundamentally uninformed and/or flawed propositions about causal relationships.