Soviet Jurists Divided: A Case for Corporatism in the U. S. S. R.?

Abstract

The ability of specialist elites in the Soviet Union to influence policy in their areas of competence continues to puzzle analysts of the Soviet political system. Groups such as economists, lawyers, educators, industrial managers, and the military can be found acting in concert to formulate proposals, many of which have won the blessing of political decision makers. Soviet professionals not always manage to achieve unity on policy issues, however, and even when they the response of the leadership is not always sympathetic. An imaginative general secretary or the collective elite of the Communist party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) may still take the initiative, disregarding the alternatives brought before them by technical specialists. As result, political scientists currently project number of conflicting images of the Soviet decision-making process. The interest group, or pluralist, ideal-type has been with us for some time. It has long been opposed by vision of autocracy that sees only marginal shift since the totalitarian era of Joseph Stalin.' Recently few authors have begun examining the applicability of the corporatist ideal-type to Soviet politics. Conceived by theorists of fascism, which in practice bore little resemblence to the ideal, the concept of corporatism was resurrected in the 1970s by Philippe Schmitter to describe interest mediation under capitalism. By contrast with pluralism, in which interest representation occurs through an unspecified number of multiple, voluntary, competitive, nonhierarchically ordered and self-determined units that do not exercise monopoly of representational activity within their respective categories, Schmitter defines corporatism as a system of interest representation in which the constituent units are organized into limited number of singular, compulsory, noncompetitive, hierarchically ordered and functionally differentiated categories ... In corporatist system the units are recognized or licensed (if not created) by the state and granted deliberate representational monopoly within their respective categories in exchange for observing certain controls on their selection of leaders and articulation of demands and supports. 2