The Political Construction of Business Interests: Coordination, Growth, and Equality
Review by Richard Deeg, Alberto Martinelli and Mikkel Mailand.
Mikkel Mailand is one of three reviewers in a ‘review symposium’ on the book The Political Construction of Business Interests: Coordination, Growth, and Equality by Cathie Jo Martin and Duane Swank. His contributions focuses especially on the chapters regarding Denmark in the book, that also includes in-depth studies of employers’ organizations in USA, the UK and Germany.
The main argument of the book seems to be that the countries with multiple party systems include more incentives for right wing party leaders to delegate decisions and power to private associations (employers’ organization). This is so because right wing parties in multi-party systems cannot obtain majority positions as easy as in two-party systems and therefore believe in winning more through neo-corporatist arrangements and on the industrial relations arena than on the parliamentarian arena. Hence, the most important explanation for the development of strong peak-level employers’ organizations is the presence of multi-party systems. The authors test and discuss this and a number of other independent variables to convince the reader about their argument. The qualitative as well as quantitative studies show, that the strongest support is for the party-system explanation. However, also other factors seem to be of importance. The authors find evidence, although less strong, that federalism, union mobilization, traditions for coordination and economic development also are related to the development of strong centralized employers’ organizations.
The 'review symposium' was published in Socio-Economic Review, vol 11, no 4, October 2013.