State Structure and Variations in Corporatism: The Swedish Case*

The question addressed in this article is: Why are some countries more corporatist than others? It is argued that neither pure micro-, nor pure macro-explanations can account for the great variation in the degree of corporatism (however measured) among western countries. Instead, an institutional variant is put forward, where the structure of the state at the time of the formation of working-class organizations is taken as the main independent variable. It has been shown that the development of collaborative or confrontational labor movements was decided by the reaction of the existing political elites to the demands from the working class in the pre-World War I period. Where suffrage came late, and where the class system was rigid. a radical/revolutionary orientation would dominate the working-class movement, hindering corporatist arrangements, and vice versa. The problem with this argument is that it does not fit the Swedish case. Although democracy was introduced comparatively late and although the class system was rigid, Sweden has been considered the nearly ideal-typical case of corporatism. It is argued that the deviant Swedish case can be explained by the specific structure of the pre-democratic Swedish state - centralized, but not closed; bureaucratic and professional but not especially authoritarian; differentiated but not without central coordination of policy.