Corporatism and the Microeconomic Foundations of Swedish Social Democracy: The Swedish Model Revisited*

The aim of this paper is to advance the research into the workings of ‘corporatist’ societies by adding a microeconomic dimension and outlining how such a revised model is applicable to recent Swedish experience. Sweden is often regarded as a corporatist society., that is, one in which policy is the outcome of a ‘social partnership’ between encompassing groups coordinated by government. This corporatist approach, resting on the existence of a macro-economic social contract between peak organizations, is complemented here by an analysis of the micro-level incentives and mechanisms conducive to operating within the corporatist cooperative framework. These characteristics are seen as together constituting what I term the solidaristic market economy, a system of economic relations different in fundamental respects from the two with which we are familiar. While Swedish reality docs not correspond exactly to the economic model set out, the case is made that it is as reasonable to extrapolate from Swedish experience to the solidaristic market economy (and vice versa) as to learn from U.S. experience about the competitive market economy and from the Soviet Union about the command economy. Complemented by these micro-characteristics, corporatist analysis of economic relations under social-democratic regimes is thus seen as explaining the resilience of the ‘Swedish model’. Rather than in constant peril as critics suggest, the encompassing interest organizations and the patterns of relations among them are characterized by continued solidity in keeping with the operating principles of the solidaristic market economy.     

Dimitar D. Gueorguiev,Retrofitting Leninism: Participation Without Democracy in China

Journal of Chinese Political Science -     

The Effects of Capital Mobility, Trade Openness, and Democracy on Social Spending in Latin America, 1980–1999

Empirical studies measuring the impact of globalization on social spending have appeared recently in leading journals. This study seeks to improve upon previous work by (1) employing a more sophisticated and comprehensive measure of financial openness; (2) using a more accurate measure of trade openness based on purchasing power parities; and (3) relying on social spending data that are more complete than those used by previous studies on Latin America. Our estimates suggest that several empirical patterns reported in previous work deserve a second look. We find that trade openness has a positive association with education and social security expenditures, that financial openness does not constrain government outlays for social programs, and that democracy has a strong positive association with social spending, particularly on items that bolster human capital formation.     

Class Divisions Today—the Inclusive Democracy Approach

The aim of this article is to show that the collapse of the socialist project and the consequent abandonment of 'grand narratives' should not be followed by the rejection of every type of class analysis and politics, or, even more so, by the abandonment of every attempt to develop a universal project for human emancipation. Instead, class divisions have to be redefined to extend beyond the original conception of them which was restricted to the economic sphere, and a new class model should be developed, which would embrace the politics of 'difference' and 'identity' and would be appropriate to the era of an internationalised market economy. In the first part of the article, the historical development of economic class divisions is examined and the inadequacies of the Marxist class categories are assessed. In the second part, a new model of class divisions based on the unequal distribution of power in all its forms is developed, whereas in the final part an attempt is made to define the subject of emancipatory politics today.     

Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime

In the intellectual confusion prevailing since the demise of Marxism and "marxism", the attempt is made to define democracy as a matter of pure procedure, explicitly avoiding and condemning any reference to substantive objectives. It can easily be shown, however, that the idea of a purely procedural "democracy" is incoherent and self-contradictory. No legal system whatsoever and no government can exist in the absence of substantive conditions which cannot be left to chance or to the workings of the "market" but must be posited as objectives of political activity. The confusion results from a deficient understanding of what makes a society and an empty idea of "freedom". The objective of politics is not happiness, an affair to be left to the individuals, but it certainly is liberty understood as participation in the governance of the polity; it is also the pursuit of the common good, defined as the sum of the prerequisites and facilitations of individual autonomy depending on collective action, and as the realization of commonly agreed collective goals.     

CSIR 1926–1939

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR, later to become CSIRO) was established in 1926 to replace the pre-existing Institute of Science and Industry. Its beginning was suffused with an optimism based on surpluses in Commonwealth revenues in the years 1926–8, an optimism which was reflected in the action of the Parliament in voting the sum of ł500,000 to be placed to the credit of a Trust Fund to give the new organization a good start. This amount was the exact sum which was mentioned by the then Prime Minister, W. M. Hughes, in his burst of enthusiasm, in December, 1915, when he first launched the Advisory Council of Science and Industry.