Corporate statism

Corporate statism, state corporatism, or simply corporatism, is a political culture and a form of corporatism the proponents of which claim or believe that corporate groups should form the basis of society and the state. By this principle, the state requires all citizens to belong to one of several officially designated interest groups (based generally on economic sector), which consequently have great control of their members. Such interest groups thus attain public status, and they or their representatives participate with national policymaking, at least formally.[1]

Societies have existed historically which exemplified corporate statism, for instance as propounded by Othmar Spann in Austria and implemented by Benito Mussolini in Italy (1922–1943), António de Oliveira Salazar's Estado Novo in Portugal (1933–1974)[2] and by the interwar Federal State of Austria. After World War II, corporate statism influenced the rapid development of South Korea and Japan.[3]

Corporate statism most commonly manifests itself as a ruling party acting as a mediator between the workers, capitalists and other major state interests by incorporating them institutionally into the government. Corporatist systems were most prevalent during the mid-20th century in Europe and later elsewhere in developing countries. One criticism is that interests, both social and economic, are so diverse that a state cannot possibly define or organize them effectively by incorporating them.[citation needed] Corporate statism differs from corporate nationalism in that it is a social mode of organization rather than economic nationalism operating by means of private business corporations. The topic remains controversial in some countries, including South Korea, Japan, and Portugal.

  1. ^ Abrahamian; DeBardeleben; DeSipio; Grindle; Kew and Lewis; Ross. Introduction to Comparative Politics. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. p. 474.
  2. ^ Badie, Bertrand; Berg-Schlosser, Dirk; Morlino, Leonardo, eds. (7 September 2011). International Encyclopedia of Political Science. SAGE Publications (published 2011). ISBN 9781483305394. Retrieved 9 September 2020. ... fascist Italy ... developed a state structure known as the corporate state with the ruling party acting as a mediator between 'corporations' making up the body of the nation. Similar designs were quite popular elsewhere in the 1930s. The most prominent examples were Estado Novo in Portugal (1932–1968) and Brazil (1937–1945), the Austrian Standestaat (1933–1938), and authoritarian experiments in Estonia, Romania, and some other countries of East and East-Central Europe,
  3. ^ Kim, B. K. & Vogel, E. F. (eds.) (2011). The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South Korea. Harvard University Press. p. 125.