How corporatist institutions shape the access of citizen groups to policy-makers: evidence from Denmark and Switzerland

ABSTRACT

Traditional corporatist groups such as business groups and unions still play an important role in many countries, and the rumors exaggerate the decline of corporatist structures. Nevertheless citizen groups have grown in number and political importance. The authors show that Danish and Swiss citizen groups have gained better access to the administrative and parliamentary venues in the period 1975–1985 through 2010, but with Swiss citizen groups more successful than their Danish counterparts, particularly with regard to the parliamentary venue. Danish and Swiss neo-corporatism has confronted similar socio-economic and political challenges during this period, but the political opportunity structure is more favorable towards citizen groups in Switzerland than in Denmark. The Swiss referendum institution makes parliamentarians more open to popular demands while in Denmark strong unions, a strong parliament and frequent minority governments make it more difficult for citizen groups to be heard.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizen groups
• corporatism
• Denmark
• political opportunity structure
• Switzerland

Acknowledgements

A first version of this paper was presented at ECPR Joint sessions 2015 in Warsaw. We thank the participants for helpful comments. The authors thank three anonymous referees and journal editor Jeremy Richardson for constructive comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Peter Munk Christiansen is professor at Aarhus University, Department of Political Science, Denmark.

André Mach is Associate Professor at the University of Lausanne, Institute of Political, Historical and International Studies, Switzerland.

Frédéric Varone is Professor at the University of Geneva, Department of Political Science and International Relations, Switzerland.

Notes

1 Conversely, Schnyder and Jackson (2013) stress the dialectical and paradoxical connection between neo-liberal reforms and the preservation of corporatism in Sweden and Germany.

2 We only include permanent extra-parliamentary committees, not ad hoc committees created for a specific task and for which it is difficult to gather systematic information.

3 Corporatist groups dropped from 71 per cent to 58 per cent of the population of groups from 1975 to 2010, but their share of committee seats only dropped from 89 per cent to 84 per cent. Unions are still the most overrepresented group compared to their share of the group population, but they have lost ground to business groups. Altogether, citizen groups make up 42 per cent of all groups, but they only occupy 16 per cent of all committee seats.

4 Permanent parliamentary committees have existed since 1979, but with limited resources, and ad hoc parliamentary committees remain important. The 1992 reform reinforced resources of specialized committees.

5 These committees can be considered least likely cases to test the hypothesis about citizen group access, as they deal with economic and social issues of central importance for traditional corporatist associations.

6 The number of MPs with leading positions in major economic associations peaked in 2010, when the presidents of the Swiss federation of trade unions (USS), the Swiss Industry and trade association (USAM) and the Swiss farmers’ association (USP) were all members of this committee.

Additional information

Funding

Frédéric Varone and André Mach also thank the Swiss National Science Foundation for its financial support (Project Nr. 100018_149689-1). Peter Munk Christiansen thanks The Danish Council for Independent Research for financial support (Grant No. 0602-01212B).