Concertation, with its various patterns discussed in the preceding chapter, represents one possible type of relationship between state and organized interests in the advanced industrial democracies. In this chapter I shall analyse the ways in which these organizations can participate first in policy-making and then in policy implementation. The strategies of political exchange and concertation – which were pivotal to the model of the centralized political regulation of the economy and hence attracted most attention from students of the relationship between economy and society in the 1970s and 1980s – will thus be framed in a broader typology which highlights their features and specific effects.

ORGANIZED INTERESTS AND POLICY-MAKING

Organized social interests are able to condition regulatory intervention by the state in various ways and to various extents. Of course, the observation that social classes and groups influence state action according to the resources available to them is by no means a new or controversial one. But what I shall seek to show in this section is that there exists another, perhaps less obvious relationship. Put briefly, depending on the type of interaction that takes place between organized interests and state institutions in the public policy-making process, the abilities of these interests to influence its outcomes will vary. In other words, although the differences in the power wielded by social groups in society account, to a large extent, for their various abilities to condition public policy, these abilities are in turn mediated by the forms assumed by their relationship with the institutions that exercise decision-making power.