Corporatism

Corporatism is a political and economic arrangement in which the state organizes society into a limited number of compulsory, hierarchically structured interest groups, typically representing labor, business and agriculture, which negotiate and administer economic policy in coordination with government rather than through open competition among independent parties or unions. Its legitimacy claim is organic rather than individualist: each recognised group is held to hold authority within its own domain because it performs a necessary function for society as a whole, and the state's own authority follows from coordinating those functions into a single national purpose rather than from the consent of atomised individual voters. The term covers both the authoritarian corporatism of Fascist Italy and Estado Novo Portugal, in which the state suppressed independent labor organizing and imposed the corporate structure from above, and the milder 'social corporatism' or 'neo-corporatism' practiced in postwar Austria and the Nordic countries, in which government, business and voluntary trade unions bargain over wages and policy within a shared framework. Corporatism positions itself explicitly against liberal individualism, which it holds fragments society into competing private interests with no common purpose, and against class-based socialism, which it holds turns that same fragmentation into open conflict between owners and workers rather than negotiated cooperation between them.