Pluralistic Corporatisms and Corporate Pluralism*

This discussion acknowledges that interest group ‐ governmental relations deserve further study, but argues that the corporatist literature of the last decade has failed to give useful guidance to the research. One major complaint concerns the hostility in many of the sources to pluralist analysis. As critiques, these attacks have been too shallow to be defended as constructive debate and in dismissing pluralist writings important insights into group‐Governmental relations have been neglected. The article broadly distinguishes two types of pluralism. There is the version which dwells on open competition between groups; there is also, however, a tradition of writing about and discussing closed group‐departmental relations and sectorized policy‐making. It is clearly this second strain that overlaps considerably with contemporary corporatist interest. It is suggested that it is worth reserving the term corporate pluralism for this model of segmented policymaking. This model is more descriptive than explanatory and is less ordered and systematised than corporatism appears to be in current theoretical use. It is further argued that in use many writers impute to corporatism little more than corporate pluralism suggests — and that advocates of corporatism now use the term in a less ambitious (an empirical) manner.