New versus Established Democracies
Jose Aleman
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INTRODUCTION
Students of comparative democracy have claimed that institutions that facilitate
representation and cooperation engender social peace. Over the last two decades, one
particular mechanism of inclusive cooperation – social concertation – has featured
prominently in processes of democratic transition and consolidation.
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In this paper, I
address two important questions. First, do new forms of social concertation operate
differently than older forms of neo-corporatism? Second, do they
effectively/successfully engender social peace in new or Third Wave democracies?
In many new democracies tripartite concertation is neither firmly rooted in a
tradition of social partnership nor in corporatist networks of interest aggregation and
representation.
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Quite the contrary, policy coordinating bodies involving state, business
and labor representatives are present in political systems that are routinely classified as
non-corporatist
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or that feature weak and/or fragmented trade union organizations. The
initiation of social pacts in countries and circumstances that differ very much from the
historical norm has re-stimulated an intense debate about the preconditions of
corporatist concertation, in particular “the politics of social pacts”.
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The paper proceeds as follows. Sections One and Two explore partisan theories
of labor compliance and the political economy of protest.
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Section Three considers
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Examples can be found in Latin American (Munck 1994, p. 90) and Eastern Europe (Ost 2000, p. 504).
Trebilcock 1994 provides a useful topical and geographical survey. Other terms used to denote this
phenomenon include ‘social pacts, ‘social compact’, ‘socio-economic pacts’, ‘employment pacts’ and
‘growth pacts’.
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Examples include Chile, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, South Africa, South Korea and Spain.
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Lijphart 1999. Buchanan and Nicholls 2003 provide some examples.
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Baccaro 2003 decouples the process of social concertation from the structure of interest representation
in neo-corporatism, thereby claiming that concertation is perfectly compatible with a non-corporatist
structure of interest representation. Hassel 2003 develops an analytical framework to understand the
politics of negotiated, voluntary wage restraint in the context of social pacts.
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Hassle 2003.
Convention