Howard J. Wiarda overestimated the staying power of neo-corporatism. In 1997, when he proclaimed that corporatism would be as influential as liberalism and socialism, a number of factors were already undermining corporatism in western democracies, such as globalization, post-materialism, and post-industrialism. Crucially, political party systems in Western democracies had begun to fragment, and formerly pillarized societies were beginning to flatten out; as a result, corporatism’s efficient secret—namely, representing as many groups as possible in as few organizations as possible—became increasingly undermined. Today, immigration-induced diversity is undermining social democratic parties, as they have difficulties negotiating the contradictory goals of pro-welfare and pro-immigrant policies. In addition, far right political parties are stoking cultural issues and populism is on the rise on both sides of the Atlantic. Besides these substantive developments, Wiarda’s preferred inductive, thick, and situational intellectual approach became eclipsed by a deductive, parsimonious, and more austere approach. The latter became paramount in explaining change in neo-corporatist countries at the turn of the century, which explains why his interpretivist accounts of the status of neo-corporatism never received the same traction as his accounts of state corporatism in Latin America.
Crepaz, M. M. L. (2018). Of Paradigms Won and Lost: The Neo-Corporatist World According to Howard J. Wiarda. Polity, 50(4), 612–621. https://doi.org/10.1086/699631
