Cooperation and political economic performance in affluent democratic capitalism

Research on comparative political economic performance has traditionally followed two separate tracks, one concerned with collective economic gain (growth and efficiency) and the other focused on distribution and redistribution. Cooperative institutions offer a key to understanding cross-national variation among the affluent capitalist democracies in both facets of political economic performance. These institutions cluster along two dimensions: neocorporatism and firm-level cooperation. Pooled time-series analysis for 18 nations over 1960-89 suggests that (1) neocorporatism is a major source of distributive/redistributive policies and outcomes and of several sources of collective gain; (2) firm-level cooperation is a key contributor to economic growth.