The Necessity of Associative Democracy: Bringing Corporatism Back In

Abstract Liberal electoral democracies face serious intrinsic as well as external problems that threaten their viability. Associative democracy (AD) holds the promise of alleviating them. I argue that a long but currently strangely ignored tradition of (neo-)corporatism has demonstrated the feasibility of associative governance arrangements. Nothing prevents governments to push corporatism into domains other than labor relations, such as education, health, housing, or climate change. I propose a two-tiered structure of AD in which extended classic corporatism forms Tier 1 and a layer of commons Tier 2. To maintain their creative, authentic organization, which collides with the organization of state bureaucracies, commons must not be integrated into state structures. Instead, they must be institutionally represented through confederate bodies which are mandatorily consulted by Tier 1 actors.