Corporatism Index

A corporatism index is a quantitative scaling of how centralized and coordinated a country's system of wage bargaining and interest intermediation is. Where the conceptual corporatism framework describes the institutional pattern in which peak associations of labor and capital negotiate with the state, a corporatism index turns that pattern into comparable numbers. The two landmark efforts are Alan Siaroff's 1999 integrated scale for 24 industrial democracies and Lane Kenworthy's 2003 systematic review and reconstruction of the available indicators. Both combine measures such as bargaining centralization, wage-setting coordination, union and employer organizational concentration, and the degree of tripartite concertation into a composite score that ranks countries from pluralist and decentralized at the low end to strongly corporatist and coordinated at the high end.