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This paper investigates the political determinants of corporatist and pluralist employers' associations and reflects on the origins of the varieties of capitalism in the early decades of the 20th century. We hypothesize that proportional, multiparty systems tend to enable employers' associations to develop into social corporatist organizations, whereas nonproportional, two-party systems are conducive to the formation of pluralist associations. Moreover, we suggest that federalism tends to reinforce incentives for pluralist organization. We assess our hypotheses through quantitative analysis of data from 1900 to the 1930s from 16 nations and case studies of the origins of peak employers' associations in Denmark and the United States. Our statistical analysis suggests that proportional, multiparty systems foster, and federalism works against, social corporatist business organization; employers' organization is also greater where the mobilization of labor, traditions of coordination, and economic development are higher. These factors also largely explain pre-World War II patterns of national coordination of capitalism. Case histories of the origins of employers' associations in Denmark and the United States further confirm the causal importance of political factors. Although Danish and American employers had similar interests in creating cooperative national industrial policies, trajectories of associational development were constrained by the structure of party competition, as well as by preindustrial traditions for coordination.

Parties and firms are the key actors of representative democracy and capitalism, respectively, and the dynamic of attachment between them is a central feature of any political economy. This is the first article to analyse systematically the exclusivity of party–firm relations. We consider exclusivity at a point in time and exclusivity over time. Does a firm have a relationship with only one party at a given point in time, or is it close to more than one party? Does a firm maintain a relationship with only one party over time, or does it switch between parties? Most important, how do patterns of exclusivity impact on a firm's ability to lobby successfully? We propose a general theory, which explains patterns of party–firm relations by reference to the division of institutions and the type of party competition in a political system. A preliminary test of our theory with Polish survey data confirms our predictions, establishing a promising hypothesis for future research.

The "party paradox" thesis claims that in the context of the legal corporate governance reforms of the 1990s, which aimed at adjusting national corporate governance systems to the "finance capitalism" of the Anglo-American type, center-left parties promoted proshareholder corporate governance reforms, whereas center-right parties opposed such reforms. Based on case studies of Switzerland, Sweden, and the Netherlands, this article shows that this thesis does not apply to two of these cases: In Sweden and the Netherlands a broad coalition uniting center-right and center-left parties opposed- with considerable success-proshareholder reforms. Therefore, the author argues that firm-level explanations of the "party paradox" are insufficient to understand the variance in center-left preferences across different cases. Instead, the historical role of labor in different countries is critical in the formation of center-left preferences. Where labor was not excluded from the formation of corporate governance structures, center-left support for proshareholder reform was weak. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

This paper attempts to understand why the Jews, who have benefited so much from capitalism, nevertheless in the main adopt political postures that reject capitalism in favor of its polar opposite, socialism and government intervention into the economy. The author discusses various theories that have been proposed to explain why this group of people, whose socio-economic status might be expected to incline them in the direction of the Republican political party in the U.S., instead vote in overwhelming numbers for Democrat party candidates. Adapted from the source document.