Die Funktionsbedingungen konzentrierter Politik: Überlegungen zu Lateinamerika

Abstract: Is "neocorporatist concertation" an exportable product? Invented and made in Europe, can it be adopted and adapted in contexts so radically different as in Latin America? And if so, under what conditions? Looking through the Latin Americandiscussion on "social concertation", as well as the North American and European literature on "neocorporatism", the present article tries to provide some systematical insights to this question. It argues that "discoursive" forms of macroeconomic decision-making are conditional upon five sets of factors: (1) logical preconditions (the existence of actors and their mutual recognition), (2) conditions of entry (the prevalence of consensual policy styles and recognized relations of interdependence), (3) acceptability of outcomes (the functional and strategic rationality of negotiation results), (4) the successfull management of temporal constraints (scarcity of time and uncertainty) and finally (5) the overcoming of "external" political constraints (intrastate and intraorganizational limiting factors). All these conditions of "social concertation" are highly demanding. Consequently, the article concludes that efforts of "neocorporatist" policy-making in Latin America are feasible - while their probability of success is rather modest.;