ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
Corporatism has been frequently and legitimately associated with the Catholic political
culture of the early 20th-century, although Fascism also codified it as an authoritarian
alternative to liberal democracy. While was present in the institutions of some democratic
regimes, it was only in the dictatorships that a serious effort was made to organize political
regimes according to corporatist ideology. The success of this process of diffusion of
corporatism among European dictatorships illustrates the pragmatic adoption of
authoritarian institutions by dictators with weaker links to the cultural background of Catholic
or Fascist corporatism. While there was some variation, the ideology of a single national
interest, typical of anti-democratic conservative elites, proved compatible with the organic-
statist core of corporatism, with the successful practical experience of some regimes leading
to its rapid diffusion.
The majority of inter-war dictatorships were personalized authoritarian regimes. Even those
regimes institutionalized following military coups or military dictatorships gave rise to
personalist regimes and attempts to create single or dominant regime parties. The
personalization of leadership within dictatorial regimes became a dominant characteristic of
the fascist era. However, autocrats need institutions and elites to exercise their rule, and
their role has often been underestimated as it has been taken as a given that decision-making
power was centralized in the dictators. To prevent the undermining of their legitimacy
and the usurpation of their authority, dictators need to co-opt elites and to either create or
adapt institutions, like controlled parliaments, corporatist assemblies and other bureaucratic-
authoritarian consultative bodies, to be the locus of the co-optation, negotiation and
(sometimes) decision-making: ‘without institutions they cannot make policy concessions’
On the other hand, no authoritarian regime can survive politically without the critical support
of interest groups and such modern elites as bureaucrats, managers and the military.
Institutional transfer was a hallmark of inter-war dictatorships, but the processes of diffusion
was differentiated. In the case of social corporatism it is clear the influence of Italian Fascism
was central. The comparative analysis of the labour charters or their equivalent within these
regimes demonstrates the role-model function of the Italian Fascist labour charter to the
great majority of these dictatorships, the national adaptations of which were an expression of
the ideological and cultural diversity of the coalition that established them (see Table 1.1).
The projects of authoritarian constitutions and labour charters, albeit in less statist versions
than those of Italian Fascism, generally began with the organic principle. Social corporatism
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