The Politics of Neo-Corporatism in France: Farmers, the State, and Agricultural Policymaking in the Fifth Republic Book

The widespread development of neocorporatism—a process in which certain interest groups derive power from their privileged relationship with the state and formal participation in public policy-making rather than through traditional lobbying or pressure tactics—has recently attracted considerable scholarly attention. This penetrating study focuses on the emergence of the most powerful agricultural union (FNSEA) as a force in French politics, the trends toward corporatization and decorporatization of the agricultural sector, and the governmental efforts at reform and decorporatization in Mitterrand's France. Keeler introduces a new, sector-oriented theoretical framework suitable for analyzing the corporatization process in any democratic polity. The book also offers a general model of the "corporatist imperative" in the agricultural sector of democratic polities and tests this model with comparative case studies of the United States, Britain, Italy, and West Germany.