Trade union strategies and change in Neo-corporatist concertation: A new century of political exchange?

This article examines change and divergence in the politics of partnership-based governance of two weak neo-corporatist countries, Italy and Spain. Evolution in the forms and processes of concertation is driven by a logic of interaction guiding actors' behaviour which is different from that theorised for strongly neo-corporatist countries. As the framework governing the industrial relations system is characterised by conflict and poor coordination capacities, change will take the form of a top-down search for accommodation of this conflict through political exchange in contexts where neo-corporatist institutions provide weak constraints on actors' behaviour. This has been possible in the last decade because political participation, though weakly institutionalised, remained for trade unions a positive course of action used instrumentally in order to achieve policy and organisational benefits. Hence, the divergent evolutions of the two countries are to be traced back to factors affecting the strategic decision of political participation of trade unions, in particular inter-union ideological and political divisions and the dynamics of the relationship between grass roots and leadership.