In the 1960s, the attention of analysts was drawn to the state's increasing intervention in the economic system – that is, to its intervention in a sphere of activities previously dominated almost entirely by the market (Shonfield 1965). However, it was only toward the mid-1970s that the full importance was grasped of what was, in a certain sense, the phenomenon in reverse – the other side of the coin, so to speak: the reduction of the state and its economic resources (public spending) to a market, to a system of exchanges among organized social groups. In other words, the realization grew that public intervention in the economy, and the partial restriction of the market's sphere of influence that this entailed, came about less through the use of the bureaucratic structures of the traditional state than through forms of exchange, of institutionalized bargaining between governments and the large interest organizations. On the one hand, as we saw in the preceding chapter, the state thus assumed a key institutional role in the management of the economy. On the other, its economic decisions in turn became the object of bargaining – that is, of exchanges with other subjects, just as happens in a market. These other subjects were the large interest organizations, which, in order to equip themselves to handle these new relationships, progressively transformed their structure and their strategies.

POLITICAL EXCHANGE AND CONCERTATION

This realization bred various new concepts, such as ‘political exchange’ and ‘political market’ (Pizzorno 1978), or ‘neocorporatism’ and ‘concertation’ (Schmitter 1974; Lehmbruch 1977), concepts which, albeit in different ways, sought to incorporate these phenomena into the model of centralized political regulation that was apparently predominant in the early 1970s.