Persistent Divergence? Chemical Business Associations in Britain and Germany

Abstract

In many comparative accounts of industrial sectors, Britain and Germany have been taken to highlight the features of two distinct ways of (regulatory) policy making and of managing state-society relations. Policy making in the UK has been described as informal, confidential, and based on close relationships between public authorities and firms, while regulation is ‘reasonable, practical, and flexible’ (Brickman etal. 1985: 225). At the same time, interest systems tend to be comparatively fragmented and state-society relations typically exhibit pluralist patterns (for many other characteristics, see Schmidt, 2006). In Germany, sectoral governance has been by self-regulation and policy making is significantly more formal and structured than in the British case. Both producer groups and public authorities prefer ‘statutory precision’ and a ‘faithful execution of regulatory requirements’ (Brickman et al. 1985: 231). Germany’s interest system, in turn, has been said to be relatively compact with state-society relations well ordered, highly formalized, and of an essentially corporatist nature. If this has been the case for many of the more traditional sectors, it has been even more pronounced in the chemical industry (see Grant et al. 1988).