Authoritarian Corporatist Relations

• Authoritarian corporatist relations are collaborations between state actors and corporate elites that concentrate power through regulatory capture and network dynamics.
• Adaptive models and empirical studies reveal that self-reinforcing ownership networks can spontaneously produce an oligarchic core, controlling over 80% of system power.
• Digital governance and AI integration amplify elite influence, challenging regulatory integrity and prompting calls for enhanced transparency and accountability.

Authoritarian corporatist relations refer to the institutional, network, and policy architectures in which political and economic power is concentrated among a small set of state actors and interconnected corporate or elite groups, often blending forms of centralized control, regulatory capture, co-optation, and constrained pluralism. This concept traditionally encompasses arrangements where the state and dominant business or social organizations collaborate to stabilize or perpetuate a hierarchical, non-democratic order. Recent research, adopting formal modeling, network science, and empirical fieldwork, has clarified not only the variety of authoritarian corporatist forms but also their spontaneous emergence, adaptation in the age of AI, and implications for labor, civil society, and digital governance.

1. Structural Dynamics and Spontaneous Core Formation

Authoritarian corporatist relations have often been theorized as the result of top-down, purposive strategies—state-planned oligarchies or collusive arrangements among economic elites. However, research employing adaptive network models of firm ownership demonstrates that pronounced centralization of control can also arise spontaneously from decentralized, self-interested behavior. In the model of company ownership evolution (Krause et al., 2013), the control (influence) of company $j$ is recursively updated as

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where $A_{(i j)}$ encodes ownership and $w_{(i j)}$ is allocated proportionally to current control. Companies maximize their own power by probabilistically rewiring ownership links:

$$p = \min\left(1, \exp\left[\beta (\tilde{w}_{(l m)} v_{(l)} - w_{(i j)} v_{(i)}) \right] \right)$$

This “rich-get-richer” feedback causes a highly connected “core” (typically <1% of nodes) to amass disproportionate control over the network—mirroring empirical core–periphery structures in real economies, where a minuscule core can control more than 80% of system power. Notably, this centralization does not require collusion or explicit hierarchy; it emerges naturally from local optimization. This finding generalizes to broader authoritarian corporatist settings: highly unequal and oligarchic structures can result from endogenous dynamics even absent deliberate coordination, raising regulatory and policy design challenges.

2. Regulatory Capture and Political Influence

At the level of state–business interaction, formal game-theoretic models clarify how “regulatory capture” operationalizes authoritarian corporatist relations. In the canonical framework (Albino et al., 2013), regulators and corporations interact through a transfer mechanism, with expected net gains for both when

$\Delta B > t > \Delta C$

where $B$ is corporate benefit, $C$ is regulator cost, $t$ is the transfer, and $\Delta$ is the change in probability of favorable outcome due to influence. The regulator's cost $C = \Delta (RA+I)$ depends on both risk of detection ($R$), assets at stake ($A$), and integrity ($I$).

Collusion is self-reinforcing when corporate benefits ($B$) substantially outweigh regulatory risks ($C$), making it rational for both parties to persistently bias the regulatory process. This interaction, durable even with only partial influence ($0 < \Delta < 1$), undermines public interest, market fairness, and regulatory integrity, and typifies the “insider” dynamics at the heart of authoritarian corporatist systems. Preventative measures—such as increased transparency, distributed regulatory power, and anti-corruption enforcement—work by targeting parameters in the above inequalities but may be insufficient if the underlying network structure is robust.

3. Elite Networks, Board Interlocks, and Structural Autonomy

Network studies of elite formation have revealed that authoritarian corporatist relations are mediated through embedded, evolving elite networks rather than only formal hierarchies. In the Chinese non-profit sector (Ma et al., 2016), board interlocking gives rise to a “rich club” of high-degree nodes operating with significant autonomy from direct state control. The network demonstrates log-normal degree distributions, multiple influential clusters identified via modularity maximization (Louvain algorithm, average $Q \approx 0.82$), and a negative association between government presence and centrality in non-public foundations. This “multipolar” structure—distinct from core–periphery typologies with a state-dominated core—shows that even in highly regulated, authoritarian contexts, elite autonomy and horizontal coordination can emerge, especially during periods of regulatory or political crisis.

Such elite sub-groups may preferentially exclude state actors while maintaining privileged influence over resources and agenda setting. The presence of “consultative authoritarianism,” whereby the state tolerates but indirectly shapes the activity of business elites rather than tightly prescribing it, further nuances classical corporatist theory.

4. Labour Unions and Authoritarian Corporatist Containment

In labor market governance, authoritarian corporatist relations are exemplified by state strategies that dismantle or co-opt independent labor unions to discipline the workforce under neoliberal economic regimes (Erol et al., 29 Sep 2025). Turkey and Egypt typify this approach: legal changes, repression, and clientelist measures foster fragmentation among dissident unions and channel influence toward compliant, regime-linked bodies. For instance, redefined participation thresholds and selective promotion of pro-government unions in Turkey led to precipitous declines in independent union power, with the post-2013 period marked by securitization and criminalization of labor protest.

A simple illustrative dynamic model formalizes the effective influence of unions $U$ (Editor’s term): $U = U_0 - \alpha C - \beta S$, where $C$ represents coercive repression and $S$ state-led co-optation. This equation captures the empirical observation that increased coercion and co-optation jointly minimize labor’s oppositional capacity, stabilizing the corporatist order.

5. Digital Governance, AI, and Recursivity of Institutional Control

The integration of AI systems into state and corporate governance introduces new modalities of authoritarian corporatist control. AI-driven authority structures (“Automatic Authorities” (Lazar, 9 Apr 2024); “authoritarian recursion” (Oguz, 12 Apr 2025)) centralize and automate judgment over resource allocation, information flows, and behavioral management across government, education, warfare, and digital platforms.

AI’s recursive architecture—modeled as $J(x) = \sigma(\sum_{i=1}^n w_i x_i + b)$—enables iterative, opaque decision processes, amplifying the ability of elites to reinforce hierarchies while deferring or obscuring accountability. Case studies show that such systems routinely normalize exclusion, create algorithmic echo chambers, and enable surveillance at scale. These developments blur the boundaries between state and corporate authority, facilitating a hybrid mode of power characteristic of late-stage authoritarian corporatism: digital feudalism, lack of contestability, and resistance to conventional democratic oversight.

Normative frameworks including FAccT, relational ethics, and data justice are proposed as counterweights, emphasizing the necessity of substantive justification, procedural legitimacy, and the assignment of proper authority for AI-mediated power.

6. Policy Volatility and Elite Uncertainty in Authoritarian Rule

Recent theoretical advances model the endogenous instability of policy and patronage flows in authoritarian corporatist regimes as a function of elite uncertainty (Zeilberger, 4 Aug 2024). Extending the logic of political survival, the level of concessions (public and private goods) an autocrat delivers depends on the relative uncertainty of the ruling coalition about their prospects:

• Asymmetric uncertainty allows the incumbent to retain surplus by minimizing concessions.
• Equal uncertainty forces the autocrat to match challenger offers exactly, eroding discretionary resources.

Key formulas include:

$$Select(g, z) = v(g) + u(z) - v(\hat{g}) - u(\hat{z}) + \frac{\delta}{1-\delta}(1 - \frac{W}{S})u(z) \geq 0$$

and the first-order condition for optimal allocations. The sensitivity of resource allocation to small changes in elite uncertainty introduces unique volatility to autocratic policy—one absent in more pluralistic, democratic settings with broader coalitions.

7. Empirical and Experimental Reflections: AI Alignment and Political Culture

The political logic of authoritarian corporatism is reflected not only in institutional architectures but also in the cultural and digital substrate. Experimental results on leading LLMs (Łukasik et al., 29 Sep 2025) show that models trained in authoritarian-corporatist contexts exhibit pronounced biases toward hierarchy, stability, and strong-leader justifications—even when outwardly affirming democratic principles on international survey instruments. The composite democracy–authoritarian index is constructed via principal component analysis that aggregates responses across RWA, SDO, WVS, and PEW scales.

Models from China, Russia, and the UAE display justifications that favor “order” and “social stability,” often hedged with conditional qualifiers—a discourse pattern mirroring bureaucratic legitimation in authoritarian corporatist regimes. Conversely, models from Poland, France, and the US stress pluralism, rights, and checks-and-balances. This divergence underscores how the latent architecture of digital agents can serve as a conduit for the perpetuation of authoritarian corporatist logics in sociotechnical systems.

Conclusion

Authoritarian corporatist relations are characterized by the convergence of hierarchical state power, concentrated corporate or elite networks, and adaptive, occasionally spontaneous, mechanisms of control operating at both structural and institutional levels. The interaction between self-reinforcing network cores, formal regulatory capture, labor containment, and recursive digital authority systems produces a distinctive pattern of oligarchic control. Whether arising from intentional design or the endogenous dynamics of networked agents, these formations demand a reassessment of regulatory strategies, democratization of information flows, and explicit attention to the political economy imprinted in both analog and digital infrastructures. Contemporary empirical, formal, and experimental analyses reveal that authoritarian corporatism is not static or monolithic, but rather is shaped by interactions across sectors, technologies, and elite configurations, with far-reaching implications for governance, pluralism, and power distribution.