SALVATORE BONFIGLIO

Note sul concetto di scambio politico

N. 145

Summary — The continuous transposition of concepts from a discipline to another, besides the incommunicability among the different specialized languages make it convenient and useful a clarification of the terms and a critical analysis of the concepts.

It is from this exigency that stems the a.’s interest in the study of the concept of political exchange of which is made more and more frequent use. The concept is examined, in its extensive meaning, as a key-concept for the explanation, of normal political processes, and, in its more recurrent restricted sense, as the core of neo-corporative modelling.

The a., distinguishing the analytical from the valuational character of the concept, points out its non-univocal use. In his opinion, when it is put forward more or less openly as a model solution of social conflicts it becomes the fruit of an ideology of the crisis built up by pragmatic points of view.

Then, of the political exchange theory are emphasized, on the one hand, the more analytically useful characteristics which bear evidence of the political approach to the economy and of the economic approach to politics, and, on the other, the limits mainly due to the fact that it omits to consider the influence the political process exercises on the political—institutional structure. This incommunicability of the concepts of process and structure causes the political exchange to result inadequate as a theoretical—scheme for interpreting the crisis of governability relative to the political systems of complex societies based on the market.