ABSTRACT
The detailed findings on the role of the corporate rich and the power elite in shaping several major government policies, and in many cases creating new government agencies and committees to carry out those policies, speak for themselves in terms of corporate domination throughout the twentieth century. In addition, the theory, methods, and findings can provide a starting point for anyone wishing to examine corporate involvement in other policy matters that impacted the lives of large numbers of citizens during that century. Those theories—interest-group pluralism, organizational state theory, and historical institutionalism—have differing origins and use different methods of inquiry, but they have come to be more similar than different. The theory also explains when the liberal-labor alliance could be successful, despite being constrained from its outset by the impossibility of creating a non-divisive third party in the American electoral context.
