Countervailing Power and the Role of State Threats: The Case of Pro-religious Employers’ Organizations in Turkey

The concept of countervailing power has been widely used to explain the emergence and development of Employers’ Organizations (EOs)in response to threats from organized labour and state legislation. However, it cannot sufficiently explain why new type of EOs have emerged where such threats are low. This chapter explores new pressures of countervailing power through a historical case study analysis of EOs in Turkey until 2012. I argue that a necessary condition for a new type of pro-religious EO to emerge were wider state threats by individual political and state actors towards autonomous employer collective action. I show that beyond regulatory IR or trade threats as recognized in the existing IR literature, wider threats towards autonomous collective action in the IR, civil society and political systems can push employers into coordination. This chapter combines countervailing power insights with the agency-centric political entrepreneurship stream to develop this argument. Such an inclusion of micro-political institutions and of wider state threats into the employment relationship can better explain EO origins in the ‘Global South’ and contribute to the EO revitalisation literature as EOs have increasingly shifted their logic of influence to the state.