On the occasion of the 25th birthday of Mancur Olson’s “The Rise and Decline of Nations” (RDN), this article reviews the political science debate over Mancur Olson’s theory on distributional coalitions. In RDN, Olson blamed societal organizations for the (above all: economic) decline of developed societies. This idea ran counter to the perspective of the debate on corporatism that reached its peak when RDN was published. I show in detail that, as a general theory, RDN did not succeed. As a heuristic, in contrast, the RDN perspective gained enormous ground among political scientists in the last years. The discussion leads to the question of why, contrary to Olson’s projection, liberalization politics became possible in the last 25 years. The article finishes by identifying questions for future research.
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