Although the comparative labour market research often highlights the importance of the incorporation of trade unions and employers' organisations into the formulation and implementation of labour market policy, questioning the concrete factors of this incorporation played hitherto a minor role. Using a historical-institutional perspective and exemplified by the rise, fall and continuity of corporatist structured public employment services (PES) in the Netherlands, Great Britain and Germany this publication inquires the institutional conditions for the formation and stability corporatist public labour market policy. While in Great Britain and in the Netherlands "only" certain phases of corporatist structured PES (Great Britain: 1973-1988; Netherlands:1991-2000) did exist, the German PES shows corporatist structures since its formation in 1927. The central result of this publication is that the institutional context for corporatist labour market policy in the Netherlands as well as in Great Britain has more in common than the comparative research about welfare states and "varities of capitalism" seems to recognise. Embedded in and generated by the historically rooted patterns of interest-mediation within the PES and the institutional structures of the political system the PES in the Netherlands and Great Britain are very closely related to a state dominated (>staatsnah<) institutional context: the PES in the Netherlands and Great Britain are institutionalised as an 'administrative responsibility' (>Verwaltungsaufgabe<). In opposition to that the German PES was created as a 'societal responsibility' (>Gesellschaftsaufgabe<). These different formative preliminaries of the PES solidified during the PES-reforms after 1945. The German trade unions and employers' organisations identify themselves with the PES (high institutional legitimacy): the preservation of the corporatist structures of the PES is considered by the social partners as very important. However, the Dutch and the British social ...