Does interest groups’ institutionalized access to the state affect their relationships to political parties? While much has been written on the development of corporatist structures and political actors separately, less is known about relationship between corporatism and interest groups’ interaction with political parties. It has been argued that formal incorporation in governmental policy processes in corporatist countries is a substitute for organizational ties to political parties and incorporated interest groups may as a result find such ties less useful. However, in this paper, we suggest that the correlation between the strength of corporatist consultation and concertation arrangements and party-group ties is likely to be positive rather than negative since relevant interest groups can use relations with political parties to secure reliable access and influence party decision-makers before and during corporatist negotiations. Moreover, because corporatism is arguably efficient at producing public policy outputs it probably makes parties, as organizers of government, more attractive targets in general, at the country-level. By using novel survey data on party-interest group ties in up to 19 mature democracies, we conduct the first systematic, cross-national analysis on the connection between the degree of corporatism and the strength of organizational ties between parties and trade unions as well as employers’ associations. Our results show that there is a positive association between institutionalized access to the state and party-group ties. This sheds new light on how the institutional framework parties and interest groups operate in, affects the interplay between these important intermediary organizations.