I suspect there are several reasons:<p>1. Cooperatives don&#x27;t have strong incentives to grow, because growing typically means more people and that means sharing of power, accordingly. Their growth is probably limited by trust.<p>2. When someone has the ability to start the company, they won&#x27;t probably want to do it as a cooperative. It&#x27;s harder to start a good cooperative than just a company. This is a corollary of 1.<p>3. It&#x27;s much harder to raise capital for a cooperative because of possibly misaligned incentives. Even though capitalist&#x27;s companies suffer from principal agent problem too, this is enough to dissuade many potential investors. Since cooperatives are not very common, this is a chicken-egg problem.<p>4. As someone else mentioned, democracies tend to be pretty conservative. This can be good in the long term, but makes them vulnerable to well-planned short term attacks from the outside.