Why Consult, Why Consent? Employers in Concertation Platforms Facing Welfare State Expansion in the Netherlands, 1920–1960 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Business and Welfare State Development: Why Did Employers Accept Social Reforms?
World Politics, 2013
In recent years, employer-centered explanations of welfare state development have begun to challenge conventional labor-centered and state-centered explanations. These new explanations suggest that sector-specific business interests and cross-class alliances propelled the adoption and expansion of social programs (the business interests thesis). This article presents a novel explanation of differences in business support for welfare state expansion based on a diachronic analysis of the German case and shadow case studies of Sweden and the United States. The article suggests that when looking at changes in employers’ positions across time rather than across sectors, political constraints turn out to be the central factor explaining variation in employers’ support for social reforms (the political accommodation thesis). The article identifies two goals of business intervention in welfare state development: pacification and containment. In the case of pacification, business interests propel social policy expansion; in the case of containment, they constrain it. Business chooses pacification when revolutionary forces challenge capitalism and political stabilization thus becomes a priority. Business chooses containment when reformist forces appear likely to succeed in expanding social protection and no revolutionary challenge exists. The article shows that changes over time in the type of political challenges that business interests confront best explain the variation in business support for labor-friendly social reforms.
The experience of negotiated reforms in the Dutch and German welfare states
CiteSeer X (The Pennsylvania State University), 2001
The current globalisation debate has revived interest in the viability of welfare states in competitive market economies. Comparing Welfare Capitalism challenges the popular theory of a downward convergence. It argues that there are at least two varieties of capitalism: Anglo-American free market economies, and Rhenish (Germanic or Japanese) coordinated economies; each variation in production systems is embedded in a national welfare regime. The chapters range from historical case studies to cross-national analyses. Adopting an institutional perspective, they explore the various aspects of the relationship between welfare states, industrial relations, financial governance and production systems. Comparing Welfare Capitalism builds upon and combines two recent approaches: comparative studies of the varieties of capitalism and of the worlds of welfare stage regimes. The contributions cluster around three topics: the role of employers and unions in social policy, the interdependencies between financial markets and pension systems, and the current welfare reform processes. Written by specialists from comparative political economy and welfare regime analysis, this book sheds new light on the tenuous relationship between social policies and market economies. Welfare states do not always institute 'politics against markets', as commonly assumed: social policies can also serve a productive function. Social policy does play a role in shaping economic structures such as financial governance, labour markets, and bargaining practices. Comparing Welfare Capitalism makes a strong case for the idea that particular welfare state regimes and certain political economies reinforce each other through 'institutional complementarities'. It will be of great interest to those involved in comparative politics-European/Asian/American politics-welfare state and social policy, and political economy.
Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2022
This article considers the debate about the process of liberalisation of industrial relations from an ideational institutional perspective. While the gradual liberalisation of industrial relations has increased employer discretion, the role of employers' organisations in this process is unclear. The case study is the Netherlands, a neo-corporatist country described as stable and robust but where institutional outcomes have undergone major shifts. To understand how this happened, the author analysed 40 years of collective bargaining policy using an ideational approach. The article argues that Dutch organised employers had the confidence that the strength of their ideas was enough to gradually but surely change industrial relations within the existing neo-corporatist framework by redefining the role of the firm, the state and the employee in the economy. The article also shows that since the early 2010s Dutch organised employers have changed their strategy leading to further de-collectivisation of industrial relations.
Wages and the bargaining regime in a corporatist setting: the Netherlands
European Journal of Political Economy, 2002
In a corporatist country like the Netherlands, wages should not be distinguished by union membership status, but by bargaining regime. Acknowledging the firms' bargaining regime, we find small differences between four regimes and certainly no distinction between "covered" and "uncovered" firms.
The Contingency of Corporatist Influence: Incomes Policy in the Netherlands
Journal of Public Policy, 2006
This paper examines the hypothesis that corporatist intermediation by party governments facilitates incomes policy formation and is effective in reaching agreements between employers and trade unions as well. A social democratic party in government would positively enhance this process. Investigating this for the Netherlands between -, two puzzles emerge. The first puzzle is that coalition governments of Social and Christian Democracy fall short of expectations despite their commitment to corporatism. The second puzzle is that the relationship between Social Democracy and effective corporatist intermediation is positive but cannot sufficiently account for the variation in agreements on Dutch incomes policy. That variation can be better understood as induced by institutional change, economic development and external vulnerabilities. The Dutch case study shows that the performance of a social democratic party in government in a corporatist context is less directly effective than the literature often has suggested.
2012
Given that business interests have assumed ever-growing importance in welfare state restructuring, and that welfare programmes impose significant costs on firms, when and how can employers decide to actively support the development of contemporary social policy? This thesis shows that specific types of business interest organisation can favour the cooperation of employers for the establishment of new social welfare legislation by mediating between their heterogeneous economic interests and the political target structure, and by governing their collective political mobilisation. Drawing on theories of collective action and neo-corporatist models, the thesis elaborates an original typological framework and assesses it through an historical cross-national study of the role of organised business in the Austrian and Italian severance pay reforms (1990s-2000s). Detail process-tracing and systematic cross-case comparison are used to reconstruct and analyse what motivated and enabled the Au...
Bureaucrats First: The Leading Role of Policymakers in the Dutch Neoliberal Turn of the 1980s
TSEG, 2021
In the 1980s, a fundamental shift took place in Dutch economic policy: Keynesian demand-management was exchanged for a neoliberal supply-side approach. The single most influential account of this transformation has focused on consensus among corporatist policymakers as key to the reforms. It is the origin story of the Dutch ‘polder model’. The problem however, is that there is surprisingly little evidence for corporatist consensus in the 1980s. Instead of consensus, we argue that there has been a conflict of ideas between Keynesians and supply-siders. And instead of corporatism, we point to bureaucratic elites as a crucial factor in the Dutch policy shift. From the mid-1970s onwards, an influential group of senior public officials emerged that successfully advocated for a supply-side policy, inspired by the industrialization policies developed in the 1950s. In so doing, we believe the Dutch case exemplifies the pathbreaking role of administrative elites as highlighted by Skocpol, Weir and Heclo, rather than corporatist consensus.
Corporate Institutions in a Weakened Welfare State
2013
This paper reexamines the import of Rawls' theory of justice for private sector institutions in the face of the decline of the welfare state. The argument is based on a Rawlsian conception of justice as the establishment of a basic structure of society that guarantees a fair distribution of primary goods. We propose that the decline of the welfare state witnessed in Western countries over the past 40 years prompts a reassessment of the boundaries of the basic structure in order to include additional corporate institutions. A discussion centred on the primary good of self-respect, but extensible to power and prerogatives as well as income and wealth, examines how the legislator should intervene in private sector institutions to counterbalance any unfairness that results from the decline of the welfare state. political form in Western democracies. Indeed, Amy Gutmann could write in the eighties that 'every modern industrial state is a welfare state' (Gutmann, 1988: 3). According to Esping-Andersen (1990: 18-9), the expression WS refers to states taking 'responsibility for securing some basic modicum of welfare to [their] citizens' in an attempt to mitigate the effects of natural and social contingencies on individuals' life chances. Contemporary welfare states are the product of a long history. Since the eighteenth century, the development of the state and its welfare institutions has been closely connected with an expansion of the protection of individual rights and liberties (Rosanvallon, 1981; Stedman Jones, 2005). Welfare states experienced accelerated development in the nineteenth century as a response to the social side effects of industrialisation, while their expansion accelerated further during the 30 years or so following World War II, resulting in a 'fantastic pace of growth during the 1960s and 1970s' (Esping-Andersen, 1990: 1). For instance, in the US 'federal spending on welfare increased from 8.2 to 18.7 per cent of the GNP between 1950 and 1980' (Gutmann, 1988: 3). Yet this common history features notable variations among countries: welfare states came in a variety of forms and shapes, reflecting different approaches regarding the extent of the benefits and the contingencies deemed to be morally acceptable. Esping-Andersen famously distinguishes between three WS regimes: social democratic, corporatist and liberal (Esping-Andersen, 1990: 26-27). At their height, Scandinavian social democratic welfare states were service intensive, comprehensive with regard to the services offered and universal in terms of coverage. They were also 'massively redistributive' as a result of their 'universal coverage, high income replacement rates […] and liberal qualifying conditions' (Stephens, 1996). Overall, they have been characterised as 'decommodifying' since they made pure citizenship, rather than citizen insertion in the labour market, the basis for entitlements (Stephens, 1996: 36). One important consequence for our argument is that 'individuals [would] suffer relatively