What do we actually mean when we refer to conflict or consensus in politics? This is a crucial preliminary question that warrants some expansion, so as to clarify the overarching argument of this special issue. The literature on corporatist consensus builds on the work of Arend Lijphart and his understanding of ‘consensus democracy’. Lijphart used this term to refer to an institutional process of decision-making that ‘aims at broad participation in government and broad agreement on the policies the government should pursue’.

A. Lijphart, Patterns of democracy. Government forms and performance in thirty-six countries (New Haven 1999) 2.

We argue that the policy shift of the 1980s does not conform to this notion of corporatist consensus: participants did not all participate in government or policymaking, they did not interpret reality in a similar way, nor did they value the same things. Participants were miles apart. To begin with, trade union participation in government policymaking was relatively minimal. When the first Lubbers cabinet enacted a fundamental shift in economic policy at the beginning of the 1980s, its unilateral approach was closer to that of a vote-winning majority ignoring minority opinion, rather than Lijphart’s ‘broad participation’ and ‘broad agreement’. The Social Democrats and trade unions were largely excluded from the decision-making process. There was little room for give and take, since the ‘government’s commitment to deficit reduction and market-led recovery offered few opportunities for the trade unions or the left to influence government policy’, as Wolinetz rightly remarked.

Wolinetz, ‘Socio-economic bargaining in the Netherlands’, 93.

In addition, actors interpreted the economic developments of the 1980s in fundamentally different ways. Evidently, there was a circumscribed agreement that something needed to be done to bring down wages and tackle the deficit. Yet expert opinion was fundamentally divided: on one side, there was a Keynesian coalition that emphasized stabilization of effective demand and on the other, a neoliberal supply-side coalition that prioritized deficit reduction and the restoration of corporate profitability. These differences of opinion were so fundamental, and the crisis so severe, that they could not be bridged in a consensual process of give and take. Corporatist institutions such as the Social and Economic Council were largely ineffective in the 1980s, paralyzed by internal disagreement.

Wolinetz, ‘Socio-economic bargaining in the Netherlands’, 90. See also T. Jaspers and F. Pennings, ‘Sociale zekerheid en zorg. De SER als moderator’, in: T. Jaspers, B. van Bavel and J. Peet (eds.), SER 19502010. Zestig jaar denkwerk voor draagvlak (Amsterdam 2010) 133-161; For internal controversy see the 1984 report from the Committee of Economic Experts (CED) within the SER, which noted that the economic policymaking field was principally divided between a Keynesian and Monetarist camp: CED, Rapport over het conjunctuurbeleid in de jaren tachtig (The Hague 1984) 55.

Our second theme concerns the state. This special issue argues that the role of the Dutch state in the 1980s policy shift has been underappreciated in existing ‘polder model’ accounts. A key argument in the literature on corporatism is the qualification of the role of the state. The state is assumed to have limited capacity for independent policymaking, due to its continuous interaction with interest groups. Instead, corporatist actors are assumed to be in the driver’s seat. Visser and Hemerijck for example, have contrasted their work with the ‘very state-centered’ analysis of the rise of British monetarism under Thatcher, by the political scientist Peter Hall. They themselves seem to have made the opposite mistake, though, by largely ignoring and downplaying the role of the state. This has led them to claim that the Netherlands did not experience a ‘state-led institutional and paradigmatic overhaul’ in the 1980s.

Visser and Hemerijck, ‘A Dutch miracle’, 79.

Here we come to our third major theme: the role of ideas. The Dutch reforms of the 1980s have generally been described as a pragmatic response to changes in the world economy, and that is certainly part of the story. Yet it was also the result of a changing perspective on the working of the economy itself. In other words, the way politicians, policymakers and the wider public viewed the economy changed fundamentally in the 1970s and 1980s, and this shift had consequences. Internationally, this development has generally been described as a move from a Keynesian to a neoliberal (or monetarist) paradigm.

P. Hall, ‘Policy paradigms, social learning, and the state. The case of economic policymaking in Britain’, Comparative Politics 25:3 (1993) 275-296; Blyth, Great transformations; V.A. Schmidt, The futures of European capitalism (Oxford 2002).

An intriguing study by historian Duco Hellema demonstrates that the consensus among politicians, journalists and economists shifted towards market reforms at a late stage: in the middle of the 1970s, the left still gained successes in its attempts to combat the stagflation crisis with Keynesian policy instruments, while public support for left-wing regimes in Western Europe remained considerable.

D. Hellema, The global 1970s. Radicalism, reform and crisis (London 2018) 191.

This brings us to our final theme: research methods. The road from ideas to policy can only be charted by means of a wider array of research methods. An important flaw of the existing literature on corporatism is its predominant focus on policy outcomes. This has resulted in a relatively narrow technocratic perspective and drove the debate mainly towards the interactions between government, employers’ and employees’ organizations. Their ideas and behavior have mostly been interpreted within the confines of corporatist institutions and a shared consensus. The impact of institutional actors on reformulating the dynamics of this political-economic arena (and thus on redefining the ‘rules of the game’), but also the internal dynamics of such actors (from ministries, planning offices, to employer organizations and labour unions), all too often remain unstudied. This special issue explores other ways to study the development of the (Dutch) political economy. It connects methods from the history of ideas to institutional, policy and social history analysis in order to reinterpret the economic transformation of the 1980s.

Covering different aspects of the Dutch political and economic transformations of the 1980s, the articles of this special issue expand on existing critiques of the polder model and, taken together, offer an alternative explanation for the policy shift of the 1980s. Based on their study of senior civil servants, Bram Mellink and Merijn Oudenampsen bring the state back into the analysis. They argue that bureaucratic or administrative elites were crucial drivers of the paradigm shift in Dutch economic policy. Mellink and Oudenampsen see little evidence for social learning and corporatist consensus. They point to the innovative and powerful role of senior policymakers in the ministries of Finance and Economic Affairs. Inspired by a historical policy repertoire from the supply-side industrialization policies in the 1950s, these leading policymakers laid the groundwork for the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s.

One of the crucial debates of the 1970s revolved around the rise of public spending and how it could be controlled. In his contribution, Tom Kayzel focuses on the public choice tradition in the Netherlands, as well as the discussions it engendered within the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA). Public choice is an international current of economic thought commonly considered to be closely aligned with the broader neoliberal movement. Kayzel explains the rise of these ideas with the Dutch Labour Party against the background of a larger backlash against the agenda of democratization and social planning. Public choice theorists such as Theo Stevers and Hans Daudt argued that the power of pressure groups had led to an incontrollable rise of public spending, ultimately threatening the very continuity of the capitalist order. Kayzel shows how these ideas challenged established Keynesian policy and contributed to a new ideal of economic planning, which Kayzel calls ‘the politics of restraint’. With his study, Kayzel underlines the importance of a (partly concealed) contest of ideas from the mid-1970s onwards.

The case of the Amsterdam shipyards, studied by Sjoerd Keulen and Ronald Kroeze from a multi-level governance-perspective, puts us in the center of the storm of the economic crisis. Their study highlights the conflicts and controversies arising around the state support and the closure of the shipyards. They contend that the transformation of state policy, with the state effectively withdrawing economic support for the shipyards, was promoted and counteracted on different government levels. The introduction of a new political actor (and level), the European Commission, created a sudden change in the landscape of policy making and provided an important and transformative push towards neoliberal policies. Keulen and Kroeze not only emphasize the role of Dutch policy officials but also point to civil servants of the European Commission and management consultants such as McKinsey in the dissemination and implementation of neoliberal economic ideas. They underline need for a multi-level approach, including various levels of interaction between policymakers, ranging from local deliberations to negotiations at the level of the European Union.

Studying the position and strategy of the largest federation in the Dutch labor union movement on the rising flexibilization of labor relations in the 1980s, Rosa Kösters, Loran van Diepen, Moira van Dijk and Matthias van Rossum argue that the Federation of Dutch Trade Unions, or FNV, grudgingly held on to the institutional agreements set forth in the Wassenaar Accord with employer organizations, despite the clear negative effects from an employee’s viewpoint. The agreements in the accord intended to boost employment through work time reduction measures in exchange for wage moderation by the labor unions, but this left the field wide open for employer strategies to flexibilize labor relations. The authors study the attitude and strategy of the trade union movement towards flexibilization, focusing on questions of power and the underlying strategies of employers and labor unions at multiple levels, rather than on the formation of political-economic consensus or ideas at the top. They argue that the responses and strategies of different levels of the labour union movement, or in many respects the lack of it, are an important factor in understanding the increasing labor flexibilization.

Reviving the critique on the ‘polder model’ perspective in the Dutch societal and academic understanding of recent economic and political history, this special issue demonstrates that the developments in the Netherlands from the late 1970s onwards marked not the birth of a unique corporatist consensus model but instead a particular Dutch manifestation of a wider global neoliberal turn. Research in this area is still in its infancy, and far from attempting to cover the Dutch neoliberal turn in its entirety, we aim to (re)open the debate regarding a fundamental shift in economic policymaking that seems to have left no continent untouched.

Hellema, The global 1970s.

This last observation may therefore also serve as an opening for future research. Since the Dutch transformation was part of a wider, global development that witnessed a rise of neoliberal policies in different countries, the implications of this remarkably wide-ranging shift need to be fleshed out further. As various contributions to this special issue suggest, such research may benefit from an eye toward the different aims and motives of actors within institutions, on the one hand, and a sensitivity for the level of analysis, on the other, all the while moving between local, regional, national and international domains.

Secondly, even a superficial overview of the available literature demonstrates that although the neoliberal reforms of the 1970s and 1980s swept over various continents, they gained traction under very different circumstances with widely divergent effects. In Europe and the United States, for instance, the neoliberal turn was accompanied by de-industrialization and the rise of service industries, while countries of the Global South witnessed rapid expansion of their industrial sectors as a result of market-oriented reforms. The expansion of industrialization in the Global South was accompanied by a pronounced informalization of labour relations, while Europe and the United States witnessed a continued flexibilization of labour in the new service industries.

E.g. J. Breman, At work in the informal economy of India. A perspective from the Bottom Up (Oxford 2013); M. van der Linden and J. Breman, ‘Informalizing the economy. The return of the social question at a global level’, Development and Change 45:5 (2014) 920-940.

Finally, we hope to have demonstrated the urgent need for deeper analyses of the complex relations between interests, institutions and ideas. Social scientists and historians have long acted as if interests and ideas could be left out of the equation, or only played a minor role. However, institutions can only govern society if they somehow align to certain interests, and these interests depend on the ideas we employ to interpret the (inherently political) world around us.

Blyth, Great transformations, 20, 35-37.