In 1975, the poet and novelist Gerrit Krol confused his readership by publishing an essay with the provocative title The Common Man and Happiness or Why It’s Not Right to Be a Union Member. The author’s intent was tricky to discern as the essay was filled with idiosyncratic abstract formulas expressing the freedom of which individual happiness would consist. As both a man of letters and a trained engineer, Krol was famous for taking the poetic power of mathematic formulas very seriously. At the same time, the tone of the essay could be highly ironic, and there was a strong possibility that Krol was satirising economists and political scientists attempting to formalise the most inner drives of human beings, giving meaning to the world by using axiomatic sets of formal language. Even the prize of the essay (12,50 guilders), together with the amount of time Krol had spent writing it and the satisfaction the reader could get out of it, were formalised into a simple cost-benefit model. Yet, Krol ended his essay with the sentence ‘the sum of members united in interest groups is proportional to the degree of decline of that society.’

G. Krol, De gewone man en het geluk of Waarom het niet goed is lid van een vakbond te zijn (Amsterdam 1975).

Public choice theory applies the techniques developed by economics to describe the behaviour of market actors to political actors. Politics in this theory is imagined as a field of competition by individual actors, each acting in accordance with their own preferences, making use of rational strategies to maximise the satisfaction of these preferences at the lowest costs. The rationality that the political agent applies is described via a so-called rational choice theory, an axiomatic set of formal prescribing rules that form the explanation of the behaviour of the actor. In short, political actors make decisions like economic actors make choices: based on optimal utility and rational strategies.

In the 1970s, Floor Hartog, Lenze Koopmans, Theo Stevers, Dick Wolfson, Arnold Heertje, Hans Daudt, Roel in ‘t Veld and Hans van den Doel, all members of the Labour party, applied public choice in one variant or another in both their academic work as well as their public writings. That the Labour party would become a hub of public choice theory is remarkable considering the prevalence of Keynesian ideas within the same party. The Dutch Labour party, following its British counterpart, had made Keynesian inspired policies into the spearhead of its economic program since the 1950s. The literature on the application of public choice in other countries suggests that the theory was often used to debunk Keynesian policies.

For example, Colin Hay has argued that public choice was deployed in the UK to explain why Keynesian demand management was nice in theory but would fail in practice. Because politicians were likely to bow to interest groups for electoral reasons, they would always artificially increase demand even when this was damaging for the economy. As such, public choice provided a very suited narrative to discredit Keynesian ideas in wake of the economic shocks of inflation and rising unemployment of the 1970s (often called the stagflation crisis).

C. Hay, Why we hate politics (Cambridge 2007) 106-107. See also: N. Thompson, ‘Hollowing out the state. Public choice theory and the critique of Keynesian social democracy’, Contemporary British History 22:3 (2008) 355-382, https://doi.org/10.1080/13619460701731913.

The association between public choice and neoliberalism is no coincidence. The origins and development of public choice are diverse,

For an overview of sources, see: B. Cherrier and J.B. Fleury, ‘Economists’ interest in collective decision after World War II. A history’, Public Choice 172:1-2 (2017) 23-44, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-017-0410-7; C. Herfeld, ‘The diversity of rational choice theory. A review note’, Topoi 39 (2020) 329-347, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9588-7.

The impact of public choice on post-war politics, especially in the neoliberal-turn made by many Western European and North-American countries throughout the 1980s, has been a fruitful research subject in recent years.

Apart from the below named example’s, see also: Thompson, ‘Hollowing out the state’; T. Biebricher, The political theory of neoliberalism (Stanford 2018); M. Olssen, ‘Neoliberalism and democracy: A Foucauldian perspective on public choice theory, ordoliberalism, and the concept of the public good’, in: D. Cahill et al. (eds.), The SAGE handbook of neoliberalism (London 2018) 384-396.

Although the rise of neoliberal thought has been an international phenomenon, in recent years scholars have argued – also in reaction to the US and UK dominated narratives – that the precise reception and implementation of neoliberal ideas were shaped by local circumstances and therefore many national varieties in neoliberalism can be discerned.

For an example of an plea of localized histories of neoliberalism, see: B. Jackson, ‘Currents of neo-liberalism. British political ideologies and the new right, c.1955-1979’, English Historical Review cxxxi:551 (2016) 823-850, https://doi.org/doi:10.1093/ehr/cew237.

The Dutch history of public choice, as I will argue in this article, shows some remarkable deviations from the main points of the international literature (as formulated above), even if the main structure remains intact. Most striking was that the public choice did not only enter the public debate through right-wing think tanks or political parties but through economists and political scientists associated with the Dutch Labour Party. Most literature on the rise of neoliberalism, both international and national, suggests that adoption of neoliberal ideas by social democratic parties in the so-called Third Way of the 1990s, was due to external pressure. Hay, for example, suggests that the UK Labour Party based its monetary policies on the established neoliberal policy-paradigm of the Conservatives; hoping to gain credibility by adhering to the ‘there is no alternative’ slogan that was made famous by Margaret Thatcher.

C. Hay, ‘The normalizing role of rationalist assumptions in the institutional embedding of neoliberalism’, Economy and Society 33:4 (2004) 500-527, https://doi.org/10.1080/0308514042000285260.

The starting point of my analysis of public choice within the labour party is their think tank the Wiardi Beckman Stichting, which was at the time an important platform for the introduction of new ideas and discussions of both ideological issues of social democracy and political strategies. The main source of research are the articles published in the think tanks periodical, Socialism and Democracy (Socialisme en democratie) for which both prominent Labour party members were writing at the time, such as Labour leader Joop Den Uyl, as well as scientist and scholars associated with the party. In my analysis, I have identified a set of social scientists who used public choice (inspired) arguments, or reacted against it. These include the above-mentioned set of Heertje, Daudt, Stevers, Van den Doel, In ‘t Veld, Wolfson, as well as Lucas Reijnders, Arnoud Weeda, Bart Tromp and Wim Duisenberg. In the second step of my analysis, I surveyed the academic writings of these scientists on the topics discussed within the Labour party at the time. I have chosen to focus on two contributors to these debates in particular, one economist and one political scientist: Theo Stevers and Hans Daudt. Stevers and Daudt were both prominent and controversial voices in these debates and in their writings the issues of public choice received their most recognisable formulations. Furthermore, the writings of Stevers provide a perfect bridge with earlier debates on public choice in the economics subdiscipline of public finance from the 1950s, showing a longer history of public choice in Dutch politics. Similarly, Daudt works on democratization within the Labour party in the 1960s provide a clear link between earlier writings on democratization and public choice theory.

The article starts by exploring the origins of public choice in the Netherlands. Public choice first became popular as part of public finance in the 1950s and 1960s but remained confined to academic circles and policymakers in the ministry of finance. The second section of the article discusses the so-called Economists’ Debate within the Labour party which concerned the many economic issues that plagued the 1970s. It was within this discussion that public choice came to wider prominence. The third section will turn to the discussions on democracy and show that public choice had a similar impact there, while the last section will address how the public choice discourse was connected to a larger discussion on social planning. These three issues prominently discussed within the Labour party – public spending, democratization and social planning – form the reasons why public choice could become so popular.

In the Netherlands, public choice theory first gained traction in relation to public spending in the 1950s. Already in the early period, the growth of public spending was mainly a concern of neoliberal economists. Subsequently, public choice was strongly associated with neoliberal thought, even before Buchanan or Tullock became household names.

In the 1950s, the rising popularity of Keynesian ideas in policymaking circles had provoked a counter-reaction amongst economists and ministers with a strongly neoliberal character.

For spread of Keynesian ideas in policymaking circles, see: M.L. Bemelmans-Videc, ‘Economen in overheidsdienst. Bijdragen van Nederlandse economen aan de vorming van het sociaal-economische beleid, 1945-1975’ (Rotterdam 1984) Chapter 2; T. Kayzel, ‘A night train in broad daylight. Changing economic expertise at the Dutch Central Planning Bureau 1945-1977’, Œconomia 9:2 (2019) 351-352, https://doi.org/10.4000/oeconomia.5613.

What made matters more alarming for neoliberals, was the idea that the growth of public spending was not the consequence of a simple political choice inspired by Keynesianism but a structural feature of the modern state as such. If it were not for strict rules and robust institutions, the modern state would always undermine itself or would become socialist. How this structural feature of increased spending exactly worked was elaborated by Willem Drees Jr. (the son of the prime minister of the time) in his dissertation On the Level of Government Expenditure in the Netherlands after the War (1955). Drees’s thesis very likely marks the first application of a form of public choice analysis in a Dutch context; even a couple years before Anthony Downs, Buchanan and Tullock came with their famous formulations. Through a study of policymaking process at the ministry of finance, Drees argued that the rise of public spending was caused not so much by democratic decision-making but rather the result of the micro-actions of the public officials that favoured policies from which they would benefit. Moreover, ministers and policymakers responsible for spending in the public or semi-public sectors, such as education, defence and health care had little to gain from more frugality in their departments. Hence, these ministries formed natural fronts against the minister of finance, forcing an increase in spending. Policymakers and ministers of social services lacked the overview to understand that an increase in spending might be beneficial to their departments but could threaten the common good.

W. Drees Jr., On the level of government expenditure in the Netherlands after the war, Aspecten der economische politiek, III (Leiden 1955) 62-67.

Drees’s analysis spurred the conviction among conservative economics circles that restricting the budget beyond democratic decision-making was necessary to protect the capitalist order. Putting his money where his mouth was, Drees became director-general of the national budget (Directeur-Generaal Rijksbegroting), a public office overseeing the budgeting process, in 1956; and chief treasurer in 1969, further propagating ideas of budget norms within policymaking circles.

M. Oudenampsen and B. Mellink, ‘The roots of Dutch frugality. The role of public choice theory in Dutch budgetary policy’, Forthcoming.

Although ideas on the use of public choice had gained a strong foothold in policymaking circles and were further disseminated in the subdiscipline of public finance – a very popular topic in the Dutch universities – they could not turn the tide with regards to public spending. With continuing economic growth, the end of wage-moderation and the further expansion of the social security system, restricting budgets was not attractive to most ministers. Zijlstra’s norm did too little to change that. In 1966, the cabinet of prime minister Jo Calls fell in a dramatic fashion over a conflict with members of parliament of the Catholic People’s Party concerning the national budget.

H. Notenboom, De val van het kabinet-Cals. De financiële politiek van de Katholieke Volkspartij in de parlementaire periode 1963-1967 (The Hague 1991) 63-76.

After falling into obscurity, public choice theory made a strong comeback in the mid-1970s. Although still strongly associated with public finances, the theory gained a new audience and new applications in the wake of the stagflation crisis. The dominant narrative is that the combination of inflation and rising unemployment was an anomaly in Keynesian theory and therefore sent the whole paradigm into a crisis. But, as thorough readers of Thomas Kuhn know, one anomaly does not cause a paradigm to sway. More issues were plaguing the economic order and the dominant knowledge about it; moreover, public choice helped to formulate a challenger paradigm. This confusion surrounding Keynesianism and stagflation is best illustrated by the fierce debates within Labour party circles between economists, later dubbed the economists’ debate (het economendebat).

For an overview of the debate by some of its participants, see: H. Van den Doel, Het biefstuksocialisme en de economie, 2nd ed. (Utrecht 1979) Chapter 4; A. Weeda, ‘Van economendebat tot economiediscussie’, Socialisme en Democratie 36:1 (1979) 3-15; P. Lansbergen, Het economiedebat. Economen contra Den Uyl en Van Agt (Amsterdam 1980).

Already in the late 1960s, inflation was rising but seldom conceived of as a problem before the early 1970s. Even without unemployment, neoliberal economists, such as Rutten and Heertje, saw rising inflation as a sign of an overburdened economy. Through index linking, raising wages kept inflation stuck in a rising spiral. They argued that the resulting high costs of labour would affect the private consumption and investments, leaving industries in a bad shape. Many pessimistic economists interpreted the sudden rise in unemployment after the oil-crisis of 1973 as confirmation of their beliefs.

A. Heertje, ‘De miljoenennota en de economische orde’, Economische en Statistische Berichten 59:2972 (1974) 880-882; Lansbergen, Het economiedebat, 19-22.

An answer to this problem was formulated by the Dutch Central Planning Bureau (CPB) in 1974 with the publication of the so-called Hartog-Tjan model. The economic planners argued that the strong rise in wages had led Dutch industries to relatively invest more in capital goods rather than labour to boost productivity. Labour was simply too expensive. Such a discrepancy between investments in labour and capital had not been noticed when the economy was booming but with the downturn, this problem became painfully visible through a spike in unemployment. In a follow-up, the CPB used the newly developed VINTAF-model to further link the high wage-costs to the growing fiscal burden: by expanding social insurances, businesses and employees had to pay higher taxes, resulting in higher wage-costs and less spendable private income.

H. Den Hartog and Hok Soei Tjan, ‘Investeringen, lonen, prijzen en arbeidsplaatsen. Een jaargangenmodel met vaste coëfficienten voor Nederland’, CPB Occasional Paper 8 (1974); H. Den Hartog, Hok Soei Tjan, and T. Van de Klundert, ‘Structurele ontwikkeling van de werkgelegenheid in macro economisch perspectief’, Paper for the Annual Meeting of the Dutch Society of Economics in The Hague, September 1975.

The CPB’s analysis was grist on the mill of neoliberal thinkers: in their eyes, the growth of government expenditure had led to the large fiscal burden which was was overburdening the economy.

The CPB-models themselves had been partly inspired by neoliberal concerns, see: Kayzel, ‘A night train in broad daylight’, 355-356.

One of the most controversial voices in this debate was the Tilburg professor and Labour member, Theo Stevers. Denoting himself a prophet of doom, he straightforwardly warned against the end of capitalism and liberal democracy if the public sector would grow any further. With this warning, Stevers continued the tradition of public finances and its neoliberal interpretation from the 1950s. In the mid-1970s, such alarming words were usually taken as an exaggeration,

See for example: J. Pen in De Tijd 13 October (1978).

In an article written five years later, when rising unemployment was a fact, Stevers repeated this analysis in a more explicit public choice framework. Although the solution to the whole crisis was, according to his view, the decrease in government spending, he had little hope that the government would actually do so. Similar to Drees’s analysis, Stevers asserted that Government spending was not completely autonomous – that is, free to change by the government’s political will – but could be described as endogenous to an economic system. State finance was stuck in a spiral in which more spending led to higher wage demands by trade unions, unemployment, and higher taxes, which led in turn to more spending. Using public choice theory, Stevers argued that the complicity of politicians and unions in this spiral was caused by the influence of interest groups. In contrast with the general labouring population, interest groups only represented partial interest and had, in good public choice fashion, little eye for the overall negative consequences of their actions. Stevers applied marginal-utility theory to elucidate why unions and political parties were willing to listen to minorities even if those would only make up a small part of their support. Interest groups were, namely, the most volatile members of their voter base; keeping them aboard was vital for electoral success. Unions and parties were thus eager to facilitate their wishes even if it went against the interests of the majority of their loyal voters. With this influence of minorities over political organizations, pressure for higher wages and rising government expenditure was kept high, even when the consequences of those measures were negative to the general working population.

Idem, ‘Is het overheidsbeleid endogeen?’, Economische en Statistische Berichten (1976) 1037-1040.

Stevers’s most dramatic statement on the matter came in an op-ed for De Volkskrant, one of the major newspapers of the Netherlands, in 1976. The growth of public spending amounted to an unlimited growth of the public sector, which would soon ‘trample’ the private sector, ending capitalism. Here it became clear that Stevers’s real concern was not so much unemployment or inflation itself but rather the crisis it caused. With the worsening of the crisis – a likely scenario given the above-described spiral of inflation – the unemployment issue could no longer be solved in indirect manners such as a demand-push. With mounting political tensions, Stevers predicted that the government would take more extreme measures to counter unemployment: directly intervening in the management of businesses and forcing the unemployed into work. This was not only the end of free enterprise but also of democracy since ‘bureaucracy apparatus [would] grow and become more powerful’ giving bureaucrats all the decision-power (see illustration 1).

T. Stevers, ‘Daling werkloosheid vrome wens’, De Volkskrant 22 September (1976).

One of Stevers’s fiercest critics was the Amsterdam economist Hans van den Doel, who, picking up Stevers’s gauntlet, departed from much of the same presumption Stevers had used. Most strikingly, Van den Doel also made use of a public choice framework in order to make his analysis, even if he arrived at opposite conclusions. Van den Doel agreed with the CPB that the rising costs of social insurances were passed on to employers and that returning to measures of wage moderation was the most effective way of countering unemployment. Accordingly, he scolded the trade unions for sticking to their demands for higher wages.

Van den Doel, Het biefstuksocialisme en de economie, 75.

Moreover, Van den Doel and Stevers clashed completely in their evaluation of the growth of the public sector. Van den Doel argued that employees in general had a higher preference for social security than for higher spendable income. If there was a trade-off between social security and wages, the choice was easily made. That this meant a growth of the fiscal burden and a growth of the public sector did not bother Van den Doel: they were in the common interest, and a diminishing private sector in relation to a public sector only seemed natural.

Ibid., 60.

Public choice in the Labour party rose to prominence in the context of debates over stagflation. This was partly a return of the discourse on public spending from the 1950s, now adjusted for new concerns. But public choice also became popular because the problem of unemployment and inflation was conceived by both neoliberal thinkers as well as their detractors as a problem of collective decision-making: the corporatist system was the issue, either because unions and political parties were taken hostage by short-sighted interest groups, or because the system allowed for the cost of social insurance to be endlessly tossed around. In other words, economists feared that the economic crisis was in essence caused by muddled decision-making. Public choice came to be the ultimate tool to analyse the decision-making structures and to turn opaque choices transparent again.

Why did discussions within the Labour party form such a fertile ground for the re-emergence of public choice in the 1970s, even when the party had rejected neoliberalism in an earlier stage?

Why so many neoliberal economists preoccupied with public finances were members of the Labour party in the first place is subject of another article. See also: M. Oudenampsen, ‘A dialectic of freedom. The Dutch post-war clash between socialism and neoliberalism’, Socialism and Democracy 30:1 (2016) 128-148, https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2015.1132648.

In the mid-1960s, a strong call for democratization emerged in Dutch society.

I. De Haan, Zelfbestuur en staatsbeheer. Het politieke debat over burgerschap en rechtsstaat in de twintigste eeuw (Amsterdam 1993) 100-116; D. Hellema, Nederland en de jaren zeventig (Amsterdam 2012) Chapter 1.

The New Left movement within the Labour party had given a clear expression of this sentiment in their first manifesto Ten Past Red (1966), when they wrote: ‘a political democracy in a socialist state can only become a reality if […] everyone is given the opportunity to take part in the decision-making process’ and ‘the type of participation the average citizen has in parliamentary politics should roughly be extended to the lower levels of government.’

H. Van den Doel et al., Tien over rood. Uitdagingen van nieuw links aan de PvdA (Amsterdam 1966) 21-22. The title of this manifesto is a reference to a type of carom billiards game, making it somewhat impossible to translate properly.

By the mid-1970s, however, much of this enthusiasm for democratization had disappeared, or even reversed into a strong discontent. One of the best expressions of these dissatisfactions are the writings of the professor of political sciences at the University of Amsterdam and Labour party member, Hans Daudt. Although Daudt always remained committed to democratization in name, he made a strong U-turn somewhere in the early 1970s about what ‘good’ democratization actually entailed. In 1967 he had contributed to A Vote That Counts report but by 1976 he decried the democratization ideal that the report had embraced as ‘a confused democratic ideology, prescribing that democracy would not only imply that everyone has the right to bring all their preferences into the process of political considerations but in addition, that everyone would have the right for their preferences to be satisfied.’

H. Daudt, ‘De politieke toekomst van de verzorgingsstaat’, in: J. Van Doorn and K. Schuyt (eds.), De stagnerende verzorgingsstaat (Amsterdam 1978) 202.

As in Stevers’s diagnosis of the national budget, Daudt laid the blame for this ‘confused democratic ideology’ with interest groups. The notion of interest group had been central to the pluralist school in American political science, associated with the names Robert Dahl and Seymour Martin Lipset, whose works Daudt had helped to introduce in Dutch political science. The focus on interest groups was also evident in A Vote That Counts report. The report spoke of action committees, pressure groups and interest groups. Action committees were generally evaluated positively, while pressure groups were more of a mixed bag. Pressure groups could undermine the primacy of the parliament and the representative character of the political system but also play a vital role in involving citizens in the policymaking process.

Den Uyl et al., Een stem die telt, 27-28.

This differentiation disappeared from Daudt’s later work. When Daudt analyzed the process of democratization, he reframed the ideal that underlying the effort of involving action committees and pressure groups in parliamentary politics as follows: ‘more and more demands enter as points of conflict in the sphere of political decision-making [… of] groups whose preferences were previously not expressed, or less explicitly expressed.’

Daudt, ‘De politieke toekomst van de verzorgingsstaat’, 201.

Making use of two British neoliberal authors Samuel Brittan and Robert Moss, Daudt argued that neither option was particularly attractive: a growing welfare state would burden the private sector too much, resulting in an economic crisis – here Daudt called the US neoliberal Milton Friedman’s variant of the argument too simplistic, although he agreed with the conclusion.

H. Daudt, ‘Verzorgingsstaat, democratie en socialisme’, Het Eerste Jaarboek voor het Democratisch Socialisme (1979) 23.

Although Daudt was particularly pessimistic in his analysis, his concern for the influence of interest groups on politics was more widely shared within the Labour party. For example, party ideologue and stern opponent of the New Left movement, Bart Tromp feared that the party had been taken over by interest groups. Pushing for their own specific agenda, he argued, there was a danger that interest groups would exclude the concerns of the majority or the common good.

B. Tromp, ‘Socialisme, organisatie en democratie’, Socialisme en Democratie 33:4 (1976) 155-172.

Daudt’s solution to this quandary was to restrict democracy, by working out a manner in which the presumed grip of interest groups on the state apparatus could be broken. One of the ways in which this was possible, he argued, was to only allow parliamentary voting on outlines of policy while leaving the details for policymakers to figure out.

Daudt, ‘De politieke toekomst van de verzorgingsstaat’, 199.

When the Minister of Finance, Wim Duisenberg, wrote his alternative party manifesto for the Labour party in 1976, he appealed to the same principles. An alternative program was necessary, according to Duisenberg, because the existing one reflected too much the partial interests of minorities and was therefore way too long. ‘Is it not the natural inclination of an administrator to seek freedom to manoeuvre and not to be hindered by a ‘participatory party’?’

W. Duisenberg, ‘Een alternatief verkiezingsprogram’, Socialisme en Democratie 33:5 (1976) 211.

Already in the discussion on stagflation, the use of public choice indicated a strong discomfort about the muddiness of the decision-making process. The institutions that should be making the decisions – governments, captains of industry, trade unions and political parties, in short, the political establishment – were wavering; becoming a plaything for sinister interest groups acting in the background. In the discussion on democratization within the Labour party, the power of these shady groups within the Labour party itself were made the subject of discussion. Public choice allowed to formulate a discontent with the party’s embrace of action groups in the 1960s and its rebranding as a participatory party. It also made a link between issues of democratization and economic issues. The structural spending problem of the modern state, already identified by Drees, was now given a democratic explanation mechanism: emancipation of minorities caused an increase of the public sector and threatened through their alliance with the bureaucrats to trample the private sector. In order to protect democracy from itself, democracy had to be restrained.

One lingering fear addressed by public choice in the debates within the Labour party was, as I have argued, that democratization had given way to indecisive politics, or shadowy undemocratic decision-making. Another fear that popped up again and again in these discussions was the growing public sector of the welfare state that would ‘trample’ the private sector. Evidently, the perceived problem of the public sector was tied in with the issue of government spending, as it was believed that most of the rising government budget went into social security provided by the public sector. However, the fear for the public sector went further than budgets or democratization alone; it was also tied up with a discussion on social planning. Fearing that under the auspice of social planning, the state would justify intrusion in each part of society, neoliberal authors started to push the market as an alternative.

Near the end of the 1960s, the OECD started to shift its focus to set of non-economic issues that seemed to plague the industrialised societies of its member countries. The mass protest of May ’68 had shocked the OECD – and not only because the riot began in close proximity of the organization’s headquarters – as they conceived the protest as part of larger friction within society caused by social change: due to newfound wealth, social habits had started to shift, with individualization, secularization, generational conflicts, youth culture and alienation as a consequence. In short, May ’68 was unintentionally caused by the growth policies of the OECD. Together with issues of environmental pollution and the depletion of natural recourses, these problems were thematised as ‘the unforeseen side-effects of long-term economic growth.’ In internal reports, the OECD suggested that such problems could be tackled by more social planning.

M. Schmelzer, ‘The crisis before the crisis. The “problems of modern society” and the OECD, 1968– 74’, European Review of History. Revue Européenne d’histoire 19:6 (2012) 999-1020, https://doi.org/10.1 080/13507486.2012.739148; E. Seefried, ‘Rethinking progress. On the origin of the modern sustainability discourse, 1970-2000’, Journal of Modern European History 13:3 (2015) 377-400; J. Andersson, The future of theworld. Futurology, futurists, andthe struggle for the post-cold war imagination (Oxford 2018) Chapter 5.

The issues coined as ‘the unforeseen side-effects of long-term economic growth’ were also an impetus on the social planning debate in the Netherlands. For a longer time, social scientists wanted to prove their social relevance by developing closer ties to the policymaking process and the ‘side-effects of growth’ formed the perfect vehicle for this ambition. The CPB was taken to be a successful example of scientific advice to the government and other social sciences sought to emulate their example.

P. Den Hoed, ‘Een keur van raadgevers. Honderd jaar vaste adviescolleges’, in: P. Den Hoed and A.-G. Keizer (eds.),Op steenworp afstand. Op de brug tussen wetenschap en politiek WRR 35 jaar (Amsterdam 2007) Chapter 4.

This enthusiasm for a planned society became inextricably bound up with the discourse on democratization. Many social scientists believed that involving the targeted social groups in the policymaking process in a more direct manner would ultimately benefit the efficiency of a policy. It was also a way to seek democratic legitimization for political power that could otherwise be understood as technocracy.

J. Andersson and A.-G. Keizer, ‘Governing the future. Science, policy and public participation in the construction of the long term in the Netherlands and Sweden’, History and Technology 30:1-2 (2014) 104-122, https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2014.932563.

When in the 1970s a backlash against democratization started, social planning soon met a similar fate. Under new ideas of planning social and cultural wellbeing became an increasingly important issue for the government, resulting in a growth of the social service sector but also in an increase in bureaucracy. This latter part formed an anathema for many political commentators. For example, when Daudt spoke about ‘the expanding army of civil servants and semi-civil servants’ and ‘the many vacancies for social workers in newspapers requiting for the new priestly caste,’

Daudt, ‘Verzorgingsstaat, democratie en socialisme’.

Similarly, on the left, a discomfort with the increased state and its bureaucracy was clearly discernible. Daudt’s invocation of a ‘priestly caste’ echoes Hans Achterhuis’s The Market of Wellbeing and Happiness (1979), which attacked the public services and social workers for excessive bureaucratization and professionalization.

H. Achterhuis, De markt van welzijn en geluk (Amsterdam 1979).

As became clear in the previous section, the neoliberal solution to the problem of a large public sector was restraining democracy. At the same time, authors such as Daudt and Heertje acknowledged that abstaining from satisfying the demand of dominant interest groups could result in anti-democratic stances. Moreover, after radical social change had unleashed the spirit of emancipation, it was unlikely to be contained again. Neither were environmental and recourse problems likely to disappear after the influence of interest group was curbed. So, what was the alternative to social planning?

Heertje and Daudt framed the problem as follows: the state’s supply of social services did not correspond to society’s demand of those services. In contrast to Van den Doel, who believed that the people simply wanted more social services, Heertje and Daudt argued that the demand for social security was artificial, driven-up through the devilish alliance of interest groups and bureaucrats. The solution was to let the public sector grow in accordance with the ‘real’ social demands.

Daudt, ‘Verzorgingsstaat, democratie en socialisme’, 22; A. Heertje, ‘De toekomst van het stelsel’, in: J. Van Doorn and K. Schuyt (eds.), De stagnerende verzorgingsstaat (Amsterdam 1978) 165-188.

Heertje’s conceptualization of the market can be understood as the proper channel through which the unleashed social forces of emancipation, environmentalism and de-growth concerns could be canalised in a manner that would not threaten the political-economic order. In essence, this was an older neoliberal argument that gained traction again in the mid-seventies in the wake of democratization, environmental and economic problems: the demands of mass-democracy should be diverted away from the state through the market. Or, to put it in other terms, the market should act as a mediator between the democratic demands and the state.

For the neoliberalism idea of the market as mediator of mass democracy, see: O. Innset, Reinventing liberalism. Early neoliberalism in context, 1920-1947 (Florence 2017).

Public choice in the 1970s in the Labour party helped to advance the core neoliberal message in a new guise while addressing new issues. In essence, public choice relayed an argument in favour of a strong but small state and a market sector framed by, but clearly distinguished from, the state. A state strong enough to make decisive choices independently of shadowy corporatist powers, but small enough that it would not pose a threat to the private sector; and an independent economy that could successfully satisfy the demand of society without making that demand artificially higher for social services.

Why did this message, that was seemingly rejected in an earlier stage, re-enter the Dutch Labour party? By attacking Keynesianism and democratization, public choice addressed the issues around which the Labour party had built its identity in the 1960s. These matters were already broadly under discussion before public choice re-entered the scene. Public choice facilitated a longer latent discontent with the course the party had taken in the early seventies. New Left had been relatively successful in putting their concerns on the agenda. Moreover, faced with new issues of long-term growth, such as environmental pollution, depleting natural recourses and the fate of development countries, the Labour party was moving to the left, seeking coalitions with parties on the left rather than entering again a coalition with a right-wing party.

Hellema, Nederland en de jaren zeventig, 139-150.

Public choice was very much a reaction against New Left ideas, but strikingly also resonated with some of the issues that the more radical wing of the party was pushing. Fear for bureaucratization was shared by both sides, as well the disdain for the narrow macroeconomic indicators that had driven economic policy in the 1950s and 1960s, including Keynesian programs. In that sense, there was a strong scepticism also among the left-wing whether Keynesianism provided any solution to the multiple crises of the mid-1970s. However, as I have argued, the concerns which public choice addressed went further back, to discussions on social planning, to which both New Left thinkers and neoliberals were reacting. Social planning was an attempt to manage the side-effects of state planning through more state planning: precisely the spiralling motion neoliberals feared the most.

How does the case of the Dutch Labour party compare to the international literature on public choice and the neoliberal turn? Much of the beats of the popularity of public choice in the US and UK were very similar. Public choice became attractive for arguing against Keynesianism in the stagflation crisis. And on a political level, public choice pointed the finger to interest groups, often understood as trade unions and labour-power, as the culprit for the economic crisis. The answer that public choice formulated was to restrain democracy, relegating important decisions to presumed neutral and technocratic institutions. But there are also significant differences. The push for neoliberal ideas did not only come from right-wing channels; internal discussion specific to the Labour Party created fertile ground for public choice arguments. Consequently, neoliberalism took a different form than was the case in the UK or US. Neoliberalism was not formulated in opposition to social democratic ideas of the welfare state, rather Daudt, Heertje and Stevers presented their proposals for restraining the welfare state as saving the state from itself. They considered the US discourse led by Friedman as too simplistic and aggressive, not completely applicable to the Dutch case. But they drew the same conclusions: they feared for the instability of the political and economic order.

Although, as other articles in this special issue argue, resistance against neoliberalism within the Labour party continued until the late 1980s, the party became susceptible to parts of neoliberalism already in an early stage. Especially the idea that interest groups posed a threat to the common good and therefore democracy should be more restrained became an accepted idea. The Labour party was not simply building on the foundation of right-wing parties when it started to adopt neoliberal-policies in 1989, as the UK case, studied by Hay, suggested. Neither was the Labour party pushed into neoliberal policies through solely outside forces, as Hellema and Van Lith recently argued. It had a long internal discussion in which neoliberal ideas were already disseminated.

A good example of this early entry of neoliberal ideas was Den Uyl’s famous election speech in the Amsterdam concert hall Paradiso in 1982. Although he strongly warned of the rise of New Right forces of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, he admitted at the same time that ‘democratization for the sake of democratization runs the risk of making democracy indecisive. [… And] democratization creates a bureaucracy in which only a small elite can find its way.’

J. Den Uyl, Tegen de stroom in (Amsterdam 1982) 12-13.