Problems of Descriptive Representation in Dutch Works Councils
| Date | 01 October 2004 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2004.00492.x |
| Published date | 01 October 2004 |
| Author | Ewald Engelen |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Problems of Descriptive Representation
in Dutch Works Councils
Ewald Engelen
University of Amsterdam
In political theory, descriptive representation as a corrective to structural asymmetries within
society is usually debated against the background of formal political institutions. It is discussed in
this paper as a means to enhance the declining legitimacy of Dutch works councils as important
sites of democratic decision-making in their own right. The aim is to show that the moral require-
ments of democratic inclusion have to be weighed against the functional requirements of effec-
tive representation, concluding that in some cases the costs in terms of effectiveness exceed the
gains in terms of inclusiveness. Hence, the debate about descriptive representation is clearly in
need of a more contextualized assessment of its pros and cons.
A growing number of political theorists are arguing for group rights. These range
from language rights, educational rights and religious rights to special representa-
tion rights. In this paper, I analyse the pros and cons of the latter. Usually, these
proposals are formulated against the foil of the dominant model of aggregative
democracy, which emphasizes the act of voting, sees majoritarian decision-making
as the hallmark of democracy and takes electoral preferences as given. The main
problem of this type of democratic decision-making is that its legitimacy is premised
on shifting rather than enduring majorities. But what if majority decisions dis-
advantage some minorities structurally and perpetuate power asymmetries, as
often seems the case? What if the institutional design of advanced capitalist
societies works enduringly in favour of some groups and disfavours others?
According to some, aggregate democratic theory fails to answer these questions.
To remedy this, they have instead proposed to offer marginalized groups special
representation rights, either in the form of earmarked seats or by redrawing the
boundaries of constituencies or voting districts, to ensure fair representation –
an idea that has been dubbed ‘group representation’, ‘the politics of presence’, ‘self-
representation’ or ‘descriptive representation’.1
However, as has often been observed, this body of literature weds a large dose of
hopefulness with an equal measure of abstraction. What is lacking is a close analy-
sis of the advantages and disadvantages of descriptive representation in concrete
cases (Bohman, 1998, p. 419). That is what I aim to do in this paper. The setting
I have chosen is that of Dutch works councils. As works councils have to operate
under the ‘harsh’ conditions of advanced capitalist economies, implying steep
power asymmetries as well as ‘hard’ economic constraints, this case can serve as a
litmus test for the viability of descriptive representation and is hence especially
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2004 VOL 52, 491–507
© Political Studies Association, 2004.
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
492 EWALD ENGELEN
suited to bring to the fore the tensions between the functional requirements of
effective representation and the moral requirements of democratic inclusion.
Whereas most studies focus on formal political institutions, I emphatically situate
this paper in the tradition of Robert Dahl (1985) and Carole Pateman (1970) that
aims to extend the scope of democratic theorizing to encompass the workplace and
other locations of daily life as important sites of democratic decision-making in
their own right. As Dutch labour relations are one of the most sophisticated
instances of workplace democracy (see Archer, 1995), and as Dutch works coun-
cils are currently facing a crisis of legitimacy as a result of structural changes within
the workforce, they provide an excellent opportunity to analyse the viability of
descriptive representation as a corrective mechanism.
The structure of the argument is as follows. I will start with a theoretical discus-
sion of the pros and cons of descriptive representation. In the subsequent section,
I will give a brief description of the workings of Dutch works councils. In the third
section, I will apply the insights from the first section to the case of the works
councils.
This is not a case study in the usual sense, for descriptive representation is not
practiced in Dutch works councils, neither de jure nor de facto. Rather, it is an
exercise in institutional imagination, investigating what the introduction of
descriptive representation would do to the functioning of Dutch works councils. I
call this an exercise in ‘concrete utopianism’. It is ‘utopian’ because it presupposes
the possibility of creating a better, more just world and, as such, is premised on
the contingent nature of what is; and it is ‘concrete’ because the imaginary trajec-
tory it follows starts from a detailed description of existing institutional arrange-
ments and explicitly tries to accommodate the desiderata of realism (Bader and
Engelen, 2003).
Pros and Cons of Descriptive Representation
In democratic theory, it is customary to distinguish between input and output
legitimacy. Noting that representativeness is not the only source of legitimacy but
has to be combined with effectiveness for the democratic entity to be truly legiti-
mate and robust, Fritz Scharpf has used this distinction to trace two distinct streams
of thought within the corpus of democratic theory that emphasize either the first
or the second source of legitimacy (1970; 1999, pp. 6–21). Effectiveness, or getting
what one wants, is the supreme value for those democratic traditions that argue
for representation, division of power and other limiting procedures. The insights
from the Federalist Papers are a case in point, as are realist and functionalist demo-
cratic theories like those of Condorcet, Pareto, Schumpeter and Downs. Inclusive-
ness and direct democracy, on the other hand, are central to the participatory
strand associated with Rousseau, Pateman and the ‘late’ Dahl.
The tension between the two forms of legitimacy stands at the root of the 1980s
literature on ‘neo-corporatism’ and ‘private interest intermediation’. In the case of
functional organizations such as labour unions and employer organizations, demo-
cratic accountability to the members can severely obstruct the discretion of the
representative, ultimately increasing the risk of producing sub-optimal negotiation
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