Industrial democracy in Europe: a quantitative approach

ABSTRACT

Industrial democracy is a dimension of industrial relations which has been largely studied. However, the international comparison of the different features and outcomes of industrial democracy has attracted much less attention. The article addresses this gap by developing three tools: a dashboard of indicators, a composite indicator aiming to measure performance, and a typology addressed to better understanding varieties of national industrial relations system. Whilst industrial democracy performance is defined in a normative way, the typology includes also other aspects related to industrial relations institutions, processes and actors. Both normative and non-normative indicators are included in the dashboard. The three tools allow for cross-time analysis and are seen as complementary for the comparative analysis of industrial democracy in Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Industrial democracy
• industrial relations
• dashboard
• composite indicator
• typology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The United Kingdom has withdrawn from the European Union and is the third country as of 1 February 2020. This article follows the guidelines as issued by EUROSTAT; cf. European Commission/EUROSTAT (2020), Guidelines for the production and dissemination of statistical data by Commission services after the UK leaves the EU, Ref. Ares(2020)440467–23/01/2020: ‘As of 1 February 2020, the new aggregate of the EU with 27 Member States should be prioritised in all statistical data; however, depending on the reference period, the EU28 aggregate may also be published (i.e. for reference periods when the UK was still a Member State)’.

2. https://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID = 6278.

3. The quality assessment and assurance framework of the European Statistical System (ESS), (Eurostat 2011, 2014) evaluates the quality of already produced statistical outputs based on the principles no. 11–15 of the European Statistics Code of Practice (Eurostat 2015).

4. Further methodological details can be found in Eurofound (2018) and its methodological annexe.

5. The weights of the indicators are retrieved from the Principal Component Analysis previously carried out.

6. This process was carried out for selecting the most robust Industrial Relation Index, being the Industrial Democracy one of its sub-indices.

7. Further methodological details can be found in Eurofound (2018) and its methodological annexe.

8. There is an ongoing debate on whether so-called Scandinavian corporatism is in decline or still alive (Vesa et al. 2018). The main indicators we include, although commonly used in empirical research on corporatism (Afonso 2013, etc.), only partially measures this regulatory or governance approach. It only reflects that the degree of involvement of social partners in policymaking in social and economic policy fields in this cluster has been less frequent than in cluster 1 in both time periods analysed.

9. See in annexe the complete set of indicators and absolute variation by countries.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pablo Sanz de Miguel

Dr. Pablo Sanz de Miguel (PhD) is researcher at Notus-asr and adjunct lecturer in the Autonomous University of Barcelona. His areas of interest are European governance of employment, industrial relations, employment and working conditions, vocational training and enforcement of labour standards. He has authored articles and worked on several European projects on these fields

Christian Welz

Dr. Christian Welz (PhD) is a senior research manager in the fields of industrial relations (IR), EU labour law and employment policy at Eurofound (a tripartite EU agency based in Dublin). He is currently in charge of the European IR Dictionary and leading a number of EU IR governance projects (varieties of industrial relations, European Social Dialogue, capacity building, working life country profiles, etc.). 

Maria Caprile

Maria Caprile is sociologist and director of research at notus-asr. Her fields of expertise are working conditions, labour market inequalities and gender mainstreaming.

Ricardo Rodríguez Contreras

Ricardo Rodríguez Contreras is a research officer at Eurofound (a tripartite EU agency based in Dublin) focussing on comparative industrial relations, social dialogue and collective bargaining at EU level, particularly related to the Economic Governance. Over the past years, he has conducted research on the implications of technology and digital change in employment relations.