A perusal of relevant welfare state and industrial relations literature would lead one to believe that a transformation of the welfare state, in its response to changing social risks, is highly unlikely. The stickiness of existing institutions, the varied interests of so many actors – any number of mechanisms can combine to make it difficult to respond to changing social risks. This chapter looks at what these mechanisms are and what the expectations for the response of the Dutch welfare state should be. That not all of these mechanisms are present or equally dominant in the Dutch case will become clearer in the coming chapters, through a thick description1 (Geertz, 1973) of three social risks: sickness and disability policy, childcare policy and employability policy. Using an actor-centred institutionalist framework, each of these cases is analysed in terms of the interests of the state and the social partners, how they perceive and manage the risk within the corporatist institutional structure and which social mechanisms explain these developments.

Both actors and institutions influence how social risk protection develops in the welfare state. To understand the role of both actors and institutions in whether and in what way the Dutch welfare state is able to respond to changing and emerging social risks, an actor-centred institutionalist approach is used. Actor-centred institutionalism, as proposed by Scharpf (1997: 34), ‘is characterized by its giving equal weight to the strategic actions and interactions of purposeful and resourceful individual and corporate actors and to the enabling, constraining and shaping effects of given (but variable) institutional structures and institutionalised norms’. In short, the focus here is on actors and institutions as well as the interaction of these two – referred to here as process. In this sense, the interaction of political, economic and social actors within the institutional context of the Dutch welfare state creates processes of social risk protection. Drawing from institutional and rational actor theories, this chapter looks for social mechanisms that play a role in explaining social risk protection. These mechanisms, at the level of institutions, actors and process, are used to create a set of expectations that suggest what is likely to happen in the Dutch response to social risks.