ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses consensus politics in the pre-1990 period for their three cases. It elaborates on the propositions to be assessed and the method and data we employ. The chapter presents the period 1990-2010 in more detail, zooming in on two periods in which the influence of European integration would have been particularly likely: the 1993-1995 period, in which entry into Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) was high on the agenda in the Low Countries, and the period of the financial and economic crisis and its aftermath. In the wake of the 1973 oil shock, national corporatist policy-making in Belgium collapsed in 1975. Between 1975 and 1981, the government repeatedly tried to entice social partners to come to national agreements in an effort to counter the socioeconomic and macroeconomic effects of the oil crisis. Between 1990 and 2010, corporatist exchange in the Netherlands was in its heyday.
