From risk to voice: Pensioner representation in Austrian and Dutch occupational pensions

Following policy changes associated with privatization and financialization, characteristics of funded occupational pension schemes have changed, shifting financial risk to beneficiaries. Scholarship of pension policy, however, has yet to take into the account the implications of these risk shifts for pension governance. Existing research on pension governance has focused almost exclusively on representation within pension funds along the lines of employers and employees (often via unions or works councils). Our paper asks: Does financialization give rise to new claims for representation by those experiencing new financial risks? We examine how pensioners demanded representation on occupational pension fund boards in Austria and the Netherlands, with varying levels of success. Based on our contextualized comparison of the two cases, we show that increasing financial risk for pensioners was a major driver behind pensioner demands for representation on pension fund boards in both countries. To explain Austrian pensioners’ limited success in gaining de facto decision-making power vis-à-vis more consequential forms of representation in the Netherlands, we turn to the political context of democratic corporatism in both countries. In particular, we argue that shifting insider-outsider dynamics within national corporatist structures explain the two different historical trajectories. Our paper shows that stakeholder representation in pension governance should be considered a dynamic feature of contemporary pension politics.