Since the mid-1990s, the Netherlands has received international acclaim for the success of its welfare state reforms and macroeconomic performance, leaving commentators and academics alike to refer to it as ‘the Dutch miracle’. This book takes a look at what has transpired since the mid-1990s, focusing on the ability of the Dutch corporatist welfare state to address changing and emerging social risks. The intention is to provide a comprehensive account of welfare state developments that are significant beyond the borders of the Netherlands by demonstrating the dramatic changes that have taken place in the response to old and new social risks.

The empirical data that form the basis for this book are the outcome of part of a larger research project on Labour, Firms and Social Security, financed by the Dutch GAK Foundation (Stichting Instituut GAK). Many thanks to all of the researchers involved in this project, in particular Romke van der Veen, Hans Pruijt and Pascal Derogee for their contributions to this research. The project also relies on data from trade union FNV's collective agreement database Ducadam. Thank you to Katinka van den Akker for answering all my questions about the data and providing updates along the way. I am also grateful to a number of colleagues at the Department of Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam for their comments on various stages of this project, in particular Kea Tijdens, Bram Peper and Judith Raven, as well as colleagues from the I3 Research Cluster at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. Thank you to Trudie Knijn for extensive comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript.

This research would not have been possible without the cooperation of all those who agreed to be interviewed for this project. Many thanks to them all. In addition, the research would have taken much longer to complete without the assistance of Marco Veenstra, who helped schedule and transcribe the interviews and helped to create the database of policy documents. A special thanks goes to him for all his assistance.

This research project has been five years in the making. Many people have contributed to its development and completion, too numerous to mention, so to anyone I may have missed – thank you. Lastly, any errors or omissions in the text are entirely my responsibility.