Employee Representation in the Board Compared : A Fuzzy Sets Analysis of Corporate Governance, Unionism, and Political Institutions

Why do employees have rights to representation within corporate boards in some countries, but not in others? Board-level codetermination is widely considered a distinctive feature of coordinated or nonliberal models of capitalism. Existing literature stresses three sets of explanations for codetermination rooted in corporate governance, union strength and political systems. The paper compares data from 22 OECD countries using the QCA method (Qualitative Comparative Analysis) and fuzzy sets approach to explore necessary and sufficient conditions for board-level codetermination. The results show two central pathways toward codetermination both rooted primarily in union coordination and consensual political systems, but with divergent implications for corporate governance systems in Scandinavia and Germany