"Rather, in our view, a reading of the historical evidence supports a different hypothesis: that in countries like Germany, Norway, and Sweden, codetermination laws arose because of pre-existing cultures of worker participation, rather than causing the development of those cultures. Germany and the Nordic countries have histories of industrial democracy, worker mobilization, and social partnership dating back to at least the early 1900s, with the codetermination reforms we study in the 1960s onwards being codifications and expansions of pre-existing ad-hoc arrangements (Adler, 1922; Bjorheim, 1974; Knudsen, 2006; Sippola, 2012; Votinius, 2012; McGaughey, 2016). We remain agnostic about what caused these cultures to develop in the first place, but it is implausible to suggest that, e.g., the high level of cooperation in contemporary Swedish industrial relations is entirely attributable to the introduction of minority board-level representation in the 1970s."