This editorial offers an introduction to the current issue.

In Western parliamentary democracies, a growing number of MPs have worked as special advisers, political assistants, and parliamentary aides prior to their election as members of parliament. They have professional political expertise without being elected officials themselves. We call them parapoliticians, akin to paramedics or paralegals. This paper researches this emerging pathway to the Dutch Second Chamber. The paper operationalizes the concept, provides theoretical and historical context and offers insights into the prevalence of parapolitical backgrounds among Dutch Second Chamber members, and examines variations across political parties. In the 2021 Second Chamber more than a quarter of MPs had previously worked as a political aid and these MPs have prominent positions in the parliamentary factions.

The integrity of politics and politicians plays a pivotal role in ensuring the quality of governance. Integrity is also an important value in societal discussions regarding that quality, as well as in research related to ‘good governance’. The public discourse concerning the integrity of politics often centers on the integrity scandals politicians are involved in. In academic research that topic is less prominent, which led to our research project in the Netherlands to gather data on integrity ‘scandals’. How frequently is the integrity of a politician publicly questioned, which political parties are implicated, and what types of integrity violations are mentioned? Since 2013, the Political Integrity Index project has been providing information about those topics. While this project has been covered in the Dutch media and in the journal Public Integrity, it has not been addressed in a Dutch scientific publication. This article provides an overview of the project, including a concise explanation of the conceptual framework and methodology employed. Additionally, it presents several new findings and offers some reflections on these findings. Given the relevance of political integrity scandals, it is hoped that the empirical information presented here will prove valuable for further research, not only in the Netherlands but also in other countries.

In the last decades, society has developed towards fragmentation and pluralism, while government has experienced a process of ‘hollowing out the state’. In response a new form of governance has emerged in recent years: societal resilience. In this form of governance, crafting communities of active citizens take the lead in creating public value. Government is at best one of the actors that contribute; at worst it is a hindrance for solutions in the lifeworld of citizens.
In this article a horizontal, self-guiding society is criticized, as well as other late- or postmodern approaches to governance. Based on literature review, the author argues that different meanings of verticality are still important in governing society: devotion, hierarchy, authority and power. These meanings are applied to reducing conflict, complexity and uncertainty, and building institutions that fit our late- or postmodern society.

Local governments across the globe increasingly aim to engage citizens in participatory governance, encouraging them to take an active stance in community activities and policy or planning decisions. Despite the inclusive and emancipatory ambitions, these projects often reproduce inequality and exclude citizens leaving them marginalized and misrecognized. In this paper, I argue that inclusion and recognition do not take shape via political ambitions or promising institutional frameworks but via informal face-to-face interactions among citizens and state actors at the street level. By drawing on 3 years of ethnographic fieldwork in The Hague, the Netherlands, I critically unpack how the engagements among state actors and citizens misrecognized the latter as political subjects. Building on critical scholarship on the politics of recognition, I propose an agent-centered and practice-oriented approach that analyzes the micro-politics of misrecognition via (1) narrative analysis, (2) the detailed analysis of speech acts and emotional expressions, and (3) with a specific focus on analyzing the spatial practices that construe the geopolitical realm. As a result, I introduce the tactic of ‘ignoring people’ as a socio-spatial practice of politics. I found five socio-spatial tactics by which citizens were ignored during the very participatory process in which they were invited: disregarded elements of citizens’ stories, omitting their counter-narrative, neglecting citizens’ memories, showing disdain for their emotional expressions and being spatially absent from their protest. These insights require scholars interested in understanding the exclusive mechanisms of citizen participation, to turn to the micro-politics of interaction where the political is practiced and experienced.

In this feature authors make a point about a socially relevant theme, building on or relating to existing scientific literature. The author may report on empirical work, but this is not required; the essay does not have to rely on its own data collection or material.

In this feature authors review recently published books on subjects of interest to readers of Beleid en Maatschappij.

The most relevant part of a discussion is not what is discussed but what cannot be spoken of. The real taboos are those for which it is taboo to call them taboos. The status quo defines itself as non-ideological while denouncing any challenge to itself as radical. Therefore the column ‘De blinde vlek’ frames the framers, politicizes the status quo and articulates what is not heard of.