The displacement of political decision making from the classic bodies of representative democracy to non democratically legitimised arenas is a major threat to contemporary representative democracy. In this essay, three displacements are discussed: from parliamentary to deliberative processes, from political to professional decision making, and from national to international arenas. Several of the safeguards that have been developed in parliamentary democracy over the past centuries, such as representation, transparency, majority voting, and public accountability, are missing or are underdeveloped in these new arenas. The essay explores how these safeguards could be introduced into these new arenas and concludes that the displacement of politics should be attended by a dissemination of democracy.

Child labor evokes deep emotions and is cause for growing international concern. What, if anything, should governments of liberal-democratic societies do to combat child labor?

This paper discusses the possibilities and pitfalls of Western policies that seek to curb child labor abroad. Since such policies aim to combat practices in another society, policy makers should be aware of the many relevant differences between developing and developed countries. We discuss three issues that are central to this debate: socioeconomic causes of child labor, different conceptions of childhood, and the distinction between child work and child labor. Studying the historical example of the emergence and disappearance of child labor in nineteenth-century Netherlands broadens our analysis. We then evaluate the implications of these investigations and conclude the paper by suggesting five recommendations for Western policy makers that would avoid the pitfalls discussed.

In December 2004, the report of the Dutch Parliamentary Investigation Committee on Infrastructural Projects was published. This committee investigated the budgets overruns of two large rail projects currently under construction in the Netherlands: the Betuwe Line and the High Speed Line (HSL)-South. The committee also looked at how mistakes that were made in the earlier projects had been avoided in the construction of the Zuiderzee Line, a project currently under preparation. The report provides a look inside the struggle of the Dutch national government from the beginning of the 1990s in their public-private partnership (PPP) efforts. In this contribution, we provide an analysis of the motives, approach and results of privatisation of these three projects on the bases of the detailed empirical analysis provided by the Committee. We seek explanations of how privatisation with these three projects evolved and what lessons can be drawn. It appears that practices have so far been far from good and instead of committing to the obligation to apply PPP in every large infrastructural project, the government should first find out how PPP in such projects should actually be carried out.