Samenvatting

Since 2014, more Municipal Councils in the Netherlands break with the longstanding tradition of simple majority coalitions and choose to work with a council-wide program. In such council-wide programs all the parties work together on a common agenda. Municipalities that do so, no longer have a fixed coalition and opposition, but make decisions based on council-wide agreement. Although this practice has become more common over the past years, hardly any empirical research has been done into this new way of political decision-making in local government. In this article we explore the practice of coalition-wide agreements and draw conclusions about the viability of this new model.