Samenvatting

This study examines the quality of visitation in three government sectors in the Netherlands: academic education (training), urban policy (urban municipalities) and municipal authorities. The focus is mainly on the visitation of municipal authorities in the Dutch province Limburg. The assessment of the visitation quality of university study programmes and of major cities policy must yield hypotheses to determine the quality of the visitation of municipal authorities that have been visited. The object of study is therefore ‘visitation’, in particular ‘visitation quality’. The visitations of university studies were viewed from four quality perspectives, namely on the design quality, the process quality, the assessing and the concluding quality, and usability or utilisation. This is also the case with the visitation of the major cities’ policy and of the Limburg municipal authorities. The question is, of course, what the analysis of the quality of all the assessments in three sectors yields, with special attention to the assessment of municipal authorities. Is it clear after that analysis how this quality inspection should be carried out? The study provides a wealth of insights and shows the state of the administrative strength of the inspected Limburg municipal authorities. A publication of this study has been postponed for more than five years, because the author wanted to investigate whether the administrative strength measurements were used in the longer term.