Samenvatting

What is the international impact of (local) administrative academics from the Netherlands and from Flanders? This essay is limited to their impact through the leading international journal in the field of local government, <i>Local Government Studies</i>. The main question is who published in that journal (Wim Derksen was the first in 1988), from which discipline of the administrative sciences and on which subject. It also discusses from which universities and research institutes the authors come and analyses its gender diversity. Since 1988 we see a growing involvement of Dutch and Flemish authors in <i>Local Government Studies</i>. The fact that the Dutch contribution is more extensive and multifaceted than the Flemish one can be explained from the history of the (local) administrative sciences in these two countries. The Dutch lead is mainly due to the actions of various high-profile administrative academics who have left their mark in this field over the past hundred years. The strongest growth among the different disciplines of the administrative sciences is in public administration as a discipline with a strongly interdisciplinary character. This applies especially to the Netherlands, while in Flanders this development started a little later. In the Netherlands, public administration in the first period still lags behind political science and economics, in the latter two periods it is the dominant factor. In Flanders, the discipline of public administration has only become dominant recently (2017-2022). Another striking difference with the Netherlands is that economists play only a marginal role in this.