Onder redactie van B. Guy Peters en Guillaume Fontaine verscheen in 2020 bij EE Publishers een handboek over vergelijkende beleidsanalyse. Dit terrein van onderzoek heeft stevige raakvlakken met beleidsevaluatie en beleidsanalyses (als die niet-vergelijkend zijn). Een breed en interessant spectrum van onderwerpen komt aan de orde, onder andere over methodologie(en), de rol van theorieën, diverse inhoudelijke onderwerpen en – voor wie het breed wil interpreteren – zelfs de groei van kennis op dit specialisme.

Het boek van voormalig topambtenaar Roel Bekker Dat had niet zo gemoeten! analyseert op scherpe wijze fouten en falen bij de overheid. Doordat de overheid allerlei steken laat vallen bij de voorbereiding van beleid en bovendien te weinig leert van beleidsevaluaties, ontstaat er beleid dat verre van optimaal functioneert, onder meer omdat de uitvoering wordt belast met (zeer) ingewikkelde procedures. Voor de overheid valt uit dit boek veel te leren over hoe het beter kan worden aangepakt. De vraag is wel of dat ook gaat gebeuren, want eerdere publicaties met waardevolle aanbevelingen op dit gebied hebben maar weinig effect gehad.

The integration of refugees in the Netherlands has been suboptimal for years. After receiving a residence permit, refugees are distributed across the country and dispersed over neighborhoods. However, since the 2015 refugee crisis, the municipality of Amsterdam has adopted a different approach. Here, refugees that have been granted residence live together with Dutch young adults in projects where they share facilities and play a role in managing the project. To what extent can such mixed housing projects help the integration of refugees? The Startblok Riekerhaven, which was the first project, was studied for a year with qualitative research. The findings show that mixed housing projects can stimulate the formation of social connections. In this way they can contribute to the integration of refugees in the Netherlands. Given the suboptimal results of the current dispersal policy, this is relevant for science and policy.

The refugee crisis of 2015-2016 prompted European governments to quickly institute new asylum seeker centres. Often however, plans for opening new reception centres are met with protest in surrounding localities. Gaining public support for new ASCs has become a pressing governance issue facing local governments. This research looks at whether a policy strategy of ‘giving back’ to the neighbourhood rather than ‘giving in’ to the demands of protesters can minimise local opposition and alleviate negative attitudes . A door-to-door survey of N = 511 neighbourhood residents is combined with semi-structured interview data of N = 31 neighbourhood residents. We find that attitudes were already neutral to fairly positive shortly after the centre opened and fears of nuisance and crime did not materialise. Those who became involved in the ASCs’ courses and activities are a small and selective group who were already fairly accepting of the centre. Contact between asylum seekers and neighbours developing within and beyond the ASC was valued but did not develop into stronger ties due to frequent moves of asylum seekers and early closure of the ASC.

After the European refugee crisis of 2015-2016, many Dutch municipalities took initiative in (re)shaping policies of asylum seeker reception and refugee integration in their own ways. We are witnessing a ‘local turn’ of integration policies with decentralization of responsibilities to the local level of governance. Besides civic integration and socioeconomic integration, social integration of asylum seekers and refugees has been a concern as these groups are often housed in superdiverse and vulnerable neighborhoods. How can municipalities best address the specific problems in their cities? This editorial introduces the four articles that are part of this special issue. We discuss three overarching topics. First, we argue that aside from targeting specific groups and issues, cities should develop mainstreamed policies and provisions to be able to handle future fluctuations and changes in their populations. Second, we observe that in policies aimed at enhancing inter-group contact, earlier immigrant groups are often overlooked. They can play a bridging role in establishing social connections. Third, we highlight the role of urban experiments and living labs in transfer and upscaling of innovative policies.

This paper analyzes the impact of linguistic characteristics of accountability reports on public sector organizations. It does so by analysing hundreds of accountability reports by four public sector bodies using the linguistic tool LIWC. The research question is: what linguistic characteristics of accountability reports are related to a bigger impact on the evaluated organization? The impact of three strategic choices is assessed. First of all, the impact of strategic positioning. Authors of texts can maintain a position of power in the choice of language (high clout) and speak top down to the recipient or they can take a more egalitarian, face to face, position. Secondly, authors can choose to use many complex linguistic phrasings, with causal reasoning for instance, or they can opt for simpler texts. Finally, the text can be littered with emotional, positive and negative, wordings or can be set in a neutral tone. Our analyses suggest that more emotional accountability reports are consistently related to a better reception and seem to have more impact. This has important consequences both theoretically and practically, which are discussed in the paper.

This article is a review of two policy documents on integrated care in the Netherlands. I argue that not a shared definition of ‘integrated care,’ but instead the own factual understandings of care and normative preferences, values or interests concerning care motivates the action of actors that need to produce integrated care. Not the network-level problem, but instead actor-level motivations explain to what extent integrated care is effectuated. The policy documents, but also important segments of the literature on policy integration seem to underestimate this problem.

The Netherlands has been struggling with the question of how to facilitate the integration of refugees who crossed into Europe during the 2015/2016 ‘refugee crisis’. Dutch municipalities aim for the dispersion of refugees over various neighborhoods under the assumption that the ethnic composition of the neighborhood is conducive to integration. In the current study, I test this assumption using a new and representative survey (N = 768 predominantly Syrian refugees living in 45 neighborhoods, response rate 85%) linked to neighborhood data situated in the most ethnically diverse city in the Netherlands; Rotterdam. Multilevel analyses revealed that, generally, a larger share of people without a migration background in the neighborhood was related to more frequent contact with neighbors without a migration background. A larger share of people with a Moroccan background was related to more frequent contact with people with a Moroccan background, but predominantly for Syrian refugees. The neighborhood was not related to contact with people from the same background of with people with a Turkish background. Hence, meeting opportunities in the neighborhood only appear to facilitate social integration if they coincide with refugees’ social preferences.

This article describes the main trends in refugee policies in sixteen Dutch cities, offering an overview of the local approaches to the reception, housing and integration of refugees that the cities rapidly had to develop in response to the increased refugee inflow in 2015. In contrast to other studies that often focus on capital and gateway cities, this article illustrates the variety of local approaches to migration diversity and refugee integration. By illustrating the different positions municipalities take, the article shows the local power to innovate. In this article clusters of cities with comparable approaches to refugee policies are identified to aid cooperation and knowledge exchange between cities, in which the big cities are not necessarily always the relevant partners.

Belgium is probably the world’s best known case of where caretaker governments reside. Yet a clear scholarly definition and measurement of this concept is missing. Based on a detailed analysis of the Belgian federal cabinets, this research note explores the main characteristics and measures the length of the various caretaker periods. We find that Belgium was governed for no less than 1,485 days by a caretaker government between 2007 and 2020, which equals more than four full calendar years. This research note also presents a novel typology of caretaker periods based on the institutional and political practice within the Belgian legislative and executive branches. This typology can be used to assess caretaker periods at other levels of government as well as in other countries in order to improve our understanding of the many ‘faces’ that a caretaker government can take on.

This article examines what explains the performance of Dutch local party branches in the recruitment of candidates for municipal councils. Fielding a list of candidates is the most basic function of political parties. In the Netherlands, party branches are under pressure from the low number of party members. To analyse how branches fulfil their role in recruitment, we employ our own survey of the secretaries of party branches held in the run-up to the 2018 municipal election. We find that party membership drives the successful fulfilment of the recruitment function but that, more than the absolute number of members, the crucial factors are how these party members cooperate, the number of active members and the development of this number.

This article investigates the feminisation of local politics. Starting from the observation that the representation of women in local electoral politics lags behind the regional and federal level, and taking into account the relevance of local party branches in the recruitment and selection of candidates for elections, we examine the extent to which there is an ‘internal’ feminisation of local party branches and how this links to the ‘external’ feminisation of local electoral politics. Based on surveys among local party chairs, the article maps patterns of feminisation over time and across parties, investigates problems local branches encounter in the recruitment of candidates for local elections, and analyses the (attitudes towards the) measures taken to further the integration of women in local electoral politics. We conclude that internal and external feminisation do not always go hand in hand and that local politics continues to be a male-dominated political biotope.

As a response to the perceived legitimacy crisis that threatens modern democracies, local government has increasingly become a laboratory for democratic renewal and citizen participation. This article studies whether and why local party chairs support democratic innovations fostering more citizen participation. More specifically, we analyse the relative weight of ideas, interests and institutions in explaining their support for citizen-centred democracy. Based on the Belgian Local Chairs Survey in 2018 (albeit restricting our analysis to Flanders), the central finding is that ideas matter more than interests and institutions. Ideology is alive and kicking with regard to democratic innovation, with socialist and ecologist parties and populist parties being most supportive of participatory arrangements. By contrast, interests and institutions play, at this stage, a minor role in explaining support for participatory innovations.

This article scrutinises local-national linkage in Belgium to better understand territorial power relations in multilevel parties. Drawing on a survey of local chairs of national parties, it adopts an innovative, informal and bottom-up approach. The descriptive analysis reveals two central axes in the morphology of linkage: scope (downward support and upward influence) and surplus (benefits versus costs). However, (the valuation of) this interdependence appears as a matter of degree. The explanatory analysis therefore probes into the effect of macro- (between environments), meso- (between parties) and micro- (within parties) level factors. It demonstrates that variance is explained by different parameters. For scope, differences between parties trump those within them. For surplus, specific differences between parties as well as within them matter. The answer to our guiding question is therefore variegated: it depends on for what and for whom.

After a year’s delay, the new Dutch Environmental Act will enter into force on January 1, 2022. Within this new legal framework, municipalities are expected to develop an environmental vision through policy integration and citizen participation. This new working method raises some questions. This article focuses on the quality of policy considerations with regard to vulnerable spatial domains and in particular religious heritage. It answers the question about the quality of policy considerations in municipal environmental visions and then examines whether policy integration and participation have contributed to this. An analysis of 33 municipal environmental visions shows that the quality of policy considerations for religious heritage is low in almost all municipalities. Interviews with nine municipalities provide a more complete picture and make it clear that the real quality of the policy considerations is higher than what can ultimately be found in the visions. However, these findings raise doubts about the future protection of the religious heritage in the further elaboration of the environmental vision in the environmental plan. In connection with this, two calls are made: (a) as a municipality, ensure that the subject of cultural heritage is on the political-administrative agenda; (b) ensure that cultural heritage is not only part of history, but also of the future.