The author discusses the practices, problems and pitfalls research in the biomedical field with regard to conflicts of interests. Medicines are not ordinary products: the exclusive right to prescribe lies with the doctor, and because of the potentially life-saving nature of medicines, their use, price and availability is surrounded by emotions, especially when there is only one medicine available for a serious illness. Nonetheless, these products are marketed by companies that have a primarily commercial interest and, on the basis of those interests, engage in pricing and advertising activities. In the research on medicines, there is close cooperation between the pharmaceutical industry and doctor-researchers, whereby independence is at stake due to the large financial interests and reimbursements. This pushes the design, outcome and publication of research in a direction that is favorable to the pharmaceutical industry, but that is not financially the best direction for society, or medically for patients.

If the stakes are high, policy researchers can find themselves under strong pressures from politicians or policy makers to compromise on issues like scope of a research project, research methodology, reporting, framing and interpretation of results, and timing of publication. Research organizations experiment with various formal and informal arrangements to cope with such pressures and guard their independence.
This article describes six coping strategies that are being explored by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL). These are: i) taking control in determining the project scope and the research questions; ii) making responsibilities explicit and guarding respective roles; iii) installing a broad based societal project advisory group; iv) having some researchers in a project that interact with stakeholders, while keeping others at a distance; v) having a differentiated communications strategy; vi) being fully transparent as to hypotheses and uncertainties regarding data and models.
Safeguarding independence in research through formal rules and provisions is generally insufficient to protect research from undue stakeholder influence. Also changes in labor routines, relationship management and organizational cultures are needed, not only on the researcher side, but on the stakeholder side as well. This calls for dialogue and joint learning processes.

Voor doeltreffend en doelmatig beleid is het essentieel om verantwoording af te leggen over de gemaakte keuzes en te leren van de lessen uit het verleden. Om dit te stimuleren verplicht de Regeling Periodiek Evaluatieonderzoek (RPE) de rijksoverheid om periodiek beleidsdoorlichtingen te (laten) verrichten. Een beleidsdoorlichting bundelt alle beschikbare kennis over de doeltreffendheid en doelmatigheid van een volledig beleidsterrein over een bepaalde periode. Daartoe worden alle tussentijds uitgevoerde beleidsevaluaties bestudeerd.
Dit artikel beschrijft de kwaliteit van beleidsdoorlichtingen. Het artikel is gebaseerd op onderzoek van SEO Economisch Onderzoek in opdracht van het Ministerie van Financiën. Het gebruik van beleidsdoorlichtingen valt buiten de scope van dit artikel.
Uit een steekproef van 49 beleidsdoorlichtingen blijkt dat de doeltreffendheid en doelmatigheid van het gevoerd beleid vaak niet goed in beeld komen. Dit komt onder meer omdat er te weinig goed evaluatieonderzoek wordt uitgevoerd en omdat beleidsdoelstellingen met enige regelmaat worden aangepast. Het gevolg hiervan is dat uitspraken over de doeltreffendheid van beleid meestal niet stevig onderbouwd zijn en de doelmatigheid van beleid onderbelicht blijft. Dit maakt het minder goed mogelijk om lessen uit het verleden te trekken.
Er is ruimte voor verbetering. Zo kan (1) het lerend vermogen van ministeries intern versterkt worden, (2) kunnen departementen hun beleidsevaluaties systematischer uitvoeren om volledigheid te waarborgen, (3) dient er ex ante te worden vastgesteld hoe de doeltreffendheid en doelmatigheid van beleidsmaatregelen ex post (causaal) kunnen worden geëvalueerd, (4) kan de onafhankelijk deskundige die bij beleidsdoorlichtingen wordt ingezet tevens de kwaliteit van het beschikbare evaluatiemateriaal vaststellen, en (5) kan worden overwogen om beleidsdoorlichtingen strategisch te plannen aan het eind van een kabinetsperiode. Op deze manier neemt de toegevoegde waarde van de beleidsdoorlichting toe.

This research note investigates the role of paid digital campaigning in the 2018 local elections in Flanders. We make use of the official declarations which candidates are legally required to submit. In these declarations, candidates indicate whether and how much they invested in online campaigning tools during the four months preceding the elections. We collected data on a sample of 3,588 individual candidates running in the 30 municipalities of the Leuven Arrondissement. A multilevel logistic regression model shows that the odds of spending on digital campaigning increases among incumbent aldermen and local councillors. The latter finding supports the normalization thesis of digital campaigning. The results also show that scale is important – the more potential voters a candidate has, the higher the odds that the candidate invests in digital tools.

In this article, we propose an in-depth exploration of blank and null ballots in the recent 2018 local elections in Wallonia (Belgium). In the official results, both blank and null ballots are merged together and are classified as invalid votes. After obtaining the authorization to access genuine electoral ballots, we study the votes which were not considered for the composition of local councils in detail. The dataset is a representative sample of 13,243 invalidated ballots from 49 Walloon municipalities. We first describe how many of these invalidated ballots are blank and how many are null votes, as well as the nature of the nulled votes (unintended errors or intentionally spoiled ballots). Second, we dig deeper into the differences between ballots that have been intentionally invalidated by voters (blank votes and intentional null votes) and ballots non-intentionally invalidated. Our results show that most of the ballots (two-thirds) are null ballots and that among them, half are unintentional null ballots. Finally, we show that contextual (socio-demographic and political) factors explain the variations in intentional and unintentional null votes across municipalities.

Even though many municipalities use a variety of means to improve turnout in local elections, citizen participation in local elections is a point of concern in many Western countries, including the Netherlands. Our research question is therefore: How effective are municipal efforts to improve turnout in (Dutch) local elections? To this end, we collected data from three sources: (1) a survey sent to the municipal clerks of 389 Dutch municipalities to learn what they do to improve turnout; (2) data from Statistics Netherlands on municipalities’ socio-demographic characteristics; and (3) data on the turnout in local elections from the Dutch Electoral Council database. Using hierarchical multiple regression analysis, we found that the direct impact of local governments’ efforts to improve turnout is low. Nevertheless, some measures seem to be able to make a difference. The relative number of polling stations was especially found to impact turnout.

This article tackles the particular issue of split-ticket voting, which has been largely overlooked in Belgian election studies thus far. We contribute to the literature by answering two particular research questions: (1) to what extent and (2) why do voters cast a different vote in the elections for the provincial council as compared to their vote in the elections for the municipal council?
The article draws on survey data collected via an exit poll in the ‘Belgian Local Elections Study’, a research project conducted by an inter-university team of scholars.
Our analysis shows that nearly 45% of the total research population cast a split-ticket vote in the local elections of 2018. However, this number drops to one out of four if we only consider a homogenous party landscape at both levels by excluding the numerous votes for ‘local’ lists (which occur mostly at the municipal level). This finding underlines the importance of accounting for the electoral and institutional context of the different electoral arenas in research on split-ticket voting in PR systems. In the Belgian context, split-ticket voting in 2018 also differed between the different parties and regions. Furthermore, it was encouraged by a higher level of education and familiarity with particular candidates. This candidate-centred and strategic voting was matched by party identification and the urban municipal context favouring straight-ticket voting. Other factors such as region, a rural municipal context and preferential voting seemed more relevant to determine voting for local parties than using the instrument of split-ticket votes as such.

Sub-constituency campaigning occurs when parties focus their campaign resources on specific geographical areas within an electoral district. This behaviour was traditionally thought to occur only in single-member plurality elections, but recent research demonstrates that proportional systems with multi-member districts can also elicit sub-constituency campaigning. However, most studies of sub-constituency campaigning rely on self-reported measures of campaigning, not direct measures of campaign intensity in different regions and communities. We present novel data on geographical variations in the intensity of Flemish parties’ campaign advertising during the 2014 general elections in Belgium, which provides a direct measure of sub-constituency campaigning. Our findings show clear evidence of sub-constituency campaigning: parties campaign more intensely in municipalities where they have stronger electoral support and in municipalities with greater population density.

Beleidsevaluatie richt zich steeds naar informatiebehoeften en technische mogelijkheden. Hierdoor is het gebruik van cijfermatige informatie toegenomen. Met name bestaande data worden, met steeds betere analysetechnieken, ingezet omdat ze beschikbaar zijn en relatief goedkoop. Dit gaat echter ten koste van de validiteit en diepgang van onderzoek. Dat is in zekere zin een regressie, een achteruitgang. We zien echter ook progressie in het beleidsonderzoek. In de eerste plaats komt er steeds meer belangstelling voor de zogenoemde mixed methods-benadering. Ten tweede is er een groeiende belangstelling voor participerende, interactieve en responsieve vormen van onderzoek. Er ontstaat weer meer oog voor de wereld achter de cijfers, het hoe en waarom van beleid, en vooral voor de mensen in die wereld.

Citizens and scholars excel in identifying and analysing government failure. It is important indeed to understand public sector, but while governments in the Low Countries are doing well on average and very well from an internationally perspective, most attention is focused on the errors and mishaps. This article argues for a robust positive perspective on the public sector as a complement to existing research. From a scientific perspective, public administration must set itself the ambition to connect and aggregate existing positive insights even better. From a social perspective, the discipline must prevent the gap from being filled by a wholesale rejection of democratic government or the use of unproven miracle cures. This article elaborates the starting points for Positive Public Administration, arguing that this perspective should be comprehensive, context related, inter-subjective, learning-oriented, and robustly scientific in nature. The article also introduces the other contributions in this special issue, which together give an initial interpretation of positive public administration.

Positive Public Administration (PPA) encourages scholars to examine governance success. The appreciation of successes, however, is not new. During previous decades, awards were bestowed for exceptional performance. We analyse whether two important awards in the Netherlands and Flanders are an expression of PPA. Firstly, we find that successes are interpreted differently: in the Netherlands, one-off, trendy performances are rewarded, while in Flanders the focus is on consolidated results of long-term change processes. Secondly, we see that ‘clean’ success criteria promote a suggestion of ‘control’, whilst public settings are ambiguous and unpredictable. Finally, we conclude that prizes are primarily celebrations; little evidence is found of systematic knowledge exchange, learning and professionalisation.

Performance Budgeting has been introduced to gain greater managerial control over the outcomes and efficiency of policies and their budgets. Strikingly, a growing body of literature has explained that politicians hardly use performance information or only to emotionally judge government performance. We, however, propose understanding the emotional use of performance information as catharsis. Catharsis is the ritual of emotional and moral judging to understand and initiate improvement. Catharsis has been named as an important function of accountability, but has not been researched in the field of Public Administration. We discuss the concept of catharsis in relation to accountability and show that, by using evidence from its role in Dutch parliament, the use of ‘cathartic emotions’ are omnipresent in financial debates, especially when parliamentary enquiries and annual budgets are debated. Based on these findings catharsis should be understood as a much more serious function of accountability by both academics and public officials.

New insights from the field of positive psychology led to the insight that people learn more effectively from positive feedback. Policy evaluation aims to improve public policy programmes through contributing to both accountability and learning. This ambiguous ambition has contributed to a considerable body of research into the impact of policy evaluation. Too often the conclusion is that the outcomes of policy evaluations – which are often negative by nature – are sparsely used by policy makers. This has led to series of improvements in the way we carry out evaluations. First through technical improvements and then by more responsive approaches. Both have not led to the desired breakthrough. Building on a number of positive evaluation studies, we advance a more positive approach in policy evaluation. Focussing on the successes in policy programmes rather than on its failures may contribute to evaluation impact. Consequently, we think a more positive, appreciative approach and using data to find success in policy making is necessary for policy evaluators to be more effective. This article presents practical examples of positive policy evaluations and successful use of data in the domain of policy evaluation.

In several regions in the Netherlands there are declining population numbers. In those regions, administrators, companies and societal organisations often start regional collaborations in order to anticipate population decline and maintain a good quality of life. This is a logical step, but in practice the collaborating partners face challenges. For this article we analysed over a period of eight years the dynamics of cooperation in the Hoeksche Waard, a region in the province of South Holland that is dealing with a decrease in the number of inhabitants. On the basis of the regime model (Stone 1989), and by conducting qualitative research, in this exploratory study we discerned a paradox of regional cooperation in this ‘shrinking’ region: a decline of population numbers is the reason to initiate informal cooperation in networks, but the complexity of the regional agenda leads to the desire for formalisation of the collaborations in formal decision making structures. This formalisation, in its turn, leads to less commitment from the parties and makes cooperation and achieving results difficult, which increases the need for informalisation.

Local authorities expect citizens to fulfil an increasing number of public services. In that context, citizen-based networks are emerging as means to fulfil a variety of public tasks, varying from supporting young entrepreneurs and strengthening social cohesion, to providing local care. In this article, we address the following questions: Which phases do community enterprises pass through in their efforts towards realising a sustainable contribution and how do participation professionals support these phases? To respond to this question, researchers followed seven community enterprises based in Amsterdam over a two-year period. We identified a typology of four development phases, with particular attention to the interaction between external participation professionals and the key persons of community enterprises. The study has practical relevance for governance of citizen participation and also raises important follow-up questions about the role of the local government.