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.

The Anthropocene offers a narrative to rethink the full range of present-day institutions. The urgency, complexity and scope of the ecological challenges that are upon us provide important challenges. Traditional institutions may be up to the task or be able to adapt to the new challenges, but likely new institutional perspectives will be required. The idea of ‘ecological reflexivity’ is helpful to critically explore some new and important institutional features for the Antropocene: recognition of the non-human world and its voices, reflection upon what works and upon what can be imagined, and response in terms of new practices and functions. We explore these features and offer some examples of new institutions.

The concept of self-reliant citizens reflects an ideology of citizenship that is multiple and flexible. It could be regarded as a ‘plastic’ word, malleable and adjustable according to convictions, needs and purposes. This study shows the importance of considering the way in which ideological views on citizenship are transferred, adjusted and enacted in an organizational context. On the basis of a case study at the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (DTCA), we contribute to knowledge on the way processes of framing interrelate on micro, meso and macro levels. We found that frames on self-reliance are enacted in a way that tensions and dilemmas are neutralized or reduced. In a dynamic context of conflicting goals and limited resources, DTCA-employees create meanings of self-reliance which legitimate practices and policies. By doing this they reproduce both organizational and social perspectives. Accounts of citizenship play an important role in this process. Self-reliant citizens are presented as active and responsible. The need of help is imagined as a normal and yet an atypical situation. This study promotes attention to the possibility that organizational systems reproduce perspectives in a way that alternative views remain unnoticed, whereas organizational choices are silently accepted as natural facts.

In the Netherlands good citizenship has become a topic of increased importance on the government agenda since the murder of Pim Fortuyn. The author assesses the effectiveness of the Dutch citizenship policies within the context of the broader policy framework of the so-called participatory society (participatiesamenleving) or do-democracy (doe-democratie). The evaluative analysis consists of two parts. In the first part the changing ideas concerning good citizenship are identified as well as the normative assumptions that are at the basis of Dutch citizenship policies. In the second part, the potential of current policies, and in particular the ideas that gave rise to creating a new social contract between government and society are assessed. To this end some key aspects of the new contract thinking of the Dutch government are contrasted with the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The findings show that the current strive for tangible agreements on citizen behavior and civic duties is at odds with the main principles of classic contract theory. This leads to the conclusion that the new contractualism that is at the basis of the Dutch citizen policies should rather be seen as a threat to a stable society than as a building block for good citizenship.

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.