Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

The most relevant part of a discussion is not what is discussed but what cannot be spoken of. The real taboos are those for which it is taboo to call them taboos. The status quo defines itself as non-ideological while denouncing any challenge to itself as radical. Therefore the column ‘De Blinde Vlek’ frames the framers, politicizes the status quo and articulates what is not heard of.

Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

The word neoliberalism has often been the object of fierce controversy in the Dutch public debate. Prominent intellectuals have equated neoliberalism with extremism and fundamentalism, with some going as far as calling it a ‘totalitarian faith’. The opposite camp in the debate has argued that neoliberalism is largely a self-invented bogeyman of the left, a swearword used by critics to engage in an intellectual witch-hunt. Of course, neoliberalism is not the only social science term suffering from a polemical status. Common concepts such as populism, socialism, nationalism or conservatism have given rise to similar lasting disagreements and comparable accusations of their derogatory use. What does appear to be exceptional about neoliberalism in the Dutch debate, is that very few conceptual and historical studies have been published on the subject. While the word neoliberalism is commonly employed in Dutch mainstream social science, many scholars seem to use the term without much further qualification. This paper explores the controversy and looks for ways to proceed beyond it. Drawing on a recent wave of international scholarship, it outlines an ideational approach to neoliberalism. After tracing the origins of the term neoliberalism, it closes with a preliminary example of an ideational analysis of Dutch neoliberalism.

In this feature authors review recently published books on subjects of interest to readers of Beleid en Maatschappij.

By examining the Belgian case, this article aims to show that methodological nationalism is strongly present in the literature on nationalization of party offer and voting behaviour. In nationalization studies, Belgium is often presented as a typical example of a denationalized country. This is true for the party offer, as it is de facto split between the two language groups since the 1980s, and therefore also voter response at the national level. However, voter response within each separate subnational party system is very homogeneous and shows interesting differences between these party systems that inform us about important electoral dynamics. We argue, on the basis of our results, that rather than stretching the concept of nationalization, it is preferable and justified to treat the concepts of nationalization of the party offer and homogenization of voter response as analytically distinct and not as two sides of the same coin.

Fiscal consolidation confronts federal states with a collective action problem, especially in federations with a tightly coupled fiscal regime such as Belgium. However, the Belgian federation has successfully solved this collective action problem even though it lacks the political institutions that the literature on dynamic federalism has identified as the main mechanisms through which federal states achieve cooperation across levels of government. This article argues that the regionalization of the party system, on the one hand, and the rationalization of the deficit problem by the High Council of Finance, on the other, are crucial to understand how Belgium was able to solve the collective action problem despite its tightly coupled fiscal regime and particularly high levels of deficits and debts. The article thus emphasizes the importance of compromise and consensus in reducing deficits and debts in federal states.

This article examines the economic agenda of the Dutch Freedom Party. It finds that this party mixes left-wing and right-wing policy positions. This inconsistency can be understood through the group-based account of Ennser-Jedenastik (2016), which proposes that the welfare state agenda of radical right-wing populist parties can be understood in terms of populism, nativism and authoritarianism. Each of these elements is linked to a particular economic policy: economic nativism, which sees the economic interest of natives and foreigners as opposed; economic populism, which seeks to limit economic privileges for the elite; and economic authoritarianism, which sees the interests of deserving and undeserving poor as opposed. By using these different oppositions, radical right-wing populist parties can reconcile left-wing and right-wing positions.

De manier waarop vraag naar en aanbod van arbeid bij elkaar komen, is met de komst van het internet en sociale media drastisch veranderd. Dit brengt kansen met zich mee: werkgevers kunnen zich bij de werving veel directer op potentiële werknemers richten en zijn niet meer gebonden aan de doelgroep van bijvoorbeeld een dagblad. Het geeft echter ook risico’s, omdat het tot uitsluiting van groepen kan leiden. De positieve keerzijde van deze technologische medaille is dat algoritmes en big data weliswaar nieuwe manieren van discriminatie in de hand werken, maar dat ze tevens kunnen worden ingezet om deze discriminatie te traceren en te bestrijden. In dit artikel worden beide zijden van de medaille toegelicht.

Evaluations of EU legislation can fulfill a key role in the European policy process. They can provide the knowledge base required for political accountability towards the electorate, and form a basis for the improvement of existing legislation. This article introduces a research agenda in the realm of the ex-post evaluation of EU legislation, which comprises two research lines. The first strand comprises research into ex post legislative evaluations conducted by the European Commission. This research is innovative, because EU policy researchers so far have barely touched upon evaluation, as a final and important stage in the EU policy cycle. By assessing evaluation critically, we can ascertain to what extent the EU’s ex-post evaluation system is more than an instrument, aimed at increasing the EU’s legitimacy. The second research strand is own evaluation research, focusing on the role of European administrative networks- intergovernmental structures that have been established to improve the implementation of EU legislation by the member states. By critically evaluating the functioning and effectiveness of these networks, I hope to be able to find out whether and under what conditions these network structures are more, than the sum of their national parts.

With her chair in urban development management, Ellen van Bueren investigates policy, governance and management issues. Cities, as economic and cultural centres in our society, are major consumers of resources. They not only contribute to problems such as climate change, but also experience the risks and consequences thereof. Technological solutions to these problems are difficult to implement. They require larger-scale system changes, or encounter resistance. Making cities sustainable not only requires technical solutions, but also institutional innovation. A socio-technical-ecological system approach to cities shows the coherence and complexity of issues. Issues play on multiple scales, are cross-sectoral, and require an interaction of citizens, companies, and governments. Moreover, the playing field between these groups of actors is changing rapidly, technological empowerment in particular has made the citizen a much more equal player alongside the government and business. Existing instruments and approaches are not sufficient to approach sustainability issues. To identify and address these issues, cooperation between science and society is necessary. Multi- and transdisciplinary learning environments enable researchers and students to identify issues, to answer questions and to try out solutions together with stakeholders. Such environments are indispensable for the development of sustainable cities.

In his inaugural lecture entitled ‘From Pillars to Bubbles: The future of consensus governance in a globalized society’, Caspar van den Berg examines the consequences of economic and cultural globalization for the model of consensus governance that defined Dutch public administration for most of the 20th century. In doing so he presents an expansion and refinement of the Lijphartian model of consociationalism, and indicates which four factors supported consensus governance in the pillarized period, and how each of them has suffered erosion as globalization proceeded. It has become increasingly visible that globalization has differentiated effects for different groups in society, but also for different types of regions: booming regions benefit greatly from globalization, shrinking regions face major challenges. By combining recent insights from public administration, sociology, political science, economics and social geography, a new social order emerges, consisting of bubbles that are distinguished along socio-economic and territorial lines. These developments cause friction with regard to representation and decision-making at national, regional and local level. These are the themes on which the research within the Chair of Global and Local Governance will focus in the coming years.

Increasing demands and competing values force public organizations to introduce new organizational forms that veer away from rigid bureaucratic structures while remaining in control. How do public managers and their employees deal with the dilemmas that these decentralized and organic ways of organizing entail? On the one hand it must be prevented that public managers fall back too quickly on structures that rely on control and formalization, while, on the other hand, they themselves as managers are still primarily held accountable based on those bureaucratic principles. New organizational forms also assume that leadership is shared and distributed. This not only asks for a higher degree of self-management of employees, but also requires from formal leaders that such behavior is supported and encouraged. In our research and teaching on these changes in public organizations, we work closely with practice. That too is a matter of balancing, this time of public engagement with scientific independence.