Shortly after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a temporary law came into force enabling online deliberation and decision-making by decentralised governments. For the duration of the law, a committee evaluated its operation and implementation. The commission focused on legality, technology and security, and on political-administrative effects, since there were concerns about the consequences of the law in these three areas. This article shows that although no significant legal and technical problems arose, online deliberation did have an effect on the practices of deliberation and decision-making. Online deliberation during the pandemic was not good for local democracy, which was also due to society temporarily going into lock-down. At the same time, online deliberation also appears to have its advantages. In order to reap the benefits of digital deliberation, however, a permanent law that includes hybrid forms of deliberation and technical improvements to online conference systems is needed.

In the Netherlands, the first period of the fight against the corona virus, which lasted from March, 1 until December 1, 2020, can be seen as a unique experiment. During this period, the 25 chairs of the ‘safety regions’ (veiligheidsregio’s), who are simultaneously the major of an important municipality in their region, were authorized for the first time to issue the most essential measures to tackle a national health crisis, partly on the binding advice of the Dutch health minister. The chairs of the safety regions gathered in the so-called ‘safety convention’ (veiligheidsberaad), in which they aimed to nationally coordinate their respective local measures. In this paper, we argue that the involvement of the safety regions provided a structure in which all local office holders in their respective regions (both on the municipal and the safety region level) could co-operate in the nation-wide fight against the pandemic, while at the same time take into account the existing (cultural) differences between the 25 regions.

In this feature authors discuss recent research findings that are of interest to readers of Beleid en Maatschappij.

More and more government organizations are making data public with the aim of promoting innovation and democratic processes. But open data does not always lead to the desired impact. In this study the authors analyze why some organizations are successful in exploiting the potential of open data and others are not. This research uses an ecosystem approach to investigate similarities and differences between four organizations that use open data. This has revealed three factors that promote the ecosystem, namely the influence of other organizations that are also involved with open data such as the motivation for open data, the important role of innovation champions and the utilization of the user perspective. Three barriers have also emerged: the preparation of a suitable case question for open data, the difficult relationship between obtaining capacity and the expected yields and the difference in scale between issues and profitable data sets.

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

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.

Taking Lijphart’s work on consensus democracies as our point of departure, we signal a major shortcoming in Lijphart’s focus being almost exclusively on the political hardware of the state structure, leaving little attention for the administrative and bureaucratic characteristics of governance systems. We propose to expand the Lijphart’s model which overviews structural aspects of the executive and the state with seven additional features of the bureaucratic system. We argue that these features are critical for understanding the processes of policymaking and service delivery. Next, in order to better understand the functioning of the Netherlands and Belgium as consensus democracies, we provide a short analysis of the historical context and current characteristics of the political-administrative systems in both countries.

De narratieve aanpak van evalueren biedt diepgang en verklaring, en vormt daarmee een betekenisvolle aanvulling op methodieken waarin de feitelijke beschrijving van de werkelijkheid en normenkaders centraal staan. De narratieve aanpak is een aanvulling op traditionele methodieken, maar is niet plaatsvervangend.

This article analyses the transformations of the Dutch civil service over the last 15 years, during which numerous cutbacks and reorganizations took place. While existing research predominantly focused on changes in the total number of civil servants, we examine how the distribution of civil servants changed in terms of rank, gender and age. We theorize four methods for shrinking the government apparatus, and for each method, we identify the possible consequences for the composition of the central civil service in terms of hierarchical make-up and of age. Our results indicate that the total number of civil servants only slightly decreased, but the decrease affected differentially the various ranks of the civil service. While at the lower ranks the number of civil servants decreased strongly, at the upper ranks the number actually increased slightly. The number of women in the civil service increased, also in the higher echelons. Regarding the age distribution, we found considerable changes, with the modal age shifting upwards with up to ten years. Altogether, the civil service has become slightly smaller, more gender-balanced, and significantly more senior (both in terms of ranks and age). The results of this study show that it is important for researchers and practitioners to look beyond the trends in the total number of civil servants and explore the deeper changes within the civil service.

This essay describes how municipal councillors can make the difference in the multiple democracy, in which forms of representative and participative democracy touch upon each other. The essay has three parts. The first part addresses the questions: what do you make politics of, and how do you fill in your role as municipal councillor in this multiple democracy? The second part is about the question: where to steer and control in the local interplay? The final part of the essay discusses what forms there are and at what moments they can be used. The key argument of the authors is that municipal councillors can make the difference by: (a) working on social assignments and connecting to these social assignments the administrative and organizational assignment by setting priorities; (b) being responsible for the whole system (for the community and for the municipality); (c) steering on a democratic process on the basis of clear criteria; (d) ensuring appropriate forms per assignment and per policy phase; and (e) thereby also supervising implementation and management.

Electoral campaigning and its financing at the local level have been hardly studied in spite of the growing political significance of municipalities in the Netherlands. Local parties have been barely studied either, even though they gained more than 30 percent of the seats in the local elections of 2014. They have done so without any public subsidy, whereas subsidized national parties can and do support their local branches. This article examines which campaign activities local parties used to attract voters, how these activities were funded, and whether local parties perceived subsidies necessary and desirable. A survey among local parties held just after the local elections of 2014, indicates that their campaigns are by and large a traditional, low-cost affair. They are often not labor-intensive nor technology-intensive, despite the electoral effectiveness of micro-targeting and canvassing. Contributions from local councilors constitute the main source of finance. The survey also shows that transparency of campaign financing can count on widespread support among local parties. They also prefer a level playing field between local parties and local branches of national parties by providing both public subsidies or none, which is an important contribution to the discussion on the current legislative proposals on party financing at the local level.

National officials play an important role in all phases of the EU policy process and are often assumed to be more euro-enthusiastic than other citizens. Yet, thus far systematic knowledge on their views on EU integration is lacking. This study fills this gap through recently collected survey data among Dutch officials (N = 3509). We find first that at least for officials, hard and soft euroscepticism are no gradations on the same scale, but separate dimensions. Second, both sociological and rational choice institutionalism help explain bureaucratic euroscepticism, where the latter seems to have a somewhat stronger explanatory power. Third, officials are on average indeed more euro-enthusiastic than other citizens. However, (a) relatively fewer officials are strongly euro-enthusiastic compared to the general population; (b) the total share of eurosceptics among officials is practically the same as the general population, and (c) significantly more officials report to be ‘strongly eurosceptic’ than among the wider population.

In this article we discuss the influence of external policy advisors on the policy process. In the Dutch context, little is known about the role, function and influence of external policy advisors (like consultants) who are hired on a temporary basis by the government. Based on a survey (N = 378) this study provides a profile of external policy advisors and the nature of their advice work. An interesting result is that external advisors generally conduct process-related policy work, but may also provide policy substance. Furthermore, the article develops an empirically and theoretically informed research agenda as a starting point for additional research.

This article is a critical review of four books: Bok, 2010 (‘The politics of happiness’); Van Campen, Bergsma, Boelhouwer, Boerefijn, & Bolier, 2012 (‘Sturen op geluk’); Diener, Lucas, Schimmack, & Helliwell, 2009 (‘Well-being for public policy’); Ott, 2012 (‘An eye on happiness’). Based on these works, we conclude that the quality of government is highly correlated with the happiness of citizens. In countries with high levels of freedom (economic, democracy, press), low levels of corruption and good public services, people appear to be the happiest. In this way governments can be seen as ‘happiness machines’. However, precise causal relationships need to be further clarified; which policies do improve happiness and which don’t? In this context, education is an important area in which government plays a role; people should leave school with the right set of competencies to be able to adequately cope with life. Governments cannot solve everybody’s unhappiness, though, but are important for creating the right circumstances.

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

In this article the question of bureaucratic autonomy of Europeanised civil servants is addressed. As a test bed we examine the political and administrative steering and control of Dutch national civil servants who are seconded to the European Commission (SNEs). The empirical analysis benefits from survey data (N = 90) and interview data (N = 28), acquired from both present and former Dutch SNEs. Based on this material we argue that despite the formal impossibility of steering and control from the member state, in practice SNEs do fulfill a bridging function between the two levels of governance. This may happen by means of frontloading (either consciously, after instructions from the national administration; or unconsciously, as a result of their national-cultural perspective) and signaling (transmitting strategic information and positions from one level of governance to the other). Although the SNEs' contacts within the Commission are generally preserved after the expiration of the secondment, the intensity of the contacts with other types of actors within the policy network mostly decrease rapidly.