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.

This article assesses the size and diversity of Belgium’s interest group population by triangulating four data sources. Combining various sources allows us to describe which societal interests get mobilised, which interest organisations become politically active and who gains access to the policy process and obtains news media attention. Unique about the project is the systematic data collection, enabling us to compare interest representation at the national, Flemish and Francophone-Walloon government levels. We find that: (1) the national government level remains an important venue for interest groups, despite the continuous transfer of competences to the subnational and European levels, (2) neo-corporatist mobilisation patterns are a persistent feature of interest representation, despite substantial interest group diversity and (3) interest mobilisation substantially varies across government levels and political-administrative arenas.

This article analyses the visual communication of the Flemish populist right-wing party Vlaams Blok/Vlaams Belang, and investigates whether or not the party uses a specific populist communication style in its campaign posters, whether or not its visual style evolves over time and how the party distinguishes itself from other (right-wing) parties in its use of images. To do this, the image use will be compared with the CVP/CD&V and the Volksunie/N-VA. This use of images will be investigated by analysing election posters from 1991 to 2018. The analysis shows that there is indeed a ‘populist visual style’. These items consist mainly of (negative) metaphors, false dilemmas, caricatures and the use of so-called ‘agonic’ visual techniques.

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.

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

On January 9 2015, Job Cohen held his inaugural speech at the University of Leiden as extraordinary professor at the prestigious Thorbecke chair. His study field was the theory of the municipality as an administrative, political and legal system. The title of his inaugural speech was ‘The fourth D’, in which the first three Ds stand for three different decentralizations of tasks to Dutch municipalities and the fourth D for democracy. In his speech Job Cohen advocated a deliberative form of democracy, because it doesn’t emphasize differences and the exaggeration of differences, but emphasizes what the members of a community have in common. This essay contains the farewell lecture that he held on November 30 2018. In it Cohen says that we are still in the transition of a gigantic operation, the three decentralizations of youth care, social services and labor participation. In many areas, therefore, cooperation at a higher level than the original municipalities is necessary and indeed established. Due to the increased regional cooperation, the House of Thorbecke no longer has such a strong foundation, which has long been the case. It is therefore inevitable, according to Cohen, that the House of Thorbecke receives more than just a new coat of paint. In his farewell lecture he furthermore discusses two kinds of citizen participation. The first kind concerns policy-influencing participation, the second involves self-reliant participation, or do-democracy or civil administration, in which the Right to Challenge is currently in the center of attention. This requires a delicate coordination between those who have and exercise government powers and citizens who want to exert influence on it.

Whereas constitutions establish the institutions of government, human beings actually govern countries, municipalities, and regions. The institutional position of these people may be constitutionally constrained but the people who occupy these positions always have some discretion with regard to the way they fulfil their duties. Either consciously or unconsciously these officials develop their styles of governance. A style of governance reflects a combination of personal traits, institutional constraints, and a genuine set of beliefs with regard to what these duties exactly entail. While some people in a government position believe that a debate in Parliament constitutes the core of their work others may prefer developing policies or meeting citizens. Twenty years ago, observational research conducted in Dutch municipalities led to a set of five coherent beliefs or styles of governance. Over the past two decades, politics in the Netherlands has changed dramatically. The stable pillars that characterized and stabilized the Dutch political system have been replaced by political online and offline swarms, the volatility of the electorate has increased more than in other European countries, and incident driven politics has replaced the ideological and managerial political styles of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In this article we explore the implications of these dramatic changes for the styles of governance in the Netherlands. As recent empirical research is not available yet, we analyse the changes in the Dutch political context to derive a number of implications for the styles of governance.

Lobbying by interest groups and the formation of governments both are established themes of empirical research, but not much is known about their linkage. This article presents an exploratory study of organizations and groups with interests seeking influence on the political agenda at the earliest stage of a governmental life cycle: its formation. From the theoretical perspective of the politics of attention, an empirical study is made of the lobby papers that government informateurs receive from business, non-profitorganizations and ngo’s, public organizations and citizens or citizen groups. By comparing the lobby agenda of these diverse organizations and groups to the coalition agreement, it is possible to draw some preliminary conclusions about whose issues and themes become visible and prominent on the governmental agenda, and whose topics obtain lower priority. This research is a basis for further analysis of the impact of lobbying on the policy agenda.

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

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

This article shows that the economic left/right dimension does not always suffice to understand the social-economic policy positions of political parties. It focuses on social-economic decision-making in the Netherlands in 2012. The increase of the government pension age, which was championed by parties of the left and the right and opposed by parties of the left and the right, is taken as a prime example of an issue where decision-making did not follow the left-right line of conflict. The article continues to show that party policy positions on a number of more important welfare state reforms do not follow the left/right line of conflict, but rather a reform line of conflict that divides parties from the left and the right into pro-European reformers and Eurosceptic defenders of the existing welfare state.

This article studies how the presence of the supported minority government Rutte-I affected patterns of legislative behaviour. Based on the literature on minority cabinets one would expect that during supported minority cabinets parliamentary parties cooperate more often across the division between coalition and opposition than under multiparty majority cabinet rule. Examining almost 30,000 parliamentary votes between 1994 and 2012, this study finds that on a host of indicators of coalition-opposition-cooperation, there was less cooperation ‘across the aisle’ during the Rutte-I cabinet than during any cabinet before it. We explain this with reference to the comprehensive nature of the support agreement as well as the impact of the cabinets’ ideological composition.