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.

In administrative practice as well as in administrative science administrative innovation is a much desired good. In this article the author makes an attempt to describe the good, or the better, that can be pursued with administrative innovation, much sharper than has been done in the past. The result is a substantive framework for qualifying and evaluating administrative innovations. The article arises from a special interaction research, that started with a question from administrative practice (about the leading principles for administrative innovation in the Dutch municipality of Breda) and ended in a confrontation between desiderata from administrative practice on the one hand and foundations from administrative science on the other hand. Finally, these six leading principles emerged out of the investigation: responsiveness, productivity, involvement, counter-pressure, creativity, and good governance. The author also discusses how the resulting framework can be used and understood. The framework is robust because it not only is theoretically (the literature on governance and democratic innovation) inspired and founded, but also recognizable and manageable for administrative practice.

The anniversary issue of this magazine (Reussing, 2016/4: 71-101) contained an essay with a short history of the (municipal) administrative sciences. This postscript contains a number of corrections, clarifications and additions to this essay, in chronological order. Examples are the inherently Fabian vision on socialism by one of the pioneers alderman Floor Wibaut, the importance of Jos (not Joop) van der Grinten in the early period (next to the founder of public administration in the Netherlands, Gerrit van Poelje) and the later prime minister Willem Drees as the successor of Herman Nieboer as member of the editorial board in 1921 of the first magazine in the field of ‘Municipal Administration’.

This essay contains a short history of the municipal and other administrative sciences in the Netherlands. This history is divided into seven lives. Each life has its own specific characteristics and approaches. The story starts in 1914 with the dissertation of Gerrit van Poelje and the aldermanship of Floor Wibaut (for the Dutch Labour Party) in Amsterdam. Nevertheless, the authors make a plea to view 1921 as the actual starting point, because it is the year of the introduction to municipal administration written by Van Poelje and the first Dutch academic magazine on municipal administration (‘Gemeentebestuur’). This means that we can prepare for the celebration of 100 years of (municipal) administrative sciences in 2021. A great challenge for all universities, but certainly for the Public Administration programme of the University of Twente, which is now celebrating its 40^th anniversary. The challenge is to work on current topics such as the relationship between public administration and technology in smart, sustainable and resilient cities.

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.

Because of the blurring of the European internal borders, combating crime is demanding closer cross-border collaboration between police forces. For that reason, the Dutch police have expressed the objective that dealing with cases with an international component should be an integral part of the job for every police officer. This study focuses on the attitudes of Dutch police officers regarding cross-border policing, and seeks to determine which factors have the greatest effect on those attitudes. This attitude approach contrasts with more traditional, top-down approaches, by shifting the focus to micro dynamics on the individual level. The methods chosen for addressing this research objective consist of semi-structured interviews and observations. The results show that the current attitude of Dutch police officers is mainly determined by the extent to which they have had to deal with international issues in their daily work. Although strong organization-wide attitudes towards cross-border policing are not likely to arise, much could still be gained by facilitating cross-border experiences and making more coherent efforts at socialization.

In recent years, European networks of national regulators and supervisors have emerged in a variety of policy fields. These networks are seen as a way to coordinate national implementation and enforcement of EU legislation in situations where centralization of these activities at European level is undesirable or politically infeasible. This article explores whether such networks indeed lead to a higher level of coordination between the member states. The authors do so by comparing four directives (two in the field of financial market supervision and two in the field of environmental policy) the implementation of which was coordinated within European networks. The results of this study show that coordination is strongest for those directives where the interdependence between national supervisors is greatest and national supervisors thus have a direct interest in coordination. This implies that European regulatory networks are only an effective form of coordination for issues involving strong interdependencies between national supervisors.

The EU is one example of how national states try to manage transnational problems. Countless national civil servants meet in EU working groups and committees with representatives of (non-governmental) organisations to exchange information, harmonise policies and regulations, and decide on implementation. To what extent and in which way do Dutch civil servants participate in these networks? How are their activities steered by politicians? One of the main conclusions of this study is that public policymaking within highly Europeanised departments is highly embedded within these transnational government networks, whereas policymaking within weakly Europeanised departments is to a substantial degree shielded from these government networks for reasons of, among others, the protection of national sovereignty of the Member State in their field.

A large number of Dutch policy areas is governed by institutionalized European policy networks and European laws and rules. Various forms of multi-level governance have emerged that were seemingly unforeseen at the time when the field of European integration studies was preoccupied by the fierce debates between intergouvernmentalists and supernationalists. Nevertheless, the field has hitherto given little attention to how europeanisation has affected national civil service systems. This article kicks off this special issue with an overview of the recent literature on the effects of Europeanisation on national civil service systems.

This article is the introduction to this special issue in which the Europeanisation of Dutch polity, politics and policy forms the central focus of attention. The main question we address in this special issue is to what extent the Netherlands has changed under the influence of processes of Europeanisation. This article first discusses the state-of-the-art Europeanisation literature; then it sets out to discuss four problems with this literature. Based on the insights generated by the contributors to this special issue, the authors conclude that for a better understanding of processes of Europeanisation, the EU should no longer be seen as an actor, but rather as an (cluster of) arena(s) in which a variety of actors (member states, EU institutions, interest groups, et cetera) are trying to achieve their political goals.

Over the last decades, the number of European Union member states has significantly increased, resulting into a reduction of the relative formal power of the Dutch government. Improving Dutch influence in Brussels is therefore an important topic on the agenda of public administration scholars and advisory boards. Using experts at the various stages of the EU policymaking process is one option to increase the influence in the EU. This article evaluates the effectiveness of this strategy concerning one of the most complex and most controversial public policy issues in the history of the European Union: the revision of the EU's chemical policy (REACH). The article demonstrates that the 'expert strategy' has been successful in this case. However, the effectiveness of this strategy comes under pressure if the trend towards core departments will continue.

This article analyzes the attention to democratic performance and the functioning of public administration by governments in the Netherlands. The views of national governments on these matters have not been mapped systematically. Through a content analysis of all annual Dutch Queen's speeches between 1945 and 2007, which is part of our broader research on the national politics of attention, we analyze the pattern of attention for democracy and public administration. The theoretical perspective used is the model of policy generations. Our findings show that governmental attention for the functioning of public administration emerged in the 1960s and since then went up and down. The time intervals in which agenda changes occurred often were longer than the duration of individual governments, although some governments contributed strongly to a change in attention and tone. Attention not only showed rise and decline, also the emphasis on efficiency, long term planning, and democratization shifted considerably from one period to the next. This empirical pattern matches for the most part the theory of policy generations, which predicts a fixed sequence in policy emphasis. In addition to general cultural driving forces central to this theoretical model, we conclude that political and institutional conditions contribute to a better understanding of the pattern of political attention.

This article explains Belgium’s European policy regarding the CAP reforms of 1992 (MacSharry Reforms) and 2003 (Mid Term Review). It addresses the question whether this policy has changed and, if so, what the conditions of policy change are. We argue that Belgium has a two-track policy regarding the CAP reforms. The first track has a conservatist content, stating that Belgium is not in favour of the proposed reforms. The second track is a the more reformist one, given the untenability of the CAP in the light of the simultaneous global GATT, WTO and/or enlargement negotiations. It is argued that the political colour of the Agriculture Minister influences partly the first track, while the relative importance of the global negotiations over the CAP reform negotiations affects the second track. Moreover, we conclude that the involvement of the Flemish and Walloon Region has not led to a deadlock in the internal policy-making process in Belgium.