Citizens are being activated to organize activities in asylum centres in both the Netherlands and Belgium. That way, asylum centres are expected to become better integrated in the local context of a municipality or neighbourhood. This ideal of citizenship does not stand on its own. The policy object to integrate asylum centres in the local context has parallels with broader societal and academic discussions about citizen participation and active citizenship. The object, however, is now the asylum seeker. In this article we research how voluntary work in two asylum centres takes shape and how policy could support voluntary activities better. A comparative interpretive policy analysis of two asylum centres in Amsterdam and Brussel shows how voluntary work is stimulated by policy, how these policies are implemented locally, and how they are experienced in daily practices of volunteers and professionals. The cases reveal stark differences, but exactly those contrasts lead to important lessons. We show that because of this policy, the asylum centre is often functioning as a community centre, that integration can be strengthened by volunteers, but we are also critical when voluntary activities are driven by an ideal picture of the ‘good asylum seeker’. There is a risk that the societal responsibility for integrating and engaging asylum seekers in the local context is pushed on the shoulders of unpaid volunteers and that activities are exclusively for one group. That is why we conclude that professional support and financial resources are crucial to implement the policy ideal of active citizenship in asylum centers.

The term ‘second-order election’ indicates some elections are less important for citizens than national elections. This article investigates to what extent that applies for the Dutch elections of the municipal council. The research builds on literature about the second-order nature of the local elections in the Netherlands. The authors focus on the question to what extent the Dutch elections of the municipal council are second-order elections, by comparing voting at local and national elections in different ways. They compare four aspects of local and national voting: the turnout, the underlying factors that explain the turnout, the factors that explain voting for local parties, and the national or local character of the voting motives at the municipal elections in 2014. The results do not give a clear answer to the question to which extent municipal elections are locally oriented. The four different angles all deliver ambiguous patterns. So municipal elections indeed partly have a second-order nature as previously argued and shown. Nevertheless, we must not underestimate local affinity and political involvement. The fact that some of the citizens are interested in local politics, local parties and in local election electoral programmes is pointing out a local political dynamics.

This article examines who ‘21^st century public managers’ are and which skills and roles they have to master to function effectively in the 21^st century. Based on a large scale analysis of literature and years of interaction with senior practitioners, seven key 21^st century demands for public managers are identified, each of which creates dilemmas as well as opportunities. 21^st century public managers utilize a combination of traditional and new roles, competencies, and values to turn demands into opportunities. The article concludes with implications for public administration research and education.

For this article, part of a series on the future of the discipline in the Netherlands, the author has talked to ten newly appointed professors in the field of public administration. We discussed their background, how they see their role and position within university and society and how they view recent developments in our field of study and our discipline. The young professors share their view on how our discipline could and should develop and what their role will be in this process.

In 2015, Dutch local governments have become responsible for youth care, social welfare, employment and income assistance programs, as a result of decentralization. Many municipalities have set up service delivery networks and community teams, in which they collaborate with healthcare providers and civic organizations to build integrated care services. It is assumed that these networks will improve outcomes in terms of enhanced people’s self-reliance and healthcare cost control; by operating close to citizens they are in a position to know the client, activate a client’s social network and mobilize specialized professional expertise if necessary. However, a comparative case study of 26 emerging local networks in the Arnhem area indicates that healthcare providers use the networks mainly for presentation purposes in an effort to secure business continuity, that the role of local governments is fuzzy, and that citizen participation only thrives when actively encouraged in a climate of trust.

Populism is usually studied by investigating the political discourses of parties considered to be populist. In contrast, this paper attempts to measure the support for a populist attitude among adolescents and young adults (age 14 to 30) in Flanders (N = 2618), the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. This paper answers two research questions: (1) Which adolescents and young adults support the populist attitude and which are the core elements of populism that get the most support? (2) To what extent are adolescents and young adults who support the core elements of populism willing to be politically engaged? The results show that: (1) the support for the populist attitude is widespread among young people in Flanders, and (2) the relationship between a support for populism and political engagement is nuanced. Implications of the support of the populist attitude for democratic participation are discussed.

Citizens’ initiatives are the focus of public attention as part of the popular ‘do-democracy’ (associative democracy). However, it is not clear to what extent citizens are able to shape self-organization in a sustainable manner, what the important factors in this respect are and if citizens’ initiatives are the sole preserve of a better educated group of citizens. Through a secondary quantitative analysis of 56 citizens’ initiatives, this article offers an empirical contribution to answering these questions. The authors explore the effects of three possible factors on the sustainability of citizens’ initiatives: the network structure of the citizens’ initiative, the organizational design of the initiative and the revenue model. They show significant relationships between the organizational design of citizens’ initiatives and their sustainability. They also show a relationship between the network structure of these initiatives and their sustainability: initiatives that develop into a fully connected network or a polycentric network are more sustainable than initiatives with a star network. The personal characteristics of the initiators show a dispersal in age, descent, gender and retirement. Relatively speaking, many initiators have a high level of education: 80% has a higher professional or university education. But there are no significant relations between these personal characteristics and the sustainability of citizens’ initiatives.

In co-production processes, citizens and professionals both contribute to the provision of public services and try to enhance the quality of the services they produce. Although government offers several opportunities for co-production, not all citizens decide to actually take part. Current insights in citizens’ individual motivations offered by the co-production literature are limited. In this article, we integrate insights from different streams of literature to build a theoretical model that explains citizens’ motivations to co-produce. We test the model using empirical data of Dutch neighborhood watches.

The involvement of citizens in discussions about policy arrangements has been growing in the past decades. These forums of decision-making often provoke criticism because of a so-called ‘lack of representativeness’. Often a small group of active citizens takes the lead and decides which problems have to be dealt with. Some active residents primarily focus on improving the neighbourhood, regardless of whether their activities have everyone’s consent. This raises many questions related their representativeness. Do these participants form an adequate cross-section of the population? Are they speaking on behalf of others? Maybe passive citizens feel fine with the opinions of active citizens and agree that a small group of citizens is taking the lead. In this paper these active citizens are viewed as ‘trustees’: informal representatives who take responsibility to look after the neighbourhood’s interests, expecting that passive residents would support their efforts. The paper has two central questions: First, which ideas do active participants have about representation and representativeness? Second, in what respects can active citizens be characterized as ‘trustees’? In the theoretical part we contend that the notion ‘trustee’ may function as a theoretical framework to understand present-day citizen participation. In local policy networks many informal representatives express views and interests that are recognizable for many citizens. They are trusted, as long as their activities can be checked. The second part of the paper focuses on three projects of citizen decision-making within local safety policies (The Dutch cities Amsterdam, Deventer and Rotterdam). Within these projects, participants prioritize what kinds of activities and interventions police officers and other frontline workers should carry out. A main finding is that many active citizens function as contact persons who are continuously available for other residents. They do not wish to speak ‘on behalf’ of others but they are bestowed – often reluctantly – with the role of representative, as they demonstratively express neighborhood interests (‘clean, intact and safe’). Their reputation seems to be decisive.

Putnam (2007) claims that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods, residents of all ethnic groups tend to ‘hunker down’. Solidarity and trust are lower, mutual help and cooperation rarer, friends fewer. Various studies in the United States found a clear correlation between diversity and cohesion, and also for many different dimensions of social cohesion. Whether this finding also holds in other (European) settings is the subject of hot and unresolved debate. Specifically, this article addresses the question whether living in an ethnically diverse setting has negative consequences for social cohesion in the Netherlands as well. To further the debate, this article pulls apart various contexts and various dimensions of social cohesion. This article examines the relationship between ethnic diversity (in socio-graphically defined neighbourhoods) and four dimensions of social cohesion (trust, informal help, voluntary work and neighbourhood contacts) for the 50 largest cities in the Netherlands. We conclude that the Putnam hypothesis holds only to a limited extent in the Dutch context. The only aspect on which ethnic diversity has a negative effect is the degree of contact in the neighbourhood.

In citizens’ initiatives (CI’s) citizens themselves take action to solve problems in their community. Many Dutch municipalities have adopted policies to facilitate CI’s. This raises a number of issues. For example who are involved in such initiatives? And, which problems are likely to be addressed? Such questions are pertinent, because for other forms of civic participation research has demonstrated that privileged social groups are overrepresented. We have compared groups of citizens who are actively involved in CI’s with less active citizens. It is demonstrated that in keeping with previous findings privileged social groups (e.g. high income and well educated people) are overrepresented amongst the more active citizens. This is true for both individual and collective neighbourhood initiatives. However, we did not find an overrepresentation of males amongst the activists. In answering the second question, we have looked at the concerns and worries of the citizens. There is no evidence of systematic differences in the problem definitions of more and less active citizens. This mitigates problem of the social selectivity in civic participation: if citizens agree about the issues to be addressed, who cares about who does the job, provided that someone is willing to do it?

In recent years the Dutch welfare state has invested substantial sums of money in activation of citizen’s initiatives in deprived neighbourhoods. As a policy concept citizen’s initiatives refers to enhancements by citizens to the quality of life in their neighbourhood. Is this activation policy productive or counterproductive for citizen participation? This question is answered by analyzing the representativeness of the activated citizens, the nature of their initiatives, the type of relations they develop with institutions, and whether they develop more competences due to their initiative(s). Our findings indicate that the activated citizens are more often female, below 50, lower educated, and 40 percent is migrant, which makes them more representative than the participation elite (male, 50+, white, and higher educated). They form a new vanguard that activates many participants through initiatives that focus on connecting people and on social problems such as anonymity, isolation and nuisance. Many contacts with professionals contribute for them to a partnership relation geared toward cooperation instead of consumerism or dissatisfaction. Also these citizens develop democratic, bureaucratic and social competences as well as social reflexivity and empathy for other citizens and institutions. We conclude that activation of citizen’s initiatives has positive effects on citizen participation.