Do citizens with a lower level of political representation evaluate political actors more negatively? While the literature has documented inequalities in political representation, less attention has been given to the extent to which different levels of representation affect citizens’ levels of political trust. We aimed to fill this gap by analysing whether Belgian citizens with a lower level of policy opinion congruence with their party’s legislators have lower levels of trust in the parliament. Our results show that policy opinion congruence has a positive impact on citizens’ political attitudes. Indeed, citizens with policy preferences closer to those of their political representatives tend to have higher levels of trust in the parliament. This rela‍tionship depends on political sophistication: policy opinion congruence affects political trust for most citizens except those who consider themselves to be ‘very interested’ in politics. Citizens with a very high level of interest in politics trust the parliament regardless of policy opinion congruence with their party’s legislators.

In this article I analyse whether differences in formal committee structures affect how parliamentary actors organise their work within them. I compare the allocation of members to specialised committees in the Dutch House of Representatives (Tweede Kamer) and the Belgian Chamber of Representatives (Kamer van Volksvertegenwoordigers/Chambre des Représentants) to test whether committee assignments are given more serious consideration when committees are strong. Despite many similarities, both parliaments differ in their internal institutional arrangements: committees in the Chamber of Representatives are, at least formally, considerably more powerful than those in the Dutch Lower House. The article uses the congressional theories of legislative organisation as heuristic devices to deduce several rationales of the assignment process. The role of parliamentary party groups is highlighted. The results indicate the presence of stable, reoccurring patterns in both parliaments. Even in the House of Representatives, where committees present lower opportunity structures, assignments are given due consideration.

There is much research available about the development and government participation of new political parties (e.g. Pedersen, 1982; Deschouwer, 2008). Scholars show that survival for new political parties is often difficult, as they in general had little time for party building (Bollyer & Bytzek, 2017). Moreover, the expectation for specific types of new parties, mainly anti-establishment parties, is that they pay a high(er) electoral price when participating in government (Van Spanje, 2011). The Dutch case of the local political party of ‘Leefbaar Rotterdam’ (Livable Rotterdam, LR) is a noteworthy exception to this rule. It won the Rotterdam local election in 2002 with almost 35 percent of the votes, only months after its establishment. Until this day, LR remains an electorally large and relevant political party, participating in Rotterdam government twice (2002-2006 and 2014-2018). The article shows that in comparison to some national new political parties, LR succeeded in building a solid party organization and that from a party institutionalization perspective, it can be considered an institutionalized party. Regarding theory, it provides some additions to party building literature, such as the importance of personal relations and the balance between organizational unity and member autonomy.

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

Onder redactie van B. Guy Peters en Guillaume Fontaine verscheen in 2020 bij EE Publishers een handboek over vergelijkende beleidsanalyse. Dit terrein van onderzoek heeft stevige raakvlakken met beleidsevaluatie en beleidsanalyses (als die niet-vergelijkend zijn). Een breed en interessant spectrum van onderwerpen komt aan de orde, onder andere over methodologie(en), de rol van theorieën, diverse inhoudelijke onderwerpen en – voor wie het breed wil interpreteren – zelfs de groei van kennis op dit specialisme.

From 1964 until roughly 1990, political science would become the dominant approach within the (local) administrative sciences in the Netherlands. This central position was taken over from the legal approach. Important impulses from political science for Public Administration came only from the second-generation political scientists: Gijs Kuypers at the Free University Amsterdam, Hans Daudt at the University of Amsterdam and Hans Daalder at the University of Leiden. In their footsteps, a political scientist emerged who, through his contribution to several universities (the Free University, the University of Nijmegen and the University of Twente), had a great deal of influence on the further development of Dutch Public Administration: Andries Hoogerwerf. Two other approaches emerged from political science that were important for the development of modern public administration in the Netherlands, namely policy science and the new political economy (public choice). In this essay the author outlines the input of the main figures from political science, policy science and public choice until 1990 in various stages that are most relevant to Public Administration. These stages take us to various cities and universities in the Netherlands. In addition, we see important cross-fertilization between the institutions through the transfer of people from one university to another. After 1990 however, Public Administration would increasingly profile itself as an independent inter-discipline.

In many Dutch municipalities, a ‘local external (in)formateur’ is deployed after the municipal elections. Local (in)formateurs guide the process of coalition formation. They investigate which political parties and political groups want to work together and try to bring them closer together. They can also play a role in the board formation, such as selecting alderman candidates and allocating portfolios. External (in)formateurs come ‘from outside’. They do not have an official political or official position in the municipality where they do their work at the time of their deployment as informateur. In 2014, forty percent of the municipalities made use of such an external (information) officer. However, we still know relatively little about the work of these local external informateurs, their background and results. The authors try to fill that gap on the basis of a literature study, interviews with stakeholders and a survey among 115 local external informateurs. They also consider the added value of local external (in)formateurs for local democracy. The work of local external (in)formal formateurs can contribute to a stable and well-functioning municipal executive. Nonetheless, they tend to have a rather one-sided socio-demographic profile and the desired party political experience and involvement with the municipality can be at odds with the desired independence and objectivity.

Despite the enduring importance of Lijphart’s work for understanding democracy in Belgium, the consociational model has come under increasing threat. Owing to deep political crises, decreasing levels of trust in elites, increasing levels of ethnic outbidding and rising demands for democratic reform, it seems as if Lijphart’s model is under siege. Even though the consociational solution proved to be very capable of transforming conflict into cooperation in Belgian politics in the past, the question we raise in this article is whether and to what extent the ‘politics of accommodation’ is still applicable to Belgian democracy. Based on an in-depth analysis of the four institutional (grand coalition, proportionality, mutual veto rights and segmental autonomy) and one cultural (public passivity) criteria, we argue that consociational democracy’s very nature and institutional set-up has largely hollowed out its potential for future conflict management.

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 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.

Lijphart (1999) argued that citizens tend to be more satisfied with democracy in consensual democracies than in majoritarian democracies and that the gap in democratic satisfaction between the winners and the losers of elections is smaller under consensualism. Twenty years on since then, this article takes stock of the literature on consensualism and political support. We find considerable ambiguity in the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence provided in this literature. Finally, we speculate on possible reasons for this ambiguity.

Belgium has long been described as a typical case of a consociational or consensus democracy. This article aims at identifying whether political parties in Belgium share the internal characteristics of parties in consensus democracies: passive mass memberships, the importance of purposive and material incentives for joining, and representation of a clear subculture in the social and attitudinal profiles of their members and via overlapping memberships with related organizations. We mobilize longitudinal party membership data and party member surveys conducted in three different time periods. We show that pillar parties still exercise their role of mobilization and representation of societal segments, but these segments tend to become smaller over time. New parties offer alternative options of mobilization and representation, although not always in line with the specific institutional arrangements of consociational democracy.

This article takes up Lijphart’s claim that consensus democracy is a ‘kinder, gentler’ form of democracy than majoritarian democracy. We zoom in on contemporary welfare state change, particularly the shift towards social investment, and argue that the kinder, gentler hypothesis remains relevant. Consensus democracies stand out in regard to the extent to which their political institutions help to overcome the politically delicate intricacies of governing for the long term. We theorize the features that can help to solve the problem of temporal commitment in democracy through processual mechanisms and illustrate these with short case studies of the contrasting welfare state reform experiences in the Netherlands and Belgium.

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.