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.

In the relationship between the Ministry of Justice and Security and the Scientific Research and Documentation Center, safeguards to prevent improper influence of research were lacking. In the opinion of the WODC II investigation committee, civil servants were too close to the substantive execution of the investigation, as a result of which the WODC was given too little room for critical investigation. For other ministries and knowledge institutions the question is relevant as to what safeguards are needed for conducting independent research. Rules and procedures are not sufficient for creating and maintaining responsible research practices. It is also important that employees learn to recognize difficult situations, can discuss these with their colleagues, and know how to deal with dilemmas. Other organizations can learn from the WODC issue that they must maintain and recalibrate the formal and professional safeguards for the independence of scientific research. Trust in science stands or falls with independence and soundness in word and deed.

The author discusses the practices, problems and pitfalls research in the biomedical field with regard to conflicts of interests. Medicines are not ordinary products: the exclusive right to prescribe lies with the doctor, and because of the potentially life-saving nature of medicines, their use, price and availability is surrounded by emotions, especially when there is only one medicine available for a serious illness. Nonetheless, these products are marketed by companies that have a primarily commercial interest and, on the basis of those interests, engage in pricing and advertising activities. In the research on medicines, there is close cooperation between the pharmaceutical industry and doctor-researchers, whereby independence is at stake due to the large financial interests and reimbursements. This pushes the design, outcome and publication of research in a direction that is favorable to the pharmaceutical industry, but that is not financially the best direction for society, or medically for patients.

In this article, we propose an in-depth exploration of blank and null ballots in the recent 2018 local elections in Wallonia (Belgium). In the official results, both blank and null ballots are merged together and are classified as invalid votes. After obtaining the authorization to access genuine electoral ballots, we study the votes which were not considered for the composition of local councils in detail. The dataset is a representative sample of 13,243 invalidated ballots from 49 Walloon municipalities. We first describe how many of these invalidated ballots are blank and how many are null votes, as well as the nature of the nulled votes (unintended errors or intentionally spoiled ballots). Second, we dig deeper into the differences between ballots that have been intentionally invalidated by voters (blank votes and intentional null votes) and ballots non-intentionally invalidated. Our results show that most of the ballots (two-thirds) are null ballots and that among them, half are unintentional null ballots. Finally, we show that contextual (socio-demographic and political) factors explain the variations in intentional and unintentional null votes across municipalities.

Even though many municipalities use a variety of means to improve turnout in local elections, citizen participation in local elections is a point of concern in many Western countries, including the Netherlands. Our research question is therefore: How effective are municipal efforts to improve turnout in (Dutch) local elections? To this end, we collected data from three sources: (1) a survey sent to the municipal clerks of 389 Dutch municipalities to learn what they do to improve turnout; (2) data from Statistics Netherlands on municipalities’ socio-demographic characteristics; and (3) data on the turnout in local elections from the Dutch Electoral Council database. Using hierarchical multiple regression analysis, we found that the direct impact of local governments’ efforts to improve turnout is low. Nevertheless, some measures seem to be able to make a difference. The relative number of polling stations was especially found to impact turnout.

This article tackles the particular issue of split-ticket voting, which has been largely overlooked in Belgian election studies thus far. We contribute to the literature by answering two particular research questions: (1) to what extent and (2) why do voters cast a different vote in the elections for the provincial council as compared to their vote in the elections for the municipal council?
The article draws on survey data collected via an exit poll in the ‘Belgian Local Elections Study’, a research project conducted by an inter-university team of scholars.
Our analysis shows that nearly 45% of the total research population cast a split-ticket vote in the local elections of 2018. However, this number drops to one out of four if we only consider a homogenous party landscape at both levels by excluding the numerous votes for ‘local’ lists (which occur mostly at the municipal level). This finding underlines the importance of accounting for the electoral and institutional context of the different electoral arenas in research on split-ticket voting in PR systems. In the Belgian context, split-ticket voting in 2018 also differed between the different parties and regions. Furthermore, it was encouraged by a higher level of education and familiarity with particular candidates. This candidate-centred and strategic voting was matched by party identification and the urban municipal context favouring straight-ticket voting. Other factors such as region, a rural municipal context and preferential voting seemed more relevant to determine voting for local parties than using the instrument of split-ticket votes as such.

Citizens and scholars excel in identifying and analysing government failure. It is important indeed to understand public sector, but while governments in the Low Countries are doing well on average and very well from an internationally perspective, most attention is focused on the errors and mishaps. This article argues for a robust positive perspective on the public sector as a complement to existing research. From a scientific perspective, public administration must set itself the ambition to connect and aggregate existing positive insights even better. From a social perspective, the discipline must prevent the gap from being filled by a wholesale rejection of democratic government or the use of unproven miracle cures. This article elaborates the starting points for Positive Public Administration, arguing that this perspective should be comprehensive, context related, inter-subjective, learning-oriented, and robustly scientific in nature. The article also introduces the other contributions in this special issue, which together give an initial interpretation of positive public administration.

The impact of residualisation on social work has so far hardly been explored. Based on existing literature and recently started empirical research in Amsterdam we analyze several consequences. Residualisation refers to the process whereby urban social housing is strictly allocated to the lowest income groups. What does this concentration of disadvantaged households mean for the role of social workers? Firstly, for community workers residualisation mostly implies a renewed role as instigators of residents’ participation in urban renewal trajectories for social mix. Furthermore community activities are increasingly used to offer safe havens for new and old groups of residents and also to prevent expensive treatments for several residential groups. For social workers focusing on individual support or casework residualisation results in an increasingly complex caseload. Residualisation does not imply extra formation for social work, but rather extra attention for the effortful coproduction of welfare between formal and informal actors. Within this playing field, we distinguish link work as vital for both formal and informal social work. Link work is about establishing vertical and horizontal connections between different worlds, across sectoral, professional or trust gaps. We expect that in areas of residualisation successful urban social work is dependent on strong linking skills.

For a long time, the three governance structures market, hierarchy, and community were regarded as separate entities. The market is based on the price mechanism, the authority mechanism is the basis of the hierarchy, and trust relations characterize the community. As the knowledge economy evolves, there is a shift in thinking about how these governance structures are related. Creating and sharing knowledge are key features of the knowledge economy. However, this knowledge is partly tacit and sharing knowledge is particularly useful among diverse organizations, which are two barriers for sharing of knowledge among organizations.
A new stream of literature suggests that the ability of organizations to combine the three governance structures contributes to their capacity to share knowledge with other organizations. Based on this literature, this article shows what kinds of organizational forms are possible. Besides that, it offer empirical example of the conditions under which these organizational forms evolve as well as how they contribute to organizational innovation.

In the implementation of the Dutch Youth Act, since the so-called ‘transition’ of 2015 under the responsibility of the municipalities, there are three major problems: the municipalities are short of money, the implementation of youth aid is accompanied by high administrative burdens and there are serious quality concerns, especially where different care providers must work together for one client. This article deals with the possibilities of the economic transaction cost theory for realizing improvements through organizing more effective collaboration between municipalities and healthcare providers. Transactions are a ‘forgotten’ cost source. There are three sources of transaction costs: limited rationality, opportunistic behavior and ‘asset specificity.’ In this article the authors analyze twelve problems documented in the literature on youth care from this perspective. This creates a framework from which municipalities can tackle these problems in order to improve the quality of youth care, to keep costs under control and to reduce the administrative burden. In a number of sectors and large projects ‘linking zones’ appear to be a way to increase the trust between players in a chain, so that transaction costs fall. Where poor cooperation between chain partners in youth care is a major cause of the problems, municipalities can make significant gains by establishing linking zones with care providers contracted by them. This article outlines the method in a linking zone.

Singapore and the Netherlands are small, export- and trade-dependent countries that perform excellently in many areas, such as good governance and integrity, policy effectiveness, liveability, innovation, and e-government. At the same time there are clear differences in political culture and history: Singapore has a more authoritarian governance style including limitations in press freedom, freedom of speech, and political activism. Within these contrasting contexts, both countries have introduced and implemented similar public management reforms since the 1990s. The aim of these reforms is to maintain public service excellence in a dynamic environment but the countries make contrasting choices in achieving this aim. This article describes how administrative excellence is organised and pursued in Singapore and identifies five lessons for the Netherlands: (1) Use positive narratives about government often; (2) be nuanced about capping top-level remuneration; (3) enhance the attractiveness of government as an employer; (4) invest in life-long learning; (5) be an authoritative expert amidst horizontalisation hypes.

Since the late eighties, Mexico has experienced profound economic modernisation and political democratisation. However, the corresponding administrative reforms have lagged: professionalisation of the public sector, improvement of public service delivery and development of modern management principles are plagued by a lack of coherence, implementation, and continuity. This can be traced back to several historically rooted and structural characteristics of Mexican public administration, which reproduce vicious circles of low trust and dysfunction. For example, (1) the extreme spoils system maintains a culture of distrust towards civil servants; (2) Mexico’s weak state capacity is a consequence of a lack of collective action, but also further undermines citizens’ trust in government; (3) strong labour unions are a response to poor labour rights, but also uphold a system of capture and confrontation; and (4) corruption is inevitable if cooperation depends on personal loyalties.

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.