Since January 2020, European countries have implemented a wide range of restrictions to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet governments have also implemented democratic compensators in order to offset the negative impacts of restrictions. This article aims to account for the variation of their use between Belgium, the Netherlands and France. We analyse three drivers: the strength of counterpowers, the ruling parties’ ideological leanings and political support. Building on an original data set, our results distinguish between embedded and ad hoc compensators. We find that ad hoc compensators are championed mainly by counterpowers, but also by ideology of the ruling coalitions in Belgium and the Netherlands and used strategically to maintain political support in France. Evidence on the link between embedded compensators and counterpowers is more ambiguous.

The impact of audit office reports has received little attention in the scientific literature. In this article, various forms of impact have been distinguished with the help of Public Administration literature and factors that promote the use of evaluations have been distinguished. This theoretical framework was subsequently used for empirical research into the effect of audit office research. The extent to which the recommendations have had an impact was investigated in 20 Dutch municipalities with the aid of impact reports from audit institutions. Out of 176 publications, 94% of the 1216 recommendations were adopted by the city council. This means that the procedural impact is high. Of the 731 recommendations that could be checked at 17 municipalities, the local audit offices report that 58% had been fully implemented, 19% partially and 15% not or not tackled differently. The three categories of success factors from the scientific literature were visible in the practice of the audit offices. This applies most strongly to impact factors related to evaluation quality, in particular the factors related to communications standards, clear recommendations, timeliness and relevance to the decision maker. As far as research and decision-making factors are concerned, the commitment of the organization and the political climate are the most important factors for audit institutions. Finally, the involvement of stakeholders promotes the impact as a catalyst. The article concludes with practical lessons for promoting the processing of audit reports.

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.

The recent decentralization of many healthcare and welfare responsibilities from the national to the municipal level in the Netherlands was aimed at reducing unnecessary bureaucracy and giving discretion to the professional. However, this is not (yet) fully achieved. Therefore, calls have been made for more purpose-driven organizations. Pro-social rule breaking, which refers to acts of rule breaking motivated by the benefits that this creates for citizens, might be a way to make organizations more focused on their organizational purpose. Since little is known about the antecedents of pro-social rule breaking, this article looks at the possible effects of red tape and supportive leadership on pro-social rule breaking behavior of professionals. Based on a quantitative large-n study of professionals in the social domain, the results show that red tape significantly affects pro-social rule breaking. Stimulating leadership does not affect pro-social rule breaking behavior, which may be caused by the fact that intended leader support is not be perceived that way by the professional. The article concludes with a discussion on the desirability of rule breaking in a public sector context, followed by practical implications and further avenues for researchers.

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

Combatting the coronavirus politicians and policy makers have to continuously make a trade-off between public health and democratic rights. How do citizens’ attitudes towards democracy develop in a pandemic? In this study we test whether changes in the information environment affect citizens’ trust in the local and national government. Moreover, we study whether changes in the information environment are associated with the perceptions about the extent to which democratic processes are under pressure. We address these questions using a five wave panel study in the Netherlands conducted between April and September 2020. We find that during this period media use and political trust decreased. Moreover, Dutch citizens are worried about the effects of the corona crisis on local and national democracy. When it comes to the effects of media use on political trust and attitudes towards democracy, we find that media use has a limited effect on attitudes towards democracy. If anything, consuming news via the public broadcaster has a positive effect on political trust. To conclude, our study provides descriptive evidence about the development of attitudes towards democracy in the Netherlands during a major public health crisis. Dutch citizens are worried about democracy but media play a limited role in amplifying or reducing these worries.

Municipalities play an important role in the Dutch energy transition. Therefore, they are expected to deal both sufficiently and timely with their tasks. The question is whether they have the capacity to do so (governing capacity). This study aims to assess whether improving governing capacity can be used to improve the policy performance. We operationalized governing capacity and built a model to assess the relation between several conditions for governing capacity and policy performance for three domains of the energy transition: built environment, mobility and renewables. We found no direct relationship between perceived governing capacity and energy transition policy output. However, we found relationships between conditions for governing capacity, and the policy output. About 25 percent of the total variance in policy performance could be attributed to population size. This percentage levels up to 55 to 60 percent if the motivation of the local administration, cooperation between municipalities and other governmental organisations and the participation of citizens and businesses are also taken into account. This contradicts the idea that enlarging municipalities is the most important way to achieve a higher policy performance.

From 1964 (until around 1990), political science became the dominant approach within (local) administrative sciences in the Netherlands. This position was taken over from the legal approach. In this period, the concepts of politics, policy and decision-making were central to research and theory. In the period up to 1990, we still see a predominantly administration-centric or government-centric perspective among these political scientists, although we already see incentives from different authors for a broader perspective (the politics, policy and decision-making concepts remain relevant however) that will continue in the period thereafter. This broader perspective (on institutions, management and governance) took shape in the period after 1990, in which Public Administration would increasingly profile itself as an independent (inter)discipline. This essay tells the story of the (local) administrative sciences in this period as envisaged by twelve high-profile professors. The story starts in 1990 in Leiden with the (gradual) transition from classical to institutional Public administration, as is revealed in the inaugural lecture by Theo Toonen. This is followed by eleven other administrative scientists, who are divided into four ‘generations’ of three professors for convenience. In conclusion, the author of this essay argues that there is mainly a need for what he calls a (self-)critical Public Administration.

For administrative sciences in the Netherlands in general and for local administrative sciences in particular 2021 is a special year. It is the year in which our Dutch journal Administrative Sciences (the first issue was published in November 1946) celebrates its 75th anniversary, even though 1947 was the first full volume. But it is also the year in which it is 100 years ago since its predecessor, Municipal Administration, was founded; the first issue was published in January 1921. This means that we can speak of 100 years of having an (academic) journal for local government in the Netherlands. In 2016 we paid extensive attention in an editorial to the start of our Administrative Sciences journal and the men (and a woman) who have worked in it from the very beginning. In this editorial, we therefore draw attention to the men from the very beginning (this time there was no women involvement) of the Municipal Administration journal. It is the first academic journal in the field of local government in the Netherlands, first published every two weeks from January 1921 and on a monthly basis after 1922. The editorial board of the new journal was entrusted to a committee, of which, in addition to the board of the VNG (that is the Dutch association for municipalities) and its secretary, six people were members: Herman Nieboer (after his sudden death on 16 November 1920, he was replaced by Willem Drees in January 1921), Gerrit van Poelje, Willem van Sonsbeeck, Ate Roelof Veenstra, Bastiaan Verheij and Jacob de Wilde. Henri Vos, Pieter Bakker Schut and Jakob Herman van Zanten joined them in 1922.

Dutch mayors are expected to act both as moral person and as moral managers. However, the extent to which council members express such requirements when selecting candidates remains underexplored. To identify possible changes in these expectations following the implementation of a 2016 integrity law, which made the mayor responsible for ‘advancing the administrative integrity of the municipality’, the current article quantitatively analyses 349 vacancy texts for Dutch mayoralty for the time period 2008-2019. Unexpectedly, the authors find that moral person requirements still feature prominently in job advertisements, but that attention is declining. In addition, they find a significant shift from moral-person requirements to moral-management requirements, which indicates that vacancy texts mirror the increasing importance of moral leadership requirements for Dutch mayors. Further, whereas the complex integrity concept requires tailoring to the unique circumstances in municipalities, the authors find that councilors make little effort to provide their own definition of integrity in vacancy texts, which leaves ample room for local customization.

Adriaan Koelma fits in with the list of legal scholars who helped to shape the early history of the (local) administrative sciences in the Netherlands, which was dominated by a legal approach to local administration. In that respect, he was not only a follower of the first Dutch public administration scholar, Gerrit van Poelje, but also his successor. He held the chair in Public Administration in Rotterdam, which Van Poelje vacated in 1933, first as a lecturer and later as a professor (from 1946 onwards). Nowadays, Koelma is mainly remembered for the state commission named after him: he (in vain) advocated the introduction of districts (next to municipalities). He was chairman of this state commission that was installed by Minister Beel on 19 December 1946. He fulfilled his scientific activities in addition to a career in the Dutch civil service. Koelma was a typical ‘self-made man’ who worked his way up from junior employee at the municipal clerk’s office of Dordrecht to municipal clerk and, if only briefly, mayor of Alkmaar. His experiences in the Second World War had a great influence on his later life. Due to a war-related illness, he had to give up the chairmanship of the Koelma Commission in 1947 and in 1948 his professorship and role as mayor of Alkmaar. This war also gave him insight into the pernicious influence of Nazi ideology on governance theory and governance practice. He could not have suspected how hard the German occupier would put the Dutch administration and its servants to the test during his public lesson of 1934, because at that time the Nazi regime in Germany had not yet shown its true nature at the local level of government.

After the European refugee crisis of 2015-2016, many Dutch municipalities took initiative in (re)shaping policies of asylum seeker reception and refugee integration in their own ways. We are witnessing a ‘local turn’ of integration policies with decentralization of responsibilities to the local level of governance. Besides civic integration and socioeconomic integration, social integration of asylum seekers and refugees has been a concern as these groups are often housed in superdiverse and vulnerable neighborhoods. How can municipalities best address the specific problems in their cities? This editorial introduces the four articles that are part of this special issue. We discuss three overarching topics. First, we argue that aside from targeting specific groups and issues, cities should develop mainstreamed policies and provisions to be able to handle future fluctuations and changes in their populations. Second, we observe that in policies aimed at enhancing inter-group contact, earlier immigrant groups are often overlooked. They can play a bridging role in establishing social connections. Third, we highlight the role of urban experiments and living labs in transfer and upscaling of innovative policies.

This article describes the main trends in refugee policies in sixteen Dutch cities, offering an overview of the local approaches to the reception, housing and integration of refugees that the cities rapidly had to develop in response to the increased refugee inflow in 2015. In contrast to other studies that often focus on capital and gateway cities, this article illustrates the variety of local approaches to migration diversity and refugee integration. By illustrating the different positions municipalities take, the article shows the local power to innovate. In this article clusters of cities with comparable approaches to refugee policies are identified to aid cooperation and knowledge exchange between cities, in which the big cities are not necessarily always the relevant partners.

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.

As a response to the perceived legitimacy crisis that threatens modern democracies, local government has increasingly become a laboratory for democratic renewal and citizen participation. This article studies whether and why local party chairs support democratic innovations fostering more citizen participation. More specifically, we analyse the relative weight of ideas, interests and institutions in explaining their support for citizen-centred democracy. Based on the Belgian Local Chairs Survey in 2018 (albeit restricting our analysis to Flanders), the central finding is that ideas matter more than interests and institutions. Ideology is alive and kicking with regard to democratic innovation, with socialist and ecologist parties and populist parties being most supportive of participatory arrangements. By contrast, interests and institutions play, at this stage, a minor role in explaining support for participatory innovations.

This article scrutinises local-national linkage in Belgium to better understand territorial power relations in multilevel parties. Drawing on a survey of local chairs of national parties, it adopts an innovative, informal and bottom-up approach. The descriptive analysis reveals two central axes in the morphology of linkage: scope (downward support and upward influence) and surplus (benefits versus costs). However, (the valuation of) this interdependence appears as a matter of degree. The explanatory analysis therefore probes into the effect of macro- (between environments), meso- (between parties) and micro- (within parties) level factors. It demonstrates that variance is explained by different parameters. For scope, differences between parties trump those within them. For surplus, specific differences between parties as well as within them matter. The answer to our guiding question is therefore variegated: it depends on for what and for whom.