The Dutch central government has a long history in its search to meaningfully present policy effects. One of the instruments that was developed to this end is the Policy Conclusion (beleidsconclusie). This part of the annual report, which has been mandatory since 2013, should provide a judgement for every policy article on its results in the year 2017. To what extent has the Policy Conclusion been successful in its aims? And how do various governmental departments give substance to it? For this article, all policy conclusions that were composed for the most recent reporting year were examined. Among others, our analysis shows that departments differ greatly in their interpretation of what the Policy Conclusion should include, such as the usage of sources and the way in which intended results are (re)addressed. In addition, it was found in the Policy Conclusions that a tendency exists to put a strong focus on positive outcomes.

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.

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.

Positive Public Administration (PPA) encourages scholars to examine governance success. The appreciation of successes, however, is not new. During previous decades, awards were bestowed for exceptional performance. We analyse whether two important awards in the Netherlands and Flanders are an expression of PPA. Firstly, we find that successes are interpreted differently: in the Netherlands, one-off, trendy performances are rewarded, while in Flanders the focus is on consolidated results of long-term change processes. Secondly, we see that ‘clean’ success criteria promote a suggestion of ‘control’, whilst public settings are ambiguous and unpredictable. Finally, we conclude that prizes are primarily celebrations; little evidence is found of systematic knowledge exchange, learning and professionalisation.

Performance Budgeting has been introduced to gain greater managerial control over the outcomes and efficiency of policies and their budgets. Strikingly, a growing body of literature has explained that politicians hardly use performance information or only to emotionally judge government performance. We, however, propose understanding the emotional use of performance information as catharsis. Catharsis is the ritual of emotional and moral judging to understand and initiate improvement. Catharsis has been named as an important function of accountability, but has not been researched in the field of Public Administration. We discuss the concept of catharsis in relation to accountability and show that, by using evidence from its role in Dutch parliament, the use of ‘cathartic emotions’ are omnipresent in financial debates, especially when parliamentary enquiries and annual budgets are debated. Based on these findings catharsis should be understood as a much more serious function of accountability by both academics and public officials.

New insights from the field of positive psychology led to the insight that people learn more effectively from positive feedback. Policy evaluation aims to improve public policy programmes through contributing to both accountability and learning. This ambiguous ambition has contributed to a considerable body of research into the impact of policy evaluation. Too often the conclusion is that the outcomes of policy evaluations – which are often negative by nature – are sparsely used by policy makers. This has led to series of improvements in the way we carry out evaluations. First through technical improvements and then by more responsive approaches. Both have not led to the desired breakthrough. Building on a number of positive evaluation studies, we advance a more positive approach in policy evaluation. Focussing on the successes in policy programmes rather than on its failures may contribute to evaluation impact. Consequently, we think a more positive, appreciative approach and using data to find success in policy making is necessary for policy evaluators to be more effective. This article presents practical examples of positive policy evaluations and successful use of data in the domain of policy evaluation.

Willem Trommel reflects on the ambitions of Positive Public Administration. He observes that Positive Public Administration is at heart the product of a longing for positivist science and ‘real facts’ in public debate, arguing instead that a more radical overhaul of the discipline is required towards Provocative Public Administration.

This article explores how we can gain insight into the quality of local government with the help of the public value perspective. The public value perspective does not evaluate government through generalised standards or benchmarks, but through the judgments of the actors involved in the policy. This approach could do better justice to the unique context of different governments, such as different local governments. The public value perspective, however, is hampered by the competing expectations that actors have of public policy and their generally negative bias towards the government. Based on 71 interviews with local actors in six municipalities, we show how the public value approach does indeed yields many different and critical perspectives, even within municipalities that are considered successful by national experts. However, we also show which connections exist between these seemingly competing perspectives and how sombre judgments about past governance are actually influenced by optimistic ambitions for the future.

Geert Bouckaert reflects on the ambitions of Positive Public Administration within the larger European research agenda for public administration.

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.

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.

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.

Civil servants at the Dutch authorities increasingly make use of behavioural insights in the policy process. These insights are primarily put on the agenda at the level of the national government in the Netherlands. However, they also seem to be particularly useful at the local level. After all, behaviour-conscious policy focuses on behavioural change through the redesign of the direct environments of citizens, and local authorities have a clear view and control over these environments. In the light of this potential, this article explores the current rise and institutionalization of behavioural expertise in local government. The work practices of local behavioural experts are examined on the basis of three dimensions of local government: positioning, practices and politics. The findings show that local behavioural experts are still in an experimental and start-up phase, but at the same time are already working with a wealth of behavioural assignments. In doing so, they deal tactically with scarce resources, resistance and abrasive institutional logics. The article shows that behavioural insights and designs are also promising in local government, that a local administrative landscape of behavioural expertise is already being developed; and that making meters in the field of behavioural expertise calls for several forms of coordination.

To address a range of interconnected food-related challenges, Dutch policymakers have invested in the development of integrated food policy in recent years. This article discusses this development in two parts. The first part contains a detailed description of the main events and lines of thinking that characterized the food policy process. From this description it becomes clear that food policy has been gradually developing towards a separate institutionalized policy domain. In the second part, this development is analysed from a policy integration perspective. This analysis shows that although considerable steps towards strengthened policy integration have been made, the Dutch ‘Food agenda’ does not yet proceed beyond symbolic levels. This particularly shows in the absence of concrete policy goals and in a policy instrument mix that has not been adjusted to strengthen consistency and effectiveness. In addition, the involvement of relevant ministries gradually decreased after the initial stages. The article concludes that the food policy process has arrived at a critical juncture: the next steps of the new government will prove decisive for whether food policy integration intentions will advance beyond the drawing board. Political and administrative leadership are identified as key conditions for such further steps to occur.

Much has been written about the decline of trust in societies: trust in governments and political systems is a popular field of research. Trust of governments in citizens however, is a relatively unknown field. This article presents a research into the trust the Dutch government has in its citizens. By conducting a discourse analysis on policy documents regarding the participation society, the degree of trust was examined. The results show that the government has trust in the capabilities of citizens, but does not trust the intentions of citizens. This results in many control measures, high transaction costs, a fragile base for public cooperation and a disturbed relationship between the government and citizens. In order to gain more trust in citizens the government has to change the way it uses language regarding citizens.

This article investigates the state of affairs of local participation and participation wishes, and its backgrounds. The central question is if those who participate a lot are also those who wish to have more participation or not. It is not possible to simply summarize the developments in time in terms of ‘less and less’ participation and ‘more and more’ wishes. Since the seventies the turnout in municipal elections has fallen (against fluctuations without trend at the national elections) and collective actions for local goals have remained at the same level (against a fall in collective actions for supralocal goals). In 2016 also less people have appeared to participate non-electorally (19% local activists) than electorally (54% turnout in 2014). In addition the support for new opportunities for participation is larger than the actual use of existing opportunities. Political participants are almost as often as non-participants in favour of new opportunities for participation. In line with previous research the authors find several social and political attitudes in support of promoting more opportunities for participation. For participants as well as non-participants it applies that support for more opportunities is promoted by ‘positive’ characteristics (like interest in local politics, worries about the environment) as well as ‘negative’ ones (dissatisfaction with local democracy, disbelief in the responsiveness of councillors).

This article is about how education administrators value complex issues or dilemmas they are confronted with in their governance practices, and which strategies they adopt to cope with them. Professional governance of school organisations was introduced gradually over the past fifteen years, and at the same time governance in education has gained in complexity and raises considerable risks, requiring more time, knowledge and expertise of education administrators. We draw on the theoretical perspective of coping to investigate the potential of education administrators to deal with the complexity, impediments and social and regulatory pressure in their daily practice. Our study consists of a comparative case study of six education administrators in secondary education. Their agency has been researched qualitatively with the help of the hierarchical model of coping strategies of Skinner and colleagues. The results show that the issues and dilemmas education administrators find most complex are about educational innovation and numbers of students enrolled. Education administrators value these issues or dilemmas hardly as threatening, and they adopt various proactive coping strategies to deal with them, such as information seeking or bargaining.

Transparency is said to be paramount for citizen’s trust in (semi-)governmental organizations, such as regulators and supervisory bodies, yet there is little empirical research in this area.
In an experiment we investigated the effect of different forms of transparency on citizen trust in a Dutch financial regulator. Our measure of trust consisted of three components: Competence, Benevolence and Integrity. Two types of transparency were used (rationale transparency and process transparency) in three different scenarios, one positive for the regulator and two negative.
Transparency, and especially when focused on the ‘why’ (rationale) led to slightly more trust by citizens. This effect was most pronounced in the Competence-component of our trust-measure. Interestingly, even being transparent about negative news – i.e. admitting that mistakes were made and focusing on the ‘why’ – does not necessarily decrease trust. In contrast, negative information that focused on the ‘how’ (process transparency) yielded a negative effect on trust.
We conclude that even when the message portrays negative information about the regulator, it pays to be transparent and communicate about it. Information should focus on explaining the rationale and underlying principles of a decision, and less on how the decision was taken.

One of the classic issues in literature on policy evaluation is that of utilization: how can we make sure the results of evaluative inquiry are used more and better? Traditionally, the answer to this question is often searched in improvement of evaluation quality (accuracy, reliability, independence of the researcher) or evaluation processes (more interaction and responsiveness). Although these are and remain crucial elements for any evaluation, the focus remains on the supply side of evaluation. The psychological insight that people tend to learn more from positive feedback and success is not taken into account.
In this article, we ask whether and how a more positive form of evaluation may contribute to a more effective cycle of learning and accountability. What if – instead of failure, compliance, and accountability – the main focus of monitoring and evaluative inquiry would be to identify and foster achievements that were successful and effective? How would such a positive approach look like and how can it help the actual utilization and usefulness of evaluation? On the basis of theory and international case studies the article describes how focusing on the positive elements of policy and/or implementation may contribute to the demand for and utilization of evaluations.