Public expensens on elderly care are paid through the exceptional Medical Expenses Act (Algemene Wet Bijzondere Ziektekosten, AWBZ in Dutch) or the Social Support Act (Wet Maatschappelijke ondersteuning, WMO in Dutch). These expenses have risen 2.8% yearly in the past decennium. This is mainly due to rising cost prices. In the same period the growth in the volume of care was much lower. Especially the volume of home care increased, while the volume of nursing-home care decreased. This is caused by the improving health of the Dutch population. Moreover Dutch elderly can live independently longer, which means that the participation component in the volume nursing-home care decreases. This trend in decreasing participation will continue the coming years, but due to the fast ageing of the Dutch population the care volume will increase somewhat faster than in the past. According to our calculations this leads to an increase of expenses of 3.6% yearly. The population decline will put severe pressure on the number of employees. This will possibly induce a reduction in the available supply of care and an increase in wages in the care sector. As a result the consequences of the population shrinkage on public expenses are unknown.

It is often claimed, that there is a clear relationship between the Dutch experience with the 'pillarization' of national minorities in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and the 'integration' of ethnic minorities in Dutch society by government policies since the 1970s. This claim has never been substantiated though. In this article, the relationship is examined systematically on the basis of an analytical distinction between the 'organizational principles' and the 'rules of the game' of pillarization. It is concluded that traces of the organizational principles and the rules of the game of pillarization can, indeed, clearly be found in the minority policies of the 1970s and 1980s, but that since the early 1990s a process of 'de-pillarization' of government policies has set in. The article shows that in the early twenty-first century the experience with pillarization can hardly be traced in the minority policies.

Governing the Netherlands seems to have become a form of governing by commission. Between 1995 and 2005 Dutch central government installed at least 364 commissions that we were able to identify. Cuts in this phenomenon are often called for by its opponents since commissions are often believed to be a strategic instrument for policymaker to cut democratic corners or slow down policy making processes. Dutch Parliament by motion has even asked government to keep from forming (so many) commissions. Still trends have not changed and new commissions are being formed almost every other week. Apparently there are compelling reasons for forming commissions. In this article we discuss how societal and public context lead to the installation of commissions. Furthermore we argue that installation of a commission can be clearly understood from the motives officials have with its formation. Hiring expertise (60%), independence of members (30%) and creating legitimacy (20%) are important factors regarding these motivations. Timing of commissions within election cycles is strategic: installation shortly after the new administration is effective, as is reporting back before the next elections. As long as politics remains politics calling for less commissions has mostly symbolic value.

Over the past decade many Western local governments have been experimenting with initiatives inviting the participation of ordinary citizens in public policy-making. However recurrently popular the idea of such participation, its practice is usually quite disappointing. Few ordinary citizens take an interest in participating in policy-affairs, and official policy-makers, anyhow, often seem to lack the will or means to contemplate or adopt their policy-suggestions. Hence, policy participation by ordinary citizens has a strong tendency to “evaporate”. In this article I address the question why this might be so. Drawing from the literature and qualitative interviews, I suggest five broad causal mechanisms to account for the phenomenon of participatory evaporation. This phenomenon seems, in fact, so overdetermined that it is hard to think of the conditions under which policy participation by ordinary citizens might work at all.