In the private sector, user innovation is used to develop innovations that better fit the needs of customers. In the public sector, interest for citizen innovation is also on the rise and new information and communication technologies seem to offer a great potential for accessing the power of citizens. At the same time these technologies offer another potential value: they can turn citizens into data sources. This data can offer governments crucial insights and may form the basis for datadriven innovation. Innovating with citizens in both different ways seems to offer great potential for broadly supported issues such as urban sustainability. This article develops a framework for studying these new developments and presents explorative research in three cities (Curitiba, Glasgow en Utrecht). The research shows that cities make different choices in their use of new technologies to innovate with or for citizens.

In recent years, attention has increasingly been focussing on the quality of local democracy. Through the transfer of central government tasks to the municipalities, the importance of local government for citizens in the Netherlands has increased. This also places higher demands on the way local democracy functions. For various reasons, it is not easy to meet these demands. The debate on the quality of local democracy can be reduced to two basic questions: what is local and what is democracy? Instead of answering these questions, the authors of the article (editors of this new series) demonstrate what knowledge is needed to do this. They outline broadly the agenda for a local democratic audit, for which this article is an introduction. After a short theoretical discussion of the importance of local democracy, the authors point out those knowledge gaps that still exist in their opinion. They do so on the basis of current research. After identifying the key relations in local democracy, they present an agenda for further research.

Is local democracy in the Netherlands equipped for its mission? There is confusion and disagreement about the answer to this question. How people assess existing democratic practices is strongly influenced by one of the three main perspectives: representative democracy, participative (deliberative) democracy or ‘do-democracy’ (associative democracy). But to be able to have this discussion in the first place, empirical knowledge is required about the state of democracy at the local level. In this article (apart from the introduction, the first in a series on the local democratic audit) the authors bring together the available research data and organize these data with the help of David Easton’s system model: from input of citizens and civil society via throughput to output and finally feedback again in the political system. The research presented offers some insight in the state of local democracy, although it is not possible to give a final assessment. That depends on the perspective on democracy chosen, but it is also not possible because of the fragmented and incomplete nature of the research on local democracy in the Netherlands. The authors advocate contributing to these discussions with more empirical knowledge. The overview in this article shows that there is work to be done in this respect.

Central concern of this article is tracing back how the making-responsible of citizens takes shape within Dutch speeches from the throne, government statements and reports of the Dutch Social and Cultural Research Institute (SCP) ever since the 1960s. The Dutch participation society, a term much discussed ever since mentioned in the 2013 speech of the throne, is often associated with a withdrawing government and a coming to end of the welfare state. At the same time, according to several authors, the notion of a withdrawing government that operates within a network of multiple equal actors has brought along the need for a widening of the government’s repertoire of action. This has been characterized as making-responsible citizens on conditions of the state. It has raised doubts about true government-withdrawal and authors have related it to the dominance of neo-liberal thinking ever since the 1990s. Applying an analysis framework derived from discourse analysis, it is made tangible in this article how within political discourse beginnings of the making-responsible of citizens can be traced to the 1960s, more than thirty years earlier than expected. It is argued that this longer history makes a plea for encouraging the political dimension of citizenship all the more important.

In the 1990’s, the Dutch social democrats were trailblazers of what became known internationally as the politics of the Third Way, a new middle course between social democracy and neoliberalism. From the start, the Dutch Third Way distinguished itself from its Anglo-Saxon counterparts by its implicit character. The Dutch social democrat party (Partij van de Arbeid, PvdA) never fully embraced the Third Way and has sought to downplay the idea of a break with traditional social democratic thinking, combining Third Way practice with more classical social democratic rhetoric. The resulting political ambiguity, this paper argues, is at the centre of the present identity crisis of the social democrat party. Even though Third Way ideology has at times been declared dead, the range of attitudes, strategies and policy proposals that were introduced under its banner, still play a vital and prominent role in Dutch politics. While in the UK and the US, communitarianism was from the very beginning a defining feature of the Third Way, in the Netherlands this only came to the fore in 2012 under the leadership of Samsom and Asscher, and in the plea for a participation society under the Rutte II government. Leading us to conclude that the reports of the Third Way’s death are greatly exaggerated.

Bedrijven en andere organisaties ontvangen vaak veel enquêtes en klagen over de lastendruk hiervan. Tevens dalen responsaantallen en zijn er zorgen over de kwaliteit van de respons. In dit artikel wordt beschreven wat er gedaan kan worden om de motivatie van bedrijven en organisaties, en hun respondenten, te verhogen om daarmee bij organisatie- en bedrijfsenquêtes de responsaantallen en de responskwaliteit te verbeteren.

Local authorities know for some time from experience with partnerships with local communities in the area of sustainable development that the urgency of climate change increases and that citizens develop into an equal partner. The convergence of these two motivations asks for an innovative way of acting, in which the performance of local authorities is a crucial factor for the ultimate success of local sustainable energy projects in which citizens are actively involved or will be involved. This article exposes the ways in which local authorities innovate with policy for the support of active citizenship in the production of locally generated sustainable energy. The article also explores the barriers that arise. The authors analyse two cases on different levels of government; ‘The Energy-workplace’ (in the Dutch province Fryslân) and ‘The Armhoede sustainable energy landscape’ (in the Dutch municipality Lochem). The cases show that policy innovations crystallize as well at ‘arm’s length’ distance as in the direct sphere of influence of the (local) authority. However, innovation takes place by the grace of the space in the existing institutional framework and the political (and administrative) system. Formal guidelines (like policy or regulation), persons, and informal practices of the traditional policy implementation may hinder a productive interaction between (active) citizens and government.

Elections are routinely investigated with a focus on the way in which winners or losers of the elections are different in their attitudes towards the political system. There is no previous research on the general impact of participation in the electoral process on support for the political system. In this study, we hypothesize – based on the procedural fairness theory – that participating in elections raises the voter’s political trust, irrespective of the result of the party s/he voted for. Furthermore, we expect this impact to be largest for voters with the lowest level of internal political efficacy. These expectations are investigated using the Belgian election panel (2009-2014) study, observing political trust before and after the elections in two consecutive electoral cycles. The results provide support for all proposed hypotheses, highlighting the importance of general participation in elections for democratic legitimacy.

Een lerende overheid heeft behoefte aan beleidsevaluaties die niet alleen van betekenis zijn voor het onderwerp waarop deze primair gericht zijn, maar ook bijdragen aan bredere, systematische opbouw van kennis en ervaring. Het interdepartementaal verbinden van expertise verruimt daarbij het zicht op factoren die het leren bevorderen of belemmeren.
Een centrale vraag is of de door het beleid beoogde publieke belangen inderdaad bevorderd worden. Beleidsevaluatie moet dan niet alleen gericht zijn op effectiviteit en doelmatigheid ten aanzien van relatief gemakkelijk meetbare indicatoren, maar ook op lastig te kwantificeren essentiële waarden zoals subjectief welzijn, rechtvaardigheid en maatschappelijke aanvaardbaarheid. Het verdient aanbeveling kostbare evaluatie-energie te concentreren op belangrijke kwesties waarover vooraf discussie of onzekerheid bestaat.
Uit een oogpunt van doelmatige beleidsvoorbereiding, en omdat de uitwerking van wetgeving en beleid ex post niet altijd eenvoudig is vast te stellen, is veel aandacht nodig voor ex ante evaluatie. Van onderzoek naar werkingsmechanismen van beleidsmaatregelen wordt in dit verband terecht veel verwacht.
Er is sprake van een paradoxaal spanningsveld tussen verwetenschappelijking en politisering van beleid. Daarom is stevig verankerde, onafhankelijke en onpartijdige beleidsevaluatie onmisbaar. Hoge methodologische kwaliteit biedt extra houvast om deze functie geloofwaardig te kunnen vervullen.
In het streven naar systematische opbouw van kennis en ervaring naast dossier-specifieke doelbereiking kan het helpen als evaluaties zowel een specifiek als een breder geldend algemeen deel bevatten. Belangrijk is ook te sturen op een evenwichtige evaluatieportfolio per beleidsterrein, met aandacht voor ex ante en ex post methoden, uiteenlopende waarden, en verschillende informatiebronnen. Naast best practices moet daarbij ook minder geslaagd beleid in beeld worden gebracht. Voor de bruikbaarheid van evaluaties voor de praktijk is goede vertegenwoordiging van het bottom-up perspectief noodzakelijk.
Evaluatie van beleid vereist gedegen inbedding binnen de nationale kennisinfrastructuur, effectieve samenwerking met kennisinstellingen en het up-to-date houden van het evalueren zelf. Dat is cruciaal voor het evaluatievermogen van de lerende overheid.

In 2015, Dutch local governments have become responsible for youth care, social welfare, employment and income assistance programs, as a result of decentralization. Many municipalities have set up service delivery networks and community teams, in which they collaborate with healthcare providers and civic organizations to build integrated care services. It is assumed that these networks will improve outcomes in terms of enhanced people’s self-reliance and healthcare cost control; by operating close to citizens they are in a position to know the client, activate a client’s social network and mobilize specialized professional expertise if necessary. However, a comparative case study of 26 emerging local networks in the Arnhem area indicates that healthcare providers use the networks mainly for presentation purposes in an effort to secure business continuity, that the role of local governments is fuzzy, and that citizen participation only thrives when actively encouraged in a climate of trust.

In imitation of the G1000 in Belgium in the Netherlands G1000-meetings were held in Amersfoort, Kruiskamp, Uden and Groningen and a citizens summit in Amsterdam with a similar design. In this article the authors investigate the design of these citizens summits and their contribution to a number of important democratic values. What is the diversity of the participants, the influence on policies and the quality of the discussions during the citizen summit? Their research shows that the diversity of the group of participants is rather limited. The selection method that is chosen, whether a lottery selection or an open invitation, doesn’t make much difference for the diversity of the group of participants. In addition the influence of citizens summits on policies and politics is nearly absent. The subjects that come forward at citizens summits hardly ever come back in the local policies, not even at the citizens summit in Uden, where the municipal council has taken the initiative to organize a G1000. Finally, in general the participants qualify the discussions at the table during citizens summits as constructive and inspiring. The specific form of the dialogue has only little influence on the extent to which the participants feel themselves heard and feel free to say whatever they want.

Populism is usually studied by investigating the political discourses of parties considered to be populist. In contrast, this paper attempts to measure the support for a populist attitude among adolescents and young adults (age 14 to 30) in Flanders (N = 2618), the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. This paper answers two research questions: (1) Which adolescents and young adults support the populist attitude and which are the core elements of populism that get the most support? (2) To what extent are adolescents and young adults who support the core elements of populism willing to be politically engaged? The results show that: (1) the support for the populist attitude is widespread among young people in Flanders, and (2) the relationship between a support for populism and political engagement is nuanced. Implications of the support of the populist attitude for democratic participation are discussed.