On January 1, 2013 an amendment entered into force, increasing the administrative fines in social security legislation and labor laws. The amendment also redesigned the way these fines were calculated. In this article these new fines are assessed for consistency. On the one hand consistency with the dominant tendency of localization of welfare states and on the other hand consistency with other penalties. Based on this assessments it is concluded that the new fines do not match the tendency of localization of the welfare state. Compared to other fines the increase itself suites the type of violation, but not with the type of offender. Moreover the amendment deviates with regard to the doubling of the fine, since the fine is based on the amount of the unduly paid benefits that have to be recovered as well. Finally the amendment deviates since the legislator obliges the administration to impose the fine: the administration has no discretion whatsoever.

‘Big Society’ has been one of those inspirational concepts that have recently swept through the public administration literature. With their appeal for a ‘Big Society’, the British Tories contrasted their policy program with Labours’ traditional ‘Big Government’ program. Upon closer inspection, however, it is revealed that the underlying analysis is not new at all, but reflects a specific analysis that can be traced back to Wilson’s famous essay on the study of public administration in 1887. Stripped from its details, the never-ending story claims that public administration now struggles with overwhelming complexity, which makes traditional bureaucratic methods obsolete and calls for innovative, new approaches. The fact that this story has remained fairly constant for over 125 years is cause for some concern. The article traces the historical genesis of this never-ending story and lands on a plea for more sophisticated attention for administrative history, more critical scrutiny of new ideas and more serious study of the nature and effects of complexity.

In recent decades, professionals in the public sector have been faced with increasingly detailed demands concerning accountability and performance. It is often argued that this increased accountability and its bureaucratic pressures limit professionals’ discretionary space and autonomy. However, this critique is hardly based on empirical research on the experiences and perceptions of professionals themselves. In this article we present an investigation into these perceptions and experiences with accountability in one particular brand of the public sector, namely youth care.
Our research indicates that professionals in youth care are hardly interested in greater autonomy or discretion. They rather want clarity, security and options for learning. Moreover, we found ‘bureaucratic attachment’: attachment to bureaucratic procedures particularly as a reaction to increased fears to be sued when something goes wrong with clients. In the recurrent arguments for reduction of bureaucracy, this other face of bureaucracy is often disregarded.
Regarding working conditions however, the professionals we interviewed do want more discretion. Especially concerning occupation of beds, as the requirement for permanent occupation is viewed to augment risk. We therefore argue for better backing of professionals in youth, for a more precise battle against unnecessary bureaucracy, and for professionalization in order to handle more discretion.

The private security sector is rapidly growing and their operations more and more comprise policing and public order maintenance, tasks which to date have been government’s primary responsibility. Some fear this development because the private sector is characterized by market values as profitability and efficiency instead of public sector values such as lawfulness and impartiality, putting the quality of public safety at risk. In this article the professional values, norms and motivations of police officers and private security employees in the Netherlands are compared on the basis of a standardized survey. The main conclusion is that there are large differences in how both groups perceive each other, however the underlying professional morale is actually more similar than different.

In order to facilitate the creation of a regulated market, Diagnostic Treatment Combinations (DBC’s in Dutch) have been introduced in Dutch mental health care in 2008. DBC’s are developed to distinguish and price the ‘products’ of health care, in order to make comparison and competition between health care providers possible. In this qualitative study we analyzed mental health care professionals experiences with the DBC-system. We focused on two questions: (1) what does the DBC-system and the related introduction of marketization of mental health care mean for professionals? and (2) how do professionals cope with the DBC-system in their daily practices? We found that the logics of the market and bureaucracy, both incorporated in the DBC-system, often conflicted with the values and ethics of mental health care professionals. Mental health professionals experience deterioration of professionalism and quality of care. They were coping with conflicting values by non-compliance with rules and pragmatic use of the DBC-system. It is argued that the efforts of professionals to protect the quality of their work might actually lead to invisibility of the problems they encounter, which reinforces the policy they criticize.

Fraud seems to be on the rise. That feeds a demand for controls. This paper sketches the diversity of supply in reaction to this demand: public regulators of course, but also commercial information providers and benchmarkers, self-regulating associations, hallmark producers, certification and accreditation bodies, and internal business management control systems, whereby ever more levels of control are piled on top of each other. More than a million Dutchmen earn a living in this booming control-industry, or 14% of the working population. In addition to fraud, other causes of this trend are being discussed, among them, paradoxically, neo-liberalist deregulation policies. All these causes contribute to a sense of risk and uncertainty. Although this trend has a number of negative consequences, it has a major benefit: jobs! Economists may have long thought that transaction costs are there for the transactions. But it looks as if transactions exist to produce transaction costs.

The EU is one example of how national states try to manage transnational problems. Countless national civil servants meet in EU working groups and committees with representatives of (non-governmental) organisations to exchange information, harmonise policies and regulations, and decide on implementation. To what extent and in which way do Dutch civil servants participate in these networks? How are their activities steered by politicians? One of the main conclusions of this study is that public policymaking within highly Europeanised departments is highly embedded within these transnational government networks, whereas policymaking within weakly Europeanised departments is to a substantial degree shielded from these government networks for reasons of, among others, the protection of national sovereignty of the Member State in their field.

Demand-steering policies in healthcare are understandable but problematic answers to the desire for democratization that dates from the seventies of the former century. Prominent critics such as Achterhuis and Illich were very critical of the undemocratic character of health care. Yet their romantic idea of society excused them from the need to articulate democratic alternatives. The empty space that they left was filled by the concept of demand-steering. Demand-steering, however, rather than strengthening democratic practices, merely undermines them, by preferring exit above voice, by putting up new bureaucratic barriers between clients and professionals and by undermining the quality of the relationship between clients and professionals.

Doing more justice to the democratic impulse is possible and desirable. A new step towards this aim is being taken by a fourth logic of steering, (next to the familiar logics of the market, bureaucracy and professionalism) that centers on improving the dialogue between clients and professionals. The one variant, democratic professionalism, starts from the position of the professional and aims at intensifying democratic control, while the other variant, collaboration, starts from the client and aims at providing him with more influence and responsibility for the health care process. This fourth logic however can only provide a new impulse to democratization when the vague notion of the dialogue is elaborated more thoroughly.

The recent decline in professionalism has frequently been explained as a result of the rise of New Public Management (NPM). As will be shown in this article, however, NPM does not automatically result in a decline in professionalism; its effects differ in various professional contexts. In a case study of the work of social insurance doctors and labor specialists the authors demonstrate that NPM structures the technical aspects of professional tasks, that are the verifiable elements of the professional's judgment. NPM proofs to have strong influence on the techniques for quality insurance (performance of production, time and lawfulness). On the longer term this influence can undermine professional self-regulation. NPM has little impact on the indeterminate task aspects, the professional judgment itself, even though this part has become more 'technical' in years. The case study shows however that this is not due to NPM but to the impact of bureaucratization of the professional task. Furthermore it becomes clear that this impact is stronger in the case of the labor specialist than with respect to the social insurance doctor.

This article examines the impact of European integration on the Dutch constitutional order. It argues that within this constitutional order, the roles of the executive and the judiciary have been strengthened at the expense of the role of parliament. Although these shifts are partly the outcome of domestic developments, they have also been caused by the process of European integration. Within the Netherlands, there has hardly been any debate on the role of the EU and EU law in the Dutch constitutional order and no formal changes to the written constitution have been made. This can be explained, on the one hand, by the openness of the Dutch legal order for international law and, on the other hand, by the fact that many constitutional practices have not been codified in the formal constitution.

The EU is transforming the function and power of the Dutch parliament as an institution, and the way in which its principal actors, the governing and opposition parliamentary party groups, interact with each other and the government. This article seeks to address the question: How does parliamentary scrutiny over EU decision-making function in the Netherlands and how has this new role for parliament changed both parliamentary and executive relations in the country and the interaction of parties in parliament? For the purposes of this research, this paper uses the typology of King. The author has conducted a number of in-depth interviews with Dutch MPs. Overall, this article concludes the process of parliamentary scrutiny over EU matters in the Netherlands is no longer exclusively about finding a national consensus towards the outside world, but increasingly mirrors the rough and tumble of normal, domestic politics.

Recently in The Netherlands, as in other countries, many have called for administrative and democratic reform. The perspectives implicated in the arguments for change differ, however. Some argue for a strengthening of mechanisms of control and accountability. Others opt for more – and more direct – citizen participation in governance. In effect, these perspectives often contradict. In this article we will look into J.S. Mill's effort to combine such different perspectives. It is shown that in his considerations on good government a third principle is active: administrative competence or quality. Mill, thus, makes us aware of a deficiency in many contemporary evaluations of administrative and democratic renewal.