This article presents an analysis of the geographical clustering at the bottom end of the human capital distribution within Belgium and its major political regions (namely, the Flemish and the Walloon Region). At the national level, there is both a clear decrease of the shares of unskilled and unqualified adults and of their regionally unequal distribution. However, this overall decrease goes along with growing divergences between Flanders and Wallonia. In Flanders the number of early school leavers has become small. In Wallonia economic problems – measured in terms of unemployment rates – go hand in hand with a comparatively high number of school dropouts. Our empirical findings suggest that the success of particular areas and regions in a knowledge-intensive economy depends not only on the presence of highly skilled and highly qualified human capital, but also suffers from the presence of relatively large shares of the less-skilled. We discuss some implications for political decision-making.

The traditional authority of mayors and aldermen is readily challenged. Formal positions do no longer constitute authority. For that reason, new political repertoires are being sought after and are being developed by local political-executive leaders. This article analyses and compares the sources of authority for mayors and aldermen: how can they develop, maintain, and strengthen their authority? It develops an innovative typology of sources of authority. A distinction is made between institutional, positional, and personal sources of authority. The model is applied to the mayors and aldermen in relation to relevant socio-political developments that affect the two offices. It is found that the authority of mayors rests on institutional sources of authority more so than that of aldermen. For the latter, positional and personal sources of authority are more important. At the same time, personal sources of authority have become very important for mayors as well as aldermen. The results call upon mayors and aldermen’s skills and competences to develop personal authority through persuasion.

This article points out some of the pitfalls and ambiguities involved in quantified cross-national policy comparisons by looking at the construction and use of standardized indicators in the field of pension policy. The empirical analysis looks at three cases where the OESO and EU use standardized pension indicators to score and rank the performance of national pension systems. The cases illustrate some of the problems associated with scoring and ranking the outcomes of unique and complex pension systems by means of internationally standardized indicators. Our results show that internationally standardised indicators for pension systems are not neutral in the sense that they favor countries with certain institutional pension policy mixes over others. When particular institutional characteristics are treated differently under the same metric, systematically distorted conclusions about the performance of national pension systems may, and likely do, result. Consequently, these observed biases hinder reliable cross-national comparison that is based on these indicators. The article concludes with some recommendations on the construction and use of international indicators in the field of pension policy. It also discusses where research on the process of commensuration – transforming qualities into quantities − in a comparative context should go from here.

The credit crisis that began in the summer of 2007 has fundamentally challenged much financial regulation and the political institutions that produced it. Measured against the criticisms that have been brought forth against previous financial governance, the extent of governments’ overall reform ambitions has been disappointing. Starting from this observation, this article asks: what explains governments’ reform choices, and thus also their limited ambitions? To explore this question, this article focuses on the positions that four governments central to global financial regulation (the USA, the UK, Germany and France) have taken in advance of the G20 meetings in 2009 across four key issue areas: accounting standards, derivatives trading, credit ratings agencies and banking rules. It evaluates both the overlap between positions across domains and governments as well as the differences between them. Such variation, we argue, provides key clues to the overall drivers behind reforms – as well as their limits. The overall picture that emerges can be summarized as follows: governments have been staunch defenders of their national firms’ competitive interests in regulatory reforms. That has not necessarily meant that they followed industry preferences across the board. It has been the relative impact, compared to foreign competitors, that counted in reform positions, not the absolute impact. These differences of opinion have played out within the context and the limits of the overall debates about thinkable policy alternatives. In spite of fundamental criticisms of pre-crisis regulatory orthodoxy, convincing and coherent alternatives have been forthcoming slowly at best. This has made reform proposals less radical than criticisms, seen on their own, might suggest.

The social security system provides some form of protection for its citizens. The social security system depends on public support in society. Support is crucial for legitimacy of the social system. To date, it remains unclear whether social policy preferences will be affected by changes on the labour market. In this article we aim to increase our understanding of individual reactions to increasing labour flexibility and the impact on social policy preferences. From the results of our study, we draw the general conclusion that employees with flexible labour contracts as well as the self-employed do not reject the idea of social security.

The recent scholarly debate on policies and discourses with regard to citizenship in the Netherlands point to a moralization or culturalization of citizenship. This article aims to contribute to this debate by zooming into the current contents of citizenship education. We make a comparative analysis of the contents of textbooks for citizenship education that are used for civic integration courses for migrants and for primary and secondary school students in the Netherlands. Our findings show that citizenship has indeed gained a moral content in both contexts but that the difference lies in the norms that are stressed and how they are conveyed to the target population of future citizens. Whereas civic integration books for migrants emphasize the importance of learning local procedures and habits in order to belong to the Dutch national community, primary and secondary school books underscore the importance of dealing with cultural diversity in the multicultural society.

The assassination of Pim Fortuyn and the electoral breakthrough of his Lijst Pim Fortuyn sent shockwaves through the Netherlands in May 2002. This article assesses the influence Fortuyn has had on Dutch politics and society. It provides an overview of the research that has been conducted on this topic over the past decade and relates the findings of previous studies to research on the consequences of the emergence of radical right-wing populist parties on West European party systems.

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 the past decades, employment and incomes were on the rise, social spending remained high while passive welfare states were progressively transformed into so-called ‘investment states’. Despite these favourable conditions, however, contemporary welfare states did not succeed in reducing poverty and inequality. What lies beneath the disquieting poverty standstill and how did welfare states miss this ‘window of opportunity’? In this article, we aim to shed more light on this question. We identify three structural trends behind the poverty standstill: rising employment has benefited workless households only partially; income protection for the working-age population out of work has become less adequate; social policies and, more generally, social redistribution have become less pro-poor. In other words, the reorientation of social expenditures to the employed occurred at the expense of those at risk in the labour market. The success of future poverty-reducing strategies will depend on the way policies aimed at labour market inclusion will be implemented and the emphasis on redistributive policies.

In recent years the Netherlands have seen an upsurge of housing enclaves. The enclaves are often built as courtyards, castles, estates or apartment complexes. The growing number of people living in housing enclaves indicates a demand for this kind of living areas. However, the motivations behind the increasing popularity of housing enclaves are unclear. Is this a reflection of a long standing tradition of people staying in their own social group, seeking for belonging and sociability? Or does it fit in a global trend of searching for security in gated communities? This paper presents empirical research in the Netherlands that addresses peoples’ motives for living in housing enclaves, as well as the role of the local government in relation to housing enclaves. The research shows that residents of housing enclaves seek a pleasant living environment in the first place, while security is a less important motive. The study gives reason for planners and developers outside the US not to assume that fear of crime and a wish for security are the main reasons for moving to housing enclaves. Further, the study shows that housing enclaves are not completely privatized areas. Local government still has an important role to play.

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 problem of climate change is high on the various political-administrative agendas, both national and international. At the same time the problem is full of uncertainties and controversies. Adaptation to climate change asks for adjustments in our spatial planning, but can also necessitate changes in the distribution of public and private responsibilities. A crucial question is how the legitimacy of adaptation measures can be organized in a context surrounded with uncertainties, controversies and conflicting interests. In this paper we introduce the central theme of this special issue and the various contributions.

It has been claimed by politicians as well as researchers that economic openness poses a threat to the welfare state. This article investigates whether there is such a threat. Based on the literature four different hypotheses are distinguished; economic openness is negatively, positively, curvilinear or not related to the welfare state. The first and the third hypothesis state that economic openness does threaten the welfare state, whereas the other two hypotheses argue that this is not the case. The empirical studies investigating the relationship between economic openness and the welfare state are systematically reviewed in this article. The analysis shows that economic openness does not threaten the welfare state.

The application to animals of biotechnological techniques raises moral dilemmas and requires collective agreements. Under what circumstances, for example, are applications permissible? The technological and ethical complexity of biotechnology makes it difficult to arrive at such agreements. With the recent Animal Biotechnology Act, the Dutch Minister of Agriculture has created an arrangement that should facilitate social learning. Did the arrangement work out as planned? This evaluation study demonstrates that very little substantive learning has taken place: positions have become more rigid and antagonists continue to contest one another in a legal discourse. The legalization has hindered learning processes but presents the opportunity for a polarized debate to be conducted within the same institutional framework.

The Netherlands has a well-developed, internationally unique system of expert advice founded in law. In addition to being instrumental for problem solving, advisory bodies are assigned tasks in mid- and long-term strategy formulation, putting new issues on the agenda, and organizing countervailing powers and checks and balances in national policy formulation. A decade ago, the number of advisory bodies was drastically reduced. Present cabinet policy pursues a second round of slimming advisory infrastructure. Through political centralization of demand for advice, and a further reduction in the number and diversity of advisory bodies, serviceable and instrumental expert advice for policy is prioritized. In times of new wicked problems for governance, there is a serious threat of erosion of expert policy advice as countervailing power. Does the present cabinet suffer from 'anorexia consulta'?