This article addresses the question how aldermen are selected and nominated and how this process is related to a number of democratic values like popular influence and transparency. The central question is how one becomes an alderman in the Netherlands. To answer this central question a document analysis has been carried out and 137 interviews with aldermen have been held in 77 municipalities that were selected on geographical dispersion and number of inhabitants. The research shows that the process until the appointment of aldermen is little transparent and democratic for the outside world. In the large majority of the cases aldermen are asked an nominated from within a political party. The road to becoming an alderman is not closed, in principle everyone can become an alderman, but it is also not transparent and accessible for everyone. For this the selection and nomination is too much tied up to and decided in political party networks. However, gradually changes occur in this closed party bastion, because now parties more often are forced to look for suitable candidates outside the party.

Nowadays municipalities in the Netherlands work together more intensively with other municipalities in the region. Also cooperation with companies, institutions and societal organizations is more often looked for at the regional level. In practice this brings along many problems and difficulties. For several reasons it appears not to be easy to combine the implementation strengths of municipalities and societal partners. This article presents a new approach (based on the theory of ‘new regionalism’) to regional implementation strength. This approach is not only about designing regional administrations, but is mainly about the factors that induce administrations as well as companies and institutions to commit themselves jointly for the region. To increase the regional implementation strength more is needed than the formation of a regional administrative structure in which municipalities do not cooperate in a non-committal manner. To induce municipalities and societal partners to commit themselves jointly to handling new tasks or new challenges it is also necessary to have a clear strategic vision on these issues that binds parties and makes them enthusiastic and that regional cooperation is rooted in a societal breeding ground. It also asks for an administrative structure that does justice to the contribution every municipality and societal partner makes to the realization of the strategy and for a democratic involvement of municipal councils and sector-based interest groups.

In the public as well as the semi-public sector numerous codes of good governance have been written. Although theses codes clearly lay down which public values must be the foundation of our administration, our newspapers often show examples of bad governance. It is striking that these codes mostly just picture an ideal, but do not give insight in tough considerations. In this article the authors show that different public values mentioned in codes are all worth pursuing as such, but that they in practice collide with each other. The manner in which administrators, managers and executives cope with such dilemmas, determines public opinion on good governance. Two cases have been researched: a municipality and a hospital. Through a Q-research six value patterns are demonstrated to exist in these cases. In addition (through interviews) the authors have discovered which values exactly collide in the cases, and which strategies are used to cope with collisions of values.

Concerns about mobile phone masts are often put down as unfounded fears of health risks. However, our ethnographic study of mast siting controversies shows that citizens mostly want to be democratically involved in the siting decisions. There is no room for such engagement in the national antenna policy, thus, citizens shift their attention to the possibility of health risks. The national government responds to this with more research and risk communication. However, the centrality of science leads to a shift in the discussion towards the credibility of science. Even a Klankbordgroep (Sounding Board) with all stakeholders fails to change the focus. This article shows that local conflicts are not so much the result of individual concerns, which is the subject of many social sciences studies, but are the outcome of a dynamic interaction between governments, citizens and scientists. Governments should not frame a local issue only in terms of a scientific problem.

Decreasing trust in government is almost universally considered to be a troubling fact of life for governments. Even though many politicians, administrators and commentators assume that the public’s trust in government is waning, the empirical data from the Netherlands are not unequivocal. This suggests that the assumed crisis of trust is not ‘just’ an empirical fact but is also to some extent a social construction. This article analyses how the major Dutch political parties have contributed to the narrative of a ‘failing government’. It does so by analysing their party programs over the last half century (95 programs in total). The analysis demonstrates that the major political parties are increasingly inconvenient with the effectiveness and efficiency of government, the traditional role of bureaucracies and the tasks of civil servants. This narrative harks back to the parties themselves and becomes increasingly inconvenient. If it is true that government fails to meet their standards, as they now all claim, what does that disclose about government policies for which those parties have been responsible?

Professionals often have problems with governmental policies they have to implement. This can lead to diminished legitimacy and lower policy performance. The goal of this article is to identify the main reasons why professionals resist implementing new policies. An interdisciplinary approach is taken. From public administration literature, I use the policy alienation model, which consists of five dimensions: strategic, tactical and operational powerlessness, societal meaninglessness and client meaninglessness. These are possible reasons why professionals resist public policies (‘resistance to change’, a concept drawn from change management literature). I test these assumptions using a survey among 1,317 healthcare professionals. The results show that when professionals experience that a policy is meaningless for society or for their own clients, they show strong resistance. A lack of perceived influence is much less important in explaining resistance, although this is partly dependent on the particular profession someone belong to. The policy alienation model can help policy makers and managers to develop policies which are accepted by professionals. The article ends with practical recommendations for policy makers, managers and professionals.

In the near future, the Dutch government intends to change the rules relating to smoking bans in the hospitality industry again. After a complete ban, coming into force in July 2008, and introducing an exception for small bars in June 2011, the complete ban will return this year. This article describes the law regarding smoking bans in the Netherlands, and reports along researches of the relevant authority and a commercial research institute the effectiveness of the bans. From these findings it becomes clear that the hospitality industry did a good job in complying with the bans. But there is one exception: small bars. Next we explain, based on the ideas of Kagan and Skolnick and Elias the effectiveness of smoking bans.

Since Pim Fortuyn, discontent has become a central issue in public and political debates in the Netherlands. The government tries to ban out all risks and polarisation between citizens, because it fears this will have a destabilising impact on society. However, these measures do not seem to decrease discontent. In this article, we analyse why discontent so persistently keeps dominating debates. We argue that it is prominently and continuously expressed due to the position of opinion polls and the interaction between politicians, journalists and citizens and due to the platform that social media offer. But meanwhile, means to convert discontent into constructive, collective action are diminishing. As a result we continuously gather superficial information about people’s discontent. In order not to hinder constructive debates with this kind of information, as happens in current political discussions, different and more detailed information about the public opinion is needed. Politicians and researchers should make a more clear distinction between discontent itself and the incapacity of citizens to deal with it. Moreover, a revitalisation of the role of civil organisations is important to channel discontent.

Many tasks will be decentralized to municipalities in the Netherlands in the coming years. To deal with these challenges, central government encourages municipal mergers, while municipalities often prefer a light form of cooperation. Since municipal boarders are converging less and less with the boarders inhabitants experience in their daily lives, municipalities feel free to cooperate in a variety of ways with other partners. This poses new challenges to democratic legitimacy, effectiveness and the role local authorities play. Local governments therefore do not need new regulations or legal forms of co-operations, but rather a repertoire fitting their role. We argue that local governments need to analyse their tasks, choose the form of cooperation that fits best and develop a repertoire for their cooperation. Light forms of cooperation are very important for developing a variety of cooperative forms and roles local governments need to play.

In the 1980s, the organizational autonomy of primary schools in the Netherlands was increased to improve the quality of education. Today, new restrictions are being imposed on this autonomy, again as a means to improve educational quality. This article discusses whether this change can be seen as a systemic change or rather a further streamlining of the policies started in the 1980s.

In policy practice sometimes organizational arrangements appear that at first glance manifest itself as cooperative relations between private organizations, but about which on second thoughts the question can be asked if after all there is an active input from the side of the government. This is for instance the case in the construction of biogas infrastructures. In this article the authors discuss if we can talk about PPC after all. In the debate on governance this question is important because in the design of PPC the public interest involved must be sufficiently guaranteed in terms of control and accountability. On the basis of a confrontation between the results of a literature review and an empirical study of the case of a Green Gas pipeline in North-East Friesland (‘Biogasleiding Noordoost Fryslân’) in the Netherlands, the authors conclude that public steering in practice can take a form in disguise. Using ‘intermediate’ civil law legal persons, governmental influence indeed can be and is exercised during the cooperation. Especially law poses specific demands on control and accountability to take care of public interests, like the promotion of the use of renewable energy. Likewise in this kind of projects, especially in comparison with pure private-private cooperation, the public and if possible even the public law regulation must be safeguarded, for instance by transparency of form and content of steering. Of course this has to be done with preservation of the cooperative nature that is typical of PPC.

More than twelve years after the appearance of the report of the Dutch Committee on the Future of Government Communication (‘Commissie Toekomst Overheidscommunicatie’) communication as the responsibility of the government is an important issue of debate and a discipline that is alive and kicking. We may even conclude that communication – in the terminology of this report – has conquered a place in the heart of policy. A lot is still unclear about the communicative function of government. On the normative question ‘why should the government communicate’ diverging answers are possible. However, the question is hardly discussed in practice and in science. For this reason the positioning of government communication as a separate discipline is also unclear. Reflection on the elementary values behind the discipline can reveal themes that have been invisible so far. The article investigates which values and motives are attached in theory and in practice to communication as a governmental function. For this reason a content analysis has been carried out of a number of volumes of five Dutch magazines (practical and scientific). The authors conclude that for professionals communication mainly is an instrument to support policy goals. The possibility to make a purposeful contribution with government communication to democratic values hardly is brought about, not so much in Communication Science as in Public Administration.

This article presents the effects of an evaluation study of different municipal amalgamations in the past ten years in the Dutch provinces Gelderland, Limburg and Overijssel. It is an evaluation that passes through two tracks; we investigate by written sources and evaluation studies of specific amalgamations its gains, but we also by the method of a survey-feedback have asked the opinions on the amalgamation of a considerable group of people involved in the amalgamation. Would they do it again this way years after the amalgamation and they do have a positive or negative assessment of the amalgamation as a whole afterwards? The answer to this question is surprising: a lot of people involved are quite positive on a municipal amalgamation and would choose for it again in the same circumstances. They also think it is an alternative to be preferred over piling up arrangements of municipal cooperation. There is also a remarkable small difference between the assessment afterwards of a voluntary or a ‘forced’ amalgamation. That difference of assessment can be felt intensively in the process before and during the amalgamation, but afterwards the respondents are also positive about amalgamations that have been imposed ‘top-down’. This result suggests that the proverb of a ‘bottom-up amalgamation’ needs relativisation and the provinces and the central government can play a more active part in the process of amalgamation.

Whereas the six Dutch islands in the Caribbean all have a (very) limited population size, analyses of political problems on the islands rarely seem to take the variable of state size into account. The available academic literature demonstrates that the population size of states has a strong influence on the quality of democratic governance, although scholars disagree on the question whether smallness is an asset or an obstacle to democratic development. After a discussion of this theoretical literature, the present article proceeds with a presentation of field research in three small island states (St. Kitts and Nevis, Seychelles, and Palau) in which the political consequences of a limited population size are analyzed. This analysis reveals that a number of size-related effects can be observed in all three examined island states, among which a tendency to personalistic competition, strong polarization between parties and politicians, particularistic relationships between voters and their representatives, and a dominant position of the political executive vis-à-vis other institutions. A subsequent analysis of the contemporary political situation on the Dutch Caribbean islands shows that the observed problems also play a role on these islands, which indicates that smallness is perhaps of greater significance than is now often supposed.

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 shows how top officials in ten European countries evaluate changes in the public sector based on a number of dimensions, such as quality, cost-efficiency, ethics, effectiveness and the attractiveness of the public sector as an employer. Senior public officials in the Netherlands are compared to their counterparts from 9 other European countries. The study is based on the large-scale academic COCOPS Top Executive Survey, and answers from 3,173 top public sector officials were used.
Results show that senior public officials in the Netherlands are very positive about changes in cost-efficiency and service quality in the public sector. Yet they are concerned about the attractiveness of the public sector as an employer and public trust in government. At the same time, senior public officials in the Netherlands appear to be among the most positive all nationalities about recent changes in how the public sector operates. Only with regard to changes in the attractiveness of the public sector as an employer are senior Dutch public officials considerably less optimistic.

In co-production processes, citizens and professionals both contribute to the provision of public services and try to enhance the quality of the services they produce. Although government offers several opportunities for co-production, not all citizens decide to actually take part. Current insights in citizens’ individual motivations offered by the co-production literature are limited. In this article, we integrate insights from different streams of literature to build a theoretical model that explains citizens’ motivations to co-produce. We test the model using empirical data of Dutch neighborhood watches.

In this contribution we analyze the content of the Veerman Commission’s report that in 2007/2008 advised the Dutch government on the necessity of measures to protect the coast against future rising waters and other climatological and environmental changes and challenges. We conclude that the content of the report is in itself an expression of the ongoing social and governmental debate and process that tries to create a sense of urgency since there is no real immediate crisis to facilitate changes. Thus the report is not only the result of the work of the commission (though its firm statements on the necessity of measures were clearly heard), but at the same time the reflection of an ongoing debate which also creates a new challenge for stakeholders in the water domain. The organizational recommendations of the commission to place the protection against rising waters as far away from day to day politics as possible have all been put into action, which is a noteworthy result. Still, it is the ongoing process between stakeholders that will determine the actual measures to be taken by the government water related bodies.

The 2008 Dutch Parliamentary Enquiry Commission on Innovations in Education researched policy making for three innovations in Dutch secondary education. These innovations have been implemented in the 1990’s, but form a continuous cause of public concern. The commission concluded that policy making fell short on many points; government had neglected its duty to provide educational quality. The commission formulated several conditions to improve policy making. This article analyses the line of reasoning of the Commission and its effect. By looking back it tried to understand the policy results at the time of the enquiry. The highly politicized context in which the enquiry took place and the political aims of the research have probably contributed to the Commission’s choice for this approach. However, such an approach does not explain the political-administrative context of the policy process and the behaviour of the policy makers involved. In recent years, policy attention for educational quality has grown, but the conditions formulated by the Commission have not been applied due to policy dynamics and time pressure.

Dutch local government is more and more regarded as a ‘first government’. Vision documents of the association of municipalities and national policy plans stress the importance of local government for improving public governance. This ‘new localism’ builds upon two conflicting perspectives to local government: the modernization model and the political community model. As a result, local governments are becoming overloaded by many new and conflicting demands. A debate about how both perspectives to the ‘first government’ can be balanced, is therefore needed.