The recent introduction of leadership primaries within the Dutch political parties PvdA, VVD and D66 has attracted much attention, but the opinions about this form of party-reform are divided. This article discusses the reasons for the recent popularity of internal primaries for the selection of the heads of the list of candidates for the national elections and describes the procedures used by the various parties. The article concludes that leader-ship primaries are not always beneficial for parties and democracy. Only if the procedures for primaries are carefully designed and the candidates behave prudently and in an integer way, leadership primaries can have a positive effect on internal party democracy and on the political system as a whole.

Contemporary western democracies, such the United States, Great Britain, and The Netherlands have become diploma democracies. They are ruled by the well educated, whereas the least educated, even though they still comprise about half of the population, have virtually vanished from most political arenas. Of course, the well educated have always been more politically active than the less educated, but in the past decades this gap has widened substantially. Well-educated citizens are more inclined to vote, to write letters to the editor, or to visit consultative or deliberative meetings than citizens with a low level of education; and most, if not all, members of parliament, all the political officials, and almost all of the political advocates and lobbyists, have college or graduate degrees. The paper substantiates the rise of diploma democracy in The Netherlands, discusses what is problematic about such an educational meritocracy in the context of democracy, and looks at what could be done to mitigate or remedy some of its negative effects.

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.

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.

In the Netherlands, an ambitious policy goal of 1,000 MW of wind power capacity by the year 2000 had already been formulated in 1985 and remained the official basis for wind energy policy until 2000. The pace of realisation of wind turbines however did not keep up with this policy objective. An important reason is that it proves difficult to provide enough locations for wind turbines in spatial plans. Over the last 15 years two covenants have been concluded between the Dutch central government and provinces in order to overcome this problem: the 1991-Governmental Agreement on Planning Problems Wind Energy (BPW), and the 2001-Governmental Agreement on the National Development Wind Energy (BLOW). In the BLOW provinces have agreed to work towards the realisation of wind turbines with a total capacity of 1,500 MW in 2010. For this purpose provinces need the co-operation of municipalities, wind power project developers and local communities. Municipalities have a crucial role because of their discretion of detailed allocation of land use in local spatial plans. They are no partners to the covenant however. Provinces can use several governance strategies for mobilising co-operation: from top-down governance in which provinces specify locations to bottom-up approaches in which the initiatives are left to municipalities and project developers. This paper compares both covenants and assesses the effectiveness of different governance strategies employed by three distinct provinces.

Traditionally, technological transitions in infrastructure bound sectors are matters for the private sector. History teaches us that as soon as technological transitions proved successful, government sooner or later got involved with the distribution. Most of this involvement, both in history and now, has taken the form of public regulation with the help of various formal legal instruments.

This article aims to answer three questions, namely (1) what ideational and materials drives can be distinguished in the government's involvement in these technological transitions, (2) through what legal instruments are these objectives expressed and how , and (3) what are the incentives of these formal legal instruments on innovative private entrepreneurs for their further technological pursuits. How were their behavioural options affected by the use of statutory acts, concessions, permits and/or licences? Incentives to private innovators are qualified as positive, neutral or negative. The research method chosen has been inspired by insights from legal sociology, public choice theory and strategic actor behaviour in qualitative simulation-games, but follows distinct methodological steps. Throughout the article a case study on the transition from telegraphy to telephony in The Netherlands will be used to illustrate the discussion.