In practice, diversity interventions do not always appear to be effective. One argument is that there is little or no match between the perspectives of public organizations on diversity and the interventions used. This article provides an overview of the underlying rationales for diversity policy and discusses the perspectives on diversity from the diversity literature, HRM, and management literature and how these overlap, complement each other and differ from each other. What these perspectives have in common is that they all emphasize the added value of diversity. In the diversity literature, the emphasis is on the four perspectives equality, legitimacy, creativity, and the labour market. HRM literature focusses on managing differences. In public administration, there is a shift from active representation by individuals to connecting by all employees. Furthermore, the binding perspective is gaining more and more importance in the public domain because it may be possible to close the gap between the government and its citizen. This perspective emphasizes the importance of the long-term relationship with citizens to strengthen the trust of citizens in the government for realizing social tasks and responsibilities. It makes diversity an issue for all employees. For Hassan and Havva, and also for Hans and Hanna.

In this feature authors review recently published books on subjects of interest to readers of Beleid en Maatschappij.

Using survey data from 1,300 welfare recipients in the Netherlands, this paper explores the effects of different enforcement styles in the field of social security law. Although most policy debates focus on punitive and persuasive enforcement, our findings suggest that both styles only play a limited role in explaining regulatory compliance. Our study also shows that the level of compliance among welfare recipients is related to their ‘motivational postures’ (Braithwaite 2003; 2009; 2011). While some of these ‘postures’ are shaped by elements of procedural justice, others are related to the perceived legitimacy of laws or to instrumental motives. Given these findings, we suggest that compliance with social security laws may not only depend on punitive or persuasive enforcement, but also on the degree in which regulatory enforcement is attuned to the individual characteristics of welfare recipients. Finally, these ideas are translated into several practical suggestions for the ‘smart enforcement’ of social security law.

There is a lot of polling in the Netherlands, especially in the run-up to elections. The assessment of future voting behavior in the run-up to elections is inherently difficult, because many voters do not know in advance whether they will vote, let alone for which party. There is therefore constant debate about the quality of these surveys. However, there are also polls that are not held prior to elections, but on election day instead. They are called exit polls or shadow elections. The sample consists of voters who actually visited the polling station and cast their vote. In this article the authors emphasize the nature and useful and interesting role of exit polls. Exit polls are an important tool for making an accurate prognosis of the results shortly after the closing of the ballot boxes. Secondly, an exit poll can provide further insight into electoral gains and losses, and thus counteract unfounded speculation. After all, the data collected form an empirical source for a first analysis of the outcome and electoral behavior. All in all, the exit poll is a relatively easy-to-organize and attractive ingredient for a results evening. Confusing pre-election polls with exit polls probably does not do justice to the higher quality of exit polls in terms of prognosis. The article explains where exit polls differ from pre-election polls and what the most important choices are when setting up such a poll; it also shows that a well-designed exit poll is accurate and has adds value to a results evening. The authors give practical examples in their argument and discuss the exit poll that was organized in Leiden at the council elections of 21 March 2018.

Social media changes society and causes new dilemmas in local government. Little is known about the nature of these conflicts and the way government organizations deal with them. Therefore the authors of this article have carried out empirical research into the manner in which police officers deal with value conflicts concerning the use of social media. Their research shows that the well-known conflicts in the literature between effectiveness and efficiency and between effectiveness and legality were also dominant in this case, but that many more conflicts than are known from other studies concerned transparency and participation. In addition they discovered that the bias strategy was often used, which suggests that a conservative response is preferable in a situation with a lot of dynamics. In this way the research shows how government officials deal with the tension between a stable organization and a dynamic environment and look for appropriate forms of coping at this specific interface. The authors stress in their recommendations that the further strengthening of the learning ability of organizations deserves attention: not just to find the right way to deal with value conflicts, but to be able to find new ways to deal with the new conflicts that arise.

Debates about the quality of local democracy are not new. This was also the case 100 years ago. In 1918 the ground-breaking dissertation of Adriaan Buriks on democratic municipal government was published in the Netherlands. In his dissertation Buriks proposed a radical democratic reform of Dutch municipal government by adopting the new system of ‘commission government’ from the US. That is a system of city government in which (almost) all city authority functions are concentrated in a small commission. The commission is organized in such a way that each member of the commission is the head of a city government department, every member is chosen by the population of the whole city and the exercise of authority is controlled by the whole population. The essay describes the remarkable life of this social revolutionary and municipal law expert. It goes on to discusses the dissertation through an introduction on the central issue of democratic municipal government, a description of the government systems of the US before and after the American Revolution of 1787, a description of the new system of ‘commission government’ and his proposal to adopt the new system in the Netherlands. The essay is closed by the author’s reflection on how the dissertation was received and its impact.

Democracy means the voice of the people. Democratic renewal means that the voice of the people is not static. Look at ostracism among the Ancient Greeks: could one imagine that it would not exist forever? Still the voice of the people, men and women, would sound different and clearer than it would if it were based on ostracism. Over the centuries change always appears to be the constant, also in democracy, for example in the democratic renewal we have been calling ‘citizen participation’. Bottom-up citizen participation originated in the 1980s, mostly in urban renewal, and was legitimized top-down in 1993 in the Dutch parliament through the Willems motion. During the past decade increasingly more instruments for citizen participation have been developed from the bottom up. This development aims for self-management, with instruments like neighbourhood rights and the right to challenge. It goes down in history under the name of ‘localism’. In this essay the author is looking for localism on the special Scottish island Gigha, which is part of the Argyll and Bute Council.

Today’s aldermen work in several different environments. They should reckon with society but also with local council, the municipal organisation, the mayor and fellow aldermen. The tasks are very clear, but how an alderman completes these tasks is very personal. For alderman Rensen his authority starts with trust. Personal and sincere relationships are the key for Rensen. His goal is to connect society to local politics and reduce the gap between the two. It is of great importance to be aware of your position and authority as an alderman. By means of this essay, he would like to give you a glimpse into his world as a social-demoratic alderman and the way in which he applies his core values in his daily work.

The election of Donald Trump, the referendum on the Brexit and the election victory of the Five Star Movement and Lega in Italy have led to the believe that democracy is at a crossroad. Many scholars and opinion makers raise concerns about the future of liberal democracy in Europe and the United States.
This article gives an overview of recent publications on the future of liberal democracy. The article focuses on the causes and possible solutions that are presented in these publications.

Theory about participation has long moved beyond merely informing citizens, arguing for more influential and effective instruments. Nevertheless, ‘inspraak’ remains widely implemented in Dutch practice, with mixed results. This article argues that the deliberative quality of the instrument is closely related to the performance of power. Dramaturgical concepts are employed to analyze resistance against the siting of a homeless facility in an Amsterdam neighborhood. One particular evening sets the stage for escalation, which ultimately frustrates the policy process. The analysis shows how the performance of the meeting invokes specific kinds of resistance. A different performance of ‘informing’ could potentially improve the quality of the public sphere.

This article reports on an analysis of the effectiveness and legitimacy of modes of governance in four European regions that clearly show signs of hybridity, that is, they have private as well as public characteristics. Berlin, Eindhoven, Copenhagen-Malmö and Zurich thus aim to increase the problem-solving capacity of their regional governance and to govern ‘smartly’ in a complex and multi-level context. The individual cities search for effective links with private and societal actors, each in its own way. Legitimacy is an issue that is hardly reflected upon, though. Hybrid modes of governance may have negative impacts on both effectiveness and legitimacy, but also offer new opportunities for good governance. ‘Hybrid’ and ‘smart’ do not always go hand in hand, but they are not mutually exclusive either.

To be able to realize the ambitions of citizen participation, diversity of participants is a crucial condition. At the same time excluding groups of citizens, amongst them critical citizens, is inextricably linked with citizen participation. In this article in the series ‘Local democratic audit’, the authors wonder what the exclusion of critical citizens means for the process and outcome of citizen participation. Through two empirical studies during a spatial intervention in different municipalities in the Netherlands, they investigated how people involved in a participation process spoke about critical citizens and their manifestations. The results show that the way these critical citizens are discussed either legitimizes exclusion or questions it critically. The legitimization of exclusion is detrimental to the support for spatial intervention. The problematization of exclusion results in a responsive approach to critical citizens, which is beneficial for both the course of the participation process and for the support for the spatial intervention.

In recent years few political ambitions enjoyed so much political support as the striving to let the welfare state become more of a ‘participation society’. This ‘participation society’ should be a society with self-reliant citizens; before turning to the state for support, citizens should first of all look at their own capacities, and only in the last case ask the state for help. The premise is promising: collective well-being. However, the fundamental assumptions behind this notion do raise questions. This article argues that the notion for citizens to be self-reliant easily builds on questionable assumptions; these assumptions on the one hand raise hope for collective well-being, but on the other hand easily catalyze citizens’ contemporary uncertainties. It indeed is desirable to restate the relation between state and citizens, but the contemporary focus on citizens’ self-reliance should watch for building on unstable foundations to easily.

This article argues that the politics of participation, as it is currently implemented in Dutch society, departs from dubious policy assumptions. The main problems relate to a controversial idea of what societal resilience is about, which in turn is a side-effect of the neoliberal conception of man and society. In particular three policy assumptions seem contested, regarding respectively the self-governance norm, the required levels of trust, and the presence of a ‘loving culture’. While discussing these three topics, the article also introduces three contributions to this special issue, which will focus in more detail on the poverty of the assumptions underlying the participation paradigm.

The Dutch Municipal Personal Records Database is an IT-innovation that enables the use of the civil registry by hundreds of (semi-)public organisations. Literature review and a case study show how this ‘basis registration’ creates a deep tension between system and lifeworld: citizens who do not fit the system’s criteria lose their access to the major part of public services. The instrumental rationality of the system simplifies the use of addresses for service delivery to one single definition, turns the consequences of address mutations into a black box, and reduces the discretionary space of street-level bureaucrats to handle with social complexities and unintended consequences of the system. This type of IT-innovations can, therefore, come to resemble a ‘digital cage’: a highly disciplining system that hinges on hardware and software design instead of Weberian rules and procedures.

Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

This article analyses the transformations of the Dutch civil service over the last 15 years, during which numerous cutbacks and reorganizations took place. While existing research predominantly focused on changes in the total number of civil servants, we examine how the distribution of civil servants changed in terms of rank, gender and age. We theorize four methods for shrinking the government apparatus, and for each method, we identify the possible consequences for the composition of the central civil service in terms of hierarchical make-up and of age. Our results indicate that the total number of civil servants only slightly decreased, but the decrease affected differentially the various ranks of the civil service. While at the lower ranks the number of civil servants decreased strongly, at the upper ranks the number actually increased slightly. The number of women in the civil service increased, also in the higher echelons. Regarding the age distribution, we found considerable changes, with the modal age shifting upwards with up to ten years. Altogether, the civil service has become slightly smaller, more gender-balanced, and significantly more senior (both in terms of ranks and age). The results of this study show that it is important for researchers and practitioners to look beyond the trends in the total number of civil servants and explore the deeper changes within the civil service.