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.

The article deals with the relationship between Islamic fundamentalism and the political participation of women. Firstly, it is discussed at length which political role women play in theories on Islamic fundamentalism. According to some scholars, it is indeed paramount to eliminate where possible, existing stereotypes which state that women are solely ‘placed’ in the private domain by fundamentalists. Secondly, the article examines the extent of actual political participation in a context of Islamic fundamentalism, more specifically the Islamic Republic of Iran. Models of political participation are often implicitly based on formal (electoral) forms of participation. However, women often remain invisible in these kinds of models. Consequently, the article centres on a possible broadening of the notion ‘political participation’ and the incorporation of new forms of informal political activities in the analysis of political participation.

This article investigates the link between state decentralization and party decentralization. We study the impact of the type (dual, integrative, asymmetrical) and degree of decentralization on two dimensions of the relationship between a party’s central party organs and its regional branches: the autonomy of the regional branches to manage their regional affairs and the degree of participation of the regional branches in the central party. We compare the organization of five state-wide parties in two decentralized multi-national polities, Spain and the UK. Our analysis of their party statutes partly confirms the link between degree and asymmetry of decentralization and party organization. However, the impact of the type of distribution of powers between the state and its regions is much less clear. This article shows the need to investigate the influence of other factors such as regional party competition and electoral rules on the type of central-regional relationships within state-wide parties.