This article explores the role of frames about the future in policy reform, by analysing Dutch debates about population ageing and their impact on welfare policies in the period from 2000 until 2008 as a case study. Mapping the debates around ageing in the Netherlands, the article demonstrates that frames are a powerful force in the policy process. Diverging frames about the future enable fundamental changes of deeply embedded policy institutions. The case study shows the process of argumentation about the future that took place between 2000 and 2008, and reflects upon the frames about the future that were of crucial importance in bringing temporary closure to the controversy over the proper response to the demographic shift, which then lead to several important and rather strong changes in institutions of welfare state policies and fiscal policies.

Nalevingsgedrag wordt door een aantal factoren beïnvloed. Deze factoren zijn door het ministerie van Justitie samengevat in de Tafel van Elf, die zowel spontane nalevings- als handhavingsdimensies bevat. Elk individu gaat verschillend om met deze dimensies. Om overall iets te kunnen zeggen over het nalevingsgedrag van een doelgroep dienen de verschillende individuen/bedrijven en hun interacties beschreven te worden. Dit is mogelijk door gebruik te maken van Agent-Based Modeling (ABM). ABM is in het hier beschreven onderzoek toegepast in een casestudie naar correct gebruik van antibiotica door varkenshouders. Simulaties lieten zien dat een hoog nalevingsniveau bereikt kan worden door een hoge mate van acceptatie van de wetgeving, waarbij enige mate van inspectie nodig zal blijven. Verder bleek dat het gedrag van varkenshouders beïnvloed wordt door het nalevingsgedrag van varkenshouders in de omgeving. Voor zover ons bekend is dit de eerste toepassing van ABM op het gebied van naleving en toezicht.

Het aandeel van de industrie in de Nederlandse economie neemt structureel af. Deze ontwikkeling wordt versterkt door een tekort aan binnenlands aanbod van technici: de belangstelling voor technische opleidingen is sterk teruggelopen. In de toekomst dreigt het tekort aan technici verder op te lopen, waardoor de positie van de Nederlandse industrie verder onder druk komt te staan. Voor een open economie als die van Nederland is de industrie, die het overgrote deel van de export voor zijn rekening neemt, echter van grote betekenis. Ook biedt de industrie relatief goed betaalde banen voor werknemers die anders aangewezen zouden zijn op laag betaalde arbeid of geen baan zouden kunnen krijgen. Om de dalende trend te keren moeten meer jongeren geïnteresseerd worden in een technische opleiding. In het artikel komt uitvoerig aan de orde hoe dat kan.

This article is one of the first to systematically examine parties’ use of YouTube in Dutch election campaigns and to consider its effects. Content analysis of 406 YouTube ads and additional research show that nine political parties made use of this new campaign instrument in the 2010 Dutch parliamentary election campaign. However, unlike U.S. presidential candidate Obama, the parties did not really use YouTube to mobilize and involve voters. Instead, YouTube was used only as a means to broadcast advertisements for the party. These ads only reached a small audience and had little influence online as well as in the print media. Furthermore, this study examines which of these ads were more likely to reach a large number of viewers. The results demonstrate that short, comparative ads that contain the party leader, that are uploaded early on in the campaign, that stem from small or winning parties and that have numerous links on external websites are likely to reach more viewers.

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.

This paper reports on a qualitative interview study into the prioritization and interpretation of public values government elites in the Netherlands, comparing value preferences between political and administrative elites. Based on 65 in-depth interviews with MPs, ministers and senior civil servants, statements on four public values (responsiveness, expertise, lawfulness, transparency) that have been deducted through a substantive literature review, are coded and categorized. Overall, political and administrative value preferences in the Netherlands turn out to be more similar than they are different. However, mutual perceptions emphasize differences and contrasts. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are offered and hypotheses are formulated for future studies.

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.

In 2010 the Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP) concluded that the Social Support Act (Wet maatschappelijke ondersteuning, Wmo) is successful as it leads to greater coherence in policies, and because the public Wmo-advisory councils are satisfied with the role they play. Wmo councils provide solicited and unsolicited advice to municipalities. They defend citizens’ interests against those of health care providers and insurance companies. Despite the positive results of the SCP study, there is an ongoing debate about the restyling of the Wmo-councils to increase their influence on local policy making. Some studies even call for a national council to prevent bargaining between the Associations of Dutch Municipalities (VNG) and the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports (VWS).

In this exploratory article, the authors analyse the influence of five local Wmo-councils - Alkmaar, Delft, Kerkrade, Tilburg and Utrecht - on local policy making. They examined the recognition and authority of these five councils and studied if municipalities heeded their advice. The article shows, that Wmo-councils themselves are dissatisfied with the influence they have. Subsequently, it demonstrates that municipalities anticipated the actions of Wmo-councils but hardly ever changed their policies accordingly. Wmo-councils are meant as a horizontal counterweight but are in danger of not being taken seriously.

Electoral institutions shape the incentive that elected representatives have to cultivate a personal vote, a geographically-concentrated personal vote in particular. But are electoral institutions able to make representatives do what they would not do otherwise and to make them not do what they otherwise would have done? Using data from the cross-national PARTIREP MP Survey, it is demonstrated that electoral institutions shape elected representatives’ local orientation. Local orientation decreases as district magnitude grows – regardless of what representatives think about political representation. But representatives’ conceptions of representation do shape their uptake in the legislative arena from their contacts with individual constituents. The effect of the electoral incentive grows stronger as elected representatives think of representation as a bottom-up rather than a top-down process.

This article investigates whether group-based politics is still relevant in Belgian and Dutch politics. Based on the PARTIREP MP Survey it more precisely studies the extent to which Belgian and Dutch parliamentarians in comparison to other European countries attach importance to the representation of ‘old’ cleavage groups (class and religious groups) or new groups (age groups, women and ethnic minorities), and which strategies are considered most appropriate. Group representation of old and new groups is found to be of great importance in both countries. Class is not dead and age groups are also highly represented. In contrast, religious groups and ethnic minorities receive far less attention in the Low Countries. Notwithstanding these similarities, there is also cross-country variation regarding the level of importance (greater in the Netherlands), the represented groups and the strategies for representation.

Electoral behavior has changed considerably over the last few decades. The Netherlands are exemplary of how the cleavage structure has waned and how this has led to a weakening of the bonds between parties and voters and to higher levels of electoral volatility. Christian democratic and social democratic parties are most affected by these changes, because of their strong roots in the cleavage structure. The alterations in electoral behavior are generally assumed to be evolving gradually through a process of generational replacement. Composition effects on the one hand and a weakening of the impact of socio-structural factors, partly caused by cognitive mobilization on the other hand are considered to be the mechanisms behind this generational change. This paper tests these assumptions with regard to the Netherlands on the basis of the Dutch Parliamentary Election Surveys, 1971-2010. The findings indicate that while some variation between different birth cohorts is visible, most of the differences in voting for both of these parties, however, are situated at the level of election years. Furthermore, with regard to what drives change over time, the analyses indicate that while composition effects and changes in the effects of socio-structural variables are of some importance, cognitive mobilization is not causing the change observed.

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.

In this paper we analyze Fortuyn’s political inheritance in the Netherlands. Going beyond the mere electoral popularity of his neo-rightist successors, we analyze the changing political culture since Fortuyn entered the political stage. More specifically we show that his ideological beliefs – Fortuyn voiced an unprecedented combination of liberal views towards homosexuals and gender equality with critical views pertaining to immigration, and he was critical of political and administrative elites – caught on in current Dutch politics. Moreover, his highly personal communicative style, placing him outside the inner circle of Dutch politics underscoring his adversity to these political elites, also caught on in mainstream political campaigning. This new personal style, however, did not mean a demise of ideology. On the contrary, Fortuyn actively tried to appeal to the electorate with ideals and ideology – hence marking the rebirth of the so-called ‘fact-free politics’ after the de-ideologized purple governments in the Netherlands. Since Fortuyn, mainly parties on the right side of the political spectrum have followed this path of re-ideologization. The paper ends with a comparison of the counterculture originating in the 1960s and post-Fortuyn right-wing politics, which surprisingly shows great continuity. We therefore argue that we are currently witnessing a veritable counterculture 2.0.

For several years, Dutch and international survey research programmes, such as the European Values Studies, the Eurobarometer, and the Dutch Parliamentary Elections Studies, have registered the judgements of (Dutch) citizens regarding a wide variety of topics. The Legitimacy-monitor Democratic Governance (Hendriks, Van Ostaaijen & Boogers, 2011) assembles those statistics that together present a layered picture of the legitimacy of democratic governance in the eyes of Dutch citizens. For this article, we review those statistics and take the ‘Fortuyn-year 2002’, the year in which Fortuyn shook up Dutch politics, as a demarcation point. Among the many continuities in pre- and post-Fortuyn statistics, we register a number of marked changes in the judgements of citizens regarding democratic governance in the Netherlands. The most salient, we conclude, is the growing thirst for vigorous ‘leadership’, which not only breaks with the trend of several decades (ever weaker preference for strong leadership), but also the logic of Dutch consensus democracy (many hands and not one head).

The Dutch electorate is the most volatile of Western Europe. At its height in 2002 more than 30 percent of the seats in the Dutch Lower House changed to another party. But what does the increased electoral volatility mean? Are volatile voters whimsical, behaving randomly like drift-sand? Or are volatile voters emancipated, no longer committed to a single political party but still loyal to their own preferences?We answer these questions by analysing the 1VOP panel data set, which covers 55.847 adult respondents who participated in at least 2 of the 58 waves between November 2006 and June 2010.First, we assess the presence, frequency, and direction of changes in voters’ party preferences. More than half of the respondents (52 percent) changed party preference at least once. However, they mostly stick to one of two ideologically coherent party blocks.Second, we explain why some voters are more likely to change party preference than others. Especially middle groups are volatile: people with modal income and average levels of education, and people who position themselves in the political center. However, the lower educated are more likely to switch between dissimilar parties. These findings support the view that increased volatility reflects voter emancipation.

In deze bijdrage plaatsen we de gezagscrisis van de hedendaagse wetenschap in cultuur en politiek in een breder, cultuursociologisch perspectief.

If the impact of party leaders on the electoral fate of their parties may be called first order personalization, this paper addresses second order personalization: a preference for an individual candidate having to do with that person embedded in a prior choice for the candidate’s party. Using survey data and election results with respect to intraparty preference voting in The Netherlands, this study explores the characteristics of both voters casting a vote for a candidate other than the party leader and candidates receiving preference votes. Given the increase in intraparty preference voting, second order personalization has increased considerably in recent decades. Moreover, the correlates of second order personalization differ from those identified for first order personalization: intraparty preference votes are cast more often by higher educated, politically interested and efficacious female voters. Intraparty preference voting also seems to be a form of expressive rather than instrumental electoral behaviour: female candidates, and to a lesser extent ethnic candidates, receive more preference votes, but such votes are cast predominantly for the highest placed female (or ethnic) candidate on the list – candidates who would be elected on the basis of their position on the party list anyway.

Urban government is expected to contribute to the solution of major urban problems. At the same time, urban government is riddled with problems itself, often denoted in terms of governing and democratic deficits. In this article, options for governance reform in the urban realm are being explored along five lines, following up on recent research in the Netherlands and abroad. Both more aggregative arrangements (electronic ‘straw polls’, knowledge polls, prediction markets, ‘dot gov’ competitions for ‘best solutions’) and more collaborative arrangements (electronic co-creation, wiki governance, vital coalitions, urban regimes) are being assessed. The conclusions is that there are good arguments for, at least, more experimentation along these lines - not only from a functionalistic, but also from a democratic and social-psychological point of view.