In this article we draw several conclusions based on the individual contributions to our special issue. We do so by making eight statements that in our view should contribute to the discussion on societal discontent and political unease in the Netherlands.

The articles in this special issue try to shed some light on the rise of societal unease and political discontent in the Netherlands. It is often assumed that citizens are angry and can no longer identify with the actions undertaken by government. But is this really true? Who are these ‘angry citizens’ that everybody seems to be talking about? Do they really exist and what are they angry about? How to square the heated discussions about the angry citizen with research that shows that trust in government still is quite high in the Netherlands? How can we understand the motivations of societal discontent and how can government react to citizens reacting to its actions more emotionally than before?

In recent narratives about the negative mood of the Dutch, ‘societal unease’ and ‘angry citizens’ seem to be concepts that are directly linked: angry behaviour is the manifestation of deep feelings of unease. Is it that simple? In this contribution, I use the Citizens’ Outlook Barometer (COB) to investigate unease and anger, and their relationship. The spread of unease in today’s Netherlands is outlined quantitatively using indicators for strong societal pessimism and political discontent (a complex of negative attitudes towards national politics and globalization). The approach to anger is more exploratory. Anger is definitely not the most dominant feeling that pessimists are aware of, but their explanations of why the country is heading in the wrong direction do often reveal anger. Interviewing ‘angry citizens’ suggests that they are not ‘angry people’ in general, but that their anger is limited to politics and social issues, and is sometimes instrumental (‘you have to express yourself angrily to be heard’). This civic anger can be important both in addressing injustice in politics and as a source of action. It is better to approach anger as a topic in its own right rather than to frame it as an expression of unease.

This article offers the reader an overview of arguments for and against the different modes of appointments of Dutch mayors. The authors do this from different perspectives that are based on relevant values of good governance. In relation to the intended deconstitutionalization of the mode of appointment, they want to contribute with this overview to the debate on the role of the mayor and the mode of appointment. The three modes of appointment discussed are nomination by the Crown, election by the municipal council and direct election by citizens. On the basis of this research, they conclude that changing the mode of appointment to one of the three (pure) modes of appointment has advantages as well as disadvantages, but that the combination has important consequences for the functioning of the local governance system as a whole. In addition, they conclude somewhat paradoxically that the mode of appointment is only one of the factors that influences the functioning of a mayor. Therefore, the question about the mode of appointment of Dutch mayors must be considered within a broader framework of possible measures, with the underlying questions: what kind of mayor, and what kind of local governance, do we want ultimately?

A provincial government in the Netherlands (Limburg) wants to start a movement designed to encourage citizens to live longer and healthier, and to participate in society. The province mobilizes partners to achieve these goals, with important tasks for the municipal governments. This article addresses the question how to help municipal governments in this approach. To draft a guide, a literature search was carried out, interviews were held and the policy practice was explored. This approach resulted in several building blocks that promote a departure from the trend in the health and participation of the citizens in Limburg. These building blocks are set in municipal activities in a Participation Compass social domain. Applying them indicates whether a municipal government is doing the right things to actively engage citizens. It gives an overall picture of the functioning of administrators, networkers and service providers. The report mentions strong points as well as learning points. It is crucial that results are recognized and accepted. The report also suggests improvement points for municipal governments and their partners on their path to the participation society.

In 2012, the municipal council of Emmen (a municipality of 107,000 inhabitants in the northeast of the Netherlands) took the final decision for the transformation and rehousing of the Wildlands Adventure Zoo on the basis of a so-called business case. Business cases are also being increasingly used in other organizations and sectors. However, not much is known yet about the qualities of the instrument. This article shows that the use of the business case in a specific case had value. For this case study, over 100 very diverse mainly digital sources, such as official decision-making documents, research reports and statement via social and other media, were used. In this way, in-depth knowledge was acquired about one of the mechanisms that underpinned the creation of the park. The sources are carriers of the narrative ‘Wildlands Emmen.’ Despite the success, a warning is called for. A healthy focus on results can result in ‘escalating’ commitment. Then the parties involved are linked to the project to such an extent that a way back is excluded by definition. Although the business case should be a ‘business-like’ justification, it seems that the mechanism of ‘self-justification’ enters into force. One shows through rationalization that previous decisions were right and then acts on these decisions in a sensible and competent manner. However, alternatives are not explicitly weighed against each other and there can be a tendency to underestimate the risks.

In recent years in the Netherlands, a lot of attention has been paid to the question of how municipal councils maintain inter-municipal cooperation, which has also become increasingly important because of decentralizations in the social domain. Other forms of collaborating governance have received much less attention. This article focuses primarily on these, until now, largely underexposed forms of collaborative governance because, apart from inter-municipal cooperation and participation of Dutch municipalities in different organizations based on private law, modern municipalities maintain a variety of cooperative relations with organizations in local society. The municipal board and the mayor often play a key role in the web of these cooperative relations, but what is the role of the municipal council? In what way do municipal councils in the Netherlands institutionally shape control and accountability in (intra-municipal) collaborative governance? The article gives an overview of the rules of the game that are currently being used in Dutch municipalities for the control and accountability of intra-municipal collaborative governance. This inventory may be a point of reference for municipal councils, individual councilors and registrars of the council in their search for new rules of the game for control and accountability for different forms of ‘displaced’ local governance. The aim of this broad inventory is to outline possible interesting and innovative forms of control and accountability; it is not about proven ‘best practices’.

Er is de laatste tijd veel aandacht voor het omgaan met onzekerheid en dynamiek in beleid. Zo is er recent de roep om leren door doen, door een overheid die samen met de samenleving het experiment aan durft te gaan. Zo’n benadering van beleid als gezamenlijk experiment is veelbelovend, maar vergt ook passende methoden voor beleidsevaluaties. Adaptief beleid speelt hierop in. De laatste jaren is een belangrijke stap gezet in de ontwikkeling van methoden waarmee adaptief beleid ontwikkeld kan worden. Voor de evaluatie en de rol van evaluaties heeft dit belangrijke implicaties. In dit artikel wordt hierop verder ingegaan, op basis van ervaringen met adaptief beleid en beleidsevaluatie binnen het Nederlandse Deltaprogramma.

In the Netherlands, as in many other countries, housing supply fails to meet the rapidly increasing housing demand in already densely urbanised areas, contributing to rising housing prices and possibly gentrification. The state and local governments aim to satisfy this demand by densifying urban areas and by transforming urban brownfields and vacant office parks into residential areas, thus containing urban sprawl. However, the private actors needed to redevelop these areas operate according to a different institutional logic and discourse: the market. According to this market logic, urban transform is too expensive, even when partly subsidized, and, to some extent, sprawl is unavoidable to satisfy housing demand. The two different logics fail to deliver the housing needed. Building discourse coalitions is suggested as a possible way out of this deadlocked debate, while government actors might also aim to influence the housing market with novel, market oriented policy instruments.

Discussions of public service motivation tend to emphasize the idealistic side of civil servants, stressing how they are led by self-sacrifice and a commitment to the public good. This article adopts a different perspective by linking the personality trait of narcissism to public service motivation. This notion was tested through a survey among employees of three public organizations. The statistical analysis shows that personalities with narcissistic elements tend to be more attracted to the world of policy and politics. This is accompanied by diminished feelings of compassion. Although the significance of this correlation should not be overstated, it does show that the link between public service motivation and commitment to the public interest is more complex than is sometimes suggested. Given the growth of narcissistic tendencies in contemporary society, it may be effective to take account of them in recruiting and managing civil service personnel.

In 2010, the three Dutch Caribbean islands of Bonaire, St. Eustatius, and Saba (the BES islands) were constitutionally integrated into the Netherlands, and were administratively reorganized on the basis of the Dutch municipal model. While this reform was anticipated to mitigate some of the governance problems of these islands, so far this expectation has remained unmet. Using the literature on the effects of smallness on the relation between formal and informal politics as a baseline, this article investigates why the new institutional structure has so far not resulted in improved governance in the Caribbean Netherlands. On the basis of three stages of field research resulting in over forty semi-structured interviews with political elites on the three islands, the analysis highlights the influence of two contextual factors – the small scale and the political culture of the postcolonial Caribbean – that have a powerful, and in many ways negative, impact on governance performance. Subsequently, the article highlights the inapplicability of the Dutch municipal model to the Dutch Caribbean islands, and also pays attention to a number of differences between the three islands, which are explained on the basis of their divergent historical and demographic trajectories, as well as differences in individual leadership.

This article compares the study and professional backgrounds of ethnic minority and native Dutch MPs in the Netherlands using self-collected data from 2010-2016. We build on previous studies and further develop and test the compensation and similarity model. We expected that ethnic minorities compensate with regard to the duration of their education and the length of their professional and pre-parliamentarian political careers. Furthermore, in line with the similarity model, we expected greater similarities between ethnic minority and Dutch MPs in terms of their educational and professional backgrounds and political experience. The results show more evidence for the similarity model than for the compensation model. We find that ethnic minority MPs have similar educational levels and types of political experience as Dutch MPs, however, contrary to the expectation they do not have more but less years of professional and pre-parliamentarian political experience.

The increased complexity of multilevel democracies makes the evaluation of the performances of the government an increasingly difficult task for citizens. Multilevel governance involves information costs, which makes it more difficult for citizens to give clear responsibility for government tasks to the correct level of government. This article contains the first study that is focussing on the responsibility perceptions in the Netherlands. The authors do not just look at who citizens hold responsible for certain government tasks, but they also look at the consequences of these perceptions for the mechanism of accountability. The satisfaction of citizens are with the policy in a particular area should only influence the political support for the level of government they hold responsible. Results of the research are that in line with this perspective a strong correlation exists between satisfaction with the pursued policy and trust of the citizens in this government, in proportion as they hold a level of government more responsible. On the other hand there are large differences between citizens, that correlate with their level of education. So there are also large groups of citizens for whom it is not possible to keep governments responsible for the policy pursued, because they simply do not know which government is responsible.

Tom van der Meer (University of Amsterdam) and Henk van der Kolk (University of Twente) are the guest editors of this special issue on local electoral research in the Netherlands. In the introduction Henk van der Kolk describes the background of the first Local Electoral Research (LKO) performed in the Netherlands in 2016. Weighted data were used from the representative LISS-panel existing of 5000 households from all over the Netherlands. The LKO could become an instrument to obtain an integral view of the state of the local democracy from the perspective of the citizen. The articles in this special issue show on the basis of the LKO data to what extent the two divergent views of local democracy correspond with the facts. The first view is that of a local democracy standing close to its citizens, the other view is that of a local government as a derivative of national government.

For the legitimacy and ability of governments it is crucial to have insight in the worries of citizens about society and politics. In the Netherlands these worries are at the national level systematically mapped by the Dutch Social and Cultural Planning Agency (SCP) through their Continuous Research Citizen Perspectives (COB) for almost ten years now. At the local level there is a lack of information about what worries citizens. Insight in locally experienced problems will probably become even more important in the coming years because of the recent decentralizations of national governmental tasks to the municipalities. This article investigates which problems citizens perceive in their municipalities based on an analysis of data from the Local Electoral Research (LKO). The authors find a number of striking differences with the problems that are perceived at the national level in the same period. The municipal issues citizens mention offer opportunities, but they also point to the limited impact force of the municipal level of government. All in all the research findings are indicative of a substantial added value of the LKO with respect to the already longer running COB.

Reading the most recent and most revealing book of Rinus van Schendelen leads to the conclusion that lobbying is not the strongest side of the Netherlands, which is rather strange for a small country with an external orientation that goes back for centuries. As one of the (six) founding fathers of European cooperation the Netherlands could not hold this special position in the EU. The money-driven attitude of the Netherlands may be profitable short-term, but is harmful for the position of the country and for its decentralized authorities (municipalities and provinces). The Dutch political scientist Rinus van Schendelen is well known for his long years of investigation into ‘lobbying’, but what in fact can be called public affairs (PA). In his older work Van Schendelen discusses PA mainly as a managerial, instrumental, Machiavellian means for steering private and public interests. In his new book he further develops this approach by investigating processes which can contribute to the use of PA instruments for sustainable effects. The new book clearly shows that nowadays the intelligent use of social media is a necessary supplement to the intelligent use of traditional PA instruments. Because of the influence of social media an adequate training of PA professionals is urgently needed in social psychology and other relevant disciplines to prevent floor tourists and other adventurers entering the PA scene.

The term ‘second-order election’ indicates some elections are less important for citizens than national elections. This article investigates to what extent that applies for the Dutch elections of the municipal council. The research builds on literature about the second-order nature of the local elections in the Netherlands. The authors focus on the question to what extent the Dutch elections of the municipal council are second-order elections, by comparing voting at local and national elections in different ways. They compare four aspects of local and national voting: the turnout, the underlying factors that explain the turnout, the factors that explain voting for local parties, and the national or local character of the voting motives at the municipal elections in 2014. The results do not give a clear answer to the question to which extent municipal elections are locally oriented. The four different angles all deliver ambiguous patterns. So municipal elections indeed partly have a second-order nature as previously argued and shown. Nevertheless, we must not underestimate local affinity and political involvement. The fact that some of the citizens are interested in local politics, local parties and in local election electoral programmes is pointing out a local political dynamics.

Studies have shown that multiple office-holding, a practice that denotes the simultaneous exercise of any directly elected municipal mandate and parliamentary seat, is more commonplace in European national parliaments than expected. However, research in Belgium, and especially in the Netherlands, is scarce and extremely fragmented. Therefore, our analysis provides a systematic comparison between the Low Countries with a longitudinal focus. In the first part of the paper, the frequency of the practice is described and its evolution in the last two decades tracked. In the second part, we provide aggregated explanations for the identified discrepancy. Indeed, our results show that after the most recent elections, more than 80% of all Belgian members of parliament held a local mandate, and this percentage increased by 10% during our reference period. In contrast, 9 out of 150 members of the Dutch Second Chamber were combining several offices at the beginning of their national mandate, while the degree of cumulards remained stable. Unexpectedly, the legislative framework and the party regulations are not the source of this deviation, as they are almost identical in both countries. We argue that the difference can be attributed to the role and position of the local government, the political culture and the electoral system.