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The problem of home care for the growing number of elderly people no longer able to take of themselves has long been overshadowed by the debates on pensions and rising medical costs. Taking the feminist critique of the welfare state as point of departure, this article examines in how far the breadwinner-caretaker model still informs ageing policies in the Netherlands (a prime example of this model) and takes women as carers for granted, despite changes in the family and women's growing labour market participation. Overall, policies since the 1990s have shown remarkable continuity, defining informal care, mainly done by women, as the cornerstone of home care policy, with state-provided care seen as strictly supplementary and rationed to cut costs. This is consistent with the welfare mix of the conservative welfare state, but contradictory to a more individualized welfare state in which women's labour market participation is becoming essential to maintain welfare state benefits in the face of the ageing issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes how privacy and data protection law and policy have evolved in the Netherlands from the 1960s onwards. The description is guided by two questions: have policy changes occurred in privacy legislation, and how can these changes be explained? The paper describes, first, legislation focusing on spatial and relational privacy, with a primary focus on constitutional law; second, informational privacy or data protection legislation; and third, non-privacy-focused legislation which impacts negatively on privacy and data protection. The analysis shows that, since privacy emerged on the policy agenda in the late 1960s, privacy law and policy can be roughly divided into two periods: two decades of creating general privacy frameworks in the Constitution and comprehensive data protection legislation, and two decades of updating these general frameworks in light of technological developments while also passing many privacy-diminishing laws to serve other policy goals. The rise of the information society, the network society, and the risk society can explain a privacy policy change occurring somewhere during the 1980s. This change can be interpreted either as a shift from generally privacy-friendly policy to generally privacy-unfriendly policy, or as a shift in focus from general, privacy-centric framework regulation to specific, privacy-unrelated legislation targeted at other, higher-ranking policy goals, such as organized crime, immigration, and health and safety. The current outlook for privacy protection does not seem bright, but recent developments in media and public agenda-setting suggest that privacy and data protection are about to become more important policy issues in sectoral legislation. Perhaps the future of privacy protection, if it has a future, should be sought outside privacy and data protection law itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy making and agenda setting often are analyzed either in terms of how policy problems are defined, or in terms of the structural setting producing stability or opportunities for change. Building on different fields of scholarly work, this paper aims at an integration of structural and substantive elements in studying agenda setting. We analyze how particular frames of immigrant issues emerge in the interaction between policy makers and experts within this immigrant policy domain. By comparing this key element of agenda setting in the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom, we show how different types of interaction produce different substantive policy frames. If immigrant integration is shaped primarily as a policy issue in broader political arenas and the media, a different frame emerges than when venues such as advisory bodies, think tanks and bureaucracies with limited access and less public exposure are involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crises may provide windows of opportunity for policy analysis, since policymakers are likely to be interested in knowledge which helps them solve their urgent problems. But what if there are deep divisions in policy-oriented research on the nature and very existence of the crisis? This article analyses the migrant integration “crisis” after 2000 in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Italy. The findings demonstrate that what counts as expertise may constantly be contested and produced at times of crisis. The notion of “(de)constructing expertise” is introduced to describe conflict-ridden patterns of knowledge utilization, where different knowledge claims and experts compete for recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert Merton's theoretical formulations of unanticipated consequences provide a useful tool for understanding the consequences of government policies. In this case study the work–life balance policies in the Netherlands over the past decade are analyzed. Based on the current understanding of family-friendly policies, one can assume that the policy intended to promote gender equality did not necessarily lead to equity in the workplace. This case study suggests that researchers and policymakers should engage the concept of unanticipated consequences of government policies into theory and research whenever possible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In contrast to what many critics claim, path dependency theory can explain both policy stability and change. It explains how public policy and institutions get increasingly consolidated, legitimated and protected by the elites governing a policy sector, and that precisely this rigidity preludes inevitable large-scale reform. Reform is the result of political behavior at a critical juncture in the history of a policy sector. This political behavior includes the use of crisis rhetoric to instigate reform. Crisis rhetoric has the most potential when institutional inertia has been building up during long periods of path-dependent policy development. This explains why similar welfare state predicaments in the Netherlands and Belgium lead to different reforms in the mid-1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approaches in comparative policy analysis have so far focused on the understanding of actors, institutions and their positions in the policy-making process. More recent work attempts to enrich comparative policy analysis by taking the social context and culture into account, in order to do justice to the relevance of policy context for policy content. However, the object or content of policy making has so far largely remained a black box. In this article we aim to open up this black box by studying the provision of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) in the Netherlands, Germany and Britain in terms of co-evolution. Co-evolution refers to the intricate development of a policy together with its content, in this case genetic technologies such as PGD. We demonstrate how co-evolution has led to specific technological arrangements in these three countries: a specific technical version of PGD to deal with restrictive legislation in Germany, to a well-funded PGD with insecure indications in the Netherlands and to a PGD with secure indications but uncertain funding in Britain. We argue that this approach can contribute to policy learning, about the role of policy content as well as the role of policy processes in shaping public policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Old age pensions are one of the keystones of traditional solidaristic welfare states. They are based on systematic risk assessments, starting from the assumption of the typical standardized life course. From this perspective "ageing" is a predictable income risk, and one that has been managed by the traditional welfare state in applying actuarial principles and collectively shared entitlements. In this contribution we join the expectation in the contemporary welfare state debate that the traditional solidaristic welfare state is changing fundamentally. On the one side the assumed standardized life course is changing rapidly. On the other side the existing welfare state institutions and policies are changing at the same time. Together, these lead to the new social risk of an increasing "unpredictability" of the future for many individuals and for vulnerable groups in particular. We discuss the case of old age pensions and assess the impact on future income predictability that results from the destabilization of life courses. This argument will be grounded in a detailed empirical analysis of risk biographies and their effect on the old age pension income in the Netherlands, and a comparative assessment of the way the Dutch pension system responds to the new social risk of unpredictability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]