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Across established democracies, citizens express high levels of support for decision making via referendums. What drives these preferences remains yet unclear. In this article it is argued that, first, process preferences are less stable than previously assumed but vary substantially across policy proposals. Second, it is suggested that instrumental considerations play an important role in shaping citizens' preferences for referendums. Specifically, citizens who favour the policy proposal or believe that they hold a majority opinion are expected to express more support for the use of referendums. An original survey was designed and conducted in the Netherlands (N = 1,289) that contains both between and within respondent variation across a range of policy proposals. The findings support these arguments: Both the desire for a specific policy change and the perception of being in the majority with one's policy preference relate to support for the use of referendums across policy proposals, levels of governance, and between and within respondents. This study contributes to a better understanding of process preferences by showing that these preferences have a non‐stable component and that instrumental considerations play an important role in citizens' support for referendums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article examines the effects of the structure of intermunicipal cooperatives (IMCs) on the perceived transaction costs and benefits of IMCs. Hypotheses based on a polycentric theory of regional governance are tested using data from Dutch municipalities. The findings are mixed. In line with polycentric theory, networks characterized by a multiplicity of territorial scales reduce IMC transaction costs. Contrary to polycentric theory, however, if IMCs are organized under a uniform legal regime, lower costs and higher benefits are reported. Structural factors that dominate the debate between polycentrism and monocentrism prove to be of limited importance. On the other hand, the results indicate support for the hypotheses that intermunicipal trust (as a cultural variable) contributes to perceptions of effective and efficient cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public leaders are expected to provide information on a crisis situation and present a plan to restore a state of normalcy. This study, based on interviews with Dutch mayors who were personally involved in crises between 1979 and 2014, assesses the various roles of public leaders’ meaning making. A total of 94 case studies were analyzed for this purpose. Responsibility and collective impact turn out to be closely intertwined phenomena, which influence the modus operandi as a public leader as perceived by the mayors themselves. The Public Meaning Making Model presented, shows four distinctive roles based on the meaning making by Dutch mayors: the roles of ‘mourner-in-chief’, ‘orchestrator’, ‘advocate’ and ‘buddy’. All of these roles emphasize different elements that depend on the collective, emotional impact of a situation as well as on the political responsibility attributed to the public leader. This article discusses the characteristics and implications of each of the four roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigration detention is formally not a punishment, but governments do use it to deter illegal residence. This study examines whether and how immigration detention affects detainees' decision-making processes regarding departure, thereby possibly resulting in de facto 'specific deterrence.' Semistructured face-to-face interviews were conducted in the Netherlands with 81 immigration detainees, and their case files were examined. Evidence is found for a limited, selective deterrence effect at the level of detainee's attitudes: most respondents considered immigration detention a painful and distressing experience, but only a minority-mostly labor migrants without family ties in the Netherlands-developed a preference to return to their country of citizenship in hopes of ending their exposure, including repeated exposure, to the detention. In line with defiance theory, we find that eventual deterrent effects mostly occurred among detainees who also attributed some measure of legitimacy to their detention. Among some detainees, the detention experience resulted in a preference to migrate to a neighboring European country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political psychologists have been quick to use prospect theory in their work, realizing its potential for explaining decisions under risk. Applying prospect theory to political decision-making is not without problems, though, and here we address two of these: (1) Does prospect theory actually apply to political decision-makers, or are politicians unlike the rest of us? (2) Which dimension do politicians use as their reference point when there are multiple dimensions (e.g., votes and policy)? We address both problems in an experiment with a unique sample of Dutch members of parliament as participants. We use well-known (incentivized) decision situations and newly developed hypothetical political decision-making scenarios. Our results indicate that politicians' deviate from expected utility theory in the direction predicted by prospect theory but that these deviations are somewhat smaller than those of other people. Votes appear to be a more important determinant of politicians' reference point than is policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public affairs (PA) practitioners play an important role in political decision-making in modern democratic societies. This study gives a first insight in how these practitioners themselves perceive their role. Based on findings from previous empirical studies and normative democratic theories, three ideal type role conceptions are constructed: shared ways in which PA practitioners see and make normative sense of their profession. Next, these role conceptions are investigated with an online survey among 100 public affairs practitioners in The Netherlands. Findings confirm that the proposed advocate , expert and mediator roles indeed represent different ways in which PA practitioners conceptualize their jobs. The advocate and expert roles are relatively dominant among the sample, while female practitioners tend to subscribe more to the mediator role. The implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses fiscal consolidation in the Netherlands, especially the politics of consolidation and cutbacks. We discuss the contents of the consolidation measures, and the political decision-making processes leading up to the measures. The analysis of the political decision-making focuses on the characteristics and stages of the decision-making. The three stages of fiscal consolidation analysed in this article – the October 2010 coalition agreement, the April 2012 spring agreement, and the October 2012 coalition agreement – show a gradually mounting recognition of the necessity for serious cutbacks. Decision-making was mainly characterized by consensual compromising, that is, incremental, across-the-board, cheese-slicing measures. However, in later stages of the fiscal crisis, hesitant attempts were made at targeted political priority-setting. Points for practitioners This article’s main focus is on the political decision-making leading up to cutback measures, whether the decisions were mainly incremental, across-the-board, cheese-slicing, or whether targeted, selective cutbacks based on political priority-setting also occurred. It turns out that hesitant attempts of the latter type were indeed made. After a while some fundamental reconsiderations did seep through in Dutch consensus politics. Another key point is that budget discipline played a dominant role in the government’s fiscal consolidation. The economic experts of the Ministry of Finance, Central Planning Bureau, etc. had a major influence on the financial frames of the cutbacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prominence of party leaders in the media is one of the presumed causes of leader effects (i.e., the influence of party leader evaluation on the voting decision). Yet there is scant knowledge of the relationship between attention for party leaders in the news and the weight of party leader evaluations in the voting decision. This study fills this research gap by examining the effect of exposure to personalized coverage on the weight of party leader evaluations in the voting decision. Based on priming theory, exposure to personalized coverage is expected to make voters weigh leader evaluations more heavily in their vote decision. The study is based on a content analysis of the coverage of the 2010 Dutch election campaign and an 11-wave panel survey. Therewith the hypotheses are tested in a dynamic natural media environment. The analyses demonstrate that leader effects do occur. Voters use leader evaluations in their voting decision, even when controlling for the lagged vote, party evaluations, and issue agreement. Our data also support the hypothesis that personalized media coverage primes personalized voting behavior, even when controlling for learning and projection. Voters weigh leader evaluations more heavily in their vote decision and party evaluations and issue agreement less heavily when they are exposed to more personalized coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of demoi-cracy have recently gained salience in the continuous debate on a legitimate democratic Euro polity. Demoi-crats argue that multiple demoi can provide the European Union (EU) with its much sought-after democratic legitimacy. This article aims to offer an empirical contribution to the literature on the EU as a legitimate demoi-cracy. The media debates in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and France were analysed in order to identify resonance of demoi-cratic ideas. Comparative analysis of legitimation statements in opinion articles in two quality newspapers per country shows that the debates often share a similar point of departure as demoi-cratic theories. However, the evaluation of this situation and the existing EU structures' legitimacy relies on either intergovernmental or supranational democratic idea(l)s. In conclusion, the analysis offers little evidence of ideas of demoi-cracy resonating in these élite debates on the EU's legitimacy except for a few potentially promising exceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issues of 'policy diffusion' or 'policy transfer' and 'mutual learning' have become important topics in comparative research on social policy and health systems. In current debates on explaining reform in ' Bismarckian' social (health) insurance systems, however, these issues have been neglected. In particular, the role of 'negative lesson-drawing' in the sense of avoiding mistakes of others has not often been considered. This article compares health system change in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, three countries with health systems of the social insurance type. In contrast to the existing literature, our analysis stresses that these countries have taken different reform paths since the 1990s. By applying a most similar systems design, we analyze how far cross-border lesson-drawing has contributed to health system divergence in the three countries. The empirical basis of the analysis is semi-structured qualitative expert interviews, a method appropriate for tracing processes of lesson-drawing. We argue that in order to fully understand the diverging reform trajectories, we need to take into account how political decision-makers refer to (negative) experiences of other countries. Generally, national driving forces for health system change were at the heart of many crucial reforms during the period studied. Nevertheless, we claim that it was the German bad practice role model that kept the reform paths of Austria and Germany apart in the Austrian health reform discussion between 2000 and 2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the sources of legitimacy of regional governance networks and pays special attention to the aspect of credibility. We argue that legitimacy of regional governance networks is not only based on legality, justifiability, and consent, but also on the ability of the regional governance network to gain credibility in the shadow of hierarchical decision making. Credibility has not received the same degree of attention as other aspects of legitimacy. However, networked forms of governing – such as regional governance – to a large extent rely on the belief held by participating governmental actors and higher levels of government in this type of collaboration and governing. They must be convinced of the added value of this type of collaboration. We empirically illustrate the importance of credibility as an aspect of legitimacy, using two examples of cases of regional housing governance in the Netherlands. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite renewed interest in role theory and its promise to relate to agent–structure relationships, research in this area has underdeveloped notions of ‘agency’ and an incomplete understanding of the interaction between ‘agency’ and ‘structure’. This problem can be attributed, in part, to the fact that the theory frequently overlooks the centrality of domestic political agents in the process of role conflict. An analysis of Danish decision-making over the country’s involvement in Iraq and of Dutch decision-making over its involvement in Afghanistan illustrates the theoretical and empirical advantages of examining role conflicts with a focus on domestic politics. We conclude that studying role conflict as embedded in domestic political processes is important in the development of role theory in international relations research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Conventional generational accounting only includes future benefits and burdens from the government. This paper's contribution is to include past benefits and burdens as well, and in this way to provide a full lifetime account of how much current and future generations benefit from government, in net terms, under various future policy lines. The calculations are carried out for the Netherlands and for the cohorts born since 1946. The more complete picture may be helpful for political decision-making on equitable intergenerational policies. A second contribution of this paper is that it uses a more comprehensive benefit concept than other such backward-looking studies by including non-cash benefits as well. The results point out that there are substantial differences in net lifetime benefits between generations and these are mainly driven by non-cash benefits such as education and healthcare, on which expenditure increased substantially after 1946. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Common sense suggests that majoritarian parliaments produce more efficient governments than proportional ones, because fewer decision-makers are involved. Empirical evidence offers only limited support for this claim. A possible explanation is that the true decision-makers are not actually the parties, but rather the factions within them. We consider some stylised real proportional cases, i.e. Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, and use simulation to assess the weight that factions must have for governability to be lower in first-past-the-post than in threshold proportionality. Overall, our results provide support for the hypothesis suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years interactive decision making has become quite popular in The Netherlands, especially at the level of local government. It involves new forms of participation of citizens, consumers of public services and interest groups in the process of policy formation. Workshops, panels, internet discussions and a lot of other techniques are used to arrive at innovative and supported solutions for existing problems. The ambitions are high: these new forms of participation should result in better government both in the sense of providing better policies, but also in bridging the democratic gap between local government and citizens. problems. Recent experiences suggest that one of the major problems is the challenge interactive decision making constitutes for the existing practice of representative politics. On the basis of two cases - the decision-making process concerning the expansion of the Rotterdam Harbour and the discussion about a new administrative structure for the Rotterdam region - this article illustrates that one of the barriers that stands in the way of the success of such processes is the ambiguous attitude of elected politicians. Although politicians often initiate interactive decision-making processes, they do not actively support these processes when they are in progress. The outcomes of interactive decision-making progress are often not used in the formal political procedures that follow. Because elected politicians fear that these new forms of participation threaten their political primacy, they find it hard to play a constructive role in these processes. In this paper we suggest that if politicians are serious about interactive decision making, they should reflect on their own role in it. Building upon empirical insights of the cases and on a discussion of two possible approaches to democracy, we suggest alternative roles for politicians. The prevailing substantive definition of primacy of politics should be redefined in order to allow politicians to fulfil the role of catalyst and facilitator of the public debate. In this way the eroded role of politicians in societal decision making may gain a new meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]