Redistribution and Ethnic Diversity in the Netherlands.

Redistributive policies concerning migrants in The Netherlands bear a striking degree of ethnic specificity. This characteristic seems to follow from the doctrine 'integration with maintenance of own culture' that has long informed Dutch minority policies. However, both central and local governments stopped subscribing to this doctrine at least a decade ago, while ethnically specific policy arrangements have continued to grow. This article explains the anomaly from an administrative mechanism: the logic of categorization for policy-making contradicts the logic of policy implementation. The use of what we call 'replacement categories' creates an administrative opportunity structure that unintentionally promotes ethnic fragmentation. We examine the workings of this mechanism in a case study of minority policy in The Netherlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]