The Republican Alternative: The Netherlands and Switzerland Compared (2025)

Dutch Government and Politics

1993

XVlll I The Country and the People A small country 212 212 214 220 225 227 x Contents 10 The Capability of a Fragmented Syste:m Decision by negotiation The constraints of consensus An underlying consensus The crucial role of experts Accepted tie-breakers The political role of the judiciary 'Brussels' as a scapegoat Capability and legitimacy Further Reading Main Data Sources

Parties, voters and policy priorities in the Netherlands, 1971-2002

Party Politics, 2005

To what extent are the priorities of voters reflected by the policy pledges of parties? And how decisive are party pledges for the policy-making of governments? The chain of delegation assumes direct linkages between voters, parties and governments, of which the voters are the principal actor. When this assumption is tested for The Netherlands, it turns out that parties are not very responsive to voter priorities and that the policy distances between parliamentary parties and governments are relatively small. This pattern makes sense in a consensus democracy in which parties have to compromise and cannot afford simply to reflect what voters perceive as important. It also suggests that the mandate theory is more directly applicable to majoritarian democracies, where the winner takes all and therefore has more scope to translate voter priorities into policy-making.

Grumpy Politics: The Netherlands in Rejectionist Mode

2006

The years 2002 and 2003 were a watershed in Dutch political life. In fall, 2001 the Dutch were in the eighth year of 'purple' or social-liberal governments led under PvdA leader, Wim Kok. On the social and economic front, the Dutch were still receiving praise for the apparent success-modest but sustained rates of economic growth and reduced unemploymentwhich renewed social partnership and the polder model had achieved. Five months later, the picture looked remarkably different: Protest party leader Pim Fortuyn burst onto the political scene, initially as the leader of a new party, Livable Netherlands (LN), and after he was dropped from its ticket, at the head of a his own List Pim Fortuyn (LPF). A Ph.D in Sociology, former Marxist, one time professor, consultant and columnist, wealthy, flamboyantly gay, Fortuyn was an atypical leader of a protest party. Charging that the social-liberal cabinets had presided over a series of disasters, allowing public services to deteriorate, and that they had failed to develop or implement policies requiring immigrants and refugees to integrate, Fortuyn broke taboos, made politically incorrect statements, and said things that other people may have been thinking (van Holsteyn et al., 2003); his assertion that Islam was a backward religion-impetus for his being dropped from the Livable Netherlands ticket-was only one example. Fortuyn's critique was devastatingly simple: established authorities had lost touch with the people, failed to deliver effective services, failed to deal with very real problems, including public safety and the multicultural society which liberal immigration and asylum problems had created. The Netherlands, in his view, was full. Immigrants and refugees, including illegal entrants already in the Netherlands would be allowed to stay, but others would be barred and those who stayed would be expected to integrate. Riding high in public opinion polls, playing the electronic media, delivering barbs which established party politicians found difficult to answer, in the run up to the May 15 th parliamentary elections, Fortuyn became a force with which other politicians had to reckon. Ignoring him and attempting to marginalize him failed. So did attempts to answer him. Although his claims that he would be the Minister President were overstated, the votes he was likely to receive meant that other parties would have found it difficult to exclude his list from the cabinet. That experiment was cut short when Fortuyn was gunned down by an animal rights activist on May 6, 2002. Even so, Fortuyn's death cast a shadow over the election and subsequent cabinet formation. Campaigning stopped while a traumatized Netherlands made pilgrimages to his home in Rotterdam or watched his funeral on national television, but parliamentary elections went ahead as scheduled. Despite, and perhaps because of his death, the Pim Fortuyn's list won 17% of the vote and twenty-six of the 150 seats in the Second Chamber, sufficient to force its inclusion in a new cabinet. The governing parties lost heavily: The Social Democrats plummeted from 29.0% to 15.1% (23 seats), while Liberals dropped from 24.7% to 15.4% (24 seats) and D66 from 9.0% to 5.1% (7 seats). The political landscape has changed since May, 2002. Included in a cabinet with Christian Democrats and Liberals, the LPF lacked the cohesion to stay there. A party in name

The Economy and Politics of the Netherlands Since 1945

1980

Originally published by Uitgeverij Martinus Nijhoff BV in 1980 Niets uit deze uitgave mag worden verveelvoudigd en/of openbaar gemaakt door middel van druk, fotokopie, microfilm of op welke andere wijze ook, zonder voorafgaande schriftelijke toestemming van de uitgever. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm or any other means without written permission from the publisher.

Austria, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland: Old and New Winning Formulas of the Populist Radical Right

European Party Politics in Times of Crisis, 2019

The Dutch Parliamentary Elections of 2002: Fortuyn versus the Establishment

2002

During the Dutch parliamentary elections of 2002 the new party ʻList of Pim Fortuynʼ has won 26 seats at the cost of the established parties, most notably the PvdA and the VVD which both hoped to win the elections. After the election, they had fallen to a shared third position. Why could one outsider without a well-developed party organisation arrive at such a smashing electoral victory? We argue that personality, media attention, party campaigns and candidate behaviour are not the main answers. Who wants to understand Fortuynʼs victory must study his victims. We show that the programmatic convergence of the established parties has made them look indistinguishable in the eyes of many voters. This perceived lack of a democratic choice has strengthened the feeling of many voters that the established parties have become part of the state and have lost their capacity to sense the problems of ordinary citizens, let alone to solve them. Fortuyn effectively used this discontent by means of right-wing populism. Although Fortuyn was pictured as a right-wing extremist, we show that this is not the case when his manifestos are compared with other European parties.

Introduction: The Dutch and Swiss Republics compared

2008

The riddle of the missing feathers: rise and decline of the Dutch Third Way

European Politics and Society

Internationally, the social-liberalism of the Third Way is experiencing a deep crisis. The Netherlands is no exception to the trend. In the 2017 elections, the Dutch social democrat party suffered the worst defeat in Dutch parliamentary history. At the same time, the Dutch Third Way distinguishes itself from its more famous Anglo-American counterparts by its implicit character. Social democrat leaders in the Netherlands have sought to downplay the idea of a break with traditional social democracy, combining a Third Way agenda with more classically social democratic rhetoric. As a result, the crisis has taken on a different form. The Dutch social democrat party is commonly associated with a wholesale lack of principles and ideas, rather than with the Third Way. As such, the curious case of the Dutch Third Way might be illustrative of a broader, 'muffled' crisis in other countries where the Third Way has been adopted in a more implicit manner.

Governance and Politics of the Netherlands

Acta Politica, 2003

ISBN 0-333-96-156 d49.50 (hardback), and 0-333-96157-9 (paper) d16.99.

The emergence of the Netherlands as a ‘democratic’ country

Journal of Modern European History

This contribution sketches the emergence of democratic self-definitions in the Netherlands, from the end of the 18th century until the post-war period, when it had become commonplace to define the country as democratic. Its point of departure is the use of the word and concept of democracy by contemporaries and Dutch and foreign historians, and it argues that the history of Dutch ‘democracy’ has been characterized by an emphasis on freedom, self-government by a broadly defined elite and a strong civil society, rather than by participation of the population at large. Democracy only became really popular after the Second World War when it could be defined as protection against dictatorship. The Dutch case shows that we should be careful about equating a strong civil society or even the rule of law with democracy in the sense of the power of the people at large. Democracy was definitely accepted as a label to characterize the Netherlands after it had been redefined as in essence the op...