Suchergebnisse

Dit boek verschijnt voorafgaand aan de verkiezingen voor de Provinciale Staten op 20 maart. Het is de opvolger van 'De gemeenteraad'. Maakt het iets uit op welke partij je stemt bij de verkiezingen voor de Provinciale Staten? Kunnen provinciebesturen wel uitvoering geven aan de wensen van kiezers? Dat zijn cruciale vragen voor wie de democratische kwaliteit van de provincies wil bepalen. Opmerkelijk genoeg is hierover tot nu toe nauwelijks gepubliceerd. Als provincies al aandacht krijgen, dan is het bijvoorbeeld vanwege de vraag of de provinciale bestuurslaag nog moet blijven bestaan tussen gemeenten en Rijk. 'Provinciale politiek' presenteert voor het eerst de bestaande en nieuwe inzichten van experts op het gebied van provinciale democratie. Het boek gaat niet alleen over de historische wortels van provinciebesturen, maar ook over de manier waarop vandaag de dag de leden van de Provinciale Staten hun burgers vertegenwoordigen en controle uitoefenen op Gedeputeerde Staten

In recent decades, so-called "mini-publics" have been organized in many countries to renew policy making and democracy. One characteristic of mini-publics is that the selection of the participants is based on random sampling or sortition. This gives each member of the community an equal chance of being selected. Another feature is that deliberation forms the core of the process of how proposals are developed. In this paper, we investigate the possibilities and challenges of sortition and deliberation in the context of the call for a deepening of democracy and more citizen engagement in policy making. Based on extensive research on citizens' forums (G1000) in The Netherlands, we show the potential of mini-publics, but a number of shortcomings as well. Some of these are related to the specific design of the G1000, while others are of a more fundamental nature and are due to the contradictory democratic values that deliberative mini-publics try to combine. One of these concerns the tension between the quality of deliberation and political impact. We conclude that combining institutional approaches could be a way out to deal with these tensions and a step forward to both deepen and connect democratic processes.

Although deliberative reforms have been proposed to strengthen democracy, little is known about their impact on politics, public policies, and society. This article develops a framework to systematically assess this impact, differentiating between direct and indirect forms of impact. We apply this framework to two cases of deliberative citizens' summits in the Netherlands. Our analysis reveals that these summits have a limited direct impact on local politics and policy making, but a relatively strong indirect impact on the local community. The article also discusses some conditions that mediate the impact of the forum.

How can we measure and explain the salience of European integration for political parties? Although salience is an extensively used concept within the field of European Union (EU) studies, it suffers from conceptual ambiguity and lacks rigorous empirical investigation. This article sets out to conceptualise and explain the salience of European integration to political parties, by cross-validating three empirical salience measures used in the Comparative Manifesto Project, European Election Study and Marks/ Steenbergen Expert survey. The analysis demonstrates that whilst one common dimension underlies the different salience measures, there is no common explanation for variation in salience. There is one exception: when the EU is salient to the party system as a whole, it tends to be salient to each party in the system. [Copyright 2006 Elsevier Ltd.]