Political Science

This research shows how a political system of consensus and accommodation relates to anti-establishment politics and vice versa. It demonstrates how adversarial politics can result in governing coalitions that are able to achieve results. In this way, this book offers insight not only for people with a general interest in the working of local politics, but also for municipalities facing similar dissensual political parties.

Recent developments in some countries suggest that the era of the citizen as a mere voter and as a customer of local services slowly has come to an end. Is the dominance of traditional models of representation and of New Public Management decreasing? Can this trend be observed in all Western European democracies?

This volume reports the results of the first phase of the Civic Education Study conducted by International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). During 1996 and 1997, researchers in 24 countries collected documentary evidence on the circumstances, contents, and processes of civic education in response to a common set of framing questions. They also solicited the views of experts on what 14-year-olds should know about a variety of political and civic issues. Each chapter provides a summary of these national case studies and highlights pressing issues or themes of current importance within civic education.

The current worldwide attention for democracy support raises questions on whether democratisation can be effectively assisted from abroad, and if so through what international modalities. In this publication, European academics and practitioners discuss various aspects of the distinctly European contribution towards this challenge.

Dialogues of the Deaf: Defining New Agendas for Environmental Deadlocks presents a way to analyze and deal with some of the most difficult policy issues today. Dialogues of the deaf are policy controversies that remain deadlocked for many years, even after extensive research and deliberation between stakeholders. In these controversies, stakeholders talk past each other, advancing arguments that are each "true" on their own terms but that lead to fundamentally different conclusions.

Policy Analysis in Multi-Actor Policy Settings; Navigating Between Negotiated Nonsense and Superfluous Knowledge synthesizes the existing, divergent policy analysis insights on how to deal with today's complex public policy issues. The result is a guide for setting up an analysis in a multi-actor setting.

Purposive Interaction in Multi-Actor Decision Making; Operationalizing Coleman's Linear System of Action for Policy Decision Support, started out with a ball and a web, a policy domain moved by a network of actors. How can the ball maintain its pace? Who are the actors that make the difference? How can policy annalists support them in moving the decision-making process forward? These are the challenges to policy analyses laid out by the pluricentric perspective on decision making.

In the area of public utilities, the member states of the European Union (EU) have agreed on ambitious policies to open up markets for competition and to regulate these markets. To have the expected effect, these policies have to be implemented effectively. In this book it is demonstrated that this is problematic; difficulties appear already in the first step of transposing the directives into national legislation.

This study is an attempt to systematically explain why and when bureaucrats interact with interest groups. It develops a new explanatory model that integrates different explanations of bureaucracy-interest group interactions. The empirical analyses are based on a true mixed-method design and include the development of a novel database of Dutch national interest groups.

EU agencies are formally independent, but do they also behave autonomously in practice? How does actual autonomy vary across EU agencies and how does this affect the role these agencies play in the multi-level system of European governance? This book provides a wealth of empirical information on EU agencies and a clear understanding of the nuts and bolts of EU governance through such agencies