The Oxford Handbook of Dutch Politics

Auteur
Sarah de Lange is Professor of Political Pluralism at the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. Prior to this she was an Assistant Professor, Associate Professor and held the Dr. J.M. Den Uyl chair at the same university. She took up a Jean Monnet Fellowship at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute and was a member of the parliamentary and governmental advisory group, the Council for Public Administration Tom Louwerse is Associate Professor at the Institute of Political Science, Leiden University. Prior to this he was Assistant Professor in Political Science at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Leiden University's Research Profile Area Political Legitimacy and as an instructor in the Institute of Political Science, Leiden University. Paul 't Hart is Professor of Public Administration, Utrecht University. He also serves as a Member of the Scientific Council for Government Policy of the Netherlands, the Dutch government's independent think tank advising the Dutch cabinet and parliament about long-range and boundary-crossing public policy challenges. Carolien van Ham is Professor of Empirical Political Science, Radboud University Nijmegen. Previously she held the position of Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the University of New South Wales, Australia and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Twente and the University of Gothenburg.

Résumé
The Oxford Handbook of Dutch Politics provides a comprehensive longitudinal overview of the state of the art of academic research on the Dutch political system: its origins and historical development, its key institutions, main fault lines, pivotal processes, and key public policy dynamics. In each of the chapters, researchers take stock of what - if anything - has changed over time, how scholars have conceptualized and studied these dynamics, and what key factors can account for the developmental patterns found to be at play. Notwithstanding its considerable degree of constitutional and institutional stability, Dutch politics has seen considerable step changes and occasional upheavals across the last half century. Influenced by long-term demographic, socio-economic, and cultural shifts the old social cleavages have waned. New social identities and dividing lines - such as ethnicity, education, place, and gender - have influenced Dutch citizens' political attitudes and behaviours, including their voting patterns. The media landscape and the information environment have been altered by new technologies that politicians and citizens alike have to navigate. This has produced changes in such pivotal components as the party system, coalition formation and management process, and executive-legislative relations, and many others. Moreover, public policy paradigms and the political coalitions that sustained them have ascended and lost traction in most of the eleven policy domains discussed in the Handbook. In all, this volume provides unique and indispensable insights into stability and change in a political system that once gained notoriety as an archetype of a consensual or consociational democracy.