Administrative Conditions to Institutional Politics: Federalism in an Unitary State

Abstract

The Netherlands is a paradoxical case in comparative public administration and comparative political science. On the one hand it is often seen as one of the most centralized state systems in Western Europe. On the other hand the system exhibits the institutional characteristics of a fragmented and disjointed ‘consociational’ consensus democracy. The institutional features of both political and administrative systems are traditionally characterized by differentiation, plurality and diversity. This strange marriage between unity and plurality is reflected in the self-imposed label of the constitutional structure as a ‘decentralized unitary state’, a label that merely seems to underscore the hybrid nature of the system (Toonen, 1990). The combination of the characteristics of a plural consensus democracy with those of a unitary rather than a federal structure — which would have been in line with the more common pattern — makes it a case of its own in comparative studies (Lijphart, 1984). This case is difficult to assess in comparative terms and therefore intriguing in academic terms.KeywordsInstitutional PoliticsDiffuse MeaningUnitary StateRegional GovernanceDutch SocietyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.