Dutch Parliament Research Articles

Rules of consultation. Parliamentary procedure in the Netherlands since 1795

ABSTRACT The Dutch Parliament claims to be one of the oldest, if not the oldest parliament still in function today, with roots tracing back to the ‘States-General’ of 17 provinces in the Low Countries that assembled for the first time in 1464. Historiography also tends to stress the remarkable continuity and stability of the Dutch Parliament, with rules, practices and traditions handed over from one generation to another – seemingly irrespective of regime changes. Continuity indeed is a significant aspect of Dutch parliamentary culture. This article will show that this is a result of an ongoing historical process of adaptation and re-negotiation, and by no means has it been self-evident. Confronted with internal and external challenges of the established (working) order, the Dutch Parliament throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sought to reconciliate ‘the old’ with ‘new’ ideas on how to put parliamentarism, representation, and deliberative democracy into daily practice. In fact, this has been at the heart of every discussion on parliamentary procedure.

What Explains Voting for DENK: Issues, Discrimination or In-group Favouritism?

ABSTRACT Why do ethnic and religious minorities vote for DENK? DENK is the first pro-Turkey and pro-Islam party represented in Dutch parliament, led by Turkish- and Moroccan-origin politicians who openly profess to practicing Islam. Drawing on an original survey (N= 905) among Dutch voters in which we oversampled those with Turkish, Moroccan and Surinamese roots, we put three possible explanations to the test: issues, discrimination and in-group favouritism. Each subsample is religiously mixed and includes Muslims and/or Christians and voters who are not religious. While ethnic in-group favouritism, feelings of belonging in the Netherlands, experiences with discrimination and issues sometimes explain voting for DENK, Muslim in-group favouritism is the decisive factor. These findings contribute to understanding voting behaviour in increasingly religiously diverse European immigration societies.

The Introduction of a New Shareholder Dispute Resolution System in the Netherlands

The Dutch Parliament has recently made some radical changes in the system to regulate shareholder disputes in the Netherlands. The current system is flawed and underused. Shareholder disputes are mainly solved through an expensive bypass via the so-called inquiry-procedure at the Enterprise Chamber (EC). In the new system, the EC will be the only competent court for shareholder disputes. The relevant criteria are clarified and expanded. The procedure will be less formal and the EC can decide on related claims too. As a result, the new system aims to facilitate a swift settlement of all claims and conflicts between the parties involved in a shareholder dispute. A comparison with the highly used and popular Belgian system shows that there are some interesting differences. This article concludes by predicting that the new Dutch dispute regulation will be heavily used and will make the inquiry-procedure superfluous.

Holocaust Analogies, Conspiracy Theories, and Far-Right Victimhood: Forum for Democracy and the Future of Holocaust Memory in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between the Far Right and Holocaust memory politics in the Netherlands through an in-depth analysis of the antisemitic and conspiratorial discourse of far-right politician Thierry Baudet and his party, Forum for Democracy (FvD). While the FvD positioned themselves as a victim of establishment politics from the outset, the party used their opposition to government COVID-19 policies to bolster the image of themselves as victim of state power as well as Jewish conspiracies. This article argues that Baudet’s Holocaust relativization and his criticism of the evolving character of Dutch Holocaust memory are intimately tied to his and the FvD’s antisemitic worldview, in which Jews are to blame for the decline of a mythologized white, Christian Dutch nation. In this context, the FvD used Holocaust analogies on social media, in the Dutch parliament, and during rallies to simultaneously accuse Jews of exploiting a victim identity for moral legitimacy and to contest the government’s acknowledgment of Dutch collaboration and inclusion of Jewish experiences into a broader national narrative of the Second World War. In posing these challenges to the status of the Holocaust in contemporary memory politics, Baudet and the FvD attempt to rewrite Dutch history with the white, Christian population as the true bearers of Dutch heritage and identity. Examining the character and normalization of Holocaust relativization in a country still lauded internationally for its tolerance despite its delayed process of ‘coming to terms’ with its Holocaust past demonstrates the centrality of memory politics to far-right ideologies.

Parliamentary Systems in Continental European Countries and its Relationship to the Effectiveness of Legislative Institutions

Every country has a unique style regarding the parliamentary system they follow. This parliamentary system may experience changes or developments that differ from the initial concept. It is expected because each country has other political, cultural, social, and economic conditions. It is normative legal research with a historical and conceptual approach, then conducted in a comparative study. The results of this study found that the French parliamentary system is included in the category of Medium-Strength bicameralism with asymmetrical and incongruent characteristics. The Dutch parliament belongs to medium-strength bicameralism with symmetrical and harmonious features. The Austrian legislature, known as the Bundesrat, does not have the same power as the Nationalrat, so the management of the two chambers of parliament is asymmetrical. Meanwhile, the parliamentary system in Indonesia can be classified as medium-strength bicameralism with asymmetrical and incongruent buildings. The parliamentary system can indirectly affect the effectiveness of the legislature's performance. Sometimes, the system adopted can make parliament an effective and efficient institution or vice versa. A small example is France, which can complete over 50% of proposed legislation in one year. Meanwhile, from 2020-2024, only 17 draft laws were constructed in Indonesia out of 215 registered. This figure is only 7.9% of the total proposed bill. Suppose the parliamentary system adopted has yet to bring parliament into a better, transparent, efficient, and open legislative body. In that case, the system can be re-evaluated by considering the existing ideal parliamentary concept.

Twitter and divides in the Dutch parliament: social and political segregation in the following, @-mentions and retweets networks

ABSTRACT MPs communication on Twitter with other MPs may facilitate forming cross-party solidarity networks and provide public micro deliberation but may also be segregated leading to information bubbles and political polarization. That party-based division lines are running through the online communication networks of politicians is a well-established finding in social media studies; however important knowledge gaps have remained on the complexity of Twitter’s multilayered network developments and their interrelatedness with socio-demographic segregation. Here, we integrate the online-network literature with that on the political consequences of the digital architecture of social media platforms to theorize and scrutinize the extent to which and why Twitter following, @-mentioning and retweeting networks among MPs are segregated along party lines and sex, age and ethnicity. Our unique dynamic take allows us to rigorously study network segregation, including feedback mechanisms between Twitter layers, based on descriptive network statistics and SIENA analyses for Dutch MPs at three time points. The findings show that political segregation patterns are strongest within the retweet layer and weakest for @-mentions. The interrelations between the Twitter network layers aggravate party-based segregation over time. MP Twitter networks are not consistently segregated along social dimensions.

Political narratives in representation: Maiden speeches of ethnic minority members of parliament

AbstractThe maiden speech – the first speech given by a newly elected member of parliament (MP) – is a tradition in many parliaments, a personalized rite of passage to political power. As ethnic minority MPs remain relative newcomers, the maiden speech is, for them, even more politically charged. How do ethnic minority MPs represent their identities in this transformative moment? Our data set includes 93 ethnic minority MPs who have held a seat in the Dutch parliament, covering 88 maiden speeches, spanning 11 cycles (1986–2023). The diachronic and intersectional analysis shows that the relation between descriptive, substantive and symbolic representation for historically marginalized groups fluctuates and is influenced by the political environment. The ‘firsts’ of a particular gender/ethnicity intersectional group are less likely to narrate a minority identity than non‐firsts. Progressive party ideology influences the extent to which ethnic minority MPs emphasize an (intersectional) minoritized identity. Personal stories and family histories are often used to counter stereotypes, unmute silenced cultures and share values. The focus on the maiden speech as a political narrative sheds light on the blurry lines between substantive, symbolic and descriptive representation. The political narrative is a strategic tool for MPs from historically disadvantaged groups to represent collective identities.

Representation of the Electorate in the Eerste Kamer

This paper aims to assess to what extent the Eerste Kamer, one of the chambers of the Dutch parliament, provides political representation. This is done by comparing three models of political representation to the political reality. These three models are the trustee, the delegate, and the resemblance models. All three models and their respective characteristics are explained in the paper before moving to the analysis. The paper concludes that political representation is not realized through these three models in the instance of the Eerste Kamer, as it fails to fulfil key characteristics of all three. The paper also evaluates some possible solutions for increasing political representation in light of these models. Keywords: Delegate, Eerste Kamer, Trustee, Political Representation

Strengthening Internal Reporting Systems: A Qualitative Study into the Role of Dutch Confidential Advisors

Organizations—public as well as private ones—continue to struggle with the correction and prevention of integrity violations. In this regard, specific attention in the Netherlands has been given to the confidential advisor (CA), who supports reporters, informs employees on integrity policies, and signals to management about integrity risks and trends in internal reporting. To further strengthen the internal reporting systems of organizations, a legislative proposal has been submitted in the Dutch Parliament with the aim of requiring all organizations with a minimum of 50 employees to appoint at least one CA. In light of the new law, the goal of this study is to examine how CAs perform their functions in practice, and to what extent they can contribute to the strengthening of internal reporting systems. The study finds that CAs lay most emphasis on supporting reporters by advising them on integrity issues, yet often at the expense of informing of employees and signaling to management. These findings have important academic and practical implications. For scholars, it gives new insight into an important element of internal reporting systems. For CAs, it shows that they should perform their three functions in an integrated manner to be the most effective.

Een beeld zegt meer dan duizend woorden

Picturing parliament. Photojournalists in the Dutch parliament in the 1970s This article aims to fill a gap in the historiography of parliamentary visual culture and specifically parliamentary photography in the Netherlands. While the 1970s are considered the heyday of parliamentary photography, historical research has mostly focused on the Interbellum and specifically the work of one photographer, Erich Salomon. Research on media in the 1970s concentrates on the impact of the growing popularity of television, when in fact parliamentary photography was also booming during this period. This article explores the impact of parliamentary photography on the Dutch parliament and its members in the 1970s. It makes a distinction between the impact of the presence of photographers in political spaces such as the plenary hall of parliament and the impact of the photographs themselves, their content, and their specific style.

Lifestyle versus social determinants of health in the Dutch parliament: An automated analysis of debate transcripts

Although public health scholars increasingly recognize the importance of the social determinants of health (SDOH), health policy outputs tend to emphasize downstream lifestyle factors instead. We use an automated corpus research approach to analyse fourteen years of health policy debate in the Dutch House of Representatives’ Health Committee, testing three potential causes of the lack of attention for SDOH: political ideology, by which members of parliament (MPs) from some political orientations may prioritize lifestyle factors over SDOH; lifestyle drift, by which early attention for SDOH during problem analysis is replaced by a lifestyle focus in the development of solutions as the challenges in addressing SDOH become clear; and focusing events, by which political or societal chance events, known to the public and political elites simultaneously, bolster the lifestyle perspective on health. Our analysis shows that overall, the committee spent most of its time discussing neither SDOH nor lifestyle: healthcare financing and service delivery dominated instead. When SDOH or lifestyle were referenced, left-leaning MPs referred significantly more to SDOH and right-leaning MPs significantly more to lifestyle. Temporal effects related to election cycles yielded inconsistent evidence. Finally, peak attention for both lifestyle and SDOH coincided with ongoing political debate instead of exogenous, unforeseen focusing events, and these peaks were rendered relatively insignificant by the larger and more consistent attention for health care. This paper provides a first step toward automated analysis of policy debates at scale, opening up new avenues for the empirical study of health political discourse.

Sporen van stadhouders

In anticipation of the current major restoration of the Binnenhof, the home of the Dutch parliament, building historians conducted research into this historically important complex of buildings in The Hague. This article focuses on the western part of the complex and the role played there by the stadholder and the States of Holland. In the northwest corner of the Binnenhof, an L-shaped Knights’ House arose in the middle of the fourteenth century with a residence for the stadholder on the first floor while the ground floor was used by the States of Holland.
 In 1585 Prince Maurits took up residence in this part of the Binnenhof and to underline his status had a tower built on the northwest corner (completed 1604). Later he had his accommodation expanded (1620-1621). His successor Frederik Hendrik further expanded the accommodation with an extruded corner containing private quarters for his son William’s wife (Mary Stuart). With the death of William II in 1650, the first stadholderless period (1650-1672) began. The States of Holland seized on this opportunity to reinforce their claim to the buildings by demolishing part of the recent expansion on the Hofvijver side and building a prominent new meeting place.
 As a consequence of the war with the French in 1672, William III became stadholder and to compensate for the lost space he commissioned an expansion of the complex on the south side (1677-1678). After the death of his wife Mary II Stuart, he had a stately house built for his favourite, the 1st Earl of Albemarle, on the south edge of the Prinsentuin in circa 1695. William’s death in 1702 ushered in the second stadholderless period until the threat of war in 1747 led to the appointment of William IV as stadholder. At this point the accommodation at the Binnenhof was deemed to be too small for the court and plans for a new palace were drawn up. What his father had been unable to achieve, William V accomplished. Existing buildings in the southwest corner made way for new stadholder quarters, but not until the States of Holland had built a new Comptoir-Generaal (money office) a little further away in 1777. In 1779 work on new quarters commenced. They consisted of a representative section in the Binnenhof, an apartment for the stadholder with an entrance on the Buitenhof and a service wing – the Cingelhuis – on the south side. The latter replaced the service wing of the Court of Albemarle. The new accommodation was finished by 1792, but just three years later William V was forced into exile, after which the newly formed Batavian Republic turned the ballroom into a meeting room, which served as the chamber of the House of Representatives from 1814 to 1992. The chamber of the States of Holland has been in use by the Senate since 1849.

‘De Tweede Kamerleden en de regering moeten ons als volwassenen beschouwen.’

‘Parliament and government should regard us as adults.’ Petitioning the Dutch parliament during the 1960s In contrast to petitioning in the Netherlands during the nineteenth century, petitioning after 1945 has received little attention. This article explores the perception of petitioning among supplicants and politicians by presenting a case study of requests addressed to the House of Representatives during the 1960s. It argues that different views of what was reasonable caused disagreement over the role of petitioning. Supplicants interpreted the right to petition as an invitation by the parliament to take part in political discussions. However, MPs both in and outside the parliamentary petitions committee appeared ambivalent, seeming to appreciate popular input but also paternalistically questioning this form of participation. This tension, rooted in the way citizens addressed the assembly, provoked debate on the role of the Ombudsman. By showing that petitioning influenced parliamentary procedures, this article re-evaluates the impact of petitioning on postwar parliamentary politics.

New parties in a crowded electoral space: the (in)stability of radical right voters in the Netherlands

Previous research demonstrated that voters for the Dutch radical right party PVV were the most stable voters among the highly volatile electorate. However, since 2017 two new radical right parties have successfully entered the Dutch Parliament: Forum for Democracy (FvD) and JA21, conceivably at the expense of the PVV. The success of these new parties is puzzling, because there does not seem to be much room for new parties campaigning on a highly similar platform. In our paper, we use LISS panel data to study the determinants of vote switching patterns between four subsequent elections from 2017 to 2021. We find that the surprise victory of the new far right in 2019 can be explained by its ability to attract both former PVV voters as well as voters new to the far right. Since then, FvD has lost many of its supporters again, but these voters have mostly switched to other far-right parties, meaning the far-right support base has become fragmented, yet enlarged. This suggests that when provided with viable alternatives, radical right voters are as volatile as other voter groups.

The Enemy Within? Article 259 TFEU and the EU’s Rule of Law Crisis

AbstractThis article explores the role which Member State-led infringement proceedings can play in overcoming the EU’s rule of law crisis, and hypothesizes that it can prove helpful in breaking the current impasse. It begins by understanding why the EU’s “traditional” rule of law enforcement mechanisms—such as Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and the recent rule of law conditionality regulation—have failed (Section 2), before exploring how infringement proceedings operate, what their shortcomings are, and why Scheppele’s proposed “systemic infringement proceedings” are important (Section 3). It then seeks to apply said findings to the rule of law crisis, using two recent developments as an example: The oral proceedings of Commission v. Poland (Régime disciplinaire des juges) and a recent vote by the Dutch Parliament compelling its government to take Poland before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) (Section 4). Finally, it explores the broader constitutional implications of relying on Article 259 Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) to overcome the rule of law crisis: It discusses Kochenov’s notion of “biting intergovernmentalism”, what Article 259 illustrates about the European Union’s (EU) hybrid constitution, and how intergovernmental legal instruments can facilitate further European integration (Section 5). It concludes by restating and summing up article’s hypothesis.

The Netherlands, the EU and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Abstract This historical study assesses the determining factors behind the development of the Netherlands as one of Israel’s most faithful European allies in its conflict with the Palestinians. As such it wants to contribute to the academic debate on foreign policy Europeanisation that started two decades ago with the publication of Ben Tonra’s seminal study on The Europeanisation of National Foreign Policy. Comprehensive studies using primary sources of the EU’s individual member states’ policies towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continue to be scarce. This study about the Netherlands contributes to filling this gap. It first sets out why the Dutch government’s position has always been more pro-Israel compared to that of the EU by assessing the relative influences of the EU and the Netherlands’ national Parliament as external and internal foreign policy determinants. After having established the dominating role of Dutch Parliament the latter part of this article tries to explain what continues to motivate a right-wing majority in Dutch Parliament to protect the Dutch government’s traditional pro-Israel position against external influences from the European level.

A Healthy Metaphor? The North Sea Consultation and the Power of Words

The North Sea Consultation was set up to resolve conflicting claims for space in the North Sea. In 2020, this consultation process resulted in the North Sea Agreement, which was supported by the Dutch Parliament and cabinet as a long-term policy; however, the fishing sector felt excluded, left the consultation process, and does not support the agreement. Using semi-constructed interviews and the method of wide reflective equilibrium, this research found that in this conflict the metaphor of ‘health’ has played a decisive role. While all stakeholders want to keep the sea ‘healthy’, they disagree on what a healthy sea actually means, leading to contrastive positions on the desirability of trawler fishing, wind parks, and conservation areas—the North Sea Agreement’s main foci of interest. To prevent the unproductive escalation of such a conflict, it is inevitable to acknowledge the moral connotations of such metaphors, as this allows a decision-making process that can be considered more just.

Fiscal Integration in an Experimental Union: How Path-Breaking Was the EU's Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic?

Fiscal Integration in an Experimental Union: How Path-Breaking Was the EU's Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic?

Roles and user characteristics as driving forces of information use in the Dutch parliament

IMPACT This article looks at how the roles and personal characteristics of politicians affect their use of accounting information. The findings in this article suggest that it is very likely that the quality of debates in parliament correlate with use of the accounting information provided. Political parties should consider age and experience in their selection of candidates and in terms of whether to retire MPs, because age and experience do seem to affect the extent to which politicians substantiate their statements and decisions with hard accounting information.

EU global human rights sanctions regime: is the genie out of the bottle?

ABSTRACT On 7 December 2020, the EU Foreign Affairs Council adopted an ‘EU Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime’ (EU HRSR). The EU HRSR is an example of a transnational response to a fundamental security-related challenge. Both its adoption and its specific institutional set-up are a continuation of the move towards stronger supranational practices in the area of sanctions. Further supranationalising the EU’s sanctioning practices, as one of its most developed and most powerful tools to response to security threats, is likely to increase the uniformity, flexibility, and arguably also the impartiality of the sanctions. At the same time, the adoption process also demonstrated that national governments set limits to further supranationalisation. While in particular the Dutch parliament was a driving force behind the adoption of the EU HRSR, both national parliaments and the European Parliament are likely to struggle to have significant influence over the sanctioning process. Yet, much depends on the actual sanctioning practices and the legal framing of the EU HRSR’s objectives, designation criteria and evidentiary threshold may in practice raise legitimacy problems.