Powers behind control: An essay on democracy

In contemporary Western democracies the role of government is not what it used to be. In the public discourse some authors claim to observe a ‘relocation of politics’, while others speak of a ‘democratic deficit’ in general. In this essay the relationship between democracy and governance is explored on a macro-level. The argument is that performance in the public domain and the decisions underlying it no longer in a direct way can be traced down to expressions of societal demands. This is because both the relationships between society and democracy and between politics and performance have become looser. In particular, the hierarchical relation between democracy and government has been replaced by a more horizontal pairing of democracy and governance. As the latter has multiple dimensions, entailing a range of activities performed at various spots by a variety of actors, it appears that democracy, as well, cannot appropriately get substance and form in a singular way anymore. Enhancing the visibility of who is involved in the processes leading to public decisions, combined with enlarging possibilities for accountability, ‘multi-localisation’ provides a conceptual perspective for rethinking contemporary democracy.Session 3: Institutional rearrangement of the public domai

Dimensions of Discretion: Specifying the Object of Street-Level Bureaucracy Research

__Abstract__ At the street level of the state public policies get their final form and substance. This being so, discretion is a key concept. The goal of this article is to specify discretion as a research object in the study of street-level bureaucracy. Therefore the theoretical views on discretion prevalent in juridical and other disciplines are explored. Discretion appears to be a multi-faceted concept. This finding has consequences for the analysis of discretion in the explanation of what happens in street-level bureaucracies

France: A Strong State, Towards a Stronger Local Democracy?

In the political organization of France, the so-called 'Jacobean logic' plays an important role. It stands for a tendency towards centralisation and uniformity. However, since the 1980s there has been a process of decentralisation to sub-national authorities. Grenoble is an example of a city in which new ways of involving citizens in urban policies are being tried out. Since the 1960s government-citizens relations in Grenoble are structured via the local associations, and mainly on the neighbourhood level. The focus of the city government's recent strategy is to adapt the infrastructure of citizen participation to the conditions of modern urban life.This means, for example, that the associations are stimulated to take into account the level of the agglomeration, and that new forms of involving individual citizens have been established

The sustainable future of implementation research: On the development of the field and its paradoxes

__Abstract__ As fashionable as implementation studies were in the 1970s and 1980s, as en vogue it has become four decades later to consider implementation as a research theme of the past. It is clear that in the study of government new themes and concepts have been put on the agenda. In the ‘age of governance’ that study takes place under a variety of headings beyond ‘implementation’. At the same time a continued attention to what happens with policies-on-paper can be observed. In this special issue the development of implementation research as a scholarly field is assessed. A closer look reveals some paradoxes, but also steady advancement

The magic of good governance

__Abstract__ Governance is a widely used concept, in both the study and practice of public administration. Particularly in conjunction with the adjective good it serves as a normative standard against which the actual situation in countries across the world is claimed to be measured. In analytical terms, however, the concept shows shortcomings. It is, for instance, broad, and seems to imply or suggest consensus and uniformity. Yet these characteristics hardly seem to hinder an almost universal appeal and a widespread usage. Governance appears to function as a ‘magic concept’. Therefore, before it can be used in theory and research, considerable specification and elaboration are needed. At the same time its ‘magic’ character does make it useful, particularly in a rhetorical sense