Polder Politics Under Pressure: The Advisory Roles of Political Scientists in the Netherlands

Abstract

AbstractPolitical science in the Netherlands has a long tradition and a history of institutionalization. It developed as a broad discipline, together with public administration, and grew into separate research and education programmes. Does this segmented nature of political science appear in the external activities of those scholars concerned? Or is the overall consensus-style and neo-corporatist (‘polder’) advisory system in which political scientists are placed a more important determinant? What about developments in the policy advisory system itself, pressures on institutions and trends in the environment and their consequences for the supply and demand of scholarly political science advice? These are the central questions we examine in this chapter. We first present the development of the discipline in the country. Then we look at the main features and trends of the advisory system and the niche occupied by political scientists. As we will show on the basis of the survey results, political scientists in the Netherlands gauge their visibility and their social and political impact as relatively high, and a large majority of them engage in advisory activities. Our findings also highlight that the effects of the segmented structure of political science on the type of advisory role are relatively limited.