I. Verhoeven

Talking active citizenship: framing welfare state reform in England and the Netherlands

This article reviews how activation policies frame citizens as individual welfare agents. The analysis focuses on the framing of feeling rules employed by governments that encourage active citizenship, in this instance in the Netherlands and England. In England, encouraging voluntarism is central to the Big Society agenda; in the Netherlands, it is at the heart of the 2007 Social Support Act and more recent ideas on citizenship. Governments cannot compel their citizens to volunteer their time; they can, however, try to seduce people by playing on their emotions. Based on an analysis of thirty-nine policy documents and political speeches, we find that English politicians employ ‘empowerment talk’ calculated to trigger positive feelings about being active citizens, while Dutch politicians employ ‘responsibility talk’ conveying negative feelings about failure to participate more actively in society. Responsibility talk runs the risk that citizens respond with counter-responsibility claims, whereas empowerment talk can fail to incite sufficient enthousiasm among citizens.

Contentious governance: local governmental players as social movement actors

In this chapter we analyze cases where social movement activists are prosecuted in the courts for protest actions. The courthouse is a significant arena for social movement strategy, a symbolic site for the arbitration of collective disputes, the legitimization of political action, and the production of social meaning; the court is “one of society’s most sacred institutions since its role in defining, interpreting and enforcing the law puts it in close proximity to the moral basis of society” (Antonio, 1972, p.291-2). The outcomes of trials depend on the organization of the criminal justice system but also the responses and strategies of multiple other players, inside and outside the court, including social movement activists, allies and supporters. In common with the other chapters in this volume, our argument here is about “breaking down the state”, about thinking through the relationships of power and agency which define the interactions between state and non-state players. We seek to go beyond conceptualizations of state-movement relationships which might cast criminal trials merely as “state repression”, setting out the architecture of the court as an arena for political interaction and tactical choice, identifying the players who act within it, and arguing that more attention be given to the courts in analyses of protest action.In this important book, Jan Willem Duyvendak and James M. Jasper bring together an internationally acclaimed group of contributors to demonstrate the complexities of the social and political spheres in various areas of public policy. By breaking down the state into the players who really make decisions and pursue coherent strategies, these essays provide new perspectives on the interactions between political protestors and the many parts of the state from courts, political parties, and legislators to police, armies, and intelligence services. By analyzing politics as the interplay of various players within structured arenas, Breaking Down the State provides an innovative look at law and order versus opposition movements in countries across the globe.

Taming uncertainty: the WRR approach to risk governance

In the past decade, Renn and others have drawn up classifications of the various types of risk problems. In these taxonomies, degree of incertitude serves as a main distinguishing mark. However, because risk problems may migrate between different categories, these classifications provide unreliable guides for policy‐makers. This paper argues that this flaw points to a deeper issue, viz. the dynamic relations between uncertainty and risk. An approach to risk governance developed within the WRR, a Dutch government think tank, addresses these issues. The paper discusses the conceptual and normative basis of the WRR approach and a number of its institutional and legislative consequences.

Understanding governmental activism

Abstract This article seeks to understand an understudied phenomenon: governmental players joining forces with non-governmental players in contentious actions against policies they want to prevent or redress. This behaviour, which we call ‘governmental activism’, problematizes important assumptions in the social movement literature on state–SMO dichotomies and on seeing ‘the state’ as a homogeneous and unified actor that solely provides the context for SMO activities. Governmental activism also problematizes assumptions on cooperation and ‘new’ modes of coordination in the governance literature. To understand governmental activism, we build on the strategic interaction perspective from social movement studies and on third-phase institutionalism from political science. In our analysis, we show the particulars of governmental activism. Our arguments are illustrated by empirical material on a case of municipal amalgamation in the Netherlands.

Enter emotions. Appealing to anxiety and anger in a process of municipal amalgamation

In recent years, emotions have taken center stage in studying politics. However, the field of interpretive policy analysis has largely neglected emotions. In this paper, we argue that we can enter emotions by studying emotional appeals by collective political actors, which are conveyed through emotion words and metaphors. For our empirical analysis, we draw on the political mobilization against the municipal amalgamation of The Hague and its vicinity in The Netherlands between 1997 and 2001. Our analysis indicates that the framing by collective actors contained emotional appeals to anxiety and anger, shifting, over time, from anxiety to anger. This shift resonated with citizens’ opinions and feelings, and provided important emotional energy to citizens’ protest against municipal amalgamation. These emotional appeals provided emotional energy that fueled many protest activities during the summer and fall of 1998. These findings are also relevant for studying other policy controversies and to more mundane processes of policy formation and implementation.

The civic support paradox: Fighting unequal participation in deprived neighbourhoods:

In urban neighbourhoods, there is an enduring problem with inequality in participation. Middle-aged, higher educated, white men are often overrepresented. Research indicates that front-line workers can play an important role to reach and activate underrepresented groups, but there is little evidence on how they manage (or fail) to do so. In this article, we focus on front-line workers’ strategies to combat inequality in citizens’ initiatives in the deprived neighbourhoods of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. To analyse these strategies, we construct the ACLR-framework. We find that front-line workers manage to activate a more diverse group of citizens by paying special attention to those who are not already active, by supporting citizens in developing and exercising civic skills, by connecting them with others, and by making sure that citizens experience the system as responsive. However, this professional support is often not recognised because of what we call the civic support paradox: the better that front-line workers do their work, the more invisible it is, and the more difficult it is to pinpoint the factors that make it effective.