Mark Bovens
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 4154863 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Mark Bovens |
| NOMBRES | Mark |
| APELLIDO | Bovens |
| FIRMA | BOVENS M |
| AFILIACIONES | Utrecht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7848-8750 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 34 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 854 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 32 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1990 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
The Parapolitical Path to Parliament
In Western parliamentary democracies, a growing number of MPs have worked as special advisers, political assistants, and parliamentary aides before their election as members of parliament. They have professional political expertise without being elected officials themselves. We call them parapoliticians, akin to paramedics or paralegals. This exploratory article describes this emerging pathway to the Dutch House of Representatives. The article op…
The Political Scientist as a Critical Friend
In liberal democracies, the very essence of political science is to be a critical friend. It is both legitimate and rewarding to engage in policy relevant studies. It is not banal, technocratic, or oppressive to do research into pressing social issues and to provide advice on the effectiveness or desirability of policy interventions, or to evaluate existing policy programmes. And is not a Faustian bargain to train thousands of students each year …
Migration Diversity and Social Cohesion
This is an open access book and provides evidence-based policy recommendations on migration diversity and social cohesion
Automated Discretion
Watching EU watchdogs assessing the accountability powers of the European Court of auditors and the European Ombudsman
The paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the accountability capacity of the two main EU watchdog institutions. The overarching research question is: how powerful are these watchdog institutions in holding the EU executive to account? The paper presents an expanded analysis of the formal and organisational accountability powers of these EU watchdogs and how these are exercised, based on an in-depth case study. We apply an assessment framew…
Why Knowing What To Do Is Not Enough
This open access book sets out to explain the reasons for the gap between “knowing” and “doing” in view of self-reliance, which is more and more often expected of citizens. In today’s society, people are expected to take responsibility for their own lives and be self-reliant. This is no easy feat. They must be on constant high alert in areas of life such as health, work and personal finances and, if things threaten to go awry, take appropriate ac…
Governance, accountability and the role of public sector boards
For many public organisations, boards are the primary accountability mechanisms for management. Boards have a multipronged portfolio: strategic advice, employment, external linkage and critical scrutiny. The literature casts serious doubts about their capabilities. There is ‘managerial dominance’. This article reviews existing studies on public sector boards and identifies important reasons why boards are likely to fail as accountability mechanis…
Diploma Democracy
Lay politics lies at the heart of democracy. Political offices are the only offices for which no formal qualifications are required. Contemporary political practices are diametrically opposed to this constitutional ideal. Most contemporary democracies in Western Europe are diploma democracies—ruled by those with the highest formal qualifications. Citizens with low or medium educational qualification levels currently make up about 70 per cent of t…
Political Elites as Educational Elites
In twenty-first-century Western Europe, almost all incumbents in political office have very high formal credentials. Aristocracy, rule by the nobility, has given way to meritocracy, rule by the well-educated. This dominance of the well-educated in the legislative and executive branches is a relatively modern phenomenon. We document how citizens with primary and secondary education have disappeared from Western European parliaments in the past dec…
The Meritocratization of Civil Society
Civil society organizations are, if not schools, at least pools of democracy. In the ‘third sector’, too, active engagement and participation ‘by the people’ have given way to meritocracy, or, in other words, to rule by the well-educated. Many popularly rooted mass organizations have witnessed a decline in membership and political influence. Their role as intermediary between politics and society has been taken over by professionally managed advo…
Revisiting the study of policy failures
The analysis of policy failures is, by definition, not a neutral endeavour, since policy fiascos are not neutral events. Moreover, they are often, usually implicitly, but sometimes explicitly, permeated with prosecutorial narratives, blame games and a search for culprits. Fiascos do not just ‘happen’. They are constructed, declared, and argued over in labelling processes that are not necessarily ‘evidence– based’. This presents a challenge for an…
Political death and survival in the Netherlands
The Ontological Challenge
This chapter examines the emergence of accountability as a culturally significant concept that both reflects and shapes changes taking place in our understanding of contemporary governance. The author explores how its emergence as a “cultural keyword” has transformed both the form and function of accountability, and the challenges this development poses for the study of accountable governance.
Public Accountability
Accountability, Legitimacy, and the Court of Public Opinion
The Oxford Handbook of Public Accountability
A. ANALYTICAL PERSPECTIVES B. STUDYING ACCOUNTABILITY C. ACCOUNTABLE GOVERNANCE D. ORGANIZATIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY E. ACCOUNTABILITY MECHANISMS F. DEBATING ACCOUNTABILITY G. REFLECTIONS ON THE FUTURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY STUDIES
The education gap in participation
A Comment on Marsh and McConnell
Legal Europeanization
By mid-2003, the legal orders (the entire bodies of legislation in force) of three EU member states – Austria , Denmark, and The Netherlands – contained between 10.5 and 14.2 per cent of rules devoted to the transposition of EU directives. Only a few ministerial jurisdictions contain more than 20 per cent of Europeanized rules. The member states show remarkable differences in the use of parliamentary versus delegated legislation as a means of tra…
The education gap in participation and its political consequences
Two Concepts of Accountability
This paper distinguishes between two main concepts of accountability: accountability as a virtue and accountability as a mechanism. In the former case, accountability is used primarily as a normative concept, as a set of standards for the evaluation of the behaviour of public actors. Accountability or, more precisely, being accountable, is seen as a positive quality in organisations or officials. Hence, accountability studies often focus on norma…
The Eu as Lawmaker
The impact of European directives on Dutch regulation is fairly limited when compared to the claims that are made by academics and politicians. We found that 12.6 per cent of all parliamentary acts, 19.7 per cent of all orders in council, and 10.1 per cent of all valid ministerial decisions were actually rules transposing EU directives. The total overall impact for all three types of legislation was 12.6 per cent. Departments generally employ the…
Does Public Accountability Work? An Assessment Tool
In recent years, there has been a drive to strengthen existing public accountability arrangements and to design new ones. This prompts the question whether accountability arrangements actually work. In the existing literature, both accountability ‘deficits’ and ‘overloads’ are alleged to exist. However, owing to the lack of a cogent yardstick, the debate tends to be impressionistic and event‐driven. In this article we develop an instrument for sy…
Deciphering the Dutch drop
The Netherlands has always been the odd case out regarding trust in public institutions. In the 1980s and 1990s, contrary to international trends, trust in government remained high and even increased. Suddenly, from 2002 onwards, public trust in government declined dramatically. In this article we examine the plausibility of ten explanations, embedded in the international scholarly literature, and explore whether they are empirically supported or…
Analysing and Assessing Accountability
It has been argued that the EU suffers from serious accountability deficits. But how can we establish the existence of accountability deficits? This article tries to get to grips with the appealing but elusive concept of accountability by asking three types of questions. First a conceptual one: what exactly is meant by accountability? In this article the concept of accountability is used in a rather narrow sense: a relationship between an actor a…
From Street‐Level to System‐Level Bureaucracies
The use of information and communication technology (ICT) is rapidly changing the structure of a number of large, executive public agencies. They used to be machine bureaucracies in which street‐level officials exercised ample administrative discretion in dealing with individual clients. In some realms, the street‐level bureaucrats have vanished. Instead of street‐level bureaucracies, they have become system‐level bureaucracies. System analysts a…
Two Concepts of Accountability
This paper distinguishes between two main concepts of accountability: accountability as a virtue and accountability as a mechanism. In the former case, accountability is used primarily as a normative concept, as a set of standards for the evaluation of the behaviour of public actors. Accountability or, more precisely, being accountable, is seen as a positive quality in organisations or officials. Hence, accountability studies often focus on norma…
Does Public Accountability Work? An Assessment Tool
In recent years, there has been a drive to strengthen existing public accountability arrangements and to design new ones. This prompts the question whether accountability arrangements actually work. In the existing literature, both accountability ‘deficits’ and ‘overloads’ are alleged to exist. However, owing to the lack of a cogent yardstick, the debate tends to be impressionistic and event‐driven. In this article we develop an instrument for sy…
Revisiting the study of policy failures
The analysis of policy failures is, by definition, not a neutral endeavour, since policy fiascos are not neutral events. Moreover, they are often, usually implicitly, but sometimes explicitly, permeated with prosecutorial narratives, blame games and a search for culprits. Fiascos do not just ‘happen’. They are constructed, declared, and argued over in labelling processes that are not necessarily ‘evidence– based’. This presents a challenge for an…
The education gap in participation and its political consequences
New Forms of Accountability and EU-Governance
Deciphering the Dutch drop
The Netherlands has always been the odd case out regarding trust in public institutions. In the 1980s and 1990s, contrary to international trends, trust in government remained high and even increased. Suddenly, from 2002 onwards, public trust in government declined dramatically. In this article we examine the plausibility of ten explanations, embedded in the international scholarly literature, and explore whether they are empirically supported or…
A Comment on Marsh and McConnell
Information Rights
Legal Europeanization
By mid-2003, the legal orders (the entire bodies of legislation in force) of three EU member states – Austria , Denmark, and The Netherlands – contained between 10.5 and 14.2 per cent of rules devoted to the transposition of EU directives. Only a few ministerial jurisdictions contain more than 20 per cent of Europeanized rules. The member states show remarkable differences in the use of parliamentary versus delegated legislation as a means of tra…
Political death and survival in the Netherlands
The digital constitutional state
What are the consequences of the ongoing process of informatisation for the democratic constitutional state? To answer this question a topical perspective of the constitutional state is provided. In this perspective, the constitutional state is portr
Watching EU watchdogs assessing the accountability powers of the European Court of auditors and the European Ombudsman
The paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the accountability capacity of the two main EU watchdog institutions. The overarching research question is: how powerful are these watchdog institutions in holding the EU executive to account? The paper presents an expanded analysis of the formal and organisational accountability powers of these EU watchdogs and how these are exercised, based on an in-depth case study. We apply an assessment framew…
Open Public Administration in the Netherlands
Governance, accountability and the role of public sector boards
For many public organisations, boards are the primary accountability mechanisms for management. Boards have a multipronged portfolio: strategic advice, employment, external linkage and critical scrutiny. The literature casts serious doubts about their capabilities. There is ‘managerial dominance’. This article reviews existing studies on public sector boards and identifies important reasons why boards are likely to fail as accountability mechanis…
The education gap in participation
The Eu as Lawmaker
The impact of European directives on Dutch regulation is fairly limited when compared to the claims that are made by academics and politicians. We found that 12.6 per cent of all parliamentary acts, 19.7 per cent of all orders in council, and 10.1 per cent of all valid ministerial decisions were actually rules transposing EU directives. The total overall impact for all three types of legislation was 12.6 per cent. Departments generally employ the…
The Social Steering of Complex Organizations
The first and perhaps most compelling attribute of the modern social structure which we inhabit’, according to James Coleman, ‘is theasymmetryof a large portion of its relations’. What is striking about modern society, however, is not the asymmetry of relations as such. Western societies have often been, and to some extent still are, highly asymmetric; think, for example, of the relations between feudal lords and their serfs, between factory owne…
The Parapolitical Path to Parliament
In Western parliamentary democracies, a growing number of MPs have worked as special advisers, political assistants, and parliamentary aides before their election as members of parliament. They have professional political expertise without being elected officials themselves. We call them parapoliticians, akin to paramedics or paralegals. This exploratory article describes this emerging pathway to the Dutch House of Representatives. The article op…
The Social Steering of Complex Organizations
The first and perhaps most compelling attribute of the modern social structure which we inhabit’, according to James Coleman, ‘is theasymmetryof a large portion of its relations’. What is striking about modern society, however, is not the asymmetry of relations as such. Western societies have often been, and to some extent still are, highly asymmetric; think, for example, of the relations between feudal lords and their serfs, between factory owne…
Open Public Administration in the Netherlands
Success and Failure in Public Governance
The literature on governmental performance falls into two categories. There is a voluminous literature communicating that what can go wrong does go wrong when we have to deal with government policy and its administration. The other category comprises a long series of writings that express unlimited trust in government and its ability to solve the difficult problems of the real world. But research that tries to strike a balance and approach the di…
Information Rights
From Street‐Level to System‐Level Bureaucracies
The use of information and communication technology (ICT) is rapidly changing the structure of a number of large, executive public agencies. They used to be machine bureaucracies in which street‐level officials exercised ample administrative discretion in dealing with individual clients. In some realms, the street‐level bureaucrats have vanished. Instead of street‐level bureaucracies, they have become system‐level bureaucracies. System analysts a…
The digital constitutional state
What are the consequences of the ongoing process of informatisation for the democratic constitutional state? To answer this question a topical perspective of the constitutional state is provided. In this perspective, the constitutional state is portr
De verspreiding van de democratie
De sluipende verplaatsing van politieke besluitvorming van de klassieke organen van de vertegenwoordigende democratie naar niet democratisch gelegitimeerde arena's vormt een belangrijke bedreiging voor de moderne democratie.In dit essay worden drie verplaatsingen besproken: van parlementaire naar deliberatieve processen, van politieke naar professionele besluitvorming en van nationale naar internationale arena's.Een aantal van de waarborgen die i…
Street‐Level Resilience
Analysing and Assessing Accountability
It has been argued that the EU suffers from serious accountability deficits. But how can we establish the existence of accountability deficits? This article tries to get to grips with the appealing but elusive concept of accountability by asking three types of questions. First a conceptual one: what exactly is meant by accountability? In this article the concept of accountability is used in a rather narrow sense: a relationship between an actor a…
New Forms of Accountability and EU-Governance
Does Public Accountability Work? An Assessment Tool
In recent years, there has been a drive to strengthen existing public accountability arrangements and to design new ones. This prompts the question whether accountability arrangements actually work. In the existing literature, both accountability ‘deficits’ and ‘overloads’ are alleged to exist. However, owing to the lack of a cogent yardstick, the debate tends to be impressionistic and event‐driven. In this article we develop an instrument for sy…
Deciphering the Dutch drop
The Netherlands has always been the odd case out regarding trust in public institutions. In the 1980s and 1990s, contrary to international trends, trust in government remained high and even increased. Suddenly, from 2002 onwards, public trust in government declined dramatically. In this article we examine the plausibility of ten explanations, embedded in the international scholarly literature, and explore whether they are empirically supported or…
The Eu as Lawmaker
The impact of European directives on Dutch regulation is fairly limited when compared to the claims that are made by academics and politicians. We found that 12.6 per cent of all parliamentary acts, 19.7 per cent of all orders in council, and 10.1 per cent of all valid ministerial decisions were actually rules transposing EU directives. The total overall impact for all three types of legislation was 12.6 per cent. Departments generally employ the…
A Comment on Marsh and McConnell
Legal Europeanization
By mid-2003, the legal orders (the entire bodies of legislation in force) of three EU member states – Austria , Denmark, and The Netherlands – contained between 10.5 and 14.2 per cent of rules devoted to the transposition of EU directives. Only a few ministerial jurisdictions contain more than 20 per cent of Europeanized rules. The member states show remarkable differences in the use of parliamentary versus delegated legislation as a means of tra…
The education gap in participation and its political consequences
Two Concepts of Accountability
This paper distinguishes between two main concepts of accountability: accountability as a virtue and accountability as a mechanism. In the former case, accountability is used primarily as a normative concept, as a set of standards for the evaluation of the behaviour of public actors. Accountability or, more precisely, being accountable, is seen as a positive quality in organisations or officials. Hence, accountability studies often focus on norma…
The education gap in participation
The Ontological Challenge
This chapter examines the emergence of accountability as a culturally significant concept that both reflects and shapes changes taking place in our understanding of contemporary governance. The author explores how its emergence as a “cultural keyword” has transformed both the form and function of accountability, and the challenges this development poses for the study of accountable governance.
Public Accountability
Accountability, Legitimacy, and the Court of Public Opinion
The Oxford Handbook of Public Accountability
A. ANALYTICAL PERSPECTIVES B. STUDYING ACCOUNTABILITY C. ACCOUNTABLE GOVERNANCE D. ORGANIZATIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY E. ACCOUNTABILITY MECHANISMS F. DEBATING ACCOUNTABILITY G. REFLECTIONS ON THE FUTURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY STUDIES
Political death and survival in the Netherlands
Revisiting the study of policy failures
The analysis of policy failures is, by definition, not a neutral endeavour, since policy fiascos are not neutral events. Moreover, they are often, usually implicitly, but sometimes explicitly, permeated with prosecutorial narratives, blame games and a search for culprits. Fiascos do not just ‘happen’. They are constructed, declared, and argued over in labelling processes that are not necessarily ‘evidence– based’. This presents a challenge for an…
Diploma Democracy
Lay politics lies at the heart of democracy. Political offices are the only offices for which no formal qualifications are required. Contemporary political practices are diametrically opposed to this constitutional ideal. Most contemporary democracies in Western Europe are diploma democracies—ruled by those with the highest formal qualifications. Citizens with low or medium educational qualification levels currently make up about 70 per cent of t…
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