Most European countries have to find a delicate balance between long term economic reform and short term impact on GDP.
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Current research on data in policy has primarily focused on street-level bureaucrats, neglecting the changes in the work of policy advisors. This research fills this gap by presenting an explorative theoretical understanding of the integration of data, local knowledge and professional expertise in the work of policy advisors. The theoretical perspective we develop builds upon Vickers’s (1995, The Art of Judgment: A Study of Policy Making, Centenary Edition, SAGE) judgments in policymaking. Empirically, we present a case study of a Dutch law enforcement network for preventing and reducing organized crime. Based on interviews, observations, and documents collected in a 13-month ethnographic fieldwork period, we study how policy advisors within this network make their judgments. In contrast with the idea of data as a rationalizing force, our study reveals that how data sources are selected and analyzed for judgments is very much shaped by the existing local and expert knowledge of policy advisors. The weight given to data is highly situational: we found that policy advisors welcome data in scoping the policy issue, but for judgments more closely connected to actual policy interventions, data are given limited value.
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Often, simplified cultural explanations of a nation‟s economy are common sense and taken for granted. Amidst the debate about the propensity of European countries to compete with other prosperous knowledge economies, some consultants in The Netherlands postulate that the Dutch will never be able to match the requirements of the new economy because of their „polder-model‟, a term used for the Dutch model of gaining consensus in which employers, syndicates and the government meet with each other to make agreements about labour. This postulation was made against the general opinion of some years ago, when this same polder-model was perceived as the main cause of the economic success of the Dutch in the 1990s: “Consensus lies at the heart of the Dutch success where unemployment has been cut to half (2% in 2000) of what it was in 1997. The government, with support of employers and unions, has cut public spending as a share of GDP from 60 to 50%. It is the combination of a quiet and flexible labour market with a solid monetary and fiscal policy and introducing more dynamic markets which is the core of the polder model.”
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