Frans Van Waarden

Utrecht University | UU · Department of Interdisciplinary Social Science and University College Utrecht

The paper offers a refined and systematic concept of state-business relations based on the ‘policy network’idea. The major dimensions of policy networks are presented as (1) number and type of actors, (2) function of networks, (3) structure, (4) institutionalization, (5) rules of conduct, (6) power relations, (7) actor strategies. Certain popular c...

Modern societies have in recent decades seen a destabilization of the traditional governing mechanisms and the advancement of new arrangements of governance. Conspicuously, this has occurred in the private, semi-private and public spheres, and has involved local, regional, national, transnational and global levels within these spheres. We have witn...

In 1997 Robert Kagan questioned whether European countries had to fear the coming of American style adversarial legalism. He answered this question with a qualified “no.” Today we are no longer so sure the answer is “no,” even in a country that Kagan considered the antipole of US adversarial legalism, the Netherlands, traditionally characterized by...

As markets become more globalized, they have become governed by an increasingly complex array of both public and private regulation as the power of public authorities tends to be limited to their territorial jurisdiction. Paradoxically, while public actors are confronted with higher expectations regarding the safety and quality of food, the prevail...

This chapter in a handbook on Inspectorates and Market Authorities in the Netherlands describes the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA). It discusses the history of official food controls and the NVWA, its duties and legal powers.and its position as part of the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The NVWA has adopted a enforceme...

The past decades have shown two important transitions in food governance in Europe. First, the increased role of private actors in global food safety regulation and the development of retail driven private food safety regulation from the 1990s onwards. Second, the increased role of the European Union and transnational governmental organisations. Th...

This article charts and compares the three sources or modes of regulating market behaviour that together constitute the governance of markets. It identifies distrust as a central problem of markets and compares governance solutions from different types of sources, including markets and commercial businesses, informal communities and networks, and f...

This article reports on a quantitative study of 1,117 cases of transposition of directives in five EU Member States and eight policy sectors between 1978 and 2002. It finds significant cross-sectoral performance differences, which complicate generalization from studies of only one sector. These differences can be partly explained by systematic cros...

Twelve years ago, Robert Kagan asked “Should Europe worry about adversarial legalism?” He answered this question with a qualified “no,” and identified a number of sources of resistance to such a trend. More recently, he broadened the issue in this journal by asking whether European countries experience an “Americanization” of their legal systems. T...

In the past decade, anti-money laundering policy has switched both in the US and in Europe from a rule- to a risk-based reporting system in order to avoid over-reporting by the private sector. However, reporting instead increased in most countries, while the quality of information decreased. Governments were drowned in data because private agents f...

The paper shows how excessive reporting, called "crying wolf", can dilute the information value of reports. Excessive reporting is investigated by undertaking the first formal analysis of money laundering enforcement. Banks monitor transactions and report suspicious activity to government agencies, which use these reports to identify investigation...

This paper assesses the claim that there is a problem with delayed transposition of directives within the EU, using a new dataset on the transposition of directives in the fields of utilities and food safety regulation in the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, Spain and Greece. This dataset overcomes most of the problems that have plagued previous data....

The themes of the earlier article by Van Waarden are applied to the empirical examples of the USA & the Netherlands. State — industry policy networks are explained by nationally specific characteristics of the actors involved: organized societal interests and state agencies. Policy networks are seen as the product of different political, administra...

The ‘national systems of innovation’ literature (Freeman 1987; Dosi et al. 1988; Lundvall 1992; Nelson 1993; Nelson 1994; Edquist 1997; Freeman and Soete 1997) has given a prominent place to institutions. It has argued that the innovative capacity of nations depends on the system of institutions that they have in place to support or hinder innovati...

'The idea behind this book is that institutions are important when it comes to explain the specialisation and performance of national innovation systems. The idea is not new. But largely the institution-concept has remained somewhat vague and unspecified in the literature. This book is valuable since it succeeds in opening up the black box of insti...

How much did national competition policies converge between 1950 and 2000, and what were the forces behind this? These are the questions the paper attempts to answer, for three countries whose competition policies differed substantially at the outset: Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. The paper measures the degree of convergence of national com...

Organised private interests have often been seen as threats to the common good, particularly in the US. James Madison, one of the founders of the American state, talked already of the ‘mischiefs of faction’. Ever since, American economic and political science literature has abounded with descriptions, analyses and criticism of the private abuse of...

The literature on `national systems of innovation' emphasizes that the innovative capacity of nations depends on their institutions. This paper investigates the influence of an ideal-typical institution, law and regulations, on innovation, both directly and indirectly, through its influence on the organizational structure of — and cooperation betwe...

The paper contradicts the thesis of Mancur Olson presented in `The Rise and Decline of Nations', using empirical evidence from studies on business interest associations and sectoral corporatism. We argue first that, unlike Olson assumes, selfish interest associations are not necessarily detrimental to economic performance and growth. Second, again...

This paper describes and analyzes the emergence and development of Dutch business interest associations (BIAs), combining the approaches of corporatism and Olsonian logic of collective action. Various factors facilitating the emergence of BIAs are identified. The development of BIAs from representative to control organizations is described on a num...

[From the Introduction]. The Dutch cannot expand their highway system as they like, because that gets them in conflict with European air quality standards; strictly enforcing the latter could also deal a death blow to the huge Dutch chicken industry; Germany has to change its returnable can system, as it de facto discriminates against foreign beer...