Government retrenchment as pacification politics: Understanding the Dutch case / Sparpolitik als Befriedungspolitik: Der niederländische Fall

In the 1980s the global reform ideology of New Public Management (NPM) was adopted in the Netherlands, although in a particular variant. Successive coalition cabinets, some of them including the Christian democrat and social democrat parties, pursuedamode of retrenchment via a range of meta policies going beyond merely the privatization of government agencies. Sustained and politically broadly accepted, this particular retrenchment mode offered political leaders a way to channel their diverse political preferences. Interestingly, the ‘hollowing out of the state’ induced by NPM matched well with the substantively ‘hollow’ character of the meta politics of pacification. Over the years such politics has been characteristic of the Dutch political system and political culture, as once identified by Arend Lijphart. Recently, perceived crises on various policy domains indicate the limits of technocratic governing. At the same time the latter has proved to be functional in keeping a segmented society together.