Categorie: Onderzoek

Today, an artice I had written for the CIGAR newsletter appeared. You can view the article here.

… het zeer aanstekelijk swingende Dead or Alive van Shurwayne Winchester [is] verbeeldingsvol bewerkt door Bram Faber en wel heel spectaculair gespeeld door de Bijlmer Steelband.”

Aart van der Wal recenseerde het album Adam & Eva – Nieuwjaarsconcert 2019 van het Nederlands Blazers Ensemble voor Opus Klassiek, waarvoor ik arrangementen leverde. Lees hier de volledige recensie.

There is a growing debate about the potential and the actual usage of public sector accounting information. This paper explores the actual usage of accounting information in parliamentary debates. We do not only analyze the kind of information that is used and which role this information plays, but also who uses this information: do background characteristics play a role in the types of accounting information that are used more frequently? In the context of the Dutch central government, various hypotheses were tested linking the upper echelons theory and the actual usage of accounting information.

In the paper I present today at the CIGAR 2019 Conference in Amsterdam, results show that the usage of accounting information varies greatly between different actors. Especially regarding prior education, the differences between actors were large: people with a prior education in economics and business made use of accounting information to a much greater degree than their counterparts. Also the difference between parliamentarians and members of state was considerable, in favor of the latter. Contrarily, differences between coalition and opposition parties were negligible.

In a co-authored chapter in this book which just appeared, we provide an overview of the development of Performance Budgeting in the Netherlands, both at the level of central government and at the level of municipalities. In central government, there has been a development toward Accountable Budgeting, addressing three ‘what’-questions: what does the minister want to achieve?, what will the minister do in order to achieve the goals?, and what does the civil service apparatus resorting under the responsibility of the minister cost? In municipalities, there was a development toward Direct Costing (no allocation of overhead cost to policy areas) and the mandatory publication of financial and policy indicators. In a general sense, the chapter discusses that the translation of programs, their activities and their resource consumption into numbers is connected to control from a distance, both in terms of space and time. Such translation is not a simple linear and straightforward process, and is inherently political. Numbers are thus mediators rather than representations; they are matters of concern rather than matters of fact. When used properly, they have the potential to build trust.

In recent years, social media has become a major venue for the interplay between citizens and public sector organizations, in order to facilitate corporate dialog. However, not much comprehensive research has been done on how interactivity between local governments and citizens takes shape.

Building on earlier work that addresses municipal e-government adoption, this article published today does empirical work on the ways in which social media is used by all 380 Dutch municipalities. It focuses on social media usage by means of a quantitative assessment through five social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram. In doing so, it sheds light on the interrelations between e-government adoption, social media deployment, and sophistication of use from a local government perspective. Furthermore we identify determinants for the types of social media usage by means of a stages of an e-government model consisting of three phases. We find that more densely populated municipalities with a larger and a higher-educated population use their Twitter account significantly different from their counterparts.