2 new articles and a book chapter 

1. The first article provides an analysis of the allocation of attention to policy problems on the local level, focusing on the executive agenda of six municipalities in the Netherlands over a 25-year period. It reveals that there is specifically a local politics of attention, showing differences between national and local policy agendas in specific policy areas. We did not find evidence that the political composition of the local executive coalitions leads to agenda differences, revealing the more problem-oriented and pragmatic nature of local politics. We did find evidence of an effect of institutional arrangements between national and local government on shifting patterns of attention, such as due to decentralisation. This shows that the local politics of attention is limited in scope and conditioned by the functions of local government and the institutional arrangements of policy making in the Dutch decentralised unitary state and that rearrangements affect these patterns of attention

Full article (login / payment required): Breeman, G, P. Scholten, and A. Timmermans (2014) Analysing Local Policy Agendas: How Dutch Municipal Executive Coalition Allocate Attention, Local Governement Studies, June 20, online first.

2. The second article analyses the principles of food safety regulation at EU level and their impact on food safety measures. It focuses on the possibilities for integrating the risk analysis methodology into the Commission’s decision making.

Full article (login/payment required): Szajkowska, A. and G. Breeman (2014) Decision-making procedures in the EU: Opening the black box of risk analysis in food saftey policy, Ars Aequi, Mei 2014: 375- 383.

3. The bookchapter analyses the correlation between Dutch coalition agreements and the governments's legislative activities. It shows that coalition agreements correlate weak in the first year to legislation, followed by 2 years of stronger correlation and, if the government stays in office long enough a weaker correlation in the fourth year. Link to the book:

Timmermans, A and G. Breeman (2014) The Policy Agenda in Multiparty Government: Coalition Agreements and Legislative Activity in the Netherlands. In: C. Green-Pedersen and S. Walgrave (eds.) Agenda Setting, Policies and Political Systems: A Comparative Approach, pp. 86-104, Chicago: Chicago University Press.