Hello? Is there anybody out there? The hurdles to policy responsiveness and congruence in Dutch municipal social welfare.

In the absence of scale advantages or spillovers, policy decentralization increases public welfare when it allows local policy to be responsive to and congruent (i.e. aligned) with local preferences (Oates, 1999). One of the key arguments in favor of democracy as a system of government is that it fosters such congruent responsiveness (Dahl, 1989). Yet, the emergence of congruent responsiveness (Beyer & Hänni, 2018) is no foregone conclusion. There is preliminary evidence that Dutch municipalities are struggling with it in the recently decentralized social welfare domain (Raad voor het Openbaar Bestuur, 2020). Politicians are said to strain themselves to formulate new policy proposals within social welfare, legislative councils find it hard to steer welfare policy at the strategic level, and the executive branch scrambles to get a grip on the expenditure related to social welfare. This paper aims to find out to what degree municipalities struggle to be congruent responsive in social welfare and which factors hinder congruent responsiveness. To do so, this paper studies two stages of the collective decision-making process: the electoral stage and the coalition-forming stage. First, in order for the democratic process to lead to congruent responsiveness, citizens must be able to make meaningful choices in elections. This requires social welfare to be politicized in municipal elections, that is, parties must offer different policy proposals. Using automated text analysis (Praprotnik, Gross, & Krauss, 2021), this paper measures the degree to which political parties prioritize social welfare in their electoral manifestos for the 2014, 2018 and 2022 elections. It also studies how this is moderated by political parties’ characteristics, as small-party size or a lack of experienced politicians may make formulating a policy proposal harder. Second, after the elections, local politicians must translate their electoral promises into policy. In the Netherlands, major policy decisions are made in the coalition agreements (Otjes, de Natris, & Allers, 2021). Therefore, this paper studies whether social welfare policy (operationalized with automated text analysis of coalition agreements from 2014, 2018 and 2022) is congruent responsive to the intentions of parties (as laid down in electoral manifestos) and responsive to local demographic factors. It also studies how the degree of congruent responsiveness is moderated by the organizational capacity and financial and political challenges of municipalities and by the legal limitations set by the Dutch national government.