Statecraft

5 May 2026 · essay

The Dissociated Legislator

How the Dutch legislative enterprise came to see itself as a law-applier

by Jacob Huibers · Lees in het Nederlands →

I. A member of parliament who says it is not allowed

An experienced parliamentary staffer, on a Wednesday evening somewhere in the past ten years. The member of parliament has floated an initiative that would directly help a specific group of people. The design has been talked through, the legal lines are clear, the strategic position rehearsed. The staffer drops by for the final check. The member looks up and says: ‘We cannot submit it like this, because it is not allowed by law.’

In that little sentence, four seconds long, the whole thesis of what follows plays out.

The member is the legislator. He can change the law. When he evaluates his own amendment or initiative against the existing law as binding ground, he treats himself as a law-applier, not a law-maker. That is no inaccuracy. It is a shift of identity that has taken place without being announced, discussed or marked. He experiences his role from the self-image of the executant, with the law above him, instead of from the self-image of the legislator, with the law beneath him. The Constitution knows that distinction sharply. The member himself, in this moment, no longer does.

The staffer has given up. Almost everyone who has worked for any length of time within the apparatus in The Hague knows a comparable moment. It is a threshold moment, and it says more about the state of the Dutch legislative enterprise than any statistic. But the statistics are there too, and they all point the same way.

II. What the corpus is and what it is no longer becoming

The Dutch fiscal and administrative-law edifice consists of a handful of major statutes of which the youngest is twenty-four years old and the oldest sixty-seven. The General State Taxes Act 1959, the Turnover Tax Act 1968, the Corporate Income Tax Act 1969, the Income Tax Act 2001. The Civil Code is a six-decade Meijers recodification project. The General Administrative Law Act 1994 (Awb) is a codification of administrative-law doctrine that ripened in the 1960s and 1970s, cast into a statute by Scheltema. The social-security system rests on the State Pension Act 1957 and the National Assistance Act 1965, with the Youth Act, the Social Support Act and the Participation Act 2015 layered on top as shifts of task, not as redesigns of legal form. Higher education works under the Higher Education and Research Act 1992, a bundling of two 1986 acts that were themselves iterations of a 1960 act. What appears after 1980 is, in architectural terms, qualitatively different from what came before. The Environment and Planning Act 2024 is the exception that proves the rule: a genuinely architectural intervention, fifteen years in preparation, and widely judged problematic in its implementation.

Whoever wishes to know quantitatively where the Netherlands stands looks at Counting All the Rules (De Jong & Herweijer, WODC 2004). It established that in January 2004 there were 1,800 statutes in the formal sense, 2,675 orders in council (AMvBs) and 7,817 ministerial regulations in the legislation database. A ratio of roughly one formal statute to one and a half orders in council and more than four ministerial regulations. Since Counting All the Rules no government-wide measurement has been made. What we do know is that the structural shift has not been reversed and has continued on all indicators. The Environment and Planning Act consists of 349 statutory articles in outline, and is filled in operationally by four substantial orders in council and the Environment Regulation, into which some sixty sectoral orders in council and ten ministerial regulations have been integrated.1 The substantive norm lives at the level of the order in council. The statute sets the framework, sometimes the objectives, and delegates the rest.

In the COVID emergency legislation this pattern became visible in its most concentrated form. The Temporary COVID-19 Measures Act (Stb. 2020, 441) gave the Minister of Health the power to set, by ministerial regulation, among other things distancing rules, group bans, closure regimes for public places, event bans, school closures and childcare closures, with a carte-blanche residual category and a one-week scrutiny period.2 The Dutch Bar Association warned during the consultation that this was a fundamental breach of the requirement of a statutory basis for restricting fundamental rights. Voermans called it, in a formulation that has not yet been quoted often enough, ‘government by ministerial decree’. The state of exception was managed via the regulation, not via the statute.

What occurs here is no incident. It is the contemporary form of a long movement. Voermans documented it already in his doctoral thesis Steering in the Fog (1995) and his Leiden inaugural lecture The Allocation of Powers (2003). He arrives at the same conclusion as the Advisory Division of the Council of State in its 2013 recalibration report: the primacy of the legislature shifts consistently in favour of the government.3 In 2021, in the general reflections accompanying the annual report, Vice-President Thom de Graaf calls government and legislator ‘overstretched’. In the letter of 19 April 2021 to the caretaker prime minister the Advisory Division calls for a re-appreciation of departmental responsibility for legislation and a strengthening of the position of the legislative directorates. The letter states that the ‘counter-pressure’ for balanced legislation from secretaries-general and directors of legislation is structurally insufficient.4

A legislature that delegates its primacy to its executive power is no longer a legislature that governs. It is a legislature that ratifies. The next question is what has happened to the test.

III. The test without consequence

The Advisory Division has applied four dicta since 1 October 2018. A: no comments. B: a number of comments, ‘yes, provided that’. C: a number of objections, ‘no, unless’. D: serious objections, do not submit. C and D are heavy dicta. Proposals with C or D must return to the Council of Ministers.5 The system is intact as ritual. As a test it is, through and through, an institution without consequence.

In 2024 the Advisory Division issued 351 advices and items of guidance; 7.1% received a heavy dictum (24 items), in 2023 it was 10.3% (35 items).6 The number of heavy dicta has therefore not risen as a trend, but their treatment in the legislative process has tipped over. Four contemporary cases suffice to show this.

The Actual Return Box 3 Act. Advice adopted 27 November 2024, published 2 December 2024 (W06.24.00138/III). Dictum: weighty objections, advice not to submit the proposal in this form and to reconsider the design.7 The state secretary let it be known on 24 January 2025 that the bill remains ‘the best option’. Submitted on 23 May 2025. Adopted by the lower house on 12 February 2026. A statute forced by the Supreme Court in 2021 (the Christmas judgment) and 2024 (the D-Day judgments), advised against by the government’s highest adviser, and adopted by the lower house because nothing better is available. The sequence, court compels, Council of State advises against, parliament accepts under protest, is no legislative process. It is a repair operation.

The Asylum Distribution Act. Advice of 1 February 2023, published 6 February 2023; C dictum.8 The government pushed the advice aside; the lower house amended the act itself along the lines of the advice. Adopted by the lower house on 10 October 2023, by the upper house on 23 January 2024.

The Affordable Rent Act. Council of State advice of 15 November 2023; effectively negative. The lower house nevertheless adopted the bill with nine amendments. The Division declined to give further guidance. The upper house accepted it on 18 June 2024.9

The Benefits Recovery Operation Act. Council of State advice of 15 June 2022 establishes that ‘the democratic legitimacy and the quality of decision-making and legislation […] come under serious pressure’.10 Accepted by the lower house on 4 October 2022, by the upper house on 1 November 2022. The supplementary regulations of 12 April 2023 again received dictum C.

In each of these four cases the legislative-technical test was pronounced, published, and ignored without genuine amendment. The Council of State still stands empirically as a diagnostic instrument, but it is decoupled from the legislative decision. That is exactly the pattern described in Series III Nº 05 on dissociated organisations as a compliance ritual, now at the heart of the trias. Power in its pure form.

The Division knows this itself. Its letter of advice of 19 April 2021 on legislative quality, its letter of advice of April 2024 on the legislative quality of amendments, its publication Digitalisation. Legislation and administrative adjudication (2021), the general reflections in the annual reports of 2022, 2023, 2024: all breathe the same diagnosis. A test that leaves its working to the advised no longer works.

IV. The lower house as a body of reflection

The lower house does more than it ever did. It does it differently than it ever did. In 1982, 598 motions were tabled, in 1992, 419, in 2002, 1,158, in 2012, 2,352, in 2019, 4,545, in 2022, more than 5,000.11 A multiplication by a factor of eight in twenty years. The number of amendments fluctuates over the same period around 300 to 600 per year, with acceptance rates between 35% and 45%.12 The motion-to-amendment ratio, which in 2002 was about two to one, lies above eleven to one in 2022.

At the same time the number of plenary legislative debates halved between 2011 and 2019, from 141 to 65.13 Under the fourth Balkenende cabinet 32% of statutes were adopted without plenary debate, under the third Rutte cabinet 38%, under the fourth Rutte cabinet 39%, a strictly monotonic rise. The number of private members’ bills rose from 34 under the fourth Balkenende cabinet with 17 acceptances, to 56 under the third Rutte cabinet with only 9 acceptances.14 More tabled, less effect. Voermans by now calls the private member’s bill ‘discovered as an instrument for scoring’.

The Temporary Committee on Executive Agencies (Bosman et al.) established in Caught between counter and policy (2021) that motions and amendments are not tested for implementability and that roughly twenty per cent of citizens cannot cope with the legislation.15 The Van der Staaij working group named, in More than the sum of the parts (16 December 2021), the proliferation of motions, the fragmented plenary debate and the shortage of legislative expertise within parliamentary groups as core causes of poor legislative scrutiny.16 The number of rapporteurs within the house grew between 2019 and 2022 from 59 to 137. The number of motions, however, grew in the same period too, to the record level mentioned above.

These figures tell no story of a lazy parliament. They tell the story of a parliament that has shifted its energy from making laws to judging policy. A house that tables eleven motions for every amendment behaves as a body of reflection, not as a co-legislator. The upper house was historically the chamber of reflection. It has long ceased to be that in the technical sense; in 2024 it rejected five bills, the highest number since 1945, and it does so on political grounds.17 The role of the considered co-legislator has, in so far as it is still fulfilled, shifted to the lower house, where it expresses itself in motions without legislative-technical elaboration. The role of legislator has shifted to the cabinet, which produces the statutory texts. The role of executive power has shifted to municipalities, joint arrangements and independent administrative bodies, where the headcount in joint arrangements alone went from 16,500 in 1998 to more than 52,000 in 2024.18 The trias is not gone. It has been reconfigured, without anyone having redesigned it.

What is addressed in the motions is, moreover, not implemented to the same degree. A government-wide public implementation monitor has not existed since the Prime Minister’s office stopped the motion monitor around 2015; the implementation rate is estimated in the administrative-science literature at 60 to 70 per cent, with great sectoral variation.19 A house that tables more motions that are implemented less often is a house whose reflection has remained without consequence. That is the mirror image of the Council of State dictum story in the previous section. Two testing mechanisms, the parliamentary motion and Council of State advice, both ritually intact, both practically decoupled from what actually happens in legislation and execution.

A study at the University of Groningen in 2003, commissioned by Twynstra Gudde and under the academic supervision of Professor S. Waslander, gave an early empirical indication here. A team of eight sociology and social-consultancy students analysed 91 written parliamentary questions and 17 motions in the secondary-education domain in the Hermans period (September 1998 to June 2002), tested against a framework derived from Kerchner and Boyd and from Waslander’s own work on stewardship and citizenship. The test was simple: did the question or motion fit within the then-prevailing policy philosophy of deregulation and increased autonomy? That is, did it address market failure or government failure in a field belonging to the core tasks of the state, or was it tabled for objective information or for a subject that involved no failure?20

The difference between the two instruments was striking. Of the 91 parliamentary questions examined, 72.5% were assessed as not fitting: in about half there was no failure of any kind, a considerable part concerned objective information also obtainable by other means, and another part concerned market failure in fields that did not belong to the core tasks of the state. Only 27.5% of the questions fitted within the framework of a legislature that confines itself to core tasks and that wishes to correct market or government failure. With the motions the share was precisely reversed: 94% fitted, only 6% did not. The difference explains itself institutionally. A motion passes a vote and a group discussion; a parliamentary question passes only the clerk and the chair. The motion is weighed by the group on its political and substantive tenability; the parliamentary question is an individual instrument without an antechamber.

For the thesis developed here this is empirically relevant on two levels. On the first level the Groningen study confirms that the lower house was already deploying its instruments reflexively and without a diagnostic link before the motion explosion of the post-2010 years. A parliamentary question was, in three-quarters of cases, put without asking whether the problem existed, whether the state was responsible for it, or whether there was reason for state action. On the second level the sharp asymmetry between question and motion indicates that the instrument with the least institutional filter is the least fitting. The motion inflation of 2010-2026 is therefore not only a quantitative shift from legislating to reflecting. It is, on the Groningen evidence, also a shift from the instrument with the highest filter to the instrument without a filter, to the instrument with the lowest filter and the highest publicity yield per investment. Fitness declines with the filter, volume rises with the visibility.

V. The coalition agreement as an architecture of exclusion

The institutional explanation of why the house no longer uses its legislative space lies for an important part in the coalition-agreement culture. The length and degree of nailing-down of coalition agreements have grown since the third Lubbers cabinet (1989, 61 pages) to their peak under the third Rutte cabinet (2017, 70 pages, more than 40,000 words, the longest coalition agreement since 1963 according to Timmermans and Breeman).21 The increasing detail went hand in hand with what Tjeenk Willink calls ‘administrativisation’: the house is in effect bound through the coalition, while in the weekly Monday-morning consultation the coalition parties commit themselves further still.22

Under the fourth Rutte cabinet (2021, 47 substantive pages) and the Schoof cabinet (2024, 26-page outline agreement) a counter-trend seems to have set in, but it is deceptive. The Schoof cabinet published on 13 September 2024 a governing programme of 128 pages, with a separate Annex 2, ‘Overview of expected legislation arising from the governing programme’.23 What the outline agreement gave back in parliamentary space was immediately taken up again by the governing programme, this time by the cabinet itself, without a coalition negotiation in which the house had any input. The legislative agenda stays with the cabinet and the departments. The house handles what is handed to it.

This explains, institutionally, why legislative-technical capacity in the house is not built up. What is nailed down in a coalition agreement asks little legislative creativity of parliament for four years; the cabinet executes, the parliament checks yes or no. The legislative staffer on the parliamentary group becomes superfluous when the group commits to an agreement; the spokesperson becomes more important, because he conducts the political fight. The growth of group support since the Jetten motion (2019) of a structural ten million euros extra has strengthened the groups, but it has gone in large part to communicative rather than legislative capacity.24 The architecture excludes the craft it no longer needs.

Against this parliamentary stripping there is no equally strong compensatory build-up on the executive side. The Academy for Legislation, since 2001, delivers some sixty trainees a year, a fraction of what the departments lose to rotation and retirement. The legislative directorates of Justice and Security, Finance and the Interior are filled for a considerable part by contract hire, including the State Advocate (Pels Rijcken). State expenditure on the State Advocate doubled between 2016 and 2020 from 23 million to 33 million euros, and stabilised after the Pels Rijcken fraud in 2020 around 25 million.25 The Silvis committee confirmed in 2022 that Pels Rijcken has formed itself ‘to the needs of the state’ and manages an ‘institutional memory’ that the state itself no longer maintains. No source establishes definitively whether the State Advocate also drafts statutory texts; the pattern of advising on legal tenability, ECHR and EU testing and risk analysis is documented. Institutional knowledge migrates away from the place where it is needed, to the place that charges a fee for it.

VI. Four recipients, and a fifth

A legislative function no longer fulfilled in its full form by its two constitutional bearers, cabinet and parliament, does not disappear. It shifts. Four recipients are identifiable. The court, in the Box 3 judgments, the hammock judgment, Urgenda, and increasingly the administrative court via proportionality testing after the benefits scandal. The Council of State, whose advice acquires, in shrinking political space, a function as the last constitutional anchor without being able to enforce its consequences. Brussels, where the architecture of VAT, corporate tax after ATAD, data protection after the GDPR, competition, financial supervision, NIS2, the DSA/DMA, the AI Act, the CSRD and MiCAR now lives. And the executive agencies themselves, which through policy rules, work instructions and infrastructure architecture produce the substantive law that formal law no longer delivers.

That fourth recipient is the least visible and therefore the most important. Widlak and Peeters documented in The Digital Cage (2018) and in subsequent work how the policy rules of the employee-insurance agency, the social-insurance bank, the Tax Administration and the education agency together are more voluminous than the statutes on which they rest.26 The infrastructure, not the statute, determines for the citizen what materially applies. A legislator that has let go of its primacy, and an executive apparatus that lets its policy rules grow unseen into substantive norm, together form a dissociated whole whose consequences only become visible when a benefits scandal, a Groningen gas extraction or a Box 3 judgment brings them before the constitutional court.

What in Series III Nº 05 is called the dissociated organisation is here reproduced at the constitutional level. The parts of the system still work. The coupling between the parts is broken. The statute exists. The test exists. The parliament exists. The cabinet exists. The court exists. The execution exists. But the old assumption that the law is set via parliament and cabinet, tested by the Council of State and executed by the executive agencies under judicial control, barely covers the actual machinery any longer. The actual machinery is that the court corrects the legislator, that the Council of State advises without consequence, that the cabinet produces statutes it must make at the behest of Brussels or a judicial ruling, that the house reflects in motions and that the executive agencies do materially what they can do in their infrastructure. It is a working system. It is simply no longer the system the Constitution describes.

VII. What this asks of our thinking

Whoever reads the shift described above as a sociological or cultural problem, a matter of mentality, education or generation, places himself at the wrong level. The Dutch state has no shortage of good intentions or of epistemic modesty. It has a shortage of architecture. The corpus of major statutes dates from a period (1959-1979) in which the Netherlands still possessed legislative-technical craft in the legislative directorates, in the lower house, and in the departmental top. Since then the craft has been hollowed out without its replacement being organised. The Academy for Legislation compensates in part, the Legislation Office of the lower house compensates in part, the Van der Staaij working group compensates in part. But the architecture that maintained the craft, senior-civil-service permanence on legislative directorates, sturdy group lawyers, an upper house technically a match for the lower house, a cabinet that did not understand coalition discipline as a legislative monopoly, has been dismantled without a new one being raised.

That explains why the tests no longer work. A member who says it is not allowed does not treat himself as legislator because the architecture in which he operates no longer produces him as legislator. He is produced as spokesperson, as group member within a coalition deal, as a voice in a media debate, as a signatory of motions. The legislative function has shrunk, in his role, to signing what others have prepared, and he experiences that himself as a limit. Not as space.

That also explains why electoral changes do little to all this. The Schoof cabinet set aside the same Council of State dicta that the fourth Rutte cabinet had set aside. The Jetten cabinet that took office in February 2026 will do so too, not because its ministers have bad intentions, but because it has become architecture-independent to submit a bill advised against by the Council of State anyway. What works regime-independently does not change by changing the regime. It changes only by changing the architecture.

Hence the closing question, and it is a thankless one. Which elements of the architecture are changeable with the current instrumental means without first forming a coalition that cannot be formed in the present condition? Four are identifiable, in ascending order of difficulty.

The first: the structural presence of directors of legislation in the Council of Ministers for every bill from their department, with an explicit counter-argument function. No reorganisation, no statutory amendment. A working arrangement that the secretaries-general can settle in an evening.

The second: an obligation on the lower house to hold, for every bill on which the Council of State has pronounced a C or D dictum, a hearing with the Advisory Division before the first round of treatment takes place. A change to the Rules of Procedure, not a constitutional amendment.

The third: a normalisation of civil-servant-to-member contact, replacing the 1998 Kok edict with a transparent framework in which departmental legislative lawyers can review amendments to their bills with groups in advance. A political arrangement, with great resistance from the primacy of the minister, but legislatively simple.

The fourth, and hardest: a redesign of the coalition-agreement culture. Not via an outline agreement followed by a 128-page governing programme, but via an agreement that genuinely confines itself to outlines and leaves the legislative elaboration to an autonomous parliament. That asks a coalition discipline that abolishes itself on the legislative axis, and with it a political culture that is not present. But it is, in the formal sense, no architectural change requiring statutory amendment. It is an arrangement that an informateur can prepare.

Whoever dismisses this as naive may be right. Whoever dismisses it as irrelevant overlooks that what is not repaired by these four measures will be repaired by no other measure. The choice is not between repair and the absence of repair. The choice is between making, or not making, an attempt at repair before the fifth recipient, the executive agencies with their policy rules and infrastructures, becomes the actual legislator on which the legislative function has come to depend.

The member who says it is not allowed does not know the architecture. He is himself the product of its working. He cannot change it, because he does not know that he could. That he should know that he could is precisely the question that is no longer asked within the architecture. Whoever does ask it takes the first step towards its redesign.

The author thanks an experienced parliamentary staffer, whose insights shaped this paper, and whose identity is not disclosed. The casuistry in section I is anonymised as to party, period and theme, but otherwise rendered verbatim.

Statecraft, May 2026 — version 0.1

Footnotes

  1. Explanatory memorandum to the Environment and Planning (Implementation) Act (Parliamentary Paper 34986, no. 3); IPLO, General rules under the Environment and Planning Act; transposition tables at wetten.nl. ↩

  2. Temporary COVID-19 Measures Act, BWBR0044337, Chapter Va of the Public Health Act, arts. 58g-58r; Parliamentary Paper 35526; W.J.M. Voermans, Draft Temporary COVID-19 Measures Act: a bad idea, 8 June 2020; NOvA consultation response, 5 June 2020. ↩

  3. P. Eijlander et al., Recalibrating the primacy of the legislature: the meaning of framework legislation and delegation, Council of State / Tilburg University, November 2013. ↩

  4. Council of State, Recommendations to promote the legislative process and legislative quality — letter from the Advisory Division to the caretaker prime minister, 19 April 2021. ↩

  5. raadvanstate.nl/overrvs/advisering/werkwijze; Montesquieu Institute, The Council of State’s advice on the Asylum Emergency Measures Act and the Two-Status System Act, 10 February 2025. ↩

  6. Council of State, Annual Report 2024, section ‘Output and processing times’, April 2025. ↩

  7. Council of State, Actual Return Box 3 Act, advice W06.24.00138/III, 27 November 2024; Supreme Court 24 December 2021, ECLI:NL:HR:2021:1963 (Christmas judgment); Supreme Court 6 June 2024, ECLI:NL:HR:2024:704 et seq. ↩

  8. Council of State, Act enabling the municipal task of providing asylum reception, advice W16.22.00210/II, 1 February 2023; Council of State Annual Report 2023, ‘Lower house ultimately made the Distribution Act less complex’. ↩

  9. Council of State, advice W04.23.00339/I; upper house proceedings 18 June 2024. ↩

  10. Council of State, Benefits Recovery Operation Act, advice W06.21.0270/III, 15 June 2022. ↩

  11. Central Information Point of the lower house, cited in NOS, Record number of motions tabled in one year in the lower house, 22 December 2022; PDC, Background: the motion, an ever blunter weapon, parlement.com, January 2025. ↩

  12. PDC, Parliamentary year review 2022, Montesquieu Institute/parlement.com, December 2022. ↩

  13. Investico/De Groene Amsterdammer/Trouw/Argos, The lower house has never had so little time and attention for legislation, 10 March 2021; data analysis of all 374 statutes under the third Rutte cabinet. ↩

  14. Investico, What does the legislature care about the laws?, 10 March 2021, with a quotation from W.J.M. Voermans. ↩

  15. Temporary Committee on Executive Agencies, Caught between counter and policy, Parliamentary Paper 35387, no. 2, 25 February 2021. ↩

  16. Van der Staaij working group, Strengthening the functions of the lower house — More than the sum of the parts, Parliamentary Paper 35992, no. 1, 16 December 2021. ↩

  17. eerstekamer.nl/verworpen_in_de_eerste_kamer; report ‘Upper house in recess’, 12 July 2024 (statement by chairman Bruijn). ↩

  18. kennisvandeoverheid.nl, ‘Size and composition of the workforce’; Statistics Netherlands, ‘Social-domain decentralisations 2015’. ↩

  19. Indication based on Bovend’Eert position papers for the executive-agencies committee 2020 and the administrative-science literature; no public longitudinal measurement available. The CDA member Bontenbal proposed, in his 2024 initiative memorandum (Parliamentary Paper 36537, no. 2), a per-group cap on motions, on the grounds that the instrument is losing its meaning. ↩

  20. K. Brinkhuizen, R. Defourny, F. Meindertsma, F. Nuus, M. Staps, T. Swierstra, F. Visser & N. de Vries, Questions about education. A study assessing which parliamentary questions and motions on secondary education no longer fit the policy philosophy of deregulation and increased autonomy, University of Groningen, commissioned by Twynstra Gudde, academic supervision Professor S. Waslander, 2003. The author of this paper was at the time involved at Twynstra Gudde in supervising the study on the client side. Theoretical basis: C.T. Kerchner & W.L. Boyd, ‘What doesn’t work: an analysis of market and bureaucratic failure in schooling’, Educational Administration Quarterly 1987; S. Waslander, Stewardship and citizenship, 1999. ↩

  21. A. Timmermans & G. Breeman, Comparative Agendas Project — Netherlands: coalition agreements since 1963, Leiden University; Leiden University, Coalition agreement third Rutte cabinet: never so little democratic renewal, October 2017. ↩

  22. H.D. Tjeenk Willink, Final report of the informateur 2017, annex; idem, Final report of the informateur 2021, 30 April 2021. ↩

  23. Outline agreement Hope, Courage and Pride, 16 May 2024; Government of the Netherlands, Governing programme of the Schoof cabinet, 13 September 2024, Parliamentary Paper 36471, no. 96. ↩

  24. Jetten et al. motion, Parliamentary Paper 35300, October 2019; Regulation on the financial support of groups in the lower house 2023, in force 1 July 2024. ↩

  25. Parliamentary letters from the Minister of Justice and Security on the costs of the State Advocate 2020-2024 (rijksoverheid.nl); Silvis committee, Legal services to the state, 6 December 2022. ↩

  26. A. Widlak & R. Peeters, The Digital Cage: on (im)proper governance through information architecture, Boom 2018; idem, ‘The digital cage: Administrative exclusion through information architecture’, Government Information Quarterly 35 (2018) no. 2. ↩