It is already in common usage in Germany, where both the government and independent media maintain websites that show which government promises have and have not (or not yet) been fulfilled. “We were surprised to hear there wasn’t anything like this in the Netherlands yet,” says Master's student in Political Science Rik Hazelaar. Together with fellow student Niek Rijks, in the context of their research internship, he is developing an online tracker: a website that tracks the promises of the Schoof government's coalition agreement. “Because for voters, it is essential to see what has become of the government's intentions.”
Although the media offers fragmented coverage of the progress of government promises, according to the two students from the Applied Political Theory specialisation, there is as yet no overall overview of the current status of all promises. “There is a government website where you can check how parties are voting on motions and legislation, but that hardly provides any context about their political responsibilities,” Hazelaar clarifies. “With our tracker, we want to provide that full responsibility context.”
A mountain of government information
Hazelaar and Rijks delved into the Schoof government's coalition agreement to filter out all their intentions and promises. For their tracker, they organise all the promises into different policy areas, such as ‘getting a grip on asylum and migration’, ‘socio-economic security’, ‘international security’ and ‘healthcare’. Under all these policy categories, they indicate for each promise whether or not work on it has already started, whether the promise has/has not/has partially been fulfilled, or whether there is a status quo.
“To clarify the status of all those promises, we had to sort through a mountain of government information,” explains Rijks. “Think of all the motions, letters to and from ministers, and legislative documents from the Senate and House of Representatives. In the Netherlands, all that information is scattered across various government websites, which makes it rather confusing. As a result, it was quite a challenge to systematically collect the status of all government promises and to organise it all for the ‘ordinary Dutchman’.”
Multiple target groups
According to Rijks, the tracker basically targets ordinary citizens: people who are further removed from politics. “We want to give people more insight into the progress of government promises. This can be important if there is a feeling in society that the government and politicians rarely deliver on their promises. When confidence in the government is low, this can affect the credibility of democracy. For example, the tracker could show that people's negative perception is false because a government really is working on or has even already fulfilled many of its promises. However, if it’s true that the government is failing to do lots of the things they promised to do, the tracker can of course also be used to highlight this. With our project, we mostly hope to close the gap between complex legislation and citizens.”
