Lifting the ban on Dutch brothels: do local social needs and local political demands matter for municipal prostitution policies?

Abstract

This article examines to what extent Dutch municipalities have adapted new local prostitution regulations to local needs and demands following decentralisation in 2000. We examined the extent to which a national template is locally adapted, and which factors inspired such adaptations. We found that many municipalities extensively copied the regulatory template developed by the Dutch Association of Municipalities. Our analyses show that – unexpectedly and contrary to popular arguments on the merits of decentralisation – local needs and demands played no major role in explaining local policy-adaptations. Political fragmentation and size-related municipal resources however do explain differences in local adaptations.

The dynamic role of governments in adopting policy innovations in China

“…Even in democracies, federal or central governments are often found to assign innovations to local governments through coercion. Yet, local governments are frequently able to defy these top-down mandates (Balla and Deering, 2015;Hannah and Mallinson, 2018) because they generally tend to be more independent from higher-level governments in democratic countries (for example, Jans et al, 2017). Authoritarian countries like China, however, are more characterised by the need to maintain stability, hierarchical command chains, and performance evaluation-based personnel systems (Zhu, 2014;Wang, 2020).…”