During the recent Senate debate about the constitutional state some senators expressed a concern about the tensions between the legislature and judiciary. The problems of overburdening, underfunding and instrumentalisation of the judiciary have a long history. The legislature has a tendency to overburden himself and the other powers of state, like the judiciary, notwithstanding the official policy to be reserved with regard to the responsibilities of government. The judiciary must adapt itself to an ever more prominent role in the constitutional state. The judiciary also has to generate its own legitimacy and cannot consider this to be a function of the legitimacy basis of the democratic legislator. The legislator for his part has all kinds of democratic wishes and expectations on how the judiciary can increase its own legitimacy basis by dealing quicker with more cases. In this context, the minister strongly adheres to the maxim that justice delayed is justice denied. The working methods of the judiciary have shown small and gradual steps in the direction of a more responsive and communicative procedure. However, the judiciary is not able to transform all its ideas into concrete initiatives and to transform successful initiatives into settled practices.

For many years, most regulatory research focused on instrumental motivations for compliance, which emphasize the role of rewards and punishments related to (dis)obeying the law. However, more recent studies have also emphasized the potential role of normative motivations. Using survey data collected from a sample of 1,182 traffic offenders in the Netherlands, and building on the ‘procedural justice model’ which was first developed in Why People Obey the Law (Tyler 1990), this paper explores how perceptions of legitimacy shape regulatory compliance. The study makes three contributions to the literature. First, this study is one of the few studies in which the procedural justice model is tested in Continental Europe. Second, following recent critiques in the literature, the paper introduces three modifications to the original model. Third, and unlike most previous studies, this study is not entirely based on self-reporting by drivers, but includes actual evidence about their behavior as well. With regard to the self-reported level of compliance, our study largely confirms Tyler’s (1990) original findings. Yet with regard to the observed level of compliance, there are also important differences between both studies. These findings will be explained by shifting our focus of attention from Tyler’s ‘universalistic’ approach to ‘legitimacy-in-context’ (Beetham 1991).

In this feature authors review recently published books on subjects of interest to readers of Beleid en Maatschappij.

In this article we study ways in which the relationship between housing and integration of migrants are being justified and legitimated in policy documents from the cities of Arnhem and Nijmegen. Making use of a critical frame analysis, we are particularly interested in the assumptions made with regard to the preferred population composition of neighbourhoods, images of ‘normality’ and ‘the ideal society’. Based on the analysis of a set of policy documents (such as the most recent coalition agreement, housing policy document and several neighbourhood plans of each city) and a pilot study that includes interviews with local administrators and residents of twelve neighbourhoods, we found that most problems that are being related to residential segregation in neighbourhoods are defined in socio-economic terms. In general, the data show that the mixing of people with different socio-economic positions is thought to be the solution to this problem. References to migrants are mainly indirect: many documents mention that a large part of the poor people are migrants. The issue of integration is mostly dealt with in documents that focus on so-called ‘problem neighbourhoods’. We conclude that the desirability of diverse neighbourhoods in terms of types of housing and groups of people is widespread. Yet the assumptions on which these ideas are built remain largely implicit.

In this contribution Ronald Leenes discusses the implications of technoregulation, i.e. regulation by means of technology. Starting from Julia Black’s definition of regulation he discusses how technologies are used to alter or modify human behaviour. One of the objections he raises concerns the intransparency of the norm that is thus enforced, and he argues that technoregulation easily becomes administration or discipline rather than law.