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Characteristics

State Committee De Quay was installed on the first of November, 1952, with the goal to advise the government over large municipalities. The committee was installed on a proposal of the Minister of the Interior, Mr. Beel. Minister Beel, member of the catholic party KVP, appointed a partisan as chair of this committee: Jan de Quay. De Quay was the Queen's Commissioner at the province of Noord-Brabant at that time. Interestingly, Mr. Beel was prime-minister from 1958- 1959 and was succeeded by Mr. De Quay, who was prime-minister from 1959 until 1963. (Parlement & Politiek, 2016j; 2016k)

Committee De Quay further consisted of thirteen members plus two secretaries. Four out of the thirteen members were mayor at the time. Two of them were professor, two were high ranked civil servants and two were representatives. The remaining three had various other jobs.

Mission and report

The mission consisted of just one sentence, translated as follows: "to advise the government over the most preferred system of government for large municipalities, also in connection with the issue of aggregation of municipalities" (p. 3). In the inaugural speech, the Minister addressed the problem that the committee had to deal with. He explained that ongoing urbanisation led to the growth of cities. In these large cities, the problem occurred that 'few rule many', as the Minister called it. The result was an inadequate local democracy.

The committee responded with many considerations that could have caused this. For instance, they described a phenomenon that is often discussed in the field of Public Administration, 'red tape'. Committee De Quay argued that the increase in size of the local civil service led to an impersonal treatment of civilians, which caused a decrease of involvement in the local government. The committee presented several recommendations that did not require regulation, and several recommendations that did require regulation. The latter category was divided into several proposals involving territorial decentralization and several proposals involving functional decentralization.

The report is rather short compared to the other reports that are investigated. It only consists of 29 pages. In addition, page 31-47 of the book contain appendices. The appendices

11 _{All references in this paragraph that contain only page numbers refer to the report by State Committee} De Quay

54 consist of some statistics and a proposed law with its explanatory memorandum. In addition, it stands out that - in contrast to the other reports investigated - the report does not contain any traces of a large study. It rather consists of many arguments based on common sense and experience. The committee also notes several times that research was an option but that the members did not consider further investigation necessary.

Foreign countries in the report

In the previous paragraphs, a table is presented that contains information about the mentioning of foreign countries in the State Committee report. The results for this committee, however, are very minor. Part of the low score can be brought back to the small amount of pages, but even on average the result is small (see Table 17 on page 59). Part of it can be brought back to a lack of interest for foreign policies by the members of the committee, as described under the next heading. For the sake of completeness, a table is also drawn for Committee De Quay.

TABLE 14: FOREIGN COUNTRIES REPORT DE QUAY

Country Count Page Number

US 1 14

Austria 1 26

Total 2

Next to the two countries that are mentioned once, the committee sometimes refers to abroad in more vague terms like 'Western-Europe'. On page 24, the committee refers to a system of 'hearings' used by 'Anglo-Saxon' countries. An explanation for the minor results in this report is presented under the next subheading.

Policy transfer

None of the above can be considered policy transfer. In conclusion, the result in terms of policy transfer in this report is zero. This seems not very surprising considering the subject of this State Committee. However, some other subjects, investigated by different State Committees, were not expected to deliver much result as well - and they did. In that sense, zero result is surprising.

Interestingly, the report contains various sections where it is discussed whether policies from abroad should be included in the research or not. The inaugural speech that was already mentioned, by Minister Beel, contains an explicit encouragement for the committee to consider policies from abroad: "your Committee (...) should also focus on the experience that has been gained on this matter by other countries, even though I admit that one should be careful when drawing parallels between the conditions that exist in The Netherlands and abroad." (p. 6). In reply to the Minister, Mr. De Quay reports that "the Committee is aware of recent developments

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and desires on this matter abroad, and besides the Committee made use of the experiences that some of the members gained abroad in this respect." (p. 8). This looks promising, but on pages 25 and 26 the committee explains explicitly that the report does not contain any policies or examples from abroad. The committee provides two reasons for this. First, the committee argues that it would be a waste of manpower to investigate the policies abroad, since it would lead to a duplicate of the reports that were written by the Viennese congress of the 'Union Internationale des Communes et des Pouvoirs Locaux'. Second, the committee argues that it would be of not much use to study policies abroad and that it "by no means would lead to a solution that fits the Dutch context" (p. 26).