Until recently, the Netherlands was one of the world’s largest tax havens. A key factor in the country’s fiscal appeal was its ruling practice, which was created as a result of the Marshall aid in 1945. The ruling practice has remained mostly stable since its foundation: it underwent incremental reforms in the 1990s and 2000s, but radical reforms in the 2010s. This article seeks to explain this stability and radical change. To do so, it turns to theories on the role of ideas and institutional path dependence. It finds that the tolerance of the US for aggressive tax policies by small states was an important precondition for the stability of the Dutch ruling practice. When this tolerance disappeared in the 2010s, the Netherlands was forced to reform its ruling practice. Thus, the agency of political actors may be overestimated and the structuring role of institutions and the international context downplayed.

Since 2007, Flemish local councils have been entitled to appoint their own chair, ending the mandatory combination of mayoralty and council chairmanship. The Flemish government initiated this reform to encourage the appointment of non-executive councillors as chairs, aiming to strengthen the council’s overall position. Through an explorative study of five types of council chairs, our article examines whether and how chairs can empower the council and whether chairs without an executive office succeed better in doing so. Based on a new typology of the office, we consider the chair’s role along three dimensions: (1) inside empowerment of the council, (2) partisanship and (3) outside empowerment of the office to the community. We find that while all types of chairs strive to empower the council within government, the non-executive chairs act less partisan and emerge as the council’s spokesperson. These findings suggest that a non-executive chair offers more guarantees to advance the council’s position.

How do political parties and civil society organisations (CSOs) navigate their relationships in the context of the profound change affecting party systems and civil society in recent decades? To answer this question, I develop a typology of party-CSO connections and undertake a comparative case study of the connections between two progressive parties and a cross-section of CSOs in the region of Flanders. I find that these connections have converged on a very similar pattern and explain this convergence in terms of the politicisation of public policymaking in Flanders and the pragmatic approach of mainstream civil society to representing the claims of their constituencies. My study suggests that to fully understand the patterns of connection between political parties and organised civil society, researchers need to consider the influence of policymaking institutions and the strategies of both parties and civic groups in pursuing their goals within those institutions.