This article looks at indications and counterindications in Dutch democracy for the popular claim that citizens, while still valuing representative democracy, are fed up with representative politics. Using available large-scale surveys, citizen attitudes are analysed at the levels of specific political actors (politicians, officials), central political institutions (political parties, parliament, government) and the general system of representative democratic politics (the way it works in the Netherlands, with multiparty coalitions, etc). While specific legitimacy problems exist, the evidence for a general legitimacy crisis in Dutch democracy is comparatively weak and highly mixed. More specifically, the evidence suggests that Dutch citizens do not so much want less representative politics, but rather representative politics of a somewhat different kind: less exclusively organized via party-political channels; more geared at recognizable and accountable political authority. Dutch citizens want to seriously influence but not supplant selectionistic representative politics, the evidence suggests.

New forms of participatory and deliberative democracy gain popularity alongside traditional representative democracy at the local level in the Netherlands. In this article we look at passive citizens defined as citizens who do not participate in any of the new practices. How do they perceive the shift from traditional to new forms of democracy (defined as stakeholder democracy, deliberative polling and associative or ‘do’ democracy)? We performed a Q-methodological study to find patterns of opinion among passive citizens. We found three patterns. Critical citizens are critical about both traditional representative democracy and new forms of democracy. Loyal citizens support traditional local democracy and do not think the shift to other forms is a change for the better. Distant citizens find that politicians should first and foremost uphold the law and act as referees when citizens disagree. This task has been neglected over the years but this deficiency cannot be remedied by new forms of democracy. All three patterns of opinion are cause for concern for the advocates of more participatory and deliberative democracy. While these new forms may restore faith in politics among active citizens they may simultaneously alienate passive citizens.

In recent years, there has been a strong diffusion of the concept of the G1000 in the Low countries. Yet, empirical research that concerns the democratic value of these mini-publics is sparse. This raises the question as to how democratic the G1000 initiatives in Belgium and the Netherlands are. To answer this question, we compare the Belgian and the Dutch G1000’s and assess these against a set of deliberative democratic criteria. We conclude that the G1000’s to a large extent meet the process criteria of deliberation. At the same time, the connection with the formal decision-making process appears to be weak. Another lesson to be drawn is that deliberative democratic criteria often seem to conflict with each other, which points to continuing tensions within the ideal of deliberative democracy.