There has been considerable concern among scientists regarding government policy for years. They believe that government policy is based too little on facts and science, and too much on ‘feeling’. Robert Dur and Jonneke Bolhaar, both professors in the Department of Economics at Erasmus School of Economics, recently gave their expertise on the subject.
During the formation of Rutte III in 2017, a letter was already sent in to De Volkskrant, signed by Dur and others. In this letter, Dur advised that every minister should conduct at least five experiments so that they could base their policies on facts and research findings. Over the years, Dur pitched the idea of doing more experiments to several government agencies, but with little success. All but one: waste policy in Rotterdam.
The power of experiments
Former alderwoman Alexandra van Huffelen was keen to find a solution to littering in Rotterdam. Since almost every party in the city council favoured a different solution, she decided to try something new and engaged Professor Dur. He tested four different solutions to find out which one was the most effective. After a year of experimentation, Dur came back to the council meeting with different graphs. ‘I could very nicely show the differences in impact,’ he says. ‘The line stays steady, it does not work, the line goes up, it works, everyone understands that.’ In this way, it is very easy to choose the most effective policy.
Examples of government experiments
A few years back, the Ministry of Social Affairs, by way of exception, allowed six cities to conduct an experiment with three different interventions in the Participation Act. Jonneke Bolhaar, head of the Labour and Knowledge department at Centraal Planbureau, was asked to combine the results of the experiments to arrive at a universal policy for all municipalities in the Netherlands.
Yet, things went wrong. In some cities, people were firstly asked if they wanted to participate, and from the group of people who wanted to participate, lots were drawn to decide who would do which experiment. In other cities, it went exactly the other way round. ‘As a result, you could no longer pinpoint a causal relationship,’ Bolhaar says, so they could not come up with overarching recommendations. So if the government does want to experiment more in the future, it is highly important that those experiments are set up correctly.
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You can read the full article from De Groene Amsterdammer, 2 October 2024, here.
