The diploma democracy of the apparatus

Jacob Huibers — Statecraft, May 2026

Context for readers outside the Netherlands

A brief primer is useful before reading the paper proper.

Diplomademocratie / diploma democracy — the term coined by Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille in their 2011 book of that name, denoting the over-representation of university-educated citizens in Dutch political institutions (parliament, councils, parties), and the political and social consequences thereof. The expanded second edition of January 2026 (Prometheus) is the immediate occasion for this paper.

Wethouder, gemeentesecretaris, college, raad: the wethouder is the alderman responsible for a portfolio in a Dutch municipal executive (the college); the gemeentesecretaris is the chief civil servant of a municipality, head of the bureaucracy. They govern alongside an elected raad (council).

MBO, HBO, WO: the three principal levels of post-secondary education in the Netherlands. MBO is senior secondary vocational education (most blue-collar and many white-collar service jobs); HBO is applied higher education (professional bachelor degrees); WO is research-university education (academic bachelor and master degrees, the gateway to most senior public-sector positions).

Senior Public Service (Algemene Bestuursdienst, ABD): the corps of senior civil servants at central level, with its own recruitment office and rotation logic.

Childcare benefits scandal (toeslagenaffaire): between roughly 2005 and 2019, the Dutch Tax Authority unlawfully accused tens of thousands of parents of fraud in claiming childcare benefits. The defining public-administration failure of the past two decades.

Pim Fortuyn was the populist politician whose 2002 campaign and assassination marked the entry of an explicitly culture-war politics into Dutch public life. The “Fortuyn revolt” is shorthand for the realignment of the Dutch political landscape around the cultural axis (migration, Europe, internationalisation) rather than the older economic axis (labour vs. capital).

Pacification of the school struggle, 1917: the constitutional settlement that ended a multi-decade conflict over the funding of religious schools by combining universal suffrage with state funding for confessional education. Bovens treats it as historical precedent for pacifying the contemporary cultural cleavage.

At which table the work is discussed

On a Tuesday morning in a Dutch municipality of one hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants, I sat in the management team of the social domain. At the table sat seven people. Five with a university degree, two with applied-higher-education backgrounds. Below in the organisation, over three hundred professionals worked on youth care, social support, debt assistance and labour participation. By my estimate, about one tenth of them held a research-university degree, a third only secondary vocational or pre-vocational schooling — often supplemented with specialised programmes the municipality itself funded. The distance between our table and the working floor was not only hierarchical. It was also sociological. We had different student-life friends, different reading preferences, different holiday patterns, different neighbourhoods, different vocabularies. The world of the social-support team leader displayed in the organisation chart above my computer lay invisibly close to the world of her clients and invisibly far away from mine.

The MT meeting that morning ran over a dossier in which an error had been made. A client had dropped out of view after a first assessment and was only picked up again three months later after a report from her neighbours. We four director members of the social domain, plus the two programme managers and the strategic adviser, discussed the matter in terms of work processes, signalling routing, IT linkages and administrative risks. The substantive knowledge of what had actually gone wrong was not at our table. It sat with the team leader who had handled the case and the support worker who had been called in too late. Their analysis, when it later reached us, was sharper, more refined and administratively more implicating than what we ourselves had produced in two hours. Our table had not worked incompetently. Our table had only not had the knowledge at the table. We had the knowledge somewhere else, and the way in which we let that knowledge come to us was itself part of the problem we thought we were discussing.

What I saw there, and what I have seen again in every interim assignment since, is what this paper addresses. The Dutch executive organisation is steered at the strategic level by people who predominantly come from one sociological layer, and the people who do the work predominantly come from other layers. That is in itself no moral matter. Highly educated people who do not do the work do not necessarily produce poorer work than practically educated people who do. But it is an institutional matter. When the place where decisions about the work fall has sociologically come loose from the place where the work happens, those decisions acquire their own language, their own rhythm and their own frame of reference, and all three are not by themselves coincident with what the work asks.

Bovens and Wille, fifteen years later

In January 2026 the expanded and revised edition of Diplomademocratie by Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille appeared, fifteen years after the first edition of 2011.¹ The thesis of the original work was that education had developed into a new cleavage in Dutch politics, that highly educated citizens dominated parliament, municipal councils and political parties, and that this had political and social consequences. The new edition extends that thesis with empirical work from the intervening fifteen years, with a social dimension that was not yet central in 2011, and with international anchoring showing that the pattern occurs in more Western societies.

The authors deploy in their interview with NRC three components a real cleavage must satisfy.² First, social groups that clearly distinguish themselves from one another, not only in income or occupation, but also in their neighbourhoods, partner choice, schools and associational life. Second, these groups have different value patterns and exhibit different voting behaviour, particularly on the cultural questions of migration, Europe and internationalisation. Third, the party landscape adapts itself to this cleavage, with as core that since the Fortuyn revolt parties have come to organise themselves politically-culturally around this cultural axis, no longer around the older axis of labour and capital. The authors emphasise that they prefer not to speak of a “gap”, because that word evokes the image of groups standing head-on against one another, while they see rather that the groups live with their backs to one another, in their own worlds that touch each other less and less.

For the political debate this work of Bovens and Wille is indispensable, and I endorse their observation that the cleavage has anchored itself. For the administrative debate, central in the Statecraft publications, their work adds something they themselves do not develop. The apparatus that must carry execution — the central-government apparatus, the provincial apparatus and the municipal apparatus — is in its leadership itself a diploma democracy. Not as the consequence of political representation, but as the consequence of selection and career mechanisms that end on the working floor far below the table where decisions fall. This is a separate diploma democracy, with its own sociological logic, and it deserves its own analysis.

Two diploma democracies

The diploma democracy of Bovens and Wille plays out primarily in the political arena. Who is elected to the House of Representatives, who sits on a municipal council, who speaks in a coalition party about migration and Europe. Their observation is that in these arenas university-educated people are far over-represented relative to their share of the population, and that this measures and moves the political agenda. Resentment over this over-representation is, according to Bovens and Wille, one of the channels through which the populist revolt since Fortuyn has mobilised its energy, and they warn of the possibility that this resentment turns against the democratic system as such.

The diploma democracy this paper addresses plays out in a different domain. In the administrative apparatus of the Netherlands — in its ministries, agencies, municipalities and executive organisations — a comparable pattern obtains, and the way this pattern has developed is at first sight contrary to what a reader might expect. For salary scale 14 and above in the municipal pay tables, corresponding to director positions, until a few years ago a research-university degree was the formal requirement in many municipalities. In current practice that requirement has, in a remarkable number of vacancy texts, disappeared, replaced by the formulation “research-university level of work and thought”. For positions in scales 11 and 12 the same shift is visible, usually as “applied-higher-education level of work and thought”. For positions below scale 10, “vocational level of work and thought” increasingly suffices. The diploma requirement has been largely abolished in formal terms. What has come in its place is a more open formulation that in practice produces a comparable selection.

That sounds at first hearing like a liberalisation. A municipality that no longer explicitly asks for a research-university degree opens its positions to a wider public. Whoever has experienced selection at close hand knows the relation works the other way round. The selection committee weighs “level of thought” in practice through assessment tests whose items are calibrated to academic reasoning patterns, through conversational registers in which academic habitus betrays itself, through motivation letters written in a specific register, and through references from people who themselves operate in the same sociological layer. The abolished requirement was visible and at least contestable. The replacing requirement is invisible and therefore harder to fight. Whoever applied as a practically educated candidate under the old requirement received a rejection on the ground of a missing diploma. Whoever applies now receives a rejection on the ground of “fit”, “profile” or “growth potential”. The ground of the judgement has been moved inward, and is therefore less contestable.

This is a precise illustration of what was described in Performative maturity in a different register.³ The exterior of selection is polished to satisfy a sensibility of the times — namely the thought that diploma requirements are unfair towards those without the diploma — and the actual operation of selection is reinforced rather than weakened by the operation. A diploma requirement was openly contestable in an application procedure or in a councillor’s question to the portfolio holder. A fit judgement is not. For the central government the same shift is partially visible, though more sharply focused. The Senior Public Service in practice recruits from a pool of research-university educated people, with a strong preference for specific universities and specific faculties. A Senior Public Service official who does not come from Leiden, Amsterdam, Utrecht or Wageningen is an exception. A Senior Public Service official without a research-university background is in the current selection framework virtually unimaginable. The ABD office uses a development budget and a mobility logic that in themselves form a sociological selection condition, and which work even when the formal diploma requirement no longer stands in the vacancy text.

Below that director and ABD layer works the apparatus that does the execution. In youth care, applied-higher-education pedagogues and vocational care workers, with a substantial layer of practical hands placing experience above diploma. In social support, consultants and district nurses are predominantly applied-higher-education and rarely research-university. In the benefits execution, thousands of staff with vocational or applied-higher-education backgrounds worked and work, sometimes supplemented with academic staff who do the decision-making. At the Tax Authority, a tax inspector in training is research-university educated, but the administrative-legal support staff is rarely so. In municipal parking enforcement, in low-level permitting, in collection, in supervision of childcare or hospitality, vocational schooling is the modal level of those who have the actual contact with citizens and entrepreneurs.

The two diploma democracies sit awkwardly on top of each other. Whoever is over-represented as a highly educated person in the political arena meets, as alderman, a gemeentesecretaris who is also highly educated, a director of social affairs who is also highly educated, a department head who in all probability is highly educated. The alderman speaks these people in a register they share, with the same academic baggage and the same institutional references. The voice of the execution reaches the political arena only through a long chain in which every link weighs a highly educated person, and only at the very last moment in the chain has had contact with whoever does the work. Between what the alderman hears and what happens at the counter, sit a column of four or five highly educated people, each with their own translation. By the end of that column, little of the original signal remains.

What the working floor sees

Michael Lipsky described in 1980 in his standard work Street-Level Bureaucracy how the staff who have direct contact with citizens are in fact the executors of policy, regardless of how policy is formulated on paper.⁴ The parking inspector, the social-assistance consultant, the youth protection officer, the immigration-service officer — these are the people whose daily decisions form the actual policy. What Lipsky pointed out is that these decisions are made under scarcity, uncertainty and discretionary room, and that they are not directly observed by higher levels. Higher management sees execution through the lens of the reports it itself requests. The executors see what the reports do not ask, and know which decisions they take of which the reports have no knowledge.

Lipsky’s analysis has since produced its own literature, and it has been refinedly applied to Dutch public administration in, among others, the work of Roel in ‘t Veld and in the WRR report Weten is nog geen doen (Knowing is not yet doing, 2017).⁵ What counts in the framework of this paper is that the distance between who does the work and who governs the work is in the Dutch executive apparatus not only hierarchical, but also sociological. The parking inspector, the social-assistance consultant and the youth protection officer have statistically a different educational profile from their department head, their director and their gemeentesecretaris. What they know, they know in a register that higher up is not automatically recognised. When they want to report something higher up, they must do so in the language of the higher level, or they will not be heard. A team leader who in an MT meeting says “this no longer adds up”, is told she must underpin that with figures, with a risk assessment, with an impact analysis. When she cannot do that herself, she is dependent on a staff function above her, and that staff function has its own priorities. At some point the team leader learns that her evident-error signal only enters the organisation if she translates it into a register removed from her work. At another point she learns it is no longer worth the effort and keeps her signal inside.

Pierre Bourdieu called what happens here cultural capital and habitus.⁶ Whoever has grown up in the right social milieus, with the right bookshelf, the right holidays, the right friends of one’s parents, masters the codes of the higher circles without it costing energy. Whoever comes from elsewhere can learn the codes, but it costs continuous energy and never produces the natural ease of those who have grown up with them. In a diploma democracy of the apparatus, whoever does not master the codes of the higher layers is structurally disadvantaged relative to those who do, regardless of their actual knowledge of the dossier. Bourdieu described this in a French context, but the pattern is at work in Dutch public administration too, though more discreetly and less visibly than in countries with more explicit class consciousness.

For execution this produces a double burden. First the ordinary burden of working under an authority structure. Second the extra burden of knowing that what one sees only reaches the place where it is decided about via translation, and that the translation often tells more about the translator than about what had to be translated. Under that condition there arises in execution what I have regularly seen in my assignments: a quiet loyalty to the client, to the case, to the work, combined with a quiet reserve towards one’s own organisation. The executors do their work well, sometimes masterfully, and they have little confidence that the organisation above them knows what they do or why. That is not paranoia. That is a rational response to a situation crystallised over years.

What this does to the dissociated organisation

In the Statecraft series Dissociated Organisations I have described four symptoms of executive organisations in which the evident error no longer lands.³ The reputation architecture that places the exterior above the substantive column, the reproduction inwards in which instrumentation-learning becomes the core competence, the absorbed debt without integration in which recovery operations cost money without touching the cause, and performative maturity in which more compliance worsens the dissociation rather than healing it. In the closing synthesis I argued that the four symptoms bring forth one another in a closed cycle, and that beneath the cycle lies one design question: how an organisation preserves the place where substantive weight weighs more heavily than procedure.

What the work of Bovens and Wille, extended to the apparatus, adds to that analysis is a sociological dimension. The place where substantive weight in an executive organisation should land is not only an organisational place. It is a sociological place. When access to that place systematically has only people from one social layer, and the people who carry the work come from other layers, the place acquires its own language and its own frame of reference. These are not by themselves the language and frame of reference of the work. The dissociated organisation is therefore not only institutionally dissociated. It is also sociologically dissociated, and the two dissociations reinforce one another. The people who sit at the table together recognise one another. The people who do not sit at the table develop their own world that at some point becomes inaccessible to those at the table.

This deepens the symptoms I described in the series. The reputation architecture can grow so thick because it is operated by people who understand each other in academic and cultural references, and who judge execution by the same references. Reproduction inwards works so smoothly because Senior Public Service rotation takes place within one sociological layer, and changing portfolio does not require a change of worldview. The absorbed debt without integration is so reliably absorbed because the recovery operation is set up by people with little social bond with the original executors and who therefore need not share or question those executors’ assumptions. Performative maturity can repeat itself so reliably because the codes and arrangements are written in a register that the execution must implement but in which it is rarely itself heard. To each of the four symptoms, sociological dissociation adds its own reinforcing layer.

For interim management practice

For the interim executive this terrain is daily present and daily delicate. Whoever enters as interim into a director position or an MT enters the diploma democracy herself. The dress, the language, the references, the email etiquette, the way the MT meeting is led — all are part of the register I spoke of in the introduction. Whoever is not aware that she is part of what she would actually want to correct, joins the cycle without realising it.

Three disciplines help to be operative in this field without disappearing into it. The first is the deliberate orientation towards execution in the first hundred days of the assignment. Not as ritual visit, but as systematic inspection of what executors see that higher up does not. A morning at a district counter, an afternoon with a youth protection officer, a day along with a debt-assistance consultant. Not as research with clipboard, but as a moment of listening in which the interim executive explicitly opens herself to the signal that disappears in the ordinary chain. What she learns in those hours often weighs more heavily than twenty MT meetings. What she learns in those hours also weighs more heavily than her own instinct, and that is precisely the discipline she must deliver.

The second is the introduction of places where the two worlds actually meet. A mixed meeting where a team leader, an executor, a department head and a director can talk about a dossier on equal footing — not for show but as regular provision. A council proposal first laid before a delegation of the execution in concept before going to the governance advisor and the executive — not as formal advisory round but as substantive test. A workroom in which the director of social affairs is available a fixed half-day per week for executors who want to bring something forward without appointment. None of these provisions is revolutionary. What they have in common is that they do not raise the sociological separation as an issue but bridge it as practice.

The third is the deliberate correction of one’s own language in the MT and in the executive. Whoever as interim executive describes an execution problem in general-management language in an MT meeting delivers a product that is accepted in that meeting and that no longer touches execution. Whoever describes the same problem in the register of execution — with the specific cases, the specific words, the specific impossibilities of the people who do the work — delivers something that is uncomfortable in that meeting at first instance, and that at second instance recovers the place where substantive weight can land again. The difference between the two language registers is in an MT meeting often the difference between a quarter-hour that runs smoothly and a quarter-hour that falls silent. The silence is not undesirable. It is the signal that the world of the work has reached the table.

What would work

Bovens and Wille name in their new edition a number of remedies for the wider diploma democracy. Later selection in education, moderating meritocracy, a societal internship for students in which they spend time behind the counter at the employment-insurance agency or the municipality to acquaint themselves with social milieus other than the one they grew up in. What Bovens names in the NRC interview as his first political priority is the pacification of the migration question as the burning cultural axis of the cleavage, comparable to the pacification of the school struggle in 1917.⁷ For the political arena these are serious proposals, and I endorse their thrust.

For the apparatus the remedies are closer to home and they are within direct reach for principals and interim executives. Three design choices are not in themselves revolutionary, but cut against current practice.

The first is making visible the selection criteria that now continue to operate beneath the abolished diploma requirement. A vacancy that asks for “research-university level of work and thought” should make explicit which specific knowledge, skill or experience this formulation refers to, and then test those specific points. A department head of youth care who has done thirty years of executive work and has mentored a programme leader within that work, possesses such knowledge and skill in a form that no research-university degree certifies and no research-university degree replaces. By making the test specific to what the function actually requires, the implicit habitus test becomes less compelling. That sounds simple and is in practice difficult, because assessment bureaus and HR functions partly build their business model on the general competence test that has now replaced the formal requirement. But it is precisely there that the gemeentesecretaris or secretary-general who designs the selection has weight. Whoever herself formulates the selection requirements can place them in terms of work and experience, not in terms of an abstracted thought standard that in practice reproduces academic habitus. The large English and German executive organisations have implemented this type of correction in part. The Dutch central-government apparatus, even after the childcare benefits scandal, has not structurally taken up this correction, and the abolition of formal diploma requirements has obscured rather than solved the necessity of doing so.

The second is the introduction of a continuous learning trajectory from execution to directorate and back. In some municipalities and at a single executive organisation this exists in limited form under the name “traffic-and-connection”. What works: a director of social affairs spends one half-day per month working as an executor, and an executor spends one half-day per month at director-level meetings, with speaking right and the room to say something about what she experiences that does not go down well. Not as job rotation, because that serves the director’s career and not the organisation. Yes as a regular provision that lets the two worlds permanently communicate with one another. Whoever organises this provision initially asks resistance from both camps, and harvests after two years an organisation in which the sociological separation has become less visible without being abolished.

The third is that the governance advisor, the strategic advisor and the director of communications of the executive may not sit in the final editing of a council proposal without a representative of the execution sitting in the same editing. This is a direct extension of what I proposed in The reputation architecture for the substantive column in general.⁸ The additional dimension here is sociological. An editing room that consists entirely of highly educated functions delivers by definition a product that serves a highly educated reading public, and that is not the same as what the execution must be able to deliver on. Whoever wishes to mix the editing room sociologically must design space for that in the editing structure. Spontaneously it does not arise.

What in the forthcoming book De Richting van de Beweging is described as the Aiki method is here usable again.⁹ The human inclination to recognise those who resemble oneself is in a diploma democracy of the apparatus a strong force. It is neither denied nor forced. It is redirected through a design that makes the incentive to work only with sociological equals weaker than the incentive to get the actual knowledge to the table. Aiki only works when the intent serves the collective interest. A director who brings the execution to the table to strengthen her own position is not practising Aiki but a new variant of the problem.

The open question

Bovens sketches in the NRC interview two scenarios for the wider cleavage. A black scenario in which the resentment turns against the democratic system, and a white scenario in which nationalist parties represent the voice of practically educated citizens within the democratic constitutional state.¹⁰ For the administrative cleavage within the apparatus a related question can be posed, with its own scenarios.

The black scenario is that the two worlds within the apparatus drift so far apart that the executors silently withdraw from the organisation, maintain their quiet loyalty to the work and carry through their quiet reserve towards their own organisation to the point at which the organisation can no longer correct itself. In this scenario the executive organisations empty out on the side where they should produce their substance, while the director layers continue to report that everything is under control. For anyone reading the childcare benefits scandal carefully, this scenario is not hypothetical.

The white scenario is that in a number of organisations at the scale of a municipality, an executive organisation or a directorate-general, people in central positions take the courage to correct the sociological diploma democracy. Not through manifestos or laws, but through selection choices, through editing-room design, through the fixed half-days where worlds meet. In this scenario the cleavage is not erased, but it is bridged at a number of places where it makes the difference. Which places those will be cannot be foreseen in advance. What I have learned in my assignments is that they begin more often with gemeentesecretarissen and directors-general who themselves come from an atypical milieu than with those who themselves have followed the pure route. Whoever has had to earn or break through her own sociological privilege more often sees where in the organisation the same pattern repeats.

What in any case does not work is the hope that the apparatus will become representative on its own as society becomes so, or the hope that abolishing formal diploma requirements opens selection sociologically. The abolition has made the filter invisible without weakening it, and thereby reduced its contestability without touching its operation. Whoever wants execution actually to have its voice heard in the apparatus must work on the actual filter, not on its formal formulation. That is no revolution. It is a reorientation of where the centre of gravity of selection lies. In the short term it asks more discomfort of those who currently master selection, because it replaces the implicit habitus test with specific experience and knowledge requirements that escape the habitus of the sitting selectors. In the long term it produces an organisation that can again carry its own work.

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Colophon

“The diploma democracy of the apparatus” is a Statecraft publication that builds on the closed series Dissociated Organisations (April-May 2026), supplemented with a sociological dimension that was implicitly present in that series. The occasion is the expanded and revised edition of Diplomademocratie by Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille, which appeared in January 2026 with Prometheus. The paper is not part of the series itself, but is independently readable and related to it in its diagnosis.

Statecraft is the platform of Jacob Huibers for strategic reflection on public-service delivery. The content connects to the forthcoming book De Richting van de Beweging: Interim-Management in de Publieke Sector (manuscript in preparation).

Response and counter-argument via Statecraft.

Footnotes

1. Mark Bovens en Anchrit Wille, Diplomademocratie: Opleiding als nieuwe scheidslijn (Diploma Democracy: Education as the New Cleavage), expanded and revised edition, Prometheus, 2026 (first edition Bert Bakker, 2011). ↩

2. Sjoerd de Jong, “Along the lines of educational level genuinely separated worlds are emerging” (orig. Dutch), interview with Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille, NRC, 29 January 2026. The three cleavage components go back to the classic work of Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives, Free Press, 1967. ↩

3. For the four symptom papers and the closing synthesis see the Statecraft series Dissociated Organisations (April-May 2026): The reputation architecture, The reproduction inwards, The absorbed debt without integration, Performative maturity, and Synthesis: the recovery of substantive weight. ↩ ↩²

4. Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services, Russell Sage Foundation, 1980; revised edition 2010. ↩

5. Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy, Weten is nog geen doen: Een realistisch perspectief op redzaamheid (Knowing is not yet doing: A realistic perspective on self-reliance), WRR Report no. 97, 2017. The application of Lipsky in Dutch public administration is further developed in, among others, Mark Bovens, Paul ‘t Hart and Mirko Noordegraaf (eds.), Public Innovation around the World, Peter Lang, 2014, and in Mirko Noordegraaf, “Risky Business: How Professionals and Professional Fields (Must) Deal with Organizational Issues”, Organization Studies 32(10), 2011. ↩

6. Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement, Éditions de Minuit, 1979; English edition Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Harvard University Press, 1984. The concepts of cultural capital and habitus are developed in this work and connect to his earlier work on reproduction and symbolic violence. ↩

7. For the pacification of the school struggle see the constitutional revision of 1917, in which universal suffrage and freedom of education were laid down in mutual interplay. For a recent administrative-science reflection on this pacification as precedent see Paul ‘t Hart and Mark Bovens (eds.), Politiek-bestuurlijke crisismanagement (Political-administrative crisis management), Boom Lemma, 2014. ↩

8. Jacob Huibers, The reputation architecture: What happens when the exterior of government begins to rewrite its own interior, symptom paper I in the series Dissociated Organisations, Statecraft, April 2026, section “What would work”. ↩

9. For the Aiki method as design principle rather than intervention technique see De Richting van de Beweging: Interim-Management in de Publieke Sector, manuscript in preparation, chapter 10. ↩

10. De Jong (2026), see note 2. ↩