Sarah Eggen

  Faculty of Law | Bachelor Dutch Law

‘Marginal, technical, non-influential, and mainly, uninteresting’? The values underlying (dis)continuity in the Dutch legislative process

Sarah's elevator pitch
The Netherlands is one of the only countries in which discontinuity in the legislative procedure applies, meaning that legislative proposals do not expire after elections. This principle is often disregarded as merely technical, but can in fact be connected to underlying values related to, inter alia, conceptions of parliament, democracy, and the relationship between the legislative and the executive. This thesis examines to which extent these values align with the Dutch parliamentary democracy and thus offers a potential basis for a re-evaluation of discontinuity in the legislative procedure.