Public disclosure of administrative decisions in the Netherlands: New avenues for transparent decision-making?

Open government legislation is increasingly obliging governments to make administrative decisions in single cases public to everyone. The underlying aim of this public disclosure is to enable citizens to compare their case with other similar cases and trace patterns of decision-making and to check whether the decision-making process has been consistent. As a result theoreof, governments might be urged to adopt a more comparative style of decision-making, which would require a reconfiguration of existing legal transparency guarantees in administrative decision-making, such as the right to reason-giving. Considering the Netherlands as a frontrunner with regard to public disclosure of administrative decisions, this paper explores to what extent open government legislation requires Dutch governments to proactively disclose their decisions and how existing practices of proactive disclosure relate to these legal obligations. Based on a joint analysis of the applicable open government legislation and disclosure practices of some selected government, it concludes that although public disclosure of single-case decisions has the potential to transform existing decision-making procedures, it is still in its infancy.