ABSTRACT
In the mid-1960s, Hans Daalder contributed a classic survey of the dynamics of the Dutch party system to Dahl's major anthology on opposition. The emphasis of the account was upon the essentially non-oppositional character of organised national politics in the Netherlands, for reasons which Daalder showed to be both historical and practical. Systematic confessional politics had its origins in the 1870s with the instrumentation of a mass movement of militant Calvinists, culminating in the formation of the Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP) in 1879. During the First World War, when Holland was neutral, a major re-appraisal of political arrangements resulted, among other things, in universal male suffrage and proportional representation on the basis of a single national constituency. To embark upon the study of Dutch politics in the early 1970s was to encounter the inquietudes of a political system apparently poised on the brink of radical change.
