Acknowledgements

Writing this book has been a challenging but also rewarding experience that I could never have managed alone. I am grateful for the help and advice of many friends, family and colleagues.

I have been working at the Department of History and Art History of Utrecht University for over eleven years now. If it has not felt that long, it is because of the stimulating and collegial environment I have always experienced. Liesbeth van de Grift, James Kennedy, Frank Sterkenburgh, Lars Behrish, Eleni Braat, Annelien de Dijn, Irina Marin, Maarten Prak, Christianne Smit, Leen Dorsman, Jolle Demmers, Oscar Gelderblom, David Onnekink, Geraldien von Frijtag, José van Dijck, Harmen Binnema, Mark Bovens, Bas van Bavel, Sven Dupré, and Tom Gerritsen: thanks for having each in your own way encouraged me along the way. Ido de Haan has as always been a great intellectual mentor and I am thankful for his guidance and for the confidence he has given me. René Koekkoek has been, from our very first day in office, a friend. I am thankful for his sharp observations and good advice.

Teaching has been a greatly rewarding experience for me. Especially the views of students brought forward in the MA-course on the history of democracy have provided me with original insights about the challenges of democracy for today’s generations. One of them, Amanda de Lannoy, deserves to be mentioned here explicitly: she did an internship in the research project of which this book has been a part, on the people’s party tendencies of Dutch political parties. I am grateful for her persistence and learned a lot from what she found out and from our talks about it.

Outside Utrecht, I am grateful to Ingrid van Biezen at Leiden University, who has been of great importance in launching the project and in helping me to formulate why it was worth it. Sarah de Lange at the University of Amsterdam deserves to be thanked for her encouragement to seek dialogue with political scientists (and for making me understand better what this required), and for giving such valuable feedback on the final sections of the book. Also at the University of Amsterdam is Niels Graaf: it is cool to accidently meet someone who not only shares my fascination with obscure early twentieth-century legal thinkers but also a passion for Ajax! I am thankful to my dear colleague Camilo Erlichman, with whom I have had the pleasure to be involved in numerous projects over the past years that somehow inspired parts of this book. The same counts for Arthur Weststeijn, whose ability to combine intellectual rigour and eloquence with just the right amount of casualness I truly admire.

Although the pandemic put a pause on travels for a while, the research for this book has taken me across Europe. This offered tempting distractions, but my stays led to something useful because of the expertise of library and archive staff in London, Berlin, Bonn, Paris, Florence, and Rome (as well as, of course, at the International Institute of Social History at home in Amsterdam). This is often taken for granted, but I could not do my work without them. Moreover, travelling has given me the pleasure to meet people (again). I am particularly thankful for the generosity of Giovanni Orsina, who invited me as a visiting fellow at the Luiss University in Rome. His own writings are always inspiring, while his suggestions greatly helped me think through the argument of the book. Rosario Forlenza and Lucia Bonfreschi have been a kind source of collegiality and enabled me to exchange ideas with them and with like-minded scholars while there. I could never do without the hospitality of the staff members of the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome. My stays there allowed me to get more writing done than I could have imagined (or, indeed, could have probably done anywhere else).

I owe a lot to the continued help and good advice of Martin Conway. He spared neither time nor efforts to comment on parts of the manuscript, helping to make this a better and more readable book (and me a better historian). He also generously hosted me as a visiting researcher at the Oxford Centre for European History. Martin’s willingness to help others is a guiding example in academia and deserves my special recognition and gratitude.

Also in Oxford, I would like to thank the team of Oxford University Press, and, in particular, my editor Cathryn Steele, for her flexibility and for enthusiastically believing in this project from the very beginning.

When I hear the word ‘party’ now I think of politics rather than festivities. I would like to thank my family and friends for bearing with me nonetheless—and for helping me to put things in life in the right perspective. I am grateful every day for the light that our children Daniel and Sebastian bring to our lives—thanks for your love and endless (really endless) energy, and for always shining so brightly. I’m deeply indebted to my wife Giovanna, whose love and support have known no limits. Thanks for being so understanding when I was at times not there because I was working on this book. And thanks even more for always, always being there for me. This book is dedicated to her.