This week, millions of Dutch citizens walked into a polling booth, picked up a red pencil, and made a decision about who should govern their city for the next four years. It is, when you think about it, a peculiar ritual. We are asked to choose between people we largely do not know, based on programmes we have mostly not read, to represent us on issues that directly shape our daily lives.
I have lived in Eindhoven for almost my entire life. I am an engaged citizen; in my neighbourhood, in local initiatives, in conversations about Brainport, parking policy, and the planned police complex in Meerhoven. I consider myself someone with an above-average interest in local governance. And yet, I must admit that I find myself wondering whether my vote can become more like an informed choice and less like educated guesswork.
“She Seemed Like a Decent One”
Before the municipal elections, I brought this up over dinner. I asked the people around the table a simple question: “How many of you actually know the candidates? What do you know about what they have actually done?”
The answers were telling, and, while expected, also a bit disheartening:
- “Yeah, well, I vote for a person who seems decent.”
- “I always vote for the same party, and then I pick the first woman on the ballot.”
- “Maybe not the best candidate, but we went to the same school.”
- “No, no idea really, and I don’t even know if I’ll vote this time.”
These are not unintelligent people. They are, if anything, a reasonable cross-section of engaged citizens. But, like most of us, they rely on impressions, habits, and proxies to make a decision that matters.
That conversation pushed me to turn the question around. Instead of searching for election materials to tell me who to choose, I wrote a public post on LinkedIn just before the elections, tagging candidates whose profiles seemed to align with my concerns. I laid out what I care about for Eindhoven: its growth as a technology hub alongside affordable housing; better regional collaboration and public transport; integration of international knowledge workers; support for citizen initiatives; and above all, transparency in policy.
Then I asked them directly: “What have you concretely done in the past to contribute to these goals? And how will you demonstrably commit to them in the next term?”. I was not looking for party slogans, I was genuinely interested in personal track records.
And some candidates reacted instantly and personally. Part of the responses I received spoke to a broader structural problem. The information that would allow a citizen to make a genuinely informed vote exists: council minutes, voting records, policy documents, participation sessions. But it is scattered, hard to find, written in bureaucratic language, and practically invisible to anyone without significant time and stamina to invest.
Local news outlets tell some of the narrative, but tend to cover local politics in a familiar pattern: the opening of a new institution, an environmental award, a governance scandal. The everyday reality of who voted for what, who tabled which motion, who showed up prepared and who did not; these are the things that mostly disappear into the walls of city hall. We can’t say that we have genuine trust in how these things work, rather, we accept it as a fact of governmental process.
The Local Appeal
Something interesting has been happening in Dutch politics that speaks directly to this trust problem: the steady rise of local parties. Over the past two decades they have become the dominant force in municipal politics. At the last local elections in 2022 they won roughly a third of the vote, significantly more than any single national party. Recent polling suggests that share is holding up, even as many of the same voters support national parties with very different profiles in parliamentary elections.
How come? Proximity and performance.
Political scientist Marcel Boogers has pointed out that dissatisfaction with national politics pushes voters toward local parties. But the attraction is not only protest. The appeal of a local party is less ideological and more relational. Voters trust people they can see working in their neighbourhood, attending the same events, going to the same shops, solving problems they can literally point to on a map.
There is an important insight in that shift. It suggests that the real gap is not between citizens and politics, but between citizens and legibility. People want to see how their vote connects to real action. When that connection is hard to trace through a national party structure, they look for it closer to home.
That search for legibility is not equally easy everywhere. Some cities make the connection between vote and outcome harder to trace than others, and some make the stakes of getting it wrong considerably higher.
Eindhoven Is Not Every City
This matters more in some places than in others, and Eindhoven is not a typical case. It is a city growing at a speed that places unusual demands on whoever sits in the council chamber. Brainport, ASML, the steady influx of international knowledge workers: these are not abstract policy topics. They show up in housing prices, in school capacity, in whether a neighbourhood feels cohesive or fragmented, in whether the person who moved here from the other side of the world last year has any meaningful connection to the community they now live in.
A fast-growing, internationally oriented city arguably needs more accountability infrastructure than most, not less. The complexity of governing Eindhoven requires councillors who can connect economic dynamism to social cohesion, and long-term strategy to lived reality. And voters in Eindhoven arguably need better tools to assess whether the people they elect are actually capable of doing that.
A Proposal: The Continuous Report Card
Here is what I think is missing, and what I would like to see exist.
Not another voting guide. The stemwijzer model, where you match your headline positions to a party programme in the weeks before an election, is useful but incomplete. It compares your opinions to promises. It tells you nothing about delivery.
What I am imagining is a continuous, independent public platform that tracks elected officials across their full term. Written in plain language, not bureaucratic lingo. Built around a simple question: did they do what they said they would do? Voting records made legible and motion outcomes summarised. Coalition agreements tracked against actual decisions; not as partisan commentary, but as factual documentation.
The raw material for this already exists. Council meetings are public. Voting records are public. Policy documents are public. The problem is not availability; it is accessibility. A platform of this kind would not require new laws or new data. It would require curation, translation into everyday language, and sustained public attention.
Come election time, or any moment for that matter, a voter would open this platform and see not just a party programme, which is often a marketing document written for an election, but an expanding trackrecord. A real report card, based on what actually happened.
A Glimpse of What It Could Be
One councillor who responded to my post did more than argue. He shared a tool he had built himself: an alternative interface on top of the official raadsinformatiesysteem (RIS), called iRIS. Where the municipal RIS lets you search documents, iRIS starts with people. You select a councillor and immediately see their motions, amendments and council questions, grouped by topic.
Look up his own profile and you see a pattern of work around health and green space. Look up another councillor and you see a focus on industry and the economy. Look up a third and you see activity on privacy, AI and data breaches; exactly as she described in her response. His accompanying line was simple and precise: never judge politicians on what they say, but on what they do.
At the same time, tools like RIS and iRIS still reflect a document-first logic. They make it easier to find material per person or per meeting, but not to follow the full historical arc of a single dossier across years, coalitions and committees. If you want to understand something like the police campus plans from beginning to end, you still need to manually stitch together reports, minutes, motions and media coverage yourself. The missing piece is a topic- or theme-based lens that lets residents see how an issue has evolved over time, who shaped it, and when crucial choices were made.
In a way, iRIS is a prototype of the insight infrastructure I am arguing for. It rearranges what already exists into a shape a citizen can read. It shows that with relatively modest effort and some technical skill, the big pile of scattered documents can become a living map of who is doing what in your city. The next step is to do the same for issues and dossiers, so that we can follow not only the people, but also the projects they are shaping on our behalf.
What Cities Can Learn from Organisations
If you suggested this kind of continuous trackrecord in a corporate setting, nobody would blink. Most large organisations already live with dashboards, KPIs, risk registers and quarterly reviews. Performance is tracked, not because people are untrustworthy, but because complex work requires shared metrics and transparent feedback.
Of course, a city is not a company. Citizens are not employees or customers, and democratic representation should never be reduced to shareholder value. But it is striking that in a city like Eindhoven, home to high-tech companies that obsess over measurement, iteration and learning, our democratic structures are still largely evaluated every four years with a single survey question: “Who gets your vote?”
Inside a company, you would expect at least three things:
- Clarity of objectives: What are we trying to achieve, and how will we know if we are making progress?
- Traceability: Who decided what, on the basis of which information, and with what outcome?
- Learning loops: When decisions turn out differently than hoped, there is reflection, adjustment, and sometimes accountability.
Translated to local democracy, that would mean:
- Council and college articulating a small set of clear, public goals, in language residents can understand.
- A public record that not only stores decisions, but actively connects them back to those goals.
- A culture where explaining a change of course is seen as a sign of maturity, not an admission of failure.
The point is not to import corporate jargon into city hall. The point is to recognise that we already know how to build systems that make complex performance visible. We use them in tech, in industry, in services. The missing step is to apply that same level of structural care to how we see our own democracy at work.
The responses I received from candidates were telling in this light. They did not just point to values or slogans, but to concrete domains: social policy and digitalisation; housing norms and their real-world effects; democratic control over large projects like KnoopXL; public transport and regional collaboration within Brainport. Each sketched a small portfolio of what they had done, or tried to do. These are fragments of a governance scorecard. What is missing is a shared structure that makes those fragments comparable, traceable, and visible beyond a LinkedIn thread.
Turning It Around
This is, admittedly, an approach available mainly to people with the time, platform, and confidence to do it. That is exactly the point. Most citizens do not have that luxury. The accountability infrastructure should do that work for them: continuously, transparently, and in a language anyone can read.
Democracy does not decay because people do not care. It becomes hollow when the information needed to hold it to account is too hard to find. And trust erodes fast when the voter thinks that their concerns are not addressed, or that city hall will push their own agenda regardless of public opinion.
A red dot next to a name should mean something more than a gut feeling. We have the tools, and even early prototypes, to turn it around. The question is whether we are willing to build the insight, instead of just performing the ritual.
Because, as we’ve seen on the news, in some places the turnout in elections is around or even below 50%. And, to me, that means that the people in our municipal council are not a real representation of the community they serve.
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