Jasper Eshuis | Erasmus University Rotterdam (original) (raw)
Papers by Jasper Eshuis
Public Management Review
This article analyzes the relation between leadership style of managers and the enforcement style... more This article analyzes the relation between leadership style of managers and the enforcement style of street-level bureaucrats. We also studied the influence of organizational culture. The analysis is based on a survey among 549 inspectors of the Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA) in The Netherlands. Studying transactional leadership and servant leadership the findings show that contrary to the general assumptions in leadership literature the influence of leadership style on enforcement behaviour of inspectors is only very limited. Organization culture has more influence on how inspectors enforce rules in their interactions with inspectees.
Public Administration Review
Journal of Risk Research
This study analyzes news media's role in governmental decision-making processes related to a grad... more This study analyzes news media's role in governmental decision-making processes related to a gradually intensifying series of earthquakes resulting from gas drilling in the Netherlands, and catastrophic natural earthquakes in Italy. According to the risk governance actors interviewed in both cases, media play three roles, as: democratic fora, agenda setters, and strategic instruments. Media attention for risk can create ripple effects in governmental decision-making processes. However, media attention tends to be risk-event driven and focuses on direct newsworthy consequences of events. For 'non-event risks', or when newsworthiness after a risk-event fades, the media's agenda setting and democratic fora roles are limited. This contributes to risk attenuation in society, potentially resulting in limited risk prevention and preparedness. Governmental actors report difficulties in using news media for strategic communication to facilitate risk governance because of media's tendency towards sensationalism. Our research suggests that, in the governance of earthquake-risk news, media logic overrules other institutional logics only for a short while and not in the long run when the three roles of media do not reinforce each other.
International Review of Administrative Sciences
Is there a relation between street-level bureaucrats’ enforcement style and their perception of t... more Is there a relation between street-level bureaucrats’ enforcement style and their perception of the risk of getting blamed? This article answers this question on the basis of a survey ( n = 507) among inspectors of the Netherlands Food and Product Safety Authority. We included perceived media attention on their work as a factor that might influence street-level bureaucrats’ perception of blame risk and their enforcement style. Three dimensions of enforcement style were distinguished from earlier research: legal, facilitative and accommodative. We found that when inspectors perceive more blame risk, they employ a slightly less legal style and, instead, employ a more accommodative style. Thus, they act a little less formally and less coercively (i.e. legal) and take greater account of their peers’ opinions (i.e. accommodative). However, perceived media attention did not have a significant influence on enforcement style. Points for practitioners 1. When inspectors perceive more blame r...
Event Management
Festivals have come to play an important role in tourism and managing their legacy has become an ... more Festivals have come to play an important role in tourism and managing their legacy has become an important challenge for governments and the events industry. Festivals typically take place over limited periods of time, but they also bring longer lasting legacies for the economy, local communities and the environment. Festival legacies are characterized by interpretive flexibility; they are interpreted differently by various actors. This complicates attempts to adapt the management of festivals in such a way that aspired legacies are realised and unwanted (negative) legacies minimised. This paper elicits the recursive relationship between the ways in which event legacies are socially constructed, and how events are managed. Building on constructivist approaches to governance and management and drawing on the empirical variety of six cultural festivals in different parts of Europe, this contribution shows how event legacy can be unpacked along actors’ diverse cognitive, social, tempor...
Public Management Review
Following the economic crisis in 2007-2008, many urban regeneration programmes were replaced with... more Following the economic crisis in 2007-2008, many urban regeneration programmes were replaced with forms of adaptive governance (e.g. slow urbanism). This paper maps and analyses transformational effects of such adaptive governance initiatives through a case of neighbourhood restructuring. It studies whether adaptive governance institutionalizesi.e. transforms the existing governance systemand whether it materializes in the built environment. It shows how the adaptive governance initiatives in this case failed to diffuse and endure, and, therefore, the transformational effect on both the existing governance system and the area has been limited. The reasons for this are discussed.
Public Administration
Funding information Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority This study investigate... more Funding information Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority This study investigates the extent to which inspectors perceive government transparency as impacting regulatory performance. It theorizes that when inspectors perceive an increase in transparency, they find that the perceived relational distance between themselves and their inspectees rises and this, subsequently, increases regulatory performance. The findings from a survey among Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority inspectors (n = 466) confirm that inspectors view an increase in transparency as enhancing regulatory performance. This study further investigates this mechanism by comparing two divisions with different levels of factual relational distance (i.e., frequency of inspector-inspectee interactions). The findings reveal that only in the division with small factual relational distance does perceived relational distance mediate the effect of transparency on regulatory performance. More specifically, in divisions with small factual relational distance, more perceived transparency increases perceived relational distance; this in turn, increases perceived regulatory performance. 1 | INTRODUCTION Government transparency is commonly understood to contribute to better governance in general (Hood 2007) and to improving regulation in particular (Meijer and Homburg 2009; Van Erp 2011; Van Dooren and Van de Walle 2016). The external pressure that develops when governments make information public about the compliance of inspectees such as business owners is assumed to help governments in executing their task of ensuring and improving the compliance of inspectees (Van Dooren and Van de Walle 2016). Encouraging inspectees' compliance also implies that the public sector itself performs better, in the sense of its effectiveness in ensuring compliance with public rules and regulations. However, empirical evidence to support this assumption is scarce and mixed (see Meijer and Homburg 2009; Im et al. 2013; Porumbescu 2017). The actual effect of government transparency on regulatory performance, therefore, remains unclear.
Public Administration Review
Rotterdam in the Netherlands. His main research interests are governance, public branding, and va... more Rotterdam in the Netherlands. His main research interests are governance, public branding, and various forms of stakeholder involvement and coproduction. His research has been published in journals such as Public Administration Review, Public Management Review, Urban Studies, and Environment and Planning C.
The SAGE Handbook of New Urban Studies
Cities
This article explores how place reputation is affected by two strategies that are frequently inco... more This article explores how place reputation is affected by two strategies that are frequently incorporated in a strategic place branding framework. The first strategy is stimulating an open place brand process in which there are more than enough opportunities for an open debate and discussion in the process of developing and implementing a place brand. The second strategy concerns stimulating an identity-image match where the communicated place image reflects the place identity. It is hypothesized that each strategy has a direct positive effect on place reputation as well as two indirect (mediated) positive effects by increasing place brand adoption and reducing conflicts about place marketing by and between place stakeholders. The research applies structural equation modelling to data from nationwide surveys in the Netherlands and Germany among professionals working in place marketing and branding (N = 444). Results show that the first strategy has a positive direct effect on place reputation. The indirect effect on place reputation mediated by place brand adoption is positive, whereas the indirect effect mediated by the level of conflicts among stakeholders is negative. Thus, an open place brand process leads to more conflicts among stakeholders and thereby affecting place reputation negatively. However, the net result of these two indirect effects is still positive albeit small. The second strategy has a strong direct positive effect on place reputation as well as two positive mediated effects though place brand adoption and reducing conflicts among stakeholders. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.
Revue Internationale Des Sciences Administratives, Mar 13, 2014
Revue Internationale Des Sciences Administratives, Jun 6, 2014
Beleid En Maatschappij, 2013
Public Administration Review, 2015
Public branding has risen in importance and magnitude. It is used as a governance strategy to cre... more Public branding has risen in importance and magnitude. It is used as a governance strategy to create images of public services, organizations, people, or policies (e.g., Eshuis and Klijn 2012). For example, numerous cities have used place branding to enhance their attractiveness to tourists and investors, but nowadays public organizations or policies are also being branded (Klijn, Eshuis, and Braun 2012; Van der Torre, Fenger, and Van Twist 2012). An example of the branding of policy is Tony Blair’s “Third Way.” This brand, emphasizing that the problem is not the state or the market but the cooperation between the two, enabled Blair to distinguish his policies from old Labour policies (state oriented) and from conservative policies (market oriented). This brand successfully created associations with voters such as new, distinctive, innovative, and problem solving (Lees- Marshment 2009). Notwithstanding the upsurge of public branding, there is very little research available that actually tests whether branding as a governance strategy has any impact; rare exceptions are Schneider (2004) and Zenker and Beckmann (2013). This article explores this new territory by measuring the effect of one of the most well-known public brands, that of the European Union (EU), on trust in the policies of the EU. Public Branding as a Governance Strategy Following Eshuis and Klijn, we define a brand as “a symbolic construct that consists of a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of these, created deliberately to identify a phenomenon and differentiate it from similar phenomena by adding particular meaning to it” (2012, 19). This definition, resembling the well-known definition of Aaker (1991) but with less emphasis on sellers, highlights that brands are manifested in certain brand elements such as names, signs, or symbols. A brand is not the product itself; it is what gives meaning and value to the product and defines its identity (Kapferer 1992). In other words, a brand signals to consumers where a product or service comes from and what makes it identifiable. Public branding is a deliberate governance strategy to influence citizens’ perceptions. Branding can be used, for example, to influence perceptions of opportunities in a city or the priorities of a political party (Braun 2012; Marsh and Fawcett 2011). As a governance strategy, branding is a strategy for communication and image building among target groups. The ultimate goal is to build a brand that enables communication with citizens, facilitates a trusting relationship with citizens, and influences behavior such as voting (political branding) or visits to a city (city branding) in a desired direction
Target 7c of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG 7c) aimed to halve the population that had no ... more Target 7c of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG 7c) aimed to halve the population that had no sustainable access to water and basic sanitation before 2015. According to the data collected by the Joint Monitoring Programme in charge of measuring progress towards MDG 7c, 2.6 billion people gained access to safe water and 2.3 billion people to basic sanitation. Despite these optimistic figures, many academics have criticised MDG 7c. We provide an overview of this critique by performing a systematic literature review of 62 studies conducted over the MDG implementation period (2002–2015) and shortly after. Our objective is to contribute to the debate on the operationalisation of the Sustainable Development Goal on water and sanitation (SDG 6). The academic debate on MDG 7c mainly focused on the effectiveness of the indicators for safe water and sanitation and on the political dynamics underlying the selection of these indicators. SDG 6 addresses some of the concerns raised on the indicators for safe water and sanitation but fails to acknowledge the politics of indicator setting. We are proposing additional indicators and reflect on the limitations of using only quantitative indicators to measure progress towards SDG 6.
Process-oriented approaches increasingly gain attention within policy and administrative studies.... more Process-oriented approaches increasingly gain attention within policy
and administrative studies. A process orientation emphasizes the
ongoing, dynamic character of policy phenomena, i.e. their becoming.
This article reflects upon the methodological particularities and challenges that come with doing process-oriented research. To do so, it
draws on experiences with a concrete process study on stakeholders’
relating dynamics within a collaborative policymaking process. This
article identifies three methodological particularities: (1) the ongoing
amplification of realities, (2) the shifting of positionalities of both
researchers and participants, through time and across contexts, and
(3) the emergence of historical-aware reflexivity. While each of these
are common issues in qualitative-interpretive research, we argue how
the longitudinal and poly-contextual orientation of a process study
amplifies their impact on the research process and poses specific
challenges. We conclude that to effectively deal with these particularities and challenges a process researcher benefits from developing and establishing good field relations, as well as from the courage to come to ‘temporary’ closure(s), against the background of the continuously becoming of the phenomenon under study.
This article analyses whether involving various stakeholder groups in place marketing has effects... more This article analyses whether involving various stakeholder groups in place marketing has effects on the content of place brands, and on how place marketing influences other policy fields, i.e. spatial planning and tourism/leisure policies. The research applies structural equation modelling to nationwide surveys in the Netherlands and Germany among professionals in place marketing (N=444). The study shows that different stakeholder groups have a varied influence; involving residents and public managers increases the influence of place marketing on spatial planning policies, whereas involving businesses increases influence on tourism/leisure policies. Other studies have shown varying influence of stakeholder groups in cases, but not in quantitative studies. The research also addresses the mechanisms at play in Germany and the Netherlands, showing mainly commonalities. Abstract. This article analyses whether involving various stakeholder groups in place marketing has effects on the content of place brands, and on how place marketing influences other policy fields, i.e. spatial planning and tourism/leisure policies. The research applies structural equation modelling to nationwide surveys in the Netherlands and Germany among professionals in place marketing (N=444). The study shows that different stakeholder groups have a varied influence; involving residents and public managers increases the influence of place marketing on spatial planning policies, whereas involving businesses increases influence on tourism/leisure policies. Other studies have shown varying influence of stakeholder groups in cases, but not in quantitative studies. The research also addresses the mechanisms at play in Germany and the Netherlands, showing mainly commonalities.
Public Management Review
This article analyzes the relation between leadership style of managers and the enforcement style... more This article analyzes the relation between leadership style of managers and the enforcement style of street-level bureaucrats. We also studied the influence of organizational culture. The analysis is based on a survey among 549 inspectors of the Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA) in The Netherlands. Studying transactional leadership and servant leadership the findings show that contrary to the general assumptions in leadership literature the influence of leadership style on enforcement behaviour of inspectors is only very limited. Organization culture has more influence on how inspectors enforce rules in their interactions with inspectees.
Public Administration Review
Journal of Risk Research
This study analyzes news media's role in governmental decision-making processes related to a grad... more This study analyzes news media's role in governmental decision-making processes related to a gradually intensifying series of earthquakes resulting from gas drilling in the Netherlands, and catastrophic natural earthquakes in Italy. According to the risk governance actors interviewed in both cases, media play three roles, as: democratic fora, agenda setters, and strategic instruments. Media attention for risk can create ripple effects in governmental decision-making processes. However, media attention tends to be risk-event driven and focuses on direct newsworthy consequences of events. For 'non-event risks', or when newsworthiness after a risk-event fades, the media's agenda setting and democratic fora roles are limited. This contributes to risk attenuation in society, potentially resulting in limited risk prevention and preparedness. Governmental actors report difficulties in using news media for strategic communication to facilitate risk governance because of media's tendency towards sensationalism. Our research suggests that, in the governance of earthquake-risk news, media logic overrules other institutional logics only for a short while and not in the long run when the three roles of media do not reinforce each other.
International Review of Administrative Sciences
Is there a relation between street-level bureaucrats’ enforcement style and their perception of t... more Is there a relation between street-level bureaucrats’ enforcement style and their perception of the risk of getting blamed? This article answers this question on the basis of a survey ( n = 507) among inspectors of the Netherlands Food and Product Safety Authority. We included perceived media attention on their work as a factor that might influence street-level bureaucrats’ perception of blame risk and their enforcement style. Three dimensions of enforcement style were distinguished from earlier research: legal, facilitative and accommodative. We found that when inspectors perceive more blame risk, they employ a slightly less legal style and, instead, employ a more accommodative style. Thus, they act a little less formally and less coercively (i.e. legal) and take greater account of their peers’ opinions (i.e. accommodative). However, perceived media attention did not have a significant influence on enforcement style. Points for practitioners 1. When inspectors perceive more blame r...
Event Management
Festivals have come to play an important role in tourism and managing their legacy has become an ... more Festivals have come to play an important role in tourism and managing their legacy has become an important challenge for governments and the events industry. Festivals typically take place over limited periods of time, but they also bring longer lasting legacies for the economy, local communities and the environment. Festival legacies are characterized by interpretive flexibility; they are interpreted differently by various actors. This complicates attempts to adapt the management of festivals in such a way that aspired legacies are realised and unwanted (negative) legacies minimised. This paper elicits the recursive relationship between the ways in which event legacies are socially constructed, and how events are managed. Building on constructivist approaches to governance and management and drawing on the empirical variety of six cultural festivals in different parts of Europe, this contribution shows how event legacy can be unpacked along actors’ diverse cognitive, social, tempor...
Public Management Review
Following the economic crisis in 2007-2008, many urban regeneration programmes were replaced with... more Following the economic crisis in 2007-2008, many urban regeneration programmes were replaced with forms of adaptive governance (e.g. slow urbanism). This paper maps and analyses transformational effects of such adaptive governance initiatives through a case of neighbourhood restructuring. It studies whether adaptive governance institutionalizesi.e. transforms the existing governance systemand whether it materializes in the built environment. It shows how the adaptive governance initiatives in this case failed to diffuse and endure, and, therefore, the transformational effect on both the existing governance system and the area has been limited. The reasons for this are discussed.
Public Administration
Funding information Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority This study investigate... more Funding information Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority This study investigates the extent to which inspectors perceive government transparency as impacting regulatory performance. It theorizes that when inspectors perceive an increase in transparency, they find that the perceived relational distance between themselves and their inspectees rises and this, subsequently, increases regulatory performance. The findings from a survey among Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority inspectors (n = 466) confirm that inspectors view an increase in transparency as enhancing regulatory performance. This study further investigates this mechanism by comparing two divisions with different levels of factual relational distance (i.e., frequency of inspector-inspectee interactions). The findings reveal that only in the division with small factual relational distance does perceived relational distance mediate the effect of transparency on regulatory performance. More specifically, in divisions with small factual relational distance, more perceived transparency increases perceived relational distance; this in turn, increases perceived regulatory performance. 1 | INTRODUCTION Government transparency is commonly understood to contribute to better governance in general (Hood 2007) and to improving regulation in particular (Meijer and Homburg 2009; Van Erp 2011; Van Dooren and Van de Walle 2016). The external pressure that develops when governments make information public about the compliance of inspectees such as business owners is assumed to help governments in executing their task of ensuring and improving the compliance of inspectees (Van Dooren and Van de Walle 2016). Encouraging inspectees' compliance also implies that the public sector itself performs better, in the sense of its effectiveness in ensuring compliance with public rules and regulations. However, empirical evidence to support this assumption is scarce and mixed (see Meijer and Homburg 2009; Im et al. 2013; Porumbescu 2017). The actual effect of government transparency on regulatory performance, therefore, remains unclear.
Public Administration Review
Rotterdam in the Netherlands. His main research interests are governance, public branding, and va... more Rotterdam in the Netherlands. His main research interests are governance, public branding, and various forms of stakeholder involvement and coproduction. His research has been published in journals such as Public Administration Review, Public Management Review, Urban Studies, and Environment and Planning C.
The SAGE Handbook of New Urban Studies
Cities
This article explores how place reputation is affected by two strategies that are frequently inco... more This article explores how place reputation is affected by two strategies that are frequently incorporated in a strategic place branding framework. The first strategy is stimulating an open place brand process in which there are more than enough opportunities for an open debate and discussion in the process of developing and implementing a place brand. The second strategy concerns stimulating an identity-image match where the communicated place image reflects the place identity. It is hypothesized that each strategy has a direct positive effect on place reputation as well as two indirect (mediated) positive effects by increasing place brand adoption and reducing conflicts about place marketing by and between place stakeholders. The research applies structural equation modelling to data from nationwide surveys in the Netherlands and Germany among professionals working in place marketing and branding (N = 444). Results show that the first strategy has a positive direct effect on place reputation. The indirect effect on place reputation mediated by place brand adoption is positive, whereas the indirect effect mediated by the level of conflicts among stakeholders is negative. Thus, an open place brand process leads to more conflicts among stakeholders and thereby affecting place reputation negatively. However, the net result of these two indirect effects is still positive albeit small. The second strategy has a strong direct positive effect on place reputation as well as two positive mediated effects though place brand adoption and reducing conflicts among stakeholders. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.
Revue Internationale Des Sciences Administratives, Mar 13, 2014
Revue Internationale Des Sciences Administratives, Jun 6, 2014
Beleid En Maatschappij, 2013
Public Administration Review, 2015
Public branding has risen in importance and magnitude. It is used as a governance strategy to cre... more Public branding has risen in importance and magnitude. It is used as a governance strategy to create images of public services, organizations, people, or policies (e.g., Eshuis and Klijn 2012). For example, numerous cities have used place branding to enhance their attractiveness to tourists and investors, but nowadays public organizations or policies are also being branded (Klijn, Eshuis, and Braun 2012; Van der Torre, Fenger, and Van Twist 2012). An example of the branding of policy is Tony Blair’s “Third Way.” This brand, emphasizing that the problem is not the state or the market but the cooperation between the two, enabled Blair to distinguish his policies from old Labour policies (state oriented) and from conservative policies (market oriented). This brand successfully created associations with voters such as new, distinctive, innovative, and problem solving (Lees- Marshment 2009). Notwithstanding the upsurge of public branding, there is very little research available that actually tests whether branding as a governance strategy has any impact; rare exceptions are Schneider (2004) and Zenker and Beckmann (2013). This article explores this new territory by measuring the effect of one of the most well-known public brands, that of the European Union (EU), on trust in the policies of the EU. Public Branding as a Governance Strategy Following Eshuis and Klijn, we define a brand as “a symbolic construct that consists of a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of these, created deliberately to identify a phenomenon and differentiate it from similar phenomena by adding particular meaning to it” (2012, 19). This definition, resembling the well-known definition of Aaker (1991) but with less emphasis on sellers, highlights that brands are manifested in certain brand elements such as names, signs, or symbols. A brand is not the product itself; it is what gives meaning and value to the product and defines its identity (Kapferer 1992). In other words, a brand signals to consumers where a product or service comes from and what makes it identifiable. Public branding is a deliberate governance strategy to influence citizens’ perceptions. Branding can be used, for example, to influence perceptions of opportunities in a city or the priorities of a political party (Braun 2012; Marsh and Fawcett 2011). As a governance strategy, branding is a strategy for communication and image building among target groups. The ultimate goal is to build a brand that enables communication with citizens, facilitates a trusting relationship with citizens, and influences behavior such as voting (political branding) or visits to a city (city branding) in a desired direction
Target 7c of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG 7c) aimed to halve the population that had no ... more Target 7c of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG 7c) aimed to halve the population that had no sustainable access to water and basic sanitation before 2015. According to the data collected by the Joint Monitoring Programme in charge of measuring progress towards MDG 7c, 2.6 billion people gained access to safe water and 2.3 billion people to basic sanitation. Despite these optimistic figures, many academics have criticised MDG 7c. We provide an overview of this critique by performing a systematic literature review of 62 studies conducted over the MDG implementation period (2002–2015) and shortly after. Our objective is to contribute to the debate on the operationalisation of the Sustainable Development Goal on water and sanitation (SDG 6). The academic debate on MDG 7c mainly focused on the effectiveness of the indicators for safe water and sanitation and on the political dynamics underlying the selection of these indicators. SDG 6 addresses some of the concerns raised on the indicators for safe water and sanitation but fails to acknowledge the politics of indicator setting. We are proposing additional indicators and reflect on the limitations of using only quantitative indicators to measure progress towards SDG 6.
Process-oriented approaches increasingly gain attention within policy and administrative studies.... more Process-oriented approaches increasingly gain attention within policy
and administrative studies. A process orientation emphasizes the
ongoing, dynamic character of policy phenomena, i.e. their becoming.
This article reflects upon the methodological particularities and challenges that come with doing process-oriented research. To do so, it
draws on experiences with a concrete process study on stakeholders’
relating dynamics within a collaborative policymaking process. This
article identifies three methodological particularities: (1) the ongoing
amplification of realities, (2) the shifting of positionalities of both
researchers and participants, through time and across contexts, and
(3) the emergence of historical-aware reflexivity. While each of these
are common issues in qualitative-interpretive research, we argue how
the longitudinal and poly-contextual orientation of a process study
amplifies their impact on the research process and poses specific
challenges. We conclude that to effectively deal with these particularities and challenges a process researcher benefits from developing and establishing good field relations, as well as from the courage to come to ‘temporary’ closure(s), against the background of the continuously becoming of the phenomenon under study.
This article analyses whether involving various stakeholder groups in place marketing has effects... more This article analyses whether involving various stakeholder groups in place marketing has effects on the content of place brands, and on how place marketing influences other policy fields, i.e. spatial planning and tourism/leisure policies. The research applies structural equation modelling to nationwide surveys in the Netherlands and Germany among professionals in place marketing (N=444). The study shows that different stakeholder groups have a varied influence; involving residents and public managers increases the influence of place marketing on spatial planning policies, whereas involving businesses increases influence on tourism/leisure policies. Other studies have shown varying influence of stakeholder groups in cases, but not in quantitative studies. The research also addresses the mechanisms at play in Germany and the Netherlands, showing mainly commonalities. Abstract. This article analyses whether involving various stakeholder groups in place marketing has effects on the content of place brands, and on how place marketing influences other policy fields, i.e. spatial planning and tourism/leisure policies. The research applies structural equation modelling to nationwide surveys in the Netherlands and Germany among professionals in place marketing (N=444). The study shows that different stakeholder groups have a varied influence; involving residents and public managers increases the influence of place marketing on spatial planning policies, whereas involving businesses increases influence on tourism/leisure policies. Other studies have shown varying influence of stakeholder groups in cases, but not in quantitative studies. The research also addresses the mechanisms at play in Germany and the Netherlands, showing mainly commonalities.