Politicians have displayed a keen interest in the build-up of regulations and bureaucracies for quite some time now. A case in point is the Netherlands. The second Balkenende cabinet, though, vowed to downsize the number of rules as one of its main policy initiatives. Evaluating the success of such a policy requires the measurement of changes in rule volumes. Doing so is no easy task. Using higher education legislation as a case study, this article attempts to chart and explain developments in regulation volumes for the period 1986—2004. For the time being, there appears to be no evidence that rule levels are on the decline — in fact, the reverse is the case. We also provide evidence for a so-called ecology of law, suggesting that the rules-breed-rules mechanism is difficult to put to a halt.
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