title: The Netherlands
abstract: The Liberal-Labour minority government that had governed since 2012, had already implemented most of its agenda of welfare state reform before 2016. Hence, 2016 was mainly a year of preparation for the 2017 parliamentary election, with a campaign on the EU-Ukraine referendum as a prelude to that election. In October 2015 sufficient signatures had been gathered to hold a non-binding referendum on the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement (Otjes 2016). The focus of the Agreement was free trade between 
journal: European Journal of Political Research Political Data Yearbook