In the months before the national elections of 1977, three Dutch journalists of the weekly Haagse Postpublished a series of interviews with the leaders of the four main political parties and their staff. They interrogated them critically and in great detail on the main topics of their electoral programmes. Making use of the economic data and forecasts of the governmental Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analyisis (CPB), they specifically asked their interlocutors to respond to criticism on the economic and financial coherence and feasibility of their programmes.

Before the next elections, in 1981, two of the journalists repeated their round of critical interviews, which were published in the daily Haarlems Dagblad.

By the next elections, in 1986, the three main political parties, the confessional CDA, the conservative-liberal VVDand the social-democratic PvdA, took the initiative and asked CPBto calculate the economic and financial coherence, feasibility and consequences of their electoral programmes. The results were published shortlyafterthe elections.

Before the next elections, in 1989, the progressive-liberal D66joined the other three parties in their renewed request for an official econometric check on their programmes. This time the results were published a month before the elections, a time-table that was to be kept on all subsequent occasions.

This set a trend that turned that into a tradition; a steadily increasing number of parties voluntarily submitted their programmes to an official check by CPB, taking the number to 10 out of 21 participating in the elections in 2012 and 11 out of 28 in 2017.

CPBresponded to these demands by standardizing and institutionalizing the procedures involved and by broadening the range of topics examined so as to include also more qualitative ones, mostly regarding the physical and social environment. This led to involvement of two additional government bodies, the National Institute of Public Health and the Environment (RIVM),later Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), and the Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP).

Within three decades, the collaboration between economists and econometricians on the one hand and political parties on the other had been revolutionized from being an exception to becoming the norm. Until very recently, this Dutch tradition was unique in the world. The paper tells the history of this quiet revolution in The Netherlands and discusses some aspects of the use of economic models for policy analysis. The question is addressed whether it is possible to introduce the habit of having electoral programmes disciplined by econometric checks in Italy.