In times of perception politics, the credibility of electoral candidates is a crucial asset in political marketing. This raises the question to which political leaders citizens attribute credibility, and how political credibility is gained and lost through media performance.We analyze and compare two contrasting cases during the Dutch parliamentary election campaign of 2010. Whereas in this campaign Mark Rutte -leader of the liberal party VVD -gained credibility, the credibility of Job Cohen -at the time leader of the socialdemocratic PvdA -waned substantially. To understand this we extend the source credibility approach with a dramaturgical approach, and as such we shed light on what happens in the dynamic, interactive process between leaders and audiences in which credibility is constructed.
The concept of an agro-production park combines industrial with environmental and animal friendly agriculture. In The Netherlands, academics and government introduced this idea-what we consider a boundary concept-to align economic and environmental ambitions. In this contribution, we argue that boundary concepts are important in deliberations as they create a sphere of engagement that enables participants to scrutinize their routines and to explore new interpretations and practices that replace their normal ways. In this way we ground the notion of 'reflexive governance' in deliberative practices for sustainable agriculture. We explored if and how the concept of an agropark induced frame-reflective conversations about conflicting and overlapping interpretations. We conducted a frame analysis of four Dutch national newspapers from which we derived four possible interpretations of an agropark: Pigs in the City, Surviving Farmers, Pigs in the Mud and Surviving Citizens. Next, we analysed 10 deliberative sessions about agroparks to study if reflectivity occurred. Our findings suggest that to move to more sustainable agriculture, the introduction of innovative boundary crossing concepts invites participants to reflect on conflicting frames and engage in reflective governance. However, facilitators and governmental actors need to support this boundary crossing for it to become tangible.
Political leaders are often perceived as unresponsive to the daily concerns of citizens, especially when European integration is concerned. Academic research, however, provides at most mixed evidence for the existence of such a gap. This article tries to shed light on this discrepancy by introducing an alternative measure to study leaders' responsiveness-narrative congruence-and explores the assumption that responsiveness increases leaders' credibility in the eyes of their voters. As narrative congruence is a more intricate measure that captures leaders' and followers' policy preferences and argumentation, it may better capture the gap between their positions and therefore provide a more adequate explanation for citizens' support for their leaders than traditional congruence measures like issue saliency and ideological distance. To provide a first test of this, the technique of cognitive mapping is introduced and used to explore the congruence in beliefs on European integration of four Dutch political leaders and their followers. Although the study finds a significant gap between some leaders and their followers' narratives on Europe, it finds no evidence that this narrative congruence is related to the credibility of these leaders in the eyes of their followers.
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