Fortuyn's Legacy: Party System Change in the Netherlands

Pellikaan, Huib; Lange, Sarah; Meer, Tom van der

doi:10.1057/palgrave.cep.6110097

Cited by 85 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…They argue that the most likely explanation for the Dutch drop lies in changes in the Dutch political culture after 2002. Between 2002 and 2006 the Dutch parliament was much more polarized than before, as a clearly right-wing government coalition stood against a left-wing opposition, while the political center was unoccupied (Pellikaan et al, 2007). The Dutch parliament temporarily took up some cultural characteristics that are commonly associated with disproportional electoral systems, like polarization, confrontational leadership, and lack of accommodation (Van der Brug and Van Praag, 2008).…”

Section: Unexplained Longitudinal Changesmentioning

confidence: 99%

In what we trust? A multi-level study into trust in parliament as an evaluation of state characteristics

Meer

2010

International Review of Administrative Sciences

147

127

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A basic level of trust in the political system is considered to be the cornerstone of modern-day democracy. Consequently, scholars and politicians have been concerned with low or declining levels of trust in political institutions. This article focuses on trust in parliament. Many theories have been offered to explain cross-national differences or longitudinal changes in trust, but they have not been subject to systematic empirical tests. This article aims to fill that theoretical and empirical gap. I conceptualize trust in parliament as citizens' rather rational evaluations of the state-citizen relationship along four dimensions: competence, intrinsic care, accountability, and reliability. Next, I relate state characteristics to each of these four aspects, and hypothesize how they might affect political trust. These hypotheses are tested simultaneously by multi-level analysis on stapled data from the European Social Survey 2002-06. The tests show that three factors explain very well the cross-national differences in trust: corruption, the electoral system, and former regime type. Somewhat surprisingly, economic performance is not related to trust in parliament. Although the analyses do not explain changes in trust across time very well, they at least dismiss some of the existing explanations. Points for practitionersThis article describes to what extent levels of trust in parliament differ across countries and change across time, and tests several explanations for comparatively low or longitudinally declining levels of trust. It offers practitioners a theoretical approach to make sense of trust issues by distinguishing four trust aspects. Moreover, it shows that objective state characteristics are crucial in explaining cross-national differences. Widespread perceptions of corruption are most harmful to trust in parliament, while democratic rule and a proportional electoral system are beneficial. Equally important, actual economic performance is unrelated to trust. Institutional designs that emphasize care and integrity appear to be more beneficial than ones that emphasize competence and performance.

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Section: Unexplained Longitudinal Changesmentioning

confidence: 99%

In what we trust? A multi-level study into trust in parliament as an evaluation of state characteristics

Meer

2010

International Review of Administrative Sciences

147

127

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“…The rise of the LPF caused a sudden systematic change in the Dutch party system, that lasted long after the party's decline, by introducing a new cleavage to a previously unidimensional party system (Pellikaan et al, 2003(Pellikaan et al, , 2007. As a reaction to its popularity, mainstream center-right parties have immediately shifted their position rightwards on issues such as immigration (Bale, 2003;Van Kersbergen and Krouwel, 2008), a movement which was followed even by center-left parties (Van Spanje, 2010).…”

Section: The Netherlands As a Case Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Populist radical right parties and mass polarization in the Netherlands

Silva¹

2017

Eur. Pol. Sci. Rev.

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Radical parties have been found to succeed under conditions of mass polarization. It is argued that their message resonates better with voters at the extremes of an ideological spectrum. This paper investigates if the reverse also holds, meaning that radical parties may contribute to the polarization of the public. I test this claim in the Netherlands, a country that has experienced the rise of populist radical right parties since 2002, using a synthetic control model built with a pool of comparable countries and Eurobarometer survey data. Results show that, after the rise of Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders, the level of polarization among the Dutch public increased more than it otherwise would have. These findings contribute to understanding the connection between elite-and mass-level polarization, and the consequences of populist radical right parties' emergence in Western Europe.

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“…The religious dimension, however, became obsolete after 1998 (cf. Pellikaan et al 2003Pellikaan et al , 2007. 4 Alternative classifications of this party system type include extreme multipartism (Siaroff 2000) or multipolar party systems (Laver and Schofield 1990;Schofield 1993).…”

Section: Appendixmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The net volatility has gone up from 10 per cent in the 1970s and 1980s to more than 20 per cent since 1994 (Mair 2008). At the same time, the rise of the radical right-wing populist parties LPF and PVV has been accompanied by changes in the dimensionality of the political space (Otjes 2011;Pellikaan et al 2007), increasing polarization (Oosterwaal and Torenvlied 2010;Pennings and Keman 2008) and the realization of new and innovative government coalitions (Andeweg 2008). …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Benoit and Laver 2006;Van der Brug and Van Spanje 2009) has been extensively demonstrated. In the Netherlands, immigration and integration have been salient issues among the electorate since 1994 (Aarts and Thomassen 2008), but these issues only became politicized in 2002 (Pellikaan et al 2003(Pellikaan et al , 2007. At least since 2006 party choice in the Netherlands has been strongly structured by voters' positions on the economic and the cultural dimensions (Van der Meer et al 2012).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Centre Does Not Hold: Coalition Politics and Party System Change in the Netherlands, 2002–12

Pellikaan¹,

Lange²,

Meer³

2016

Gov. & oppos.

Self Cite

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Like many party systems across Western Europe, the Dutch party system has been in flux since 2002 as a result of a series of related developments, including the decline of mainstream parties which coincided with the emergence of radical right-wing populist parties and the concurrent dimensional transformation of the political space. This article analyses how these challenges to mainstream parties fundamentally affected the structure of party competition. On the basis of content analysis of party programmes, we examine the changing configuration of the Dutch party space since 2002 and investigate the impact of these changes on coalition-formation patterns. We conclude that the Dutch party system has become increasingly unstable. It has gradually lost its core through electoral fragmentation and mainstream parties’ positional shifts. The disappearance of a core party that dominates the coalition-formation process initially transformed the direction of party competition from centripetal to centrifugal. However, since 2012 a theoretically novel configuration has emerged in which no party or coherent group of parties dominates competition.

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Fortuyn's Legacy: Party System Change in the Netherlands

Cited by 85 publications

References 22 publications

In what we trust? A multi-level study into trust in parliament as an evaluation of state characteristics

In what we trust? A multi-level study into trust in parliament as an evaluation of state characteristics

Populist radical right parties and mass polarization in the Netherlands

The Centre Does Not Hold: Coalition Politics and Party System Change in the Netherlands, 2002–12

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