Acta Politica最新文献

Associative issue ownership (AIO) has proven its value in describing issue competition and explaining voting behavior. Yet, it is unclear whether and to what extent AIO also differentiates parties and influences vote choice in highly fragmented, multiparty systems. In such a context, parties must differentiate from many electoral competitors, which makes AIO worth pursuing. At the same time, obtaining unequivocal ownership may be a very difficult endeavor in the face of so many rivals. This paper aims to assess these questions empirically by employing the Dutch Parliamentary Election Study 2021 on a system with 17 elected parties (ENPP = 8). At the aggregate level, we find unequivocal issue ownership for 4 of the 14 issues under study. AIO of most other issues is contested, either by parties with very similar policy positions (within-block competition) or by parties with opposing positions (between-block competition). A final set of issues remain unclaimed. At the individual level, perceptions of issue ownership explain the composition of voters' party consideration sets (pre-elections) and their actual vote choice (post-elections). These impacts are stronger when voters associate the party with an issue they find important. We conclude that AIO perceptions are an important factor to consider when studying party dynamics and voting behavior in a context of highly fragmented multipartyism.

Supplementary information: The online version of this article (10.1057/s41269-022-00274-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Previous research has demonstrated that both visibility of parties, party leaders, candidates, and topics, and the sentiment of this coverage can affect people's decision in the ballot box. Most of this research was, however, done in the period before social media gained importance which has drastically changed the media consumption of citizens. The main aim of this paper is to investigate whether, and if so to what extent, traditional media use during the 2021 Dutch parliamentary elections has (still) affected vote choice in this era of social media. To study this, two-wave panel survey data from the Dutch Parliamentary Election Survey (DPES) are combined with an automated content analysis of newspaper articles (N = 35,511). We created respondent-specific content variables to conduct a linkage analysis. Our analysis, relying on a pooled analysis of respondent-party combinations (N = 54,162), demonstrates that political parties profit electorally from being visible in both newspapers and online outlets. This is in particular true for parties that are not part of parliament yet, thus increasing the further fragmentation and division in Dutch politics. Contrary to the expectations, sentiment in online media has a negative effect, with negative coverage increasing electoral support.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41269-022-00270-7.

We test the somewhat counter-intuitive expectation that support for populist radical right (PRR) parties at the national level is associated with public support for ethno-traditional cues-a frequent feature in PRR imagery and nativist discourse-abroad. We do so by leveraging a large-scale comparative dataset that covers voting patterns during the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) between 1999 and 2019. Looking at voting patterns for more than 30,000 country dyads (i.e., ESC points given by country A to country B in a given contest), we show that countries with stronger national support for PRR parties tend to vote more clearly for songs showcasing ethno-traditional cues (ethnic imagery and, in particular, the use of non-English national languages), even when accounting for cultural and regional ties and song characteristics. These results provide novel insights into the relationship between nativism, radical right populism, and perceptions of foreign ethno-traditionalism.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41269-022-00262-7.

Previous research demonstrated that voters for the Dutch radical right party PVV were the most stable voters among the highly volatile electorate. However, since 2017 two new radical right parties have successfully entered the Dutch Parliament: Forum for Democracy (FvD) and JA21, conceivably at the expense of the PVV. The success of these new parties is puzzling, because there does not seem to be much room for new parties campaigning on a highly similar platform. In our paper, we use LISS panel data to study the determinants of vote switching patterns between four subsequent elections from 2017 to 2021. We find that the surprise victory of the new far right in 2019 can be explained by its ability to attract both former PVV voters as well as voters new to the far right. Since then, FvD has lost many of its supporters again, but these voters have mostly switched to other far-right parties, meaning the far-right support base has become fragmented, yet enlarged. This suggests that when provided with viable alternatives, radical right voters are as volatile as other voter groups.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41269-022-00269-0.

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, democracy's promise to enable well-informed, responsible decisions gained almost unprecedented appeal. At this stage, many European governments mainly deferred to expert judgment. This is what some experts and activist groups occasionally call for in the case of an even more severe global crisis: the climate crisis. But where citizens are asked to more or less blindly follow the lead of expert judgments, politics takes what Lafont (Democracy without shortcuts: a participatory conception of deliberative democracy. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 10.1093/oso/9780198848189.001.0001, 2020) calls an 'expertocratic shortcut'. In the first part of this paper, we delineate the perceptions of threat that characterize these two cases and that can lead to expertocratic temptations. We point out that shortcuts to democratic decisions not only constitute dead ends, but can also be used to reinforce existing power structures. In the second part, we show how and why such shortcuts are sociologically likely to cause alienation and reactance, as accountability is lost and the rationale for decisions cannot be retraced. We conclude that if a democratic system is to live up to its promise of rationality, legitimate expert involvement has to meet three requirements: political mandate and control, transparency of uncertainty and expert disagreement, linkage to inclusive and effective citizen deliberation.

Political opponents are often divided not only in their attitudes (i.e., ideological polarization) and their feelings toward each other (i.e., affective polarization), but also in their factual perceptions of reality (i.e., factual belief polarization). This paper describes factual belief polarization in the Netherlands around three core issues. Furthermore, this paper examines who are most susceptible to this type of polarization. Analyses on the 2021 Dutch Parliamentary Election Study reveal that citizens hold different perceptions than their political opponents about income inequality, immigration, and climate change. This type of polarization is strongest among citizens who have hostile feelings toward their political opponents and, paradoxically, among those who are highly educated and interested in politics. Trust in epistemic authorities did not mitigate factual belief polarization, perhaps because this trust has itself become politicized. These findings underline that factual belief polarization constitutes a core pillar of political polarization, alongside ideological and affective polarization.