What happens when populist radical right parties (PRRPs) adopt an anti-lockdown stance? PRRPs in Western Europe, which in ideology are mostly comparable, have been divided on the issue of COVID-19....Show moreWhat happens when populist radical right parties (PRRPs) adopt an anti-lockdown stance? PRRPs in Western Europe, which in ideology are mostly comparable, have been divided on the issue of COVID-19. The answer does not follow automatically from their economic, cultural or anti-elitist positions, which all seem to advocate for a different strategy. In some countries, such as the Netherlands, two PRRPs have each taken a different approach: one became an anti-lockdown party, the other did not. In this study the effects of becoming an anti-lockdown party on their voter base, who either vote for economic, cultural or anti-elitist reasons, have been examined using a mediation analysis on existing panel data. This study concludes that voters, who mostly vote because they agree with the PRRPs cultural right-wing positions, might be dissuaded to vote for a PRRP that has become an anti-lockdown party. However, anti-lockdown attitudes most strongly positively affect voting for an anti-lockdown party on their own and appear to tap into a new voter base. Future research is needed in order to corroborate this finding.Show less
This paper analyzes the interaction between policy distance and issue salience using the proximity model of voting. It uses a quantitative analysis of items from the Dutch Parliamentary Electoral...Show moreThis paper analyzes the interaction between policy distance and issue salience using the proximity model of voting. It uses a quantitative analysis of items from the Dutch Parliamentary Electoral Survey (2021) and POPPA (2018) to research whether the more salience is attached to economic, socio-cultural, and political issues by voters, the more important the chosen dimension will be for their vote. The examination provides data on voters’ and party positions on these three dimensions, and the binary logistic regression finds that the effect is strongest for the socio-cultural issues, but also somewhat significant for political issues, which confirms the importance of populism in contemporary Western European democracy.Show less
Political science literature has previously focused on different political behaviors among men and women in the United States, where little research of this type has been conducted in a west...Show morePolitical science literature has previously focused on different political behaviors among men and women in the United States, where little research of this type has been conducted in a west European context in parliamentary systems. Within a framework of cospecialization, this study explores potential gender differences in the municipal council of Utrecht in the period of October 2020 to October 2021 using mixed methods. Motions and its cosponsors were analyzed, where gender did not have a significant effect on the cosponsoring of council members. Cospecialization however, did have a significant effect, in line with the cospecialization literature. The interviews with council members were intended to explain any potentially found effects in the quantitative analysis, yet none of the participants alluded to a difference in gender when it came to political behavior quantified as cosponsoring motions. Still, some other themes for potential future research were brought up. A new hierarchy of factors is proposed based on the qualitative data (cospecialization, agreement, issue topic, and personal relations), and the data is contextualized and situated in the existent literature, from which future comparative studies are suggested.Show less
This thesis contributes to existing theories on democratization by examining the effect of Western influence on democratization in post-Soviet countries from 1991 until 2019. Western influence is...Show moreThis thesis contributes to existing theories on democratization by examining the effect of Western influence on democratization in post-Soviet countries from 1991 until 2019. Western influence is divided in two dimensions: leverage as governments’ vulnerability to external pressure and linkage as the density of ties to the West. It is expected that leverage alone does not enhance democratization, but linkage does, and that a combination of high linkage and leverage has the strongest effect on democratization. Surprisingly, a factor analysis on the dimensions of linkage and leverage reveals that leverage is not a coherent concept as was expected beforehand. Moreover, after performing multiple OLS regressions, it is concluded that linkage has a strong effect on democratization, and some dimensions of leverage positively influence democratization. Finally, it cannot be concluded that an interaction effect exists whereby leverage enhances the effect of linkage on democratization. This is due to the lack of coherence between the leverage dimensions and due to conflicting results of the performed tests.Show less
The following thesis investigates the moderation effects of issue salience on the relationship between retrospective evaluations of governments' healthcare as well as economy policies performance...Show moreThe following thesis investigates the moderation effects of issue salience on the relationship between retrospective evaluations of governments' healthcare as well as economy policies performance and government popularity. Its core hypothesis postulates that voters are more likely to reward incumbents with reelection if they pursue successful policies, as well as more likely sanction them with defection to opposition, if their policies fail for issues they consider to be salient. The thesis runs two separate studies using different measurements of the same theoretical concepts to check for robustness of results. The first study is based on individual-level data, while the second study employs macro-level data. Results of the first study suggest, that voters are more likely to reward incumbents for improving healthcare standards when healthcare-related issues are salient, but not more likely to sanction incumbents for worsening healthcare standards. Contrary to expectations, voters who are of the view that economic issues are salient, seem to be more likely to support incumbents when national economic conditions are regressing. For Study 2, the thesis found no significant effect – objective indicators of economic and healthcare quality performance as well as measures of economy and healthcare-related issues on a macro-level seem to be unrelated to government popularity, though data validty is suspected to play an important part in the outcome of the regressions of Study 1.Show less
This study examines how the government accession within an EU country can affect the discourse of the left-wing and right-wing populist parties. We analyzed this question by tracing two Greek...Show moreThis study examines how the government accession within an EU country can affect the discourse of the left-wing and right-wing populist parties. We analyzed this question by tracing two Greek populist parties' discourse, the left-wing Syriza and the right-wing Independent Greeks (Anel), during the 2012-2019 period. We have split the examined period into two subperiods (2012 to July 2015, and August 2015 to 2019). The turning point was the Syriza-Anel government’s signature of the third EU bailout program in August 2015. The first hypothesis was that the government accession within the EU context would slightly decrease the populist logic of the two parties. The next two hypotheses referred that the EU leverage emerged by the signing of the bailout agreement will decrease the populist rhetoric of the two parties towards the external elites (mainly the EU). However, the right-wing populists (Anel)- even after this decrease- will target the external elites to a larger extent than the left-wing populists. To examine the hypotheses in-depth, we applied a combination of quantitative content analysis with qualitative discourse analysis. The findings have corroborated our three initial hypotheses. Simultaneously, the qualitative discourse analysis offered us some additional findings concerning the two parties' use of topos of “History” to increase their populist appeal within the electorate.Show less
Political trust is seen as a requirement for democratic regimes to function well. In the Netherlands, polling data indicates that trust is lower in less densely populated provinces, while remaining...Show morePolitical trust is seen as a requirement for democratic regimes to function well. In the Netherlands, polling data indicates that trust is lower in less densely populated provinces, while remaining high nation-wide. This study aims to identify if living in less urbanized - low population density - areas in the Netherlands have lower levels of political trust, and if so look at potential explanations. I investigate the two most specific levels of the framework by Norris (2011, 2017) of political trust: trust in regime institutions as well as trust in incumbent office-holders. All analyses were performed on four waves of data from the DPES (2006 - 2017). After controlling for education, religion, gender and age, urbanization did not improve the prediction of political trust in either level. One remarkable result was that education and age had opposite influences in trust in regime institutions versus trust in incumbent office-holders. These differences demonstrate the value of Norris’ framework: the type of relation between an underlying factor and political trust may depend on the type of political trust considered.Show less
The 2015 European migration crisis was caused by turmoil in Sub-Saharan Africa, civil war in Syria and civil unrest in Central Asia. This caused a massive influx of migrants into the European Union...Show moreThe 2015 European migration crisis was caused by turmoil in Sub-Saharan Africa, civil war in Syria and civil unrest in Central Asia. This caused a massive influx of migrants into the European Union. This influx of migrants fuelled the rise of radical right populist parties. In March 2016, a migration deal was struck between the European Union and Turkey to control this influx of migration. For this thesis, we want to examine to what extent rhetoric frames are used by the radical right populist parties within the Dutch Lower House by examining the European migration crisis. We will examine what kind of frames the spokespersons of the radical right populist parties used to highlight and how they use framing the context of the migration crisis. One would expect that the frames used by the popular parties in the Dutch Lower House change as the severity of the crisis changed and the consequences nationally shifts during the crisis. In order to do this, I will use a framing theory where we will be able to perform a qualitative discourse analysis that provides us with analysable results. As a specific case study, we will perform the discourse analysis of the parliamentary debates on the European migration crisis, as we would expect that radical right populist parties would make more prominent use of radical right populist frames as the migration crisis touches some of the core elements of radical right populist characteristics. We will analyse debates on migration before, during, and after the migration crisis. We will combine this framing theory with radical right populist theories to be able to identify the frames we have to analyse. Thereafter, we will use the transcripts of debates on migration, which we will analyse and finally we should be able to present some conclusions.Show less
