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
