Although the mostly reported outcome of the Dutch Elections, held on 15 March 2017, is that Geert Wilders’ party PVV did not become the largest party, a lot of significant changes to other parties’ support have occurred as well. The most important outcomes of the elections are the historically large loss for Labour party PvdA, and large wins for cosmopolitan party D66 and the Green Left (GL). The picture that appears is an even more fragmented party system than is usual in The Netherlands. However, our comparative study on issue competition, featuring an original data collection on the Netherlands (see...

Nicola Maggini,  Young People’s Voting Behaviour in Europe. A Comparative Perspective, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Nicola Maggini, interviewed by Gianmarco Botti (English translation by Elisabetta Mannoni) What is your book about and why is it innovative? The book is about young people’s voting behavior in six European countries - namely Italy, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom - in a long-time perspective, from 1981 to the first years of the 21st century. The comparative approach is thus both a synchronic as well as a diachronic one. To be more precise, the book analyzes the determinants of young people’s voting behavior in...

Lorenzo De Sio Party systems across the Western world appear increasingly challenged. After the 1990s and 2000s saw the prevalence of a two-bloc (or two-party) competition by mainstream parties with relatively similar, moderate policies, recent years have seen an unprecedented emergence of successful challenger parties (and leaders), with examples both on the right-wing (e.g. Donald Trump, the UKIP, the Front National) and on the left wing (e.g. Bernie Sanders, SYRIZA, Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn and Benoît Hamon). Such new, challenger parties and leaders share instead a conflictual emphasis on a relatively small set of controversial policy issues that have proved electorally...

Nicola Maggini, Lorenzo De Sio and Mathilde van Ditmars Following on the tools provided by issue yield theory (De Sio and Weber 2014), this analysis provides a specific perspective on the data we at CISE collected through a CAWI survey few weeks before the Dutch election. We rely here on an innovative measurement of positional issues, which allows to derive a common issue yield index for this kind of issues. Positional issues are, in general, defined by reference to two rival goals (e.g. progressive vs. traditional morality): the issue yield measure permits us to assess the presence of strategic issue opportunities for a...

Aldo Paparo, Lorenzo De Sio, Mathilde van Ditmars As seen in the analysis by Emanuele, De Sio and van Ditmars, the survey data we collected on Dutch public opinion includes data on agreement and priority of a series of important policy goals. By looking at those we were able to map the general state of Dutch public opinion and the structure of opportunity on various issue dimensions. However, the data we collected also include information concerning the credibility of each of the different parties. Basically, respondents were asked to indicate all parties that they considered credible to achieve a particular...