Issues, Discontent, and Third-Party Voting: The Case of the Netherlands

Scholarly accounts of the dramatic breakthrough of the List Pim Fortuyn (LPF) in the 2002 Dutch parliamentary election have mostly emphasized two factors behind the success of that party. It has first been argued that the LPF brought a distinct issue profile to the electoral arena, which made it attractive for voters holding similar policy views. The second hypothesis, that feelings of political discontent also fuelled support for the LPF, remains highly contested because of the possible endogeneity bias of cynicism attitudes. We re-examine this question using survey data from the 1998-2002 panel of the Dutch National Election Study. Our approach’s novelty is to estimate 2002’s vote choice using indicators of individuals’ issue priorities and cynical attitudes as measured in the 1998 wave of the panel. The findings suggest that policy preferences and attitudes of discontent both contributed to the LPF vote, thus providing support for both interpretations of the rise of this party. These results are consistent with most existing work on “third” or minor party voting showing that lack of confidence toward government and politics is fertile ground for these party movements.Session 2: Political representation and legitimac

Political-administrative Relations and Separation of Powers

The authority of the state in a constitutional democracy is never self-evident. The state can only claim obedience of its citizens if the authority of the state is morally justified from the point of view of the citizens.1 In this moral justification of authority exists the essence of the concept of legitimacy. To be considered legitimate the actions of the state (public administration) have to meet a number of normative standards. National as well as local government (the municipalities) have to meet normative standards which can be derived from the concept of the constitutional state.2 One of these standards is the principle of legality (rule of law). This contribution however concentrates on the principle of separation of powers

Nationaal Kiezersonderzoek, NKO 2006

Dutch Parliamentary Election Study 2006 (DPES/NKO 2006). The Dutch Parliamentary Election Studies (DPES) are a series of national surveys carried out under the auspices of the Dutch Electoral Research Foundation (SKON). These surveys have been conducted since 1970. Studies since 1971 were conducted before and after the national parliamentary elections. Panel studies are also conducted within the framework of the DPES. Many questions are replicated across studies, although each has questions not asked in the others. The major substantive areas consistently covered include the respondents' attitudes toward and expectations of the government and its effectiveness in both domestic and foreign policy, the most important problems facing the people of the Netherlands, the respondents' voting behavior and participation history, and his/her knowledge of and faith in the nation's political leaders. The data for the DPES 2006 were collected by Statistics Netherlands and by Kees Aarts, Henk van der Kolk, Martin Rosema and Martha Brinkman on behalf of the SKON. The study has been made possible by grants from Statistics Netherlands, the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations (BZK), the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations (BZK), the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports (VWS), the Social and Cultural Planning Office (SCP), and the Department of Political Science and Research Methodology, University of Twente. In order to provide the funding agencies with essential information about the use of the data that have been collected with their assistance, each user of the data is expected to send two copies of each completed and published manuscript to the distributor of the data. Number of cases: 2806, number of variables: 696. A version including all variables of this survey, including variables that were dropped for reasons of privacy protections (municipality, day of birth, exact regional newspaper) and additional variables from population records is available under strongly restrictive rules at Statistics Netherlands. The questionnaires (both Dutch and English) used in this survey are available on http://www.dpes.nl