Gekanaliseerd onbehagen? PVV-stemmers, niet-stemmers, en hun betekenisvolle politieke agency

The channelling discontent thesis contends that populist parties form an efficacious exhaust valve, providing their voters with democratic fulfilment. Building on in-depth interviews with PVV-voters and (deliberate) non-voters, I assess that assumption by comparing these citizens’ political efficacy. The analysis shows that differences in political efficacy are not explained by voting behaviour, as the thesis would assume, but rather by the inductively conceptualized dimension of power orientation. This highlights not just the value, but also the (future) potential of a cultural-sociological approach to studying the political domain

Seculiere intolerantie: Morele progressiviteit en afwijzing van de islam in Nederland

Terwijl Nederland bekendstaat als baken van tolerantie, wordt er de laatste jaren opvallend veel kritiek geuit op de islam. Bovendien hanteren islamkritische opinie- leiders hierbij een discours waarbij progressieve waarden centraal staan. Dit roept de vraag op hoe morele progressiviteit en afwijzing van de islam met elkaar verbon- den zijn onder de bredere bevolking. En hoe verhoudt een op progressieve waarden gebaseerde verwerping van de islam zich tot

Becoming politically discontented: Anti-establishment careers of Dutch nonvoters and PVV voters

Popular political discontent has become increasingly salient in western countries in recent decades, as can be witnessed by the rise of populist anti-establishment parties, nonvoting and increasing distrust in politics. However, these phenomena have predominantly been treated as ‘democracy’s deviants’, neglecting the perspectives of the people concerned. Taking an inductive approach, this article examines how ordinary citizens come to turn away from established politics. Drawing on in-depth interviews with politically discontented Dutch nonvoters and PVV voters, the article develops a three-stage ‘anti-establishment career’ – ‘introduction’, ‘validation’ and ‘consolidation’ – through which their conceptions of politics gradually change. This deviant career model takes into account the dynamics and agency involved in the process, in contrast to conceptions of discontented citizens as utterly passive and anomic. The article concludes by arguing for more cultural-sociological sensitivity in the use of concepts referring to social-political action

Burgers op afstand? Naar een beter begrip van ontevreden burgers

Veel beschouwingen over de politiek in het algemeen en de vermeende kloof tussen de burger en de politiek in het bijzonder richten zich op ‘de ontevreden burger’. Ontevredenheid wordt daarbij op verschillende manieren ingevuld, variërend van zich niet vertegenwoordigd of gehoord voelen tot wantrouwen in instituties als de politiek en de rechtspraak, en steun aan populistische partijen. Maar wie zijn die ontevreden burgers, en waarom zijn zij zo ontevreden

State of Disgrace: Popular Political Discontents about the Dutch State in the 2000s

While it is widely acknowledged that politics and politicians have fallen from grace among large parts of the public in western democracies, it is less clear what the latter’s political discontents are about. To find out, we performed an interpretative content analysis of the letters to the editor of the largest popular Dutch newspaper in the 2000s (2000–2009). It yielded three empirically grounded discourses of political discontents about ‘the state’—shorthand for the government, its agencies, officials, judges, politicians and political parties—‘the incompetent state’, ‘the alienated state’ and ‘the corrupted state’. The relevance of these findings is subsequently discussed in the light of research on political distrus

Ontevreden burgers serieus nemen

De laatste decennia is er onder politici en beleidsmakers veel aandacht voor ‘ontevreden’, ‘boze’ of ‘bezorgde’ burgers. Maar een goed begrip van hun boosheid blijft vooralsnog achterwege. In deze bijdrage stellen de auteurs dat dit kan veranderen door het perspectief en de belevingswereld van ontevreden burgers serieus te nemen

‘Stray appetites’: a socio-ecological analysis of free-ranging dogs living alongside human communities in Bangalore, India

Across the developing world, humans and free-ranging domestic dogs share common spaces. The relationship between these dogs and humans can range from one of dependence, to apathy, to conflict. Given the high number of humans attacked by dogs every year in India, and the lack of an effective population control strategy, we seek to provide insights into the conflict and propose alternative population management options based on reducing the carrying capacity of the environment. We used a mixed methods approach to understand both ecological and sociological underpinnings of free-ranging dog-human relationships in Bangalore, India. We conducted a photographic capture-recapture survey of free-ranging dogs to estimate population size and linked it to the availability of potential food sources. We also conducted a qualitative sur

Disturbance and resource availability act differently on the same suite of plant traits: revisiting assembly hypotheses.

Understanding the mechanisms of trait selection at the scale of plant communities is a crucial step toward predicting community assembly. Although it is commonly assumed that disturbance and resource availability constrain separate suites of traits, representing the regenerative and established phases, respectively, a quantification and test of this accepted hypothesis is still lacking due to limitations of traditional statistical techniques. In this paper we quantify, using structural equation modeling (SEM), the relative contributions of disturbance and resource availability to the selection of suites of traits at the community scale. Our model specifies and reflects previously obtained ecological insights, taking disturbance and nutrient availability as central drivers affecting leaf, allometric, seed, and phenology traits in 156 (semi-) natural plant communities throughout The Netherlands. The common hypothesis positing that disturbance and resource availability each affect a set of mutually independent traits was not consistent with the data. Instead, our final model shows that most traits are strongly affected by both drivers. In addition, trait-trait constraints are more important in community assembly than environmental drivers in half of the cases. Both aspects of trait selection are crucial for correctly predicting ecosystem processes and community assembly, and they provide new insights into hitherto underappreciated ecological interactions. © 2012 by the Ecological Society of America