Parties, Voters and Policy Priorities in the Netherlands, 1971-2002

To what extent are the priorities of voters reflected by the policy pledges of parties? And how decisive are party pledges for the policy-making of governments? The chain of delegation assumes direct linkages between voters, parties and governments, of which the voters are the principal actor. When this assumption is tested for The Netherlands, it turns out that parties are not very responsive to voter priorities and that the policy distances between parliamentary parties and governments are relatively small. This pattern makes sense in a consensus democracy in which parties have to compromise and cannot afford simply to reflect what voters perceive as important. It also suggests that the mandate theory is more directly applicable to majoritarian democracies, where the winner takes all and therefore has more scope to translate voter priorities into policy-making

The British party funding regime at a critical juncture? Applying new institutional analysis

This article analyses the state of play regarding party funding reform in British Politics through the application of new institutionalism. It then investigates whether the Collins Review of 2014 represents a critical juncture in the evolution of the political finance regime. Utilising elite interview and documentary research, the article argues that the removal of a key institutional stumbling block – the concession of the opt-in for trade union members of the Labour party – has created a situation which may have a very real effect on both British party funding and how we understand party finance reform more generally

Do European Parliament Elections Impact National Party System Fragmentation?

Why have European large parties lost electoral ground in recent decades? Whereas most explanations draw on theories of dealignment, this paper advances a novel, institutional, argument by focusing on the introduction of direct elections to the European Parliament (EP) in 1979. Archetypes of second-order elections, EP elections are characterized by lower vote shares for 1) large and 2) incumbent parties. Bridging the second-order elections theory with theories of political socialization, we posit that voting patterns in EP elections spill over onto national elections, especially among voters not yet socialized into patterns of habitual voting. In so doing, they increase the national vote shares of small parties. This proposition is examined using an instrumental variables approach. We also derive a set of testable propositions to shed light on the underlying mechanisms of this pattern. Our findings show that EP elections decrease support for big parties at the national arena by inculcating voting habits