Avoiding the mainstream: why radical right-wing populist parties remain ‘radical’ in government

Radical right-wing populist parties have experienced a growth in support in several European countries over the last 15 years, but how do such parties adapt to power when they enter government? Tjitske Akkerman, Sarah de Lange and Matthijs Rooduijn write that although radical right-wing populist parties do become more mainstream in some respects when they enter office, this is largely only true in a procedural sense, with their policy platforms quickly becoming just as radical as before when they go back into opposition

Paying the price: why parties that turn their back on civil society face electoral upheaval

Political parties are increasingly confronted with high levels of electoral volatility. Nick Martin, Sarah de Lange and Wouter van der Brug write, however, that even in times of increased volatility, connections between party elites and organised civil society matter electorally. Drawing on a new study, they illustrate how these ties can help to stabilise the electorates of parties on both the left and right

Which Personal and Organizational Factors Influence the Organizational Commitment and Job Satisfaction of Shipyard Blue-Collar Workers?

[Abstract] The purpose of this research was to analyze which personal and organizational factors are related to organizational commitment and job satisfaction of shipyard workers who work in different auxiliary shipyard military companies in the north of Spain. Methods: In total, 567 shipyard workers participated in this cross-sectional survey study. The ages were between 19 and 64 (M = 39.36, SD = 10.01), males 82.52%, females 17.48%. We used a survey that included questions about personal and organizational factors such as physical environment, occupational risks, and psychosocial risks, in addition to the job commitment and job satisfaction scales. Results: The results of this study show that job commitment is significantly related to a higher age, lower education, and environmental risk (low vs. high). Furthermore, job satisfaction (high vs. low) and organizational commitment (high vs. low) is related with environmental risk (low vs. high). Job commitment is also higher in workers with a low educational level and older workers. Job satisfaction is lower in workers with a high educational level. Conclusions: This study shows that different personal and environmental factors influence the shipyard workers’ organizational commitment and job satisfaction

Burnout and Time Perspective of Blue-Collar Workers at the Shipyard

[Abstract] Background: The aim of the research was to investigate the association between time perspective in relation to burnout and successful ageing of blue-collar workers with physically highly demanding work and low autonomy. Shipyard blue-collar workers usually do predominantly manual labor versus white-collar workers, whose jobs do not usually involve physical work. Methods: 497 participants workers in a shipyard in the north of Spain. Ages were between 20 and 69 (M = 46.62, SD = 10.79). We used the Zimbardo Time Perspective Instrument (ZTPI), Spanish version, and the Maslach Burnout Inventory–General Survey (MBI-GS). Results: Emotional exhaustion factor obtained a coefficient of 0.97; cynicism factor of 0.83; and professional efficacy factor of p = 0.86. The mean of the three reliability coefficients was 0.887. With respect to the five factors of the ZTPI questionnaire: the negative past factor obtained a coefficient of p = 0.91; that of positive past p = 0.81; the present hedonistic of 0.878; the future of p = 0.83; and the fatalistic present of p = 0.90. The mean of the five coefficients, was p = 0.86. Conclusions: Within shipyard workers, burnout is associated with a negative past and negative future time perspective. This makes shipyard workers at a higher risk of developing burnout and this can have serious consequences for the sustainable employability of these blue-collar workers

Burnout and Time Perspective of Blue-Collar Workers at the Shipyard

Background: The aim of the research was to investigate the association between time perspective in relation to burnout and successful ageing of blue-collar workers with physically highly demanding work and low autonomy. Shipyard blue-collar workers usually do predominantly manual labor versus white-collar workers, whose jobs do not usually involve physical work. Methods: 497 participants workers in a shipyard in the north of Spain. Ages were between 20 and 69 (M = 46.62, SD = 10.79). We used the Zimbardo Time Perspective Instrument (ZTPI), Spanish version, and the Maslach Burnout Inventory–General Survey (MBI-GS). Results: Emotional exhaustion factor obtained a coefficient of 0.97; cynicism factor of 0.83; and professional efficacy factor of p = 0.86. The mean of the three reliability coefficients was 0.887. With respect to the five factors of the ZTPI questionnaire: the negative past factor obtained a coefficient of p = 0.91; that of positive past p = 0.81; the present hedonistic of 0.878; the future of p = 0.83; and the fatalistic present of p = 0.90. The mean of the five coefficients, was p = 0.86. Conclusions: Within shipyard workers, burnout is associated with a negative past and negative future time perspective. This makes shipyard workers at a higher risk of developing burnout and this can have serious consequences for the sustainable employability of these blue-collar workers.publishedVersio

Editorial to the Issue on Populism and the Remaking of (Il)Liberal Democracy in Europe

Populism has become the issue of comparative political science today. The rise and continuing success of populist parties is by now evident across Europe, despite persistent cross-national variations. Populist parties’ electoral success and their participation in government have raised questions about their impact: not just on established party systems, but also on the systemic core of European democracies. In theory, this impact can be both beneficial for, as well as a challenge to democracy in general, and the tenets of liberal constitutional democracy in particular. The presence of populist parties has, in several cases, increased electoral turnout and public participation, which is generally seen as a positive effect when measuring the quality of democracy. However, populist parties’ rise also points to negative effects. In addition to profoundly reshaping European party systems, they advocate what the populist Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán calls “illiberal democracy”. Both as an ideal and as an institutional practice when in government, the illiberal remaking of democracy implies eroding the separation of powers and subordinating constitutionally guaranteed individual civil and human rights to an alleged “general will” and a particular conception of “the people”. The thematic issue explores the ideological supply, favorable conditions, political contexts and dynamics, as well as the impact of the populist surge in Europe in relation to the systemic consolidation of (il)liberal democracy on a theoretical and comparative empirical level

Re-examining Distillation For Continual Object Detection

Training models continually to detect and classify objects, from new classes and new domains, remains an open problem. In this work, we conduct a thorough analysis of why and how object detection models forget catastrophically. We focus on distillation-based approaches in two-stage networks; the most-common strategy employed in contemporary continual object detection work.Distillation aims to transfer the knowledge of a model trained on previous tasks -- the teacher -- to a new model -- the student -- while it learns the new task. We show that this works well for the region proposal network, but that wrong, yet overly confident teacher predictions prevent student models from effective learning of the classification head. Our analysis provides a foundation that allows us to propose improvements for existing techniques by detecting incorrect teacher predictions, based on current ground-truth labels, and by employing an adaptive Huber loss as opposed to the mean squared error for the distillation loss in the classification heads. We evidence that our strategy works not only in a class incremental setting, but also in domain incremental settings, which constitute a realistic context, likely to be the setting of representative real-world problems