The Netherlands: Old Solutions to New Problems

2021 ◽  
pp. 448-481
Author(s):  
Tom Louwerse ◽  
Arco Timmermans

The emergence of immigration and integration as a new line of conflict, the rise of new political parties, and the fragmentation of the political landscape have contributed to cabinet volatility in the Netherlands. While this presented new challenges for coalition governance, Dutch politicians have mainly looked to old consensus-based solutions to address these new problems. Whereas electoral politics and political campaigns have become more adversarial in style over the last twenty years, coalition governance seems still to be guided by the politics of accommodation. The Netherlands can clearly be described in terms of the Coalition Compromise Model, in which the coalition agreement as well as coordination and conflict-management mechanisms remain of central importance. Majority coalition formation is still the norm, even though since the early 2010s governments have not always commanded a majority in the Senate, which necessitated various forms of cooperation with opposition parties.

2021 ◽  
pp. 181-204
Author(s):  
Johannes Bergh ◽  
Jo Saglie

In this chapter, we explore the ideological and political landscape of Sámi electoral politics. Which ideological and political cleavages are important in Sámi politics, and how do these cleavages manifest themselves in voting patterns and party differences? We use the Sámi election surveys from 2013 to 2017. The analysis describes a Sámi political landscape with small ideological and political differences, where primarily the Progress Party stands out. Voters who favour this party are far from other party voters on the central issue of Sámi self-determination, and there is a mutually frosty relationship between Progress Party voters and other voters. On some issues, Conservative Party voters are in an intermediate position between the Progress Party voters and the rest, and voters for the Nordkalottfolket party also have a somewhat different profile. However, the differences between the remaining parties are less clear. This also applies to the two main competitors, the NSR and the Labour Party, and the political distances found in our survey questions cannot explain the pattern of coalition formation in the Sámi Parliament. The relatively small distances between the largest parties can be advantageous in dealing outwardly with the Norwegian state. Internally, however, small political distances can blur the political landscape in the eyes of the voters and make it difficult to choose between parties.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-124
Author(s):  
Maiken Ana Kores

Given the rise in far-right and populist rhetoric in Europe, particularly in light of the 2015 refugee crisis and the racist and xenophobic responses to it, this paper provides a multimodal analysis of the campaign slogans and posters of Slovenian political parties that gained parliamentary seats during the 2018 parliamentary elections that were, alongside focusing on issues pertaining to the Slovenian political landscape, heavily infused with concerns and potential solutions on how to tackle the challenges currently faced by Europe. The aim is to examine the linguistic and visual tools used by parties across the political spectrum, and to find out if the use of certain elements is characteristic of a determined political orientation. A brief outline of Slovenian party dynamics and the conditions that have contributed to them is followed by an analysis of the parties’ political campaigns. Using the tools of political discourse analysis, the first part is centred around parties’ choice of syntax and lexis in their political slogans, as well as the imagery on their posters, whereas the second is devoted to a linguistic analysis of how parties frame and address five key common issues in their political programmes: pensions, corruption, finance, healthcare and safety. Their stances and how these differ or coincide based on their place on the political spectrum are exemplified by short excerpts from the programmes.


Author(s):  
I. Semenenko ◽  
G. Irishin

The economic crisis of 2008–2009 highlighted new problems in the development of the German social market economy model and brought to the forefront the factors of its resilience that have ensured Germany’s leadership positions in the EU. Changes in economic policy have affected in the first place the energy and the financial sectors. Shifts in the political landscape have led to the appearance of new political parties. These changes have affected the results of the 2013 elections, the liberal democrats failure to enter the Bundestag has made the winner – CDU – seek new coalition partners.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 919-930
Author(s):  
Hanan Afzal ◽  
Masroor Sibtain ◽  
Zafar Iqbal ◽  
Hina Saleem

Purpose: The present study investigates the violations of SOPs regarding the spread of COVID19 during the political processional campaigns in the Gilgit Baltistan and Senate elections in Pakistan held just before the second and third waves of COVID-19. For instance, during the first wave Pakistani government employed a smart lockdown along with persuasive awareness campaign. However, in the second and third waves, it seemed that SOPs were not influential due to violations by politicians themselves. Method: The researchers analyze the journalistic text both verbal and pictorial by employing the qualitative and interpretive paradigm to understand the policies and strategies of political parties in their political gatherings. Data regarding political campaigns have been collected from the print media through the purposive sampling technique. The secondary data has been collected from various research publications to establish the background. Main Findings: The study analyzed political response to COVID-19 SOPs on the part of Pakistani political parties during the political campaigns in Gilgit Baltistan and senate elections. Referent pictures (see Figures), taken from authentic, official newspaper websites, showed that during ‘Political congregations and rallies’, individuals and politicians attended the events without requiring social distance and masks. Both the opposition and ruling party and their workers have taken approximately equal parts to violate the SOPs to gain political gains and benefits. Application of the Study: The study suggests that the political parties would not conduct these types of political events that cause the spread of the virus, especially when it is considered a worldwide pandemic. The study would be both socially and politically beneficial for the organizations and groups to learn how a pandemic may affect the masses if precautionary measures are not followed adequately. The Originality of the Study: According to the researchers' best knowledge, the research gap of the present study is contemporary and innovative, i.e., integrating the conceptual model of political discourse with political events.


Author(s):  
Margaret Ivy Amoakohene ◽  
Gilbert K. M. Tietaah ◽  
Favour Esinam Normeshie ◽  
Fidelis Yayra Sesenu

As persuasive tools for political campaigns, songs and music are integral features of electioneering in Africa. Since Ghana's return to multiparty democracy in 1992, election cycles in the country have been heralded and accentuated by campaign songs which extol the virtues of their sponsors and/or denigrate the achievements and their suitability for political office. This chapter examines the use of repetitions, testimonials, and biblical imagery in campaign songs of two major political parties in Ghana—the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC)—during the 2012 and 2016 elections. Eight campaign songs were analyzed. The findings show that the songs sought to communicate messages/themes of submissiveness/humility, divine choice/prophecy, achievers/achievement, and opponents as failures/deceivers about the political parties and their candidates.


Author(s):  
Alenka Krašovec ◽  
Tomaž Krpič

Under the proportional representation (PR) electoral system in Slovenia, after elections, coalition governments have formed. However, the coalition partners have also adopted a ‘dropping out from government’ strategy between elections, which in some cases has led to minority governments. This has occurred despite a frequent use of several conflict-prevention and conflict-resolution mechanisms. One such mechanism, coalition agreements, are mostly understood in terms of policy agreements. After each election in the period 1992–2000, the leading party, the LDS, signed a coalition agreement with each coalition partner. Since 2013, such coalition agreements include a mechanism of explicitly stating in coalition agreements that certain issues are to be avoided. Regardless, governments termination in majority cases happened due to different (policy or personal) conflicts within the government. Early in the period, government coalitions were ideologically mixed. This was characteristic for governments under LDS leadership from 1992 to 2004, while after the 2004 elections, the governmental coalitions were much more ideologically homogenous. Alternation between like-minded ideological coalitions (centre-left or centre-right) took place. Simultaneously, the main lines of conflict changed. In the 1990s, initially a mostly ideological cleavage between ‘transformed’ and ‘newly established’ political parties was present, while after the 2004 elections, the economic cleavage became more salient. All parliamentary parties, except the Slovenian National Party, have at least briefly participated in governments, while the Democratic Party of Retired Persons have been since the mid-1990s the party with the biggest coalition potential. Since 2011, small parties have received pivotal roles in coalition formation. Generally speaking, participation in the government has not been electorally rewarding for the political parties.


2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 938-967 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Laxer

AbstractIn July 2010, following a year-long nationwide debate over Islamic veiling, the French government passed a law prohibiting facial coverings in all public spaces. Prior research attributes this and other restrictive laws to France's republican secular tradition. This article takes a different approach. Building on literature that sees electoral politics as a site for articulating, rather than merely reflecting, social identities, I argue that the 2010 ban arose in significant part out of political parties’ struggles to demarcate the boundaries of legitimate politics in the face of an ultra-right electoral threat. Specifically, I show that in seeking to prevent the ultra-right National Front party from monopolizing the religious signs issue, France's major right and left parties agreed to portray republicanism as requiring the exclusion of face veiling from public space. Because it was forged in conflict, however, the consensus thus generated is highly fractured and unstable. It conceals ongoing conflict, both between and within political parties, over the precise meaning(s) of French republican nationhood. The findings thus underscore the relationship between boundary-drawing in the political sphere and the process of demarcating the cultural and political boundaries of nationhood in contexts of immigrant diversity.


Author(s):  
Sara Rich Dorman

This chapter explores how ZANU used the creation of a government of national unity (GNU) between 2008 to 2013 to regain control of the political landscape. It tracks the economic and social crises that led to power-sharing, and explores the political dynamics first from the perspective of political parties and then from civil society. We see how church leaders and chiefs were (re-)incorporated into the ZANU discursive project, and how NGOs were marginalized from political discourse. The GNU limited and contained the extremes of political violence and economic crisis. This allowed ZANU to capitalize on its successes, build a new coalition of supporters and regain control of the state through the 2014 general election. Despite an institutional facade of unity, political factionalization deepened, and politics became increasingly driven by a dynamic of "winner takes all."


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-56
Author(s):  
Erich Prisner

AbstractWe try to calculate the position of the six largest German political parties to each other in 2013 and 2017, based on data of Wahl-O-Mat, a German Voting Advice Application. Different to other existing approaches, we do not try to locate these parties in an Euclidean space, but rather on topological trees (with the straight line, the usual left-right model, being the simplest one). This approach has the advantage that – different to two- or higher dimensional spaces – our model allows betweenness information, keeping the parties linearly ordered at least at parts of the tree, with possible conclusions about center or periphery of the political landscape, and possible coalitions. We do not focus primarily on distance but after the topological model is found, we attempt to approximate these distances, in a second step.


1994 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Brown

Comparatively little of a scholarly nature has been written about Indonesian trade unions, particularly on the two decades from 1945 to 1965 when, like the political parties to which so many of them were affiliated, the unions had their heyday. This paper focuses on the development of trade unions in one specific industry: refined sugar production. The period to be examined—1945 to 1949—runs from the proclamation of Indonesian independence by Sukarno and Hatta, through the revolution fought against the returning Dutch, to December 1949 when the Netherlands finally acknowledged Indonesian independence. It was during this period that the major post-war sugar industry unions were established. The circumstances surrounding the establishment of these unions will be examined, along with their leaders and members, ideological leanings and political and industrial objectives.


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