scholarly journals What’s Work Got to Do with It? How Precarity Influences Radical Party Support in France and the Netherlands

2021 ◽  
pp. 136078042110203
Author(s):  
Lorenza Antonucci ◽  
Carlo D’Ippoliti ◽  
Laszlo Horvath ◽  
André Krouwel
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Insecurity ◽  
Multidimensional Measure ◽  
Work Insecurity ◽  
Party Support ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Voting Advice Applications

The rising support for radical parties in Europe has triggered a new interest in the political sociology of voting and how voters with socio-economic insecurity are moving away from establishment politics. In this article, we apply Standing’s concept of ‘precarity’ to capture insecurity among ordinary voters and thereby expand the individual socio-economic explanations behind the vote for radical populist right (RPR) and radical left (RL) parties. We develop a multidimensional measure of precarity to capture subjective labour market insecurity in its different manifestations. The article examines the influence of precarity on voting in two countries – France and the Netherlands – that, in the 2017 elections, saw the culmination of a decline in support for establishment parties and a rise in support for both RPR and RL parties. We use panels of voters collected during these elections through online Voting Advice Applications, weighted against national census benchmarks. We identify and assess the role of two dimensions of precarity: ‘precarity of tenure’ and ‘precarity at work’. We find that in both France and the Netherlands precarity is, overall, negatively correlated with voting for established parties and positively correlated with voting for RPR and RL parties. Furthermore, our investigation shows that ‘precarity at work’ is more significant in explaining voting support than the more widely investigated ‘precarity of tenure’. Our results stress the importance of assessing how subjective work insecurity explains voting and support for RPR and RL parties.

Trade Unions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Whiting
Keyword(s):  
Trade Unions ◽  
Political System ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Critical Moments

In assessing the relationship between trade unions and British politics, this chapter has two focuses. First, it examines the role of trade unions as significant intermediate associations within the political system. They have been significant as the means for the development of citizenship and involvement in society, as well as a restraint upon the power of the state. Their power has also raised questions about the relationship between the role of associations and the freedom of the individual. Second, the chapter considers critical moments when the trade unions challenged the authority of governments, especially in the periods 1918–26 and 1979–85. Both of these lines of inquiry underline the importance of conservatism in the achievement of stability in modern Britain.

Laws, Liberties, and the Will of the People

2021 ◽  
pp. 155-177
Author(s):  
Sarah Mortimer
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Dutch Revolt ◽  
Development Of Resistance ◽  
The People ◽  
The Will ◽  
Role Of Religion

From the 1560s, tensions between Protestant and Catholics escalated and this was accompanied by a wave of writing on political and religious ideas, especially in France and the Netherlands. There was a renewed interest in the nature and origins of authority within the political sphere, particularly the importance of the ‘people’ and the ways in which their will could be both represented and controlled. This chapter considers some of the key texts of resistance theory written in the 1560s and 1570s, including Francogallia and the Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos in France, and George Buchanan’s De Jure Regni apud Scotos in Scotland. Discussions of liberty and privileges in the Netherlands during the Dutch Revolt are also considered; here historically based arguments began to be supplemented by appeals to wider principles of morality and natural law. The election of Henry of Valois to the Polish throne provides one example of elective monarchy in practice. This chapter discusses the role of religion and of legal arguments in the development of resistance theories. It also highlights some of the practical and conceptual difficulties in appealing to popular sovereignty, especially in a period of deep confessional divisions, and shows how the authority of magistrates could be understood in different ways.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 159-178
Author(s):  
Mike Allen ◽  
Lars Benjaminsen ◽  
Eoin O’Sullivan ◽  
Nicholas Pleace
Keyword(s):  
Social Services ◽  
The State ◽  
European Countries ◽  
The Political ◽  
Administrative Culture ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
State And Market ◽  
The Individual

Chapter 7 draws together some of the lessons that can be learned from the experiences of three small European countries in responding to homelessness. It is clear that responses to homelessness are embedded and enmeshed in the political and administrative culture of the individual countries, particularly the role of the state, both centrally and locally, in the provision of housing, welfare, and social services. Homelessness cannot be responded to as a separate issue from this broader context, and this is particularly the case in Finland and Ireland, where the roles of the state and market are understood very differently.

Political Embeddedness and the Management of Emotions

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Blocq ◽  
Bert Klandermans ◽  
Jacquelien van Stekelenburg
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Using Data

This article explores how variation in political embeddedness of social movement organi-zations (SMOs) influences the management of emotions. By variation in the political embed-dedness of SMOs, we mean variation in the strength and the number of ties between SMOs and the political establishment. By management of emotions, we mean the efforts of SMO leaders to evoke particular emotions among SMO members. Using data from protest surveys conducted at demonstrations regarding climate change in Belgium and the Netherlands in 2009, we find that protestors who are members of more politically embedded SMOs are generally less angry than protestors who are members of less politically embedded SMOs. The finding that this pattern is especially strong among SMO members who heard about the dem-onstration through an SMO confirms the assumed role of SMO leaders in the management of emotions.

Citizens and Political Sophistication

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrik Oscarsson ◽  
Lauri Rapeli
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Sophistication ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Changes Over Time

Political sophistication refers to the role of expertise and the use of information in the forming of political judgments. Citizens in a democracy need a sufficient level of political sophistication to make sense of politics and to hold office holders accountable. Most people do not seem to be as sophisticated as theory would expect, and political sophistication also seems to be very unevenly spread among individuals. The consequences for democratic governance continue to be a matter of much scholarly debate. Although most researchers agree that sophistication among citizens tends to be low, many issues in the research field are deeply contested. First, several concepts such as awareness, sophistication, and knowledge are used more or less interchangeably in analyses of the political competence of citizens. It is, however, unclear whether the terminology conceals essential conceptual differences. Second, the empirical strategy of using surveys to measure sophistication has been heavily criticized. For some, the survey is an unsuitable method because it measures the respondents’ ability to produce correct answers under suboptimal conditions, rather than measuring what they actually know about politics. For others, the survey questions themselves are an inadequate measure of sophistication. Third, it is not clear what the effects of citizens’ political sophistication or lack thereof are on democratic governance. According to one group of scholars, the aggregated opinions and electoral choices of democratic publics would not look very different even if they were more sophisticated. The opponents of this low-information rationality theorem claim that increases in citizens’ sophistication would lead to substantial differences in democratic output. In other words, perceptions of the significance of sophistication for democracy deeply divide scholars working in the field. There is less disagreement concerning the individual-level determinants of sophistication. Although being male, well educated, and in a socially advantaged position still stand out as the strongest predictors of high sophistication, recent findings provide a more nuanced understanding of how sophistication is distributed among citizens. In addition to many enduring disputes, some questions remain largely unanswered. Without cross-nationally standardized survey items, scholars have struggled to conduct comparative studies of political sophistication. Therefore, role of political institutions as facilitators of political sophistication is to some extent uncertain. Whether and how sophistication changes over time are equally important, but mostly unexplored, questions.

Role of Normative Commitment in Predicting Members' Participation in the Union

1997 ◽  
Vol 80 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1183-1207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Pisnar-Sweeney
Keyword(s):  
Structural Equation ◽  
Labor Union ◽  
Behavioral Outcomes ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Collective Bargaining Agreement ◽  
Equation Modeling ◽  
Normative Commitment ◽  
Community Activities ◽  
The Individual

This study examined commitment to a labor union as a two-dimensional construct consisting of Normative Commitment and Instrumental Attachment. Historically commitment to a labor organization has been viewed as an instrumental construct referring to union members who become attached to the union because of economic and extrinsic benefits gained from the collective bargaining agreement. Normative Commitment represents the individual association with the organization based upon a belief in and agreement with its values, ideals, and goals. A sample of 173 unionized firefighters was used to evaluate a model of commitment to a union in which the two dimensions of Normative Commitment and Instrumental Attachment are assumed to be intervening constructs with six antecedent factors, i.e., Family History, Work Beliefs, Union Socialization, Employment Alternatives, Union Benefits, and Satisfaction with the Grievance System, and two behavioral outcomes of Participation of union members in routine union activities, i.e., holding office, serving on a committee, and Extrarole Behavior such as volunteering for union, political, or community activities. Structural equation modeling indicated that Normative Commitment to the union is a significant predictor of members' Participation and Extrarole Behavior.

scholarly journals Blockchain as Res Publica: Towards a Political Genealogy of a Distributed Ledger

2021 ◽  
Vol V (4) ◽  
pp. 175-200
Author(s):  
Olga Bychkova ◽  
Artem Kosmarsky
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Common Good ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cooperative Action ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Civic Virtues ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Individual

This paper focuses on the political genealogy of one of the most promising and influential IT technologies of our time: the blockchain (or distributed registry). We point at important commonalities between the principles of blockchain projects and models of republican governance. In contrast to techno-anarchist and democratic ideas, the republican genealogy of blockchain has so far failed to attract the attention of researchers. After examining the basic technical properties and ideological images of blockchain, we explore how the four main principles of classical republicanism (personal freedom and autonomy of the individual; civic virtues; common good; recognition of great causes) are realized in influential blockchain projects — Bitcoin (developed by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto) and Ethereum (developed by Vitalik Buterin). The functioning of blockchain nodes is supported by a community of miners, who are free, but at the same time agree to act for the development of a common thing. What the republic and the blockchain have in common is that it is impossible to have a community without cooperative action. At the same time, blockchain is a vivid illustration of Bruno Latour's argument on the role of non-humans in social relations: his code seeks to replace untrustworthy humans with rule-acting nodes, and to create a cryptographic society where untrustworthy human relations are replaced by computers' relations. This article is an invitation to begin a discussion of the political ideas that are embedded in new technologies and the models of governance that are mobilized through them, often without proper reflection on the nature of such ideas by their creators.

The Dynamics of Voters’ Left/Right Identification: The Role of Economic and Cultural Attitudes

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine E. de Vries ◽  
Armen Hakhverdian ◽  
Bram Lancee
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Longitudinal Data ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
The Past ◽  
Economic Attitudes

The mobilization of culturally rooted issues has altered political competition throughout Western Europe. This article analyzes to what extent the mobilization of immigration issues has affected how people identify with politics. Specifically, it analyzes whether voters’ left/right self-identifications over the past 30 years increasingly correspond to cultural rather than economic attitudes. This study uses longitudinal data from the Netherlands between 1980 and 2006 to demonstrate that as time progresses, voters’ left/right self-placements are indeed more strongly determined by anti-immigrant attitudes than by attitudes towards redistribution.These findings show that the issue basis of left/right identification is dynamic in nature and responsive to changes in the political environment.

The New Technopolitics of Development and the Global South as a Laboratory of Technological Experimentation

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (5) ◽  
pp. 947-968 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Moe Fejerskov
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Global South ◽  
Development Cooperation ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
Gates Foundation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Contemporary Technology

Science and technology have been integral issues of development cooperation for more than sixty years. Contrary to early efforts’ transfer of established technologies from the West to developing countries, contemporary technology aspirations increasingly articulate and practice the Global South as a live laboratory for technological experimentation. This approach is especially furthered by a group of private foundations and philanthrocapitalists whose endeavors in developing countries are, like their companies, shaped by logics of the individual, the market, and of societal progress through technological innovation and experimentation. This article draws upon critical intellectual thought about the political and social ramifications of technology to reflect on the renascent role of technology in development cooperation. It traces the discourses and practices of philanthrocapitalist organizations, in particular the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to understand how their experimentalist technology aspirations influence human life and relations in the Global South. This article argues that this newfound focus on technology in development cooperation may challenge the essence of democracy, reduce participation, and have undesirable consequences for populations in the Global South.

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