New Dutch government will prioritise higher spending

Significance His new government, which took a record 271 days to form, is a reiteration of the previous four-party coalition involving Rutte's centre-right People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), the centrist liberals of Democrats 66 (D66) and two Christian democratic parties, the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) and the more conservative Christian Union (CU). The coalition deal promises a significant shift away from the austerity policies of previous governments. Impacts The collective rise of the far-right vote means the far right will continue to worry centrist parties and thus influence government policy. Higher structural spending in education should improve medium-to-long-term productivity development and output. The government promises to strengthen cyber capabilities in order to crack down on intellectual property theft.

Christian Democracy and Europe

Christian democracy is the heir to the Catholic confessional parties that emerged in the late nineteenth century. It is a Western European phenomenon promoting a particular social policy, aimed at the moderation of social conflicts especially between social classes. With a distinctive ideology and by appealing to religion and religious values, Christian democracy became broadly attractive to all sections of the electorate. Christian democracy was also a key driver of international cooperation and integration, and particularly influential in the formation of the European Union. Yet the overall picture of Christian democratic parties in recent decades has been one of decline. Secularization plays an obvious role here. That said, there is still some room for political movements to respond actively and strategically to changes in their environment. The chapter concludes by discussing some future options for these parties.

Pumping Up the Base: Deployment of Strong Emotion and Simple Language in Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speeches

Background and Method: This research examines the nomination acceptance speeches of US presidential candidates from Republican and Democratic parties in the post-WWII mass communication era (1948–2020, 38 speeches). Variables studied are the emotional tone of the speeches, their abstractness, their Grade Level, their employment of personal pronouns and their mentions of “America”. Speeches were scored with the Dictionary of Affect in Language (a sentiment analysis tool).Predictions: On the basis of functionalist theories of political discourse, it was predicted that the speeches would have a pleasant and active or celebratory emotional tone. Based on related research that focused on the effects of mass distribution on presidential communications, it was predicted that the speeches would increase in pleasantness, arousal and linguistic simplicity across years.Results: As predicted, speeches were pleasant and active in tone. Across years, speeches became significantly more arousing, less abstract, simpler, and longer. When individual speeches were divided into five equal portions, a strong significant quadratic trend was observed for pleasantness, which started high at the beginning of a speech, fell in the center, and rose again at the end.Conclusions: Presidential nomination acceptance speeches are emotionally pleasant and active and linguistically simple (Grade 8 level). Between 1948 and 2020, they remained pleasant, and became more active and simpler. In service of their aim to “pump up the base” individual speeches began on a pleasant, nationalistic and personal note, encompassed duller and more impersonal material in their centers, and became positive again at the end.

Constructing Fascist Hagiographies: The Genealogy of the Prison Saints Movement in Contemporary Romania

The paper focuses on the ideological roots of the prison saints movement in contemporary Romania. The text uncovers the interwar and communist conceptual premises upon which the biographies of fascist martyrs for canonisation as saints by the Romanian Orthodox Church were shaped. As martyrs for the Christian faith, those deceased were depicted as respectable figures, showcasing their martyrdom on the same moral footing as the dissidents of former democratic parties opposing communism. Furthermore, the narrative strategies in shaping a fascist hagiography from the interwar up to the post-communist years stand as another critical issue for the present article.

Parties

This chapter focuses attention on short-term and long-term impacts of political parties on social policy in advanced democracies. According to a wide variety of both comparative research and in-depth country studies, partisan effects have influenced the structure and expansion of the welfare state in the post-Second World War period to a large extent. Particularly strong have been these effects in the ‘Golden Age’ of the welfare state in the 1960s, 1970s, and in some countries also in the 1980s—mainly due to policy choices of leftist and Christian democratic parties. More mixed has been the explanatory power of partisan theory after the ‘Golden Age’. In view of critical circumstances, such as a major fiscal crisis of the state and the pressure generated by demographic ageing, but also due to massive changes in their social constituencies, a considerable number of pro-welfare state parties accepted recalibration and cutbacks in social policy in order to consolidate budgets.

The Realignment of Class Politics and Class Voting

Since the early days of the study of political behavior, class politics has been a key component. Initially researchers focused on simple manual versus nonmanual occupations and left versus right parties, and found consistent evidence of a strong effect of class on support for left-wing parties. This finding was assumed to be simply a matter of the redistributive preferences of the poor, an expression of the “democratic class struggle.” However, as the world became more complex, many established democracies developed more nuanced class structures and multidimensional party systems. How has this affected class politics? From the simple, but not deterministic pattern of left-voting workers, the early 21st century witnessed substantial realignment processes. Many remain faithful to social democratic (and to a lesser extent radical left) parties, but plenty of workers support radical right parties or have left the electoral arena entirely. To account for these changes, political scientists and sociologists have identified two mechanisms through which class voting occurs. The most frequently studied mechanism behind class voting is that classes have different attitudes, values, and ideologies, and political parties supply policies that appeal to different classes’ preferences. These ideologies are related not only to redistribution but also to newer issues such as immigration, which appear to some degree to have replaced competition over class-related inequality and the redistribution of wealth as the primary axis of class politics. A secondary mechanism is that members of different classes hold different social identities, and parties can connect to these identities by making symbolic class appeals or by descriptively representing a class. It follows that class realignment can occur either because the classes have changed their ideologies or identities, because the parties have changed their policies, class appeals, or personnel, or both. Early explanations focused on the classes themselves, arguing that they had become more similar in terms of living conditions, ideologies, and identities. However, later longitudinal studies failed to find such convergences taking place. The workers still have poorer, more uncertain, and shorter lives than their middle-class counterparts, identify more with the working class, and are more in favor of redistribution and opposed to immigration. While the classes are still distinctive, it seems that the parties have changed. Several social democratic parties have become less representative of working-class voters in terms of policies, rhetorical appeals, or the changing social composition of their activists and leaders. This representational defection is a response to the declining size of the working class, but not to the changing character or extent of class divisions in preferences. It is also connected to the exogeneous rise of new issues, on which these parties tend not to align with working-class preferences. By failing to represent the preferences or identities of many of their former core supporters, social democratic parties have initiated a supply-side driven process of realignment. This has primarily taken two forms; class–party realignments on both left and right and growing class inequalities in participation and representation.

Political and ideological normalization: quality of government, mainstream-right ideological positions and extreme-right support

This article aims to explain the variation in the electoral support for extreme-right parties (ERPs) in Europe. The extant literature on the far-right party family does not answer this question specifically with regard to the extreme-right variants for two main reasons. Firstly, theories did not expect the electoral success of these parties in post-war Europe due to their anti-democratic profiles and association with fascism. Secondly, despite the fact that they acknowledge the differences between the parties under the far-right umbrella – namely, the extreme and the radical – they normally do not take these differences into account, and if so, they focus on the radical-right parties. This article shows that electoral support for ERPs is associated with low quality of government and highly conservative mainstream-right parties. The former creates political legitimization for anti-democratic parties and the latter ideological normalization of extreme right.

Pro-Russian parties in Ukrainian party system in terms of linguistic constructivism

Since Ukraine gaining independence in 1991, parties supporting close cooperation with the Russian Federation have been an integral part of the Ukrainian political scene. Nevertheless, after the Revolution of Dignity, the annexation of Crimea and the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war, it would seem that their influence will steadily decline. Nevertheless, the recent parliamentary election shows a reverse tendency, and the Opposition Platform - For Life, political party founded in 2018, headed by former members of the Party of Regions and persons closely connected to Vladimir Putin, managed to defeat national-democratic parties. In this paper, the Author tries to answer the question, using the theory of linguistic constructivism, how the Opposition Platform - For Life is regaining its influence in the new political reality in Ukraine, analyzing the genesis of pro-Russian parties since independence, their political programs and narratives in the media environment, which were and are created by pro-Russian parties.

Islamic Populism in Turkey

In the last two decades, multiple Islamic parties have become incumbent parties and/or joined coalition governments. Such a development brought debate as to whether these parties could moderate into democratic actors à la Christian Democratic Parties in Western Europe, or whether they were aiming at the formation of an Islamist state and society through electoral means. What remains relatively unaddressed in the literature, however, is to what degree Islamic parties truly derive their socio-political agenda from Islam. Hence, this paper will ask, how do Islamic parties utilize Islam? To answer this question, this paper will use a single case-study approach to test and to rethink Islamic political parties and what is “Islamic” about them in the Turkish case. This paper will study the Turkish case because the country’s incumbent party, the Justice and Development Party (JDP), has been governing Turkey since 2002, making the Party the longest ruling Islamic party still in power. Based on the literature on populism, this paper will argue that the way the JDP utilized Islam can be characterized as populism flavored by religion that is based on (i) a thin theological foundation, (ii) a majoritarian rather than a multivocal interpretation of Islam, and (iii) a Muslim unity rhetoric.