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This article studies the extent to which Dutch political parties fulfil their electoral mandates. The central question is how collective mandate fulfilment has developed over the last sixty years. Increasing electoral volatility, changes in party organizations and the rise of populist parties could have resulted in a decrease of party mandate fulfilment. Contrary to previous studies, this article studies the mandate in terms of congruence between the electoral and parliamentary party competition. This allows for the study of opposition parties' mandate fulfilment. Election manifestos and parliamentary debates are studied for six elections and the subsequent parliaments (between 1950-2006). The structure of the party competition is rather congruent before and after elections for all of the cases, except 1972-1977. There is no evidence for a decline of the degree to which parties collectively fulfil their electoral mandates. Adapted from the source document.

Previous studies have demonstrated the common occurrence of constituency focus in parliamentary questions, which is most often attributed to electoral incentives. If an electoral system makes use of a single nationwide district, however, these district‐oriented electoral incentives do not apply. MPs may still substantively represent a geographical region, because they are motivated to stand up for a specific region for other reasons. This article explores the extent to which Dutch MPs pay attention in parliamentary questions and debates to specific regions. We find that those with stronger ties to a region, and especially MPs who reside in a region, are more likely to mention it in parliamentary questions and speeches. In addition, we find that this effect is stronger for provinces where regional attachment among residents is relatively stronger.

Populist parties have become an important factor in opposition politics all over Europe. While we know a lot about the behaviour of populist parties in the electoral arena and even in the governmental arena, we know surprisingly little about their behaviour in parliament. This article studies the behaviour of populist opposition parties in parliament. We hypothesise that it is the anti-elitism of populism that is the 'active' element that shapes their parliamentary behaviour. Anti-elitist parties are more likely to be 'responsive' parties, using parliament as a bully pulpit to amplify citizens' objections to policy and less likely to be 'responsible' parties, using the legislature as a place to find support for policy alternatives. We hypothesise anti-elitist parties to use parliamentary scrutiny tools more often than other parties. We make use of recently collected cross-national data on parliamentary behaviour in seven European democracies to test this hypothesis. Our results indicate that parties that have been characterised as anti-elitist tend to vote more against legislation, but they do not ask more parliamentary questions.

AbstractDoes government party support decline in a monotonic fashion throughout the legislative cycle or do we observe a u-shaped "electoral cycle effect"? Moving beyond the study of midterm election results, this is the first comparative study to assess the cyclical pulse of government party support in parliamentary democracies based on voting intention polls from 171 cycles in 22 countries. On average, government parties lose support during the first half of the electoral cycle, but at most partially recover from their initial losses. Under single-party government and when prime ministers control cabinet dissolution, support tends to follow the previously assumed u-shaped pattern more strongly. Finally, we find that government parties hardly recover from early losses since the 2000s.