Suchergebnisse

Since the upsurge of the so-called 'third wave' of right-wing extreraism many researchers have addressed the question to what extent the success of these kind of parties is grounded in diffuse feelings of political alienation. Unfortunately these inquiries did not produce unequivocal answers. As a matter of fact some of the findings are clearly contradictory. In the first part of this article we will establish that these divergences are largely attributable to alternative conceptualisations and operationalisations. In the second part of the article we will question the validity of the conventional causal direction, namely from 'feelings of alienation' to 'voting for an extreme-right wing party'. We will show that it might be very fruitful to reverse this relationship. In this respect we will test to what extent repeatedly voting for an extreme-right wing party such as the Vlaams Blok in Belgium actually produces feelings of'external political powerlessness'.

AbstractInspired by Lipset and Rokkan, the field of political science has primarily focused on party oppositions as a derivative of historically anchored conflicts among social groups. Yet parties are not mere social mirrors; they are also active interpreters of social context. In a globalized era they deploy conflicting frames on how solidarity may be preserved, as recent work on populist welfare chauvinism shows. However, the role of party political agency in framing solidarity lacks an overarching framework. This article therefore proposes a Durkheimian model that takes the integrative pole of the conflict–integration dialectic seriously and distinguishes among group-based, compassionate, exchange-based and empathic frames. The authors test this solidarity framework in Flanders (Belgium) – a good case study due to its fragmented party system and increasing economic and cultural openness. The content analyses of party manifestos presented here suggest that a solidarity-based deductive approach to studying partisan competition is relevant because partisan differentiation along solidarity lines is growing; this evolution converges with similar inductive expert-based and issue-based findings.

In this paper we study both long term and short term individual effects of political participation at the local level. Participatory theorists argue that political participation could lead to individual emancipation in terms of a rise of political knowledge and, in the long term, political trust. Indeed, in the short term the increased political knowledge associated with participation might enable citizens to better define their self-interest, which may be inconsistent with actual policies pursued by the local authorities and thus might be conductive to distrust. In the empirical part we will test these assertions using two-wave panel data for a random sample of 457 individuals in the district of Deurne (Antwerp -- Belgium). Our results suggest that in the short term participation leads to more local political knowledge and distrust in the local administration. However, we do not find a significant increase in political trust in the long term. Adapted from the source document.

In this article we examine to what degree the national ideological positions with respect to gender equality on ballot lists are shared (subjective gender sensitivity) and implemented (objective gender sensitivity) by local party officials. Our analysis is based on ballot lists presented at the Antwerp district council elections of 8 October 2000. With respect to the objective gender sensitivity of local party officials we analyse both the gender proportions and the gender structure of the ranking order of the lists. To examine this last indica tor, we introduce a new statistic that is also suitable for other comparative research designs. We find that the leaders of the slating committees, the actual lists and the voters of the right-wing parties (VLD and Vlaams Blok) are all in all not less sensitive to gender issues than those of CVP and SP. This is remarkable since the latter played an important role in the installment of the national gender quota laws.