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The debate on personalization in electoral politics is inconclusive. There is confusion about the concept of personalization. Moreover, the fact that party evaluation and person evaluation are interrelated complicates the debate. This paper focuses on the latter problem by employing counterfactual thought experiments in which voters are asked to simulate their vote with their candidate lower on the party list or nominated by another party. The results show that most voters put party above person and less than ten percent put person above party. A sizeable third category has a preference for an individual candidate as long as that candidate does not leave the party. Also, personalization is slightly more important with regard to (the leaders of) populist parties, and individual candidates are more important for voters with less education, less political knowledge and a less deeply rooted party preference. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

Political parties are the building blocks of representative democracy since they traditionally perform roles that are considered essential for the functioning & well-being of democracy. In the study & evaluation of the democratic system as a whole, as a general rule, parties are treated as unitary actors. Most political parties, however, are membership organizations & their external functioning is partly dependent on internal affairs, including the behavior & opinions of their members. In this paper we open the black box of parties & show on the basis of a 2008 survey among seven political parties how united or divided ordinary Dutch party members are with respect to various political issues & orientations. It is shown that most parties are rather united on most issues. They are least united on two of the most pertinent issues of today's politics, ie., the integration of ethnic minorities & European integration. Adapted from the source document.

Examines the 2003 parliamentary elections in the Netherlands, resulting from a loss of confidence in the center-Right Cabinet after only 87 days. The campaign & outcome are described. The strong recovery of the Labour Party seemed to dictate the kind of coalition that would form; however, a center-Left coalition failed to materialize, leaving a center-Right coalition as the most promising prospect. This formation process is explicated. 1 Table, 3 References. J. Zendejas

The election of May 2002 was one of the most, if not the most, spectacular election in the history of the Netherlands. The government coalition parties suffered record losses, while a new party, the List Pim Fortuyn, entered parliament with a record 26 seats. This article concentrates on explanation of the extraordinary success of this new party. A prominent explanation of this success was that the electorate had shifted to the Right. A comparison of the views of respondents from the 1994, 1998, & 2002 Dutch Parliamentary Election Studies on Left-Right self-placement & a set of issues rejects this argument. Very little change is found in the viewpoints held by the electorate. Instead, Pim Fortuyn provided the electorate with a choice that it had not previously had. He rallied voters who had negative sentiments toward immigration & immigrants, who were cynical about politics, & who were dissatisfied with the performance of previous government coalition. It was not a shift in the views of the electorate that brought electoral change, but an addition to the selection of political parties from which it could choose. 12 Tables. Adapted from the source document.

Voter expectations concerning the electoral prospects of parties & candidates (viability & electability) play an important role in modern theories of voting behavior, especially if more than two choices are involved. Research on public opinion polls as source of these expectations has been hampered by circumstantial & methodological difficulties. The research reported here satisfied the necessary condition & presents (on the basis of a survey among 1,393 respondents & with the use of multiple logistic regression analysis) strong evidence that the polls were the dominant source of expectations for voters in the 1994 Dutch parliamentary election. 4 Tables, 1 Appendix, 29 References. Adapted from the source document.

The so-called pillarization model of voting behavior, which once was central to understanding voting in the Netherlands, has declined in importance at recent elections. Short-term factors (feelings that voters have about the political parties, their leaders, & their candidates) have replaced the long-term factors of religion & social class that defined this model. There has been much discussion about the effects of candidates, most importantly the first candidate on the party list, but only recently has empirical research begun to show the existence & importance of such effects. A two-dimensional ideological issue space can be constructed to define heartlands of potential support for various political parties. Here, using 1994 & 1998 election results, it is shown that even in such ideological heartlands, popular candidates can generate (or lose) support for their parties. Leaders who are more popular than their party can provide for it an electoral bonus. In the elections of 1998, it was the PvdA that profited most from such a bonus. Party leader & first candidate Wim Kok was popular throughout all ideological areas & much of the electoral success of his party can be ascribed to him. For the party's strongest competitor at this election, the VVD, the situation was quite different. This party also achieved success, but more in spite of than due to the popularity of party leader Frits Bolkestein. Bolkestein proved to be not particularly attractive to many voters, some of whom found him less attractive than his party. Although to a lesser degree, it can also be shown for the other parties that electoral success was at least in part due to the feelings voters had about the parties' first candidates. 6 Tables, 1 Figure, 54 References. Adapted from the source document.

For over 40 years now, the debate on the hierarchical opinion structure within political parties has been colored by May's laws of General and Special curvilinear disparity. Their essence is that, compared to non-leaders and top leaders, the mid-level of sub-leaders of parties consists of radicals as regards their ideological, substantive positions. Persistent as this vision is, however, there have been few comprehensive empirical tests. In this paper such a test is employed for Dutch parties, consisting of: a) a comparison of average positions on issues and in terms of left and right of voters, members and MPs; b) a comparison of the full opinion distributions on particular political issues for these groups; and c) an exploration of perceptions among top leaders and sub-leaders of the opinion structure within their party. We conclude that there is not enough support to uphold May's laws any longer. His laws should be dismissed, but May's legacy should consist of a more open study of the opinion structures of parties, which are still crucial actors in Western representative democracies.