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This special issue about the practice of local referendums in the Netherlands and Flanders, Belgium, focuses in particular on the relationship between referendums and the consensus model of democracy. On the one hand, referendums are widely conceived of as a typical majoritarian device. On the other hand, the legal possibility of referendums forces political elites to reach broad agreement, in order to prevent a popular vote in which decisions would be recalled. The three contributions to this issue demonstrate that consensus democracy influences the debate about referendums in the legislative, as well as how the practicalities are organised, in more varied ways. Studies of independent referendum bodies in the Netherlands and question wording in referendums in Flanders show that the nature of consensus democracy enables both countries to find solutions to potential problems, but also brings new problems. Guidelines for how these may be prevented in future referendums are provided. Adapted from the source document.

This article contrasts the view on low turnout as a threat to democracy with the unfashionable argument that low turnout might be a blessing in disguise. The political sophistication of those who participate is then relatively high, and their choices presumably better. This is consistent with the key functions of elections: mandate and accountability. Analyses based on the European Election Study 1999 show that the level of turnout not only affects how well particular groups are represented at the polls (potential threat), but also show how well their voting links up with the mandate and accountability function of elections (potential blessing). The effects are of limited size and counterbalance each other, which means that from neither perspective does low turnout really matter. [Copyright 2006 Elsevier Ltd.]

This article argues that in Europe partisanship is best conceptualised in terms of evaluation instead of identification. This follows in part from the fact that the position of partisanship in the funnel of causality differs between parliamentary & presidential systems. Moreover, the conceptualisation proposed (on the basis of the social-psychological notion of attitudes) overcomes various problems associated with the party identification concept. Empirical analyses of four Dutch parliamentary elections indicate that partisanship can then be distinguished meaningfully from vote choice. Although most voters cast a sincere vote, each year discrepancies between party preferences & vote choice were observed. These could be partly accounted for by the impact of candidate evaluations & prospective considerations concerning the future government. Tables, Figures, Appendixes, References. [Copyright 2005 Elsevier Ltd.]

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) represent popular election campaign tools in many countries, enabling voters to discover which party or candidate provides the best match with their political preferences. This article examines the effects of design choices on these tools by focusing on the response scale that is used to measure the policy positions of parties and voters. We analyze the impact of scale length on the advice generated by these tools using user data from a VAA developed for the 2014 Dutch local elections. We transform the original 101-point scale into several alternative scale formats and determine if this leads to a different voting recommendation. We also examine the suitability of alternative scales for creating spatial models, which are often employed by VAAs. We show that the response scale has a potentially profound impact on the resulting advice (with voters receiving different VAA outcomes depending on the scale length), except for voters with an extremist response style. The findings have practical implications for the design of these tools: outcomes should be presented as a preference list, rather than focusing on the "best match."