Suchergebnisse

In national elections the results tend to become more 'nationalized': a homogeneous party offer all over the territory, less variation in the results per constituency & more homogeneous electoral swings. This article investigates whether this nationalization can also be witnessed at local elections. It focuses on two indicators: the party offer & the voting behavior. The party offer is the presence of the national parties on the local ballot paper, while the voting behavior looks at patterns of homogeneity across the municipalities. The answer to the question of nationalization is mixed. The Flemish & Walloon local elections display the same long-term trend as the national elections, but they keep their own local character. The heterogeneity of the local party offer clearly demonstrates the local specificity of the local elections, & consequently the voting behavior also differs from the voting behavior at national elections. We also find that the local elections in Wallonia are less nationalized than in Flanders. Although the local character of the local elections remains important, the newer parties -- Ecolo & Groen! -- show until 2000 a clear trend towards nationalization. Especially the extreme right Vlaams Belang shows positive scores on all indicators of nationalization since its first local appearance in 1982. Tables, Figures. Adapted from the source document.

It is often suggested that the nationalization of local elections has increased. As a result, a hypothesis could be that the mutual differences between policy programs of local divisions of the same national party decrease. In this contribution, we focus on the local election of October 8th 2006 in order to analyze these mutual differences. The aim of this contribution is to measure the homogeneity or heterogeneity of the policy positions of the local divisions of national political parties, on a range of substantive issues on which they have the freedom to differ. Therefore, we compare the opinions of local party agents within the different party families. We use the results of a survey among the representatives of the local departments of the different political parties in the run-up to the local elections. Our research shows that, regarding to the selected questions, in general the local divisions speak with one voice. Our analysis does not indicate that there is a large mixture of visions between divisions of the same national party. Besides, this analysis shows that in general, the size of the municipality can seldom be used in indicating the relative disagreement within political families. This level of agreement is the largest within the green party & the smallest within the liberal family. Those are also the two parties of which the local agents say that the influence of supra-local party levels is small, compared to representatives of other political families. Tables. Adapted from the source document.