Kees Aarts

Political leaders and democratic elections

1. Introduction 2. Changing Patterns of Political Communication 3. Party Leader Effects on the Vote 4. Political Leaders in Westminster Systems - 5. US Party Leaders: Exploring the Meaning of Candidate-Centered Politics - 6. Elections as Beauty Contests 7. Leader Effects and Party Characteristics 8. Leader Effects and Leader Characteristics 9. Voter Characteristics and Leader Effects 10. Pull or Push? Positive and Negative Leader Evaluations and Vote Choice 11. Leader Traits, Leader Image and Vote Choice -

Understanding the Dutch “No”: The Euro, the East, and the Elite

The Dutch have been counted among the staunchest supporters of European integration ever since the parliamentary ratification of the European Community for Coal and Steel in late 1951. The major political parties—the Christian Democrats (CDA) and its forerunners, the Labor Party (PvdA), and the liberal parties VVD and D66—supported all important European treaties of the past decades. Only the smaller orthodox-Calvinist parties, some smaller left-wing parties, and, more recently, the List Pim Fortuyn (LPF) have opposed these treaties in parliament. This overwhelmingly large support in the Second Chamber of the Dutch parliament included the Treaty of Rome of 2004—the treaty establishing a constitution for Europe. One hundred twenty-eight out of 150 members of parliament favored the ratification of the European Constitution

Issues and party competition in the Netherlands

The Netherlands represents the prototypic case of a consociational democracy; in addition, the Dutch system has an extremely low threshold for obtaining representation in the legislature, making it open to challengers of any political persuasion. This article has two explicit goals: to compare two models of issue-based party choice, the directional and proximity models; and to understand the changing nature of electoral competition in the Netherlands. The articles analytic focus is the elections of 1971, 1986, and 1994. These elections, the only ones for which appropriate data are available for testing the issue theories, represent important points in the historical sequence. Tests of the alternate issue voting models generally favor directional over proximity theory. The broader analysis suggests substantial change in Dutch politics, away from the tight structuring of subcultural allegiances to a more politically homogeneous culture in which party strength appears rather fluid.

How Do Online Citizens Persuade Fellow Voters? Using Twitter During the 2012 Dutch Parliamentary Election Campaign

This article explores how Twitter was used by voters to participate in electoral campaigning during the Dutch election campaign of 2012. New social media networks like Twitter are believed to be efficient tools of communication between electoral candidates and voters during electoral campaign periods. Yet only few studies have been conducted so far to discover in what way the content of online discussions is being used for campaigning. In particular, there have been very few studies of electoral campaigning, which study the content of the social media messages sent by citizens. In order to understand the extent to which citizens utilize Twitter in different forms of electoral campaigning—that is, persuading followers about voting for a particular party or to conduct negative campaigning, we conducted an automated content analysis of a large corpus of tweets collected during the Dutch parliamentary election campaign of 2012. Our findings show that citizens participate significantly in online electoral campaigning on Twitter, whereas they differ from professional users in the style of campaigning. Persuasive campaigning is observed to a lesser extent among citizens than among politicians, while citizens more commonly use negative campaigning. Moreover, qualitative content analysis of campaigning tweets by citizens has revealed that expressions of emotions and opinions make up a large majority of negative tweets, indicating that citizens regard Twitter more as an outlet for expressing discontent than as a medium for negative campaigning.

Who is Less Welcome?: The Impact of Individuating Cues on Attitudes towards Immigrants

Based on a novel experimental design, the current study examines the impact of economic and cultural characteristics of potential immigrants on anti-immigrant sentiments. We investigate the extent to which individuating cues affect public support for individual immigrants in the USA and the Netherlands through a series of online survey experiments carried out by the YouGov online panel in 2010 and the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences Panel in 2011. Our findings demonstrate that individual immigrants elicit different levels of public support for their temporary and permanent immigration applications, and that support depends overwhelmingly on educational and occupational credentials of potential immigrants. Other individual attributes, such as presence of family dependents, country of origin and skin complexion also affect acceptance rates, but to a much lesser extent.

Media, Political Trust, and Political Knowledge : A comparative perspective

Contents Lists of Tables and Figures Acknowledgements I: Introduction 1: How Media Inform Democracy: Central Debates, Toril Aalberg and James Curran 2: Research Design, Toril Aalberg, Zan Strabac and Tove Brekken II: How Media Provides Political Information 3: Media Systems and the Political Information Environment. A Cross-National Comparisons, Toril Aalberg, Peter van Aelst and James Curran 4: The Political Information Environment during Election Campaigns, Peter van Aelst, Kjersti Thorbjornsrud and Toril Aalberg 5: News Substance: The Relative Importance of Soft and De-contextualized News, Tove Brekken, Kjersti Thorbjornsrud and Toril Aalberg III: How Media Affects Public Knowledge And Perceptions 6: News Content, Media Use and Current Affairs Knowledge, James Curran, Sharon Coen, Toril Aalberg and Shanto Iyengar 7: Media, Political Trust and Political Knowledge: A Comparative Perspective, Kees Aarts, Audun Fladmoe and Jesper Stromback 8: Does Knowledge of Hard News go with Knowledge of Soft News? A Cross-National Analysis of the Structure of Public Affairs Knowledge, Kyu S. Hahn, Shanto Iyengar, Peter van Aelst and James Curran 9: Informed Citizens, Media Use and Public Knowledge of Parties Policy Positions, Anders Todal Jenssen, Toril Aalberg and Kees Aarts 10: The Financial Crises as a Global News Event: Cross-National Media Coverage and Public Knowledge of Economic Affairs, Jesper Stromback, Anders Todal Jenssen and Toril Aalberg 11: News Consumption and Public Opposition to Immigration across Countries, Zan Strabac, Kjersti Thorbjornsrud and Anders Todal Jenssen 12: Conclusion, Toril Aalberg and James Curran Bibliography IndexThe Financial Crisis as a Global News Event : Cross-National Media Coverage and Public Knowledge of Economic Affairs

Political Trust and Sophistication: Taking Measurement Seriously

Political trust is an important indicator of political legitimacy. Hence, seemingly decreasing levels of political trust in Western democracies have stimulated a growing body of research on the causes and consequences of political trust. However, the neglect of potential measurement problems of political trust raises doubts about the findings of earlier studies. The current study revisits the measurement of political trust and re-examines the relationship between political trust and sophistication in the Netherlands by utilizing European Social Survey (ESS) data across five time points and four-wave panel data from the Panel Component of ESS. Our findings illustrate that high and low political sophistication groups display different levels of political trust even when measurement characteristics of political trust are taken into consideration. However, the relationship between political sophistication and political trust is weaker than it is often suggested by earlier research. Our findings also provide partial support for the argument that the gap between sophistication groups is widening over time. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, although the between-method differences between the latent means and the composite score means of political trust for high- and low sophistication groups are relatively minor, it is important to analyze the measurement characteristics of the political trust construct.

Wahlbeteiligung in Deutschland und bei europäischen Nachbarn

Wahlbeteiligung gilt als wichtiger Gradmesser fur das Funktionieren von Demokratien. Allerdings ist umstritten, ob eine niedrige Wahlbeteiligung auf Unzufriedenheit oder Zufriedenheit der Burger schliesen lasst. Das Niveau der Wahlbeteiligung allein lasst keine klaren Aussagen zu. Unstrittig ist hingegen die Beurteilung sich andernder Wahlbeteiligung. Eine sinkende Wahlbeteiligung in einem sich ansonsten nicht in einer besonderen Situation befindenden politischen System wird gemeinhin als Problem angesehen (vgl. Kaase/Bauer-Kaase 1998: 86), weil davon ausgegangen wird, dass hierin ein Verlust an Bindungswirkung und Attraktivitat des politischen Systems und seiner Akteure zu sehen ist. Deutschland bildet in dieser Hinsicht keine Ausnahme. Dem nach den Bundestagswahlen 1983 einsetzenden, bis 1994 anhaltenden Trend des Niedergangs der Wahlbeteiligung wurde grose offentliche und wissenschaftliche Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt (Falter/Schumann 1993; Eilfort 1994; Klingemann/ Lass 1995; Kaase/Bauer-Kaase 1998; Gabriel/Volkl 2004). Der Trend scheint mit den Bundestagswahlen 1998 zwar gebrochen, aber das Niveau etwa 10 Prozentpunkte niedriger zu liegen als bei der Bundestagswahl 1983.

Reaching Hard-to-Survey Populations: Mode Choice and Mode Preference

Abstract This study assesses the effect of response-mode choices on response rates, and responsemode preferences of hard-to-survey populations: young adults, full-time workers, big city inhabitants, and non-Western immigrants. Using address-based sampling, a stratified sample of 3,496 households was selected. The first group of sample members was contacted face to face and could choose between a CAPI and web response mode. The second group, contacted by telephone, could choose between CATI and web. The third group, contacted by telephone, was randomly allocated to a response mode. Our address-based sampling technique was successful in reaching most of the hard-to-survey groups. Insufficient numbers of non- Western immigrants were reached; therefore this group was excluded from our analyses. In our mixed-effect models, no significant effects on the willingness to participate were found for mode choice. We found that full-time workers and young adults were significantly more likely to choose web over CAPI when contacted face to face.

The swamp of Dutch politics: how the impact of modernization on political institutions is modified by institutional context

As argued in the introductory chapter, the institutions of government and the relations between government and society are currently undergoing important changes. Firstly, the distinction between different levels of government has become more diffuse than ever. Due to processes of globalization and developments in information and communication technology, jurisdictions — from nation states to local governments — are losing their borders. Secondly, both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of representative democracy in its classic form appear to be undergoing erosion.