P. van Praag

Winners and losers in a turbulent political year

In this paper, some main lines of a turbulent political year will be sketched. In the autumn of 2001, the coming campaign was expected to be dominated by the contest between the two main governmental parties, the PvdA (labour) and the VVD (liberals). The political arrival of Fortuyn prevented this scenario to become true. Under the leadership of Fortuyn, the anti-establishment party Liveable Netherlands (LN) that started as a leftist populist developed into a rightist populist party. Fortuyn dominated the 2002 campaign and forced other parties to focus on his campaign themes. The success of Fortuyns party seems to be in particular attributable to his viewpoints concerning asylum seekers and criminality. Balkenende and his party, the CDA, are the winners of the confusion caused by the arrival and the murder on Fortuyn. The elections of January 2003, after the quick collapse of the new cabinet Balkenende, did not bring about the desired majority in parliament for the CDA and the VVD. The CDA remained the largest party, but it was above all the PvdA, under the new leadership of Bos, which profited by the increasing priority that voters gave to social economic issues.

When the Stakes Are High Party Competition and Negative Campaigning

This article examines the conditions under which different kinds of parties resort to negative campaigning in three Western European countries: the Netherlands, Britain, and Germany in the period between 1980 and 2006. Data were collected for 27 parties, participating in 23 elections, yielding a total of 129 cases. The study uses a cross-nested multilevel model to estimate the effects of party characteristics as well as the electoral context in which these parties operate. It contributes to the state of the art on negative campaigning in two ways. First, being the first comparative and across-time study on negative campaigning, it compares negative campaigning across 23 elections, which is more than in any other study so far. It therefore contributes to the development of a more general theory on this type of campaign strategy. Second, it is the first study outside the American context to empirically estimate the effect of the electoral context on the use of negative campaigning. The results show that party characteristics are much more important than the electoral context in explaining when parties go negative.

A mixed report: The effects of strategic and substantive news content on political cynicism and voting

Abstract This article examines the effects of strategic and substantive news on political cynicism, turnout intention and voter uncertainty, drawing on two experiments (n = 451, 18–25 year-olds). We found that among less politically knowledgeable citizens, all news mobilizes, but strategic news also induces cynicism. For the more knowledgeable citizens, we found that the combination of strategic and substantive news yields slightly less cynicism and that substantive news makes these citizens reconsider their voting choice. Overall, we only found favorable or neutral effects among the more knowledgeable, while we found both favorable and unfavorable effects among the less knowledgeable. The implications for news effects research are discussed.

BEYOND MEDIA LOGIC

Mediatization and media logic are concepts that enjoy a growing academic popularity. At the same time, the phenomena that they cover and the empirical proof of their existence and growing presence are at best ambiguous. This article firstly dissects and problematizes these concepts and, secondly, it discusses the likelihood of other logics, notably ones in which the vox populi has a more central, albeit contested, place. The conclusion is that, as audience and as voters, the public is increasingly powerful in relation to politics and media, but at the same time it is fragmented and volatile. This begs the question whether it is helpful to speak of a logic of the public in explaining the present changes in Europe of the character, composition and driving force of political communication or that we just would coin another misnomer.

Van volgzaam en respectvol naar dominant en sturend: de rol van de moderator in het Nederlandse verkiezingsdebat (1963-2010)

Televisiedebatten hebben zich ontwikkeld tot een onmisbaar onderdeel van verkiezingscampagnes. In Nederland is er weinig systematisch onderzoek gedaan naar verkiezingsdebatten en geheel niet naar de rol van de moderator. In dit paper zullen we ingaan op de vraag wat de rol van de moderator is in het Nederlandse verkiezingsdebat en of hier de laatste decennia veranderingen in zijn opgetreden.

Nieuwe scheidslijnen en de turbulente relatie tussen politiek, media en burgers

Het openbaar bestuur is in theorie voor iedereen bindend, het treedt handelend op, is net als de samenleving pluralistisch en legt verantwoording af. In de praktijk is het accent de laatste jaren echter sterk op uitvoering en controle komen te liggen. Wie herkent nog het publieke karakter van het bestuur? En wat kan zo’n bestuur nog betekenen voor de grote vragen rond voedsel, energie, klimaat en economie? Deze en andere vragen komen aan de orde in de vandaag verschenen Verkenning van de WRR, Het gezicht van de publieke zaak. Openbaar bestuur onder ogen. Geen receptenboek met oplossingen, maar een bundel die recht doet aan het publieke karakter van het openbaar bestuur.