Tom Louwerse

Populists in Parliament: Comparing Left‐Wing and Right‐Wing Populism in the Netherlands

In parliament, populist parties express their positions almost every day through voting. There is great diversity among them, for instance between left-wing and right-wing populist parties. This gives rise to the question: is the parliamentary behaviour of populists motivated by their populism or by their position on the left/right spectrum? This article compares the parliamentary voting behaviour of the Dutch SP and PVV, the only left-wing and right-wing populist parties that have been in a Western European parliament for more than four years. We find that for their voting behaviour the left/right position of these populist parties is more important than their shared populism. Only on one core populist issue (opposition to supranational institutions) do we find strong similarity in their voting behaviour.

Design challenges in cross-national VAAs: the case of the EU Profiler

This paper analyses the design of the EU Profiler, the first truly cross–national VAA. We assess the convergent validity and scaling reliability of the low–dimensional models that are used to represent differences between parties and users. Convergent validity of the party positions in the EU Profiler is moderate to high, but scaling reliability is low for most of the issue dimensions included. We examine whether these problems are related to the EU Profilers cross–national nature. The EU Profiler integrates the positions of parties from all over Europe into one pan–European model, even though students of European politics emphasise that there are structural differences between party competition in Central and Eastern Europe and Western Europe. We find that the EU Profiler performs better in terms of scaling reliability in Western European party systems than in Central and Eastern European party systems. In addition, there are substantive differences between individual countries.

Mechanisms of Issue Congruence: The Democratic Party Mandate

Issue congruence between voters and parties can be achieved if voters and parties follow the party mandate model. A central requirement of this model is that parties fulfil their electoral mandate. This article studies collective party mandate fulfilment by comparing parties’ election manifestos with the parliamentary speeches of their politicians in two countries: a typical consensus democracy, the Netherlands, and a typical majoritarian democracy, the United Kingdom. The central question is whether a difference in collective mandate fulfilment exists between these two types of democracy. Contrary to previous findings, this study finds that such a difference does not exist, at least not with regard to the two countries analysed. This can be explained by the way in which the party mandate is conceptualised. The article also analyses the development of party mandate fulfilment over time and finds no evidence for the idea that collective mandate fulfilment is declining.

Parliament without Government: The Belgian Parliament and the Government Formation Processes of 2007–2011

Parliamentary systems are characterised by strong links between the executive and the legislature. While the importance of executive–legislative relationships is well-known, the extent to which executive dominance affects parliamentary behaviour is hard to grasp. This study uses the recent institutional crises in Belgium to study parliamentary behaviour in the absence of a government with full powers. Cabinet formation in Belgium has proved to be protracted in recent years, leading to long periods of government formation in both 2007–2008 and 2010–2011. Such circumstances provide a unique comparison between normal situations of parliament in the presence of government, and exceptional situations of prolonged periods of caretaker government. In particular the article looks at three aspects of parliamentary behaviour that are usually linked to executive–legislative relations: legislative initiatives, voting behaviour and party unity. The general hypothesis is that prolonged periods of government formation gave parliamentarians more opportunities to influence the legislative process and more (ideological) freedom. The results show a nuanced picture: parliament became more pro-active, the salience of the government–opposition divide declined, while party unity remained as strong as ever. It is concluded that government formation processes did not lead to drastic changes in the legislative–executive relationship, but rather permitted a modest correction to the extremely weak position of parliament.

Personalised parliamentary behaviour without electoral incentives : the case of the Netherlands

Abstract Most theories of legislative behaviour explain the behaviour of MPs through electoral incentives. However, they fail to explain variation in parliamentary activity when individual electoral incentives are largely absent. This article studies MPs’ activity in such a parliament: the Dutch Tweede Kamer. It examines four clusters of incentives that may drive parliamentarians to be active. Party and committee environments provide the best explanation for the level of activity of individual MPs. Reselection and promotion prospects explain MPs’ behaviour, but only under more particular specifications. Re-election prospects were not found to affect activity levels.

The Impact of Parliamentary Specialisation on Cosponsorship

This study seeks to establish the effect of parliamentary specialisation on cosponsorship of parliamentary proposals in parliamentary systems with high levels of party unity. Existing studies on presidential systems suggest that cosponsorship is mainly related to legislators’ policy preferences. It is proposed that in parliamentary systems cosponsorship is, in the first place, structured by the division of labour in parliamentary party groups: MPs who do not have overlapping policy portfolios will not cosponsor proposals. Other explanations, such as policy distance and the government–opposition divide, only come into play when MPs are specialised in the same field. This expectation is tested using data from the Netherlands, a parliamentary system with a clear division of labour between MPs. It is found that specialisation has a very large impact on cosponsorship.

Reaching across the aisle: Explaining government–opposition voting in parliament

The divide between government and opposition is clearly visible in the way members of parliament vote, but the variation in government–opposition voting has been left relatively unexplored. This is particularly the case for contextual variation in the extent to which parliamentary voting behaviour follows the government–opposition divide. This article attempts to explain levels of government–opposition voting by looking at three factors: first, the majority status of cabinets (differentiating between majority and minority cabinets), cabinet ideology (differentiating between more centrist and more extremist cabinets) and norms about cabinet formation (differentiating between wholesale and partial alternation in government). The study includes variation at the level of the country, the government and the vote. The article examines voting in the Netherlands (with a history of partial alternation) and Sweden (with a history of wholesale alternation). We find strong support for the effect of cabinet majority status, cabinet ideology and norms about cabinet formation on government–opposition voting.

A special majority cabinet? : Supported minority governance and parliamentary behavior in the Netherlands

Abstract This article studies how the presence of the supported minority government Rutte-I affected patterns of legislative behavior. On the basis of the literature on minority cabinets, one would expect that during supported minority cabinets parliamentary parties cooperate more often across the division between coalition and opposition than under multiparty majority cabinet rule. Examining almost 30,000 parliamentary votes between 1994 and 2012, this study finds that on a host of indicators of coalition-opposition-cooperation, there was less cooperation “across the aisle” during the Rutte-I cabinet than during any cabinet before it. We explain this with reference to the encompassing nature of the support agreement as well as the impact of the cabinets’ ideological composition.

Parliamentary questions as strategic party tools

Abstract This article shifts the analysis of parliamentary oversight tools to the level of the political party, asking how political parties make use of written parliamentary questions. It theorises that the use of parliamentary questions is related to the ideological and electoral competition between political parties, borrowing from theories on issue competition and negative campaigning. It provides an empirical test, using data on written questions from the lower house in the Netherlands (1994–2014). The analysis shows that parties tend to put questions to ministers whose portfolios are salient to them, in line with issue ownership theories. Moreover they ask questions of both ministers from parties that are ideologically distant and those with whom they have considerable electoral overlap in line with studies of negative campaigning.

How populists wage opposition: Parliamentary opposition party behaviour and populism in Netherlands

This article analyses how populist parties wage opposition in parliament. We conceptualise opposition behaviour in terms of two independent dimensions: scrutiny (monitoring and criticising government actions) and policy-making (participating in or directly influencing legislative production). In line with the conceptualisation of populism as an opposition to the ruling elite in name of ‘the people’, our hypothesis is that populist opposition parties are more likely to use scrutiny and less likely to use policy-making tools than non-populist opposition parties. We study the Netherlands between 1998 and 2017 as a typical example of a consensus democracy, where populist parties have a greater opportunity to win representation and use parliamentary tools (compared to majoritarian democracies). Our findings indicate that populist opposition parties are particularly less likely to engage in policy-making behaviour and somewhat more likely to engage in scrutiny behaviour.