Abstract
There is widespread agreement among scholars that political competition in Western Europe is multidimensional in nature. Most existing studies at the very least distinguish an economic from a cultural dimension of conflict. However, while large segments of the population are found to combine egalitarian and nationalist attitudes, parties adopting that ideological stance are exceedingly rare, if not completely absent. This has implications for the political representation of these so-called ‘left-nationalist’ voters and, more specifically, for their evaluations of the legitimacy of the representative system. In this paper, we put these expectations to the test using the 2017 Dutch Parliamentary Election Study. We show that evaluations of representative democracy vary for different combinations of egalitarian and nationalist attitudes. The findings shed further light on the link between substantive and symbolic representation and, more generally, on the functioning of representative democracy in the Netherlands.
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Notes
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We repeat the analyses using two lesser known evaluations of representation. Firstly, the Dutch Parliamentary Election Studies contains the following question on the ideological match between voters and representatives: “Are the views of Parliamentarians a good reflection of the views of voters, a fairly good reflection, a not so good reflection or a bad reflection?” As the question makes clear, it has four possible answers, but since the vast majority (89%) places themselves in the middle two categories, we simplify it to a dichotomous variable with “good” and “fairly good” on one side and “not so good” and “bad” on the other. The second dependent variable is the following question: “Is there a party that you mostly agree with, or does such a party not exist?” The results of these analyses are presented in Table 10 in the Appendix.
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This estimate is based on model 2 in Table 2, with other variables held at their means.
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Appendix
Appendix
See Tables 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10.
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Hakhverdian, A., Schakel, W. The political representation of left-nationalist voters. Acta Polit 57, 489–509 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-021-00205-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-021-00205-8