TOP‐DOWN AND BOTTOM‐UP: INSTITUTIONAL EFFECTS ON DEBT AND GRANTS AT THE ENGLISH AND GERMAN LOCAL LEVEL

This article investigates the impact of institutional factors on the relationship between grant funding and local debt in England and Germany. Using a panel dataset covering the period 2005–12, the research identifies a positive relationship between grants and local debt. The positive relationship between grants and debt is reduced due to the impact of political and administrative variables. The findings demonstrate three shortcomings of the current literature. First, in contrast to the dominant portrayal of German local administration as predominantly legalistic, partisan dynamics affect the allocation of grants to the German local level. Second, institutional variables operate differently depending upon grant type, providing a rationale against the scholarly practice of using aggregate grants. Third, grant mechanisms provide a promising key to unlock institutional dynamics in systems of multilevel governance, but only when scholars integrate institutional differences more explicitly in their research design than hitherto accounted for by political economy.     

How to Counter Radical Narratives: Dutch Deradicalization Policy in the Case of Moluccan and Islamic Radicals

This article deals with the role of government in encouraging the decline of radical movements. The question posed is: “Which story can the government tell to encourage the decline of radical groups and the disengagement of their members?” The article makes use of the survey of factors promoting decline and disengagement drawn up by Demant, Slootman, Buijs (? ^?Deceased. ) and Tillie in 2008, as well as the factor “official policy strategies” based on concepts taken from discourse analysis, adapted to counterterrorism and deradicalization strategies by De Graaf in 2009. The article will therefore not address the different practical measures in this field, but focus instead on the perception of these official measures by the radicals. It will illustrate this with two case studies: the deradicalization of South Moluccan youths in the 1970s and of jihadist radicals after 2001, both in the Netherlands.     

Mind the gap: How party–voter incongruence fuels the entry and support of new parties

This article examines to what extent ideological incongruence (i.e., mismatch between policy positions of voters and parties) increases the entry of new parties in national parliamentary elections and their individual-level electoral support. Current empirical research on party entry and new party support either neglects the role of party–voter incongruence, or it only examines its effect on the entry and support of specific new parties or party families. This article fills this lacuna. Based on spatial theory, we hypothesise that parties are more likely to enter when ideological incongruence between voters and parties is higher (Study 1) and that voters are more likely to vote for new parties if these stand closer to them than established parties (Study 2). Together our two studies span 17 countries between 1996 and 2016. Time-series analyses support both hypotheses. This has important implications for spatial models of elections and empirical research on party entry and new party support.     

Multiple roots of the populist radical right: Support for the Dutch PVV in cities and the countryside

Populist radical right parties are considerably more popular in some areas (neighbourhoods, municipalities, regions) than others. They thrive in some cities, in some smaller towns, and in some rural areas, but they are unsuccessful in other cities, small towns, and rural areas. We seek to explain this regional variation by modelling at the individual level how citizens respond to local conditions. We argue that patterns of populist radical right support can be explained by anxiety in the face of social change. However, how social change manifests itself is different in rural and urban areas, so that variations in populist radical right support are rooted in different kinds of conditions. To analyse the effects of these conditions we use unique geo-referenced survey data from the Netherlands collected among a nationwide sample of 8,000 Dutch respondents. Our analyses demonstrate that the presence of immigrants (and particularly increases therein) can explain why populist radical right parties are more popular in some urban areas than in others, but that it cannot explain variation across rural areas. In these areas, local marginalization is an important predictor of support for populist radical right parties. Hence, to understand the support for the populist radical right, the heterogeneity of its electorate should be recognized.     

STRATEGIES FOR SAFEGUARDING PUBLIC VALUES IN LIBERALIZED UTILITY SECTORS

In the utility sectors, public values such as affordability, safety, and protection of the environment, require safeguarding. In the last 15 years, most utilities have been either liberalized or privatized. In an attempt to protect public values under these new conditions, this shift has been accompanied by an emphasis on tight regulations and strict norms. These are examples of hierarchical safeguarding mechanisms. This mechanism can cause adverse effects, such as an increase in transaction costs, which diminish or even outweigh the supposed advantages of liberalization and privatization. In addition to hierarchical safeguarding, this article describes two mechanisms used to safeguard public values: network mechanisms and market mechanisms. We suggest that smart combinations of network and hierarchy on the one hand, and market and hierarchy on the other, will lead to more effective and efficient safeguarding of public values than relying on hierarchy alone.     

Does a public sphere exist in the European Union? An analysis of the content of the debate on the Haider case

Abstract.  This article sets out how the public sphere can be studied through an analysis of the content of a specific debate. A public discourse can be said to pertain to a European Union-wide public sphere where the discourse within the EU is significantly different from that developed in non-EU countries, where such differences are not nationally defined, and where the debates in individual newspapers (which provide the fora for a public sphere) should be connected on the basis of some underlying factors. These conditions are tested with a quantitative analysis of the newspaper debate in 1999 and 2000 on the sanctions of the EU-14 against Austria. To the extent that the conditions are found, it can be concluded that there exists a European public opinion. The objective of studying this specific case is to demonstrate that, as far as an EU issue is concerned, there are already signs of an EU transnational political community.