Samenvatting

Within political science there is an ongoing discussion about the persistent or diminishing influence of social cleavages on voting behavior and the extent to which new voting motives have taken over the explanatory power of these predictors. We investigate the influence of religion, nationalism, ethical conservatism/progressivism and left-right orientations on the voters’ appreciation of political parties in Belgium. This method allows us to make a more qualified analysis on voting motives, in particular for smaller parties. We use data from the 2009 PartiRep election study, which show that traditional cleavages still have an important influence on political preferences. While the left-right-dimension has a limited influence on voting preferences in Flanders, it does play a major role in Wallonia. Contrary to expectations, the explanatory power of left-libertarian and right-authoritarian positions is rather weak, with one major exception: the preference for Vlaams Belang is almost entirely determined by ethnocentrism while this attitude is not relevant for other parties. In general, we find that both traditional and postmaterialist cleavages play a more important role in predicting party appreciations in Flanders than they do for French-speaking respondents.