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Aflevering 4, 2021 Alle samenvattingen uitklappen
Wel beschouwd

Nog langer dromen over autonoom lokaal bestuur?

Auteurs Michiel Herweijer
Auteursinformatie

Michiel Herweijer
Prof. dr. M. Herweijer is sinds september 2011 bijzonder hoogleraar Bestuurskunde verbonden aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, en sinds november 2018 als universitair docent aan de Campus Fryslân, een vestiging van de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
Thema

Access_open Lokale partijen tussen eenheid en verscheidenheid

Auteurs Simon Otjes en Julien van Ostaaijen
Auteursinformatie

Simon Otjes
Dr. S.P. Otjes is onderzoeker bij het Documentatiecentrum Nederlandse Politieke Partijen (DNPP) van de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen en universitair docent aan de Universiteit Leiden.

Julien van Ostaaijen
Dr. J.J.C. van Ostaaijen is als lector Recht en Veiligheid verbonden aan Avans Hogeschool in Den Bosch en als universitair docent Bestuurskunde aan de Universiteit van Tilburg.

    The history of local parties in the Netherlands is quite a mystery. Since their first appearance at the dawn of the twentieth century, local parties were founded sooner or later in all municipalities. They seemed to have served as an addition to local representatives of national parties. Despite the variety in their ideologies, shapes and modi operandi, they could be qualified and studied as ‘niche parties’, offering an alternative to the viewpoints and divisions of the traditional (national) party politics. With this article, the authors aim to contribute to a better understanding of Dutch local parties, whose origins and development have largely remained a black box due to the scarcity of sources and studies. They do so by adopting a partly quantitative, partly qualitative or narrative approach, while looking at the election results of local parties in the past century, including salient regional differences, and by comparing these to the success of national parties in local elections. Within the boundaries of their research, their hypothesis seems to hold true that the popularity of local parties, as ‘niche parties’, depended largely on the strategies of national parties, which justifies the assumption that these two types of parties have acted as communicating vessels.


Ingrid van Biezen
Prof. dr. I. van Biezen is hoogleraar vergelijkende politicologie aan de Universiteit Leiden. Daarvoor was ze verbonden aan de University of Birmingham.

Geerten Waling
Dr. G.H. Waling is historicus en is als onderzoeker verbonden aan de Universiteit Leiden. Hij studeerde geschiedenis en wijsbegeerte aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam.

    In this study, the authors analyse the development of the 46 Dutch local parties that received at least ten per cent of the vote in the 2014 municipal elections as a new party. The aim is to determine which factors are most relevant to the successful entry and survival of this group of parties. To this end, they conduct interviews with leaders of these parties, but also, for comparison, with the leaders of parties who failed to win a seat. An important common feature of the most successful local parties is that they express dissatisfaction with local politics in an appealing way and offer voters perspective. They do this by putting people on the list who are known in the small communities and who are actively involved. The following factors are present in varying compositions among the parties that even exceeded their election victory four years later: unity in the party or at least no ‘hassle’ visible to society, visible and appealing to residents, having clearly achieved something and being able to transmit that to society. Most founders of the most successful newcomers were previously politically active for a local branch of a political party. It is also striking that three quarters of the most successful newcomers come from municipalities with a maximum of 40,000 inhabitants.


Julien van Ostaaijen
Dr. J.J.C. van Ostaaijen is als lector Recht en Veiligheid verbonden aan Avans Hogeschool in Den Bosch en als universitair docent Bestuurskunde aan de Universiteit van Tilburg.

Milou Peeters
M. Peeters BSc is masterstudent Management van de Publieke Sector aan de Universiteit Leiden. Ook doet ze als student-assistent bij de Universiteit Maastricht onderzoek naar de controlefunctie van gemeenteraden. Zij deed een bachelor Bestuurskunde aan de Universiteit van Tilburg.

Sander Jennissen
S. Jennissen BSc is masterstudent Management van de Publieke Sector aan de Universiteit Leiden. Hij deed een bachelor Bestuurskunde aan de Universiteit van Tilburg.

    Local political parties are an important factor in local politics in the Netherlands. These parties, which participate in municipal elections but are not affiliated with national political parties, are currently the largest ‘political family’ in the municipal councils. Yet surprisingly little is known about these parties. The existing research indicates that this ‘party family’ has a protest character. But at the same time, more precise analyses indicate that this party family is more diverse: and that the label ‘local party’ describes all kinds of different movements. However, a comprehensive analysis of the programmatic positioning of all parties in this family in relation to national parties is lacking. That is the purpose of this article. For this research, all election manifestoes of the departments and parties that participated in the municipal elections in November 2013, March and November 2014, November 2017 and March and November 2018 were collected. On this basis, the positions of all these parties are estimated on the left-right dimension, a scale that measures anti-elitist rhetoric and a scale that measures localism, based on modern quantitative text analysis techniques (bag-of-words approaches). In this way, for the first time, a picture is obtained of the programmatic cohesion and diversity of this party family as a whole.


Simon Otjes
Dr. S.P. Otjes is onderzoeker bij het Documentatiecentrum Nederlandse Politieke Partijen (DNPP) van de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen en universitair docent aan de Universiteit Leiden.
Thema

De organisatie van de lokale partijen

Auteurs Marcel Boogers en Gerrit Voerman
SamenvattingAuteursinformatie

    Since 1989, the parties participating in the Dutch elections have been obliged to opt for the legal form of an association with full legal capacity, if they wish to be stated on the ballot under their own name. What this has meant in practice for the structure of local party organisations is, however, unknown. For this reason, this article focuses on the question of how local parties are organised. How have the parties arranged their internal functioning and what human and financial resources do they have at their disposal? A second reason to take a closer look at the organisation of local parties lies in their increased electoral significance. Since 2010, as a collective category, they have managed to attract the largest percentage of voters, with 29% of the total number of votes in the 2018 municipal elections. This justifies the question of whether the social significance of local parties is now just as strong. How do local parties organise their members, sympathisers and volunteers. On the basis of this exploratory study into the organisation of local parties, it can be concluded that both the internal and the external facets of the party organisation are relatively highly developed. Where, according to the literature, national political parties place less emphasis on the external mobilisation function, we see that local parties perform better than the branches of national parties in terms of both the internal organisational function and the external mobilisation function.


Marcel Boogers
Prof. dr. M.J.G.J.A. Boogers is hoogleraar Innovatie en Regionaal Bestuur aan de Universiteit Twente, onderzoeker bij Necker van Naem en hoofdredacteur van Bestuurswetenschappen.

Gerrit Voerman
Prof. dr. G. Voerman is directeur van het Documentatiecentrum Nederlandse Politieke Partijen (DNPP) en hoogleraar Ontwikkeling en functioneren van het Nederlandse en Europese partijstelsel aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.

    Because local political parties are by definition only active in one municipality, the assumption is that they are less effective compared to national parties because they have no representation at other levels of government and in other municipalities. It is then expected that aldermen of local parties will have more difficulty advocating the interests of their municipality in the region or province, the national government or the European Union. Interviews with aldermen of local parties and a survey among aldermen show that this picture needs some nuance. Aldermen from local parties say they can compensate for the lack of party political contacts by investing in personal relationships. It is striking that the non-partisan role of these aldermen also benefits them: because they do not have to take party political interests into account, they can more forcefully propagate the interests of their municipality if they are at odds with provincial or national policy. Because of their party-politically neutral role, they also acquire key positions more quickly in the region. The only disadvantage that aldermen of local parties do experience is the lack of support in the form of professionalisation and of knowledge exchange. They see that aldermen of national parties, who usually receive support from their national party bureau, sometimes have an advantage in this regard. This sheds new, and relatively little mentioned, light on the importance of party-political contacts.


Marcel Boogers
Prof. dr. M.J.G.J.A. Boogers is hoogleraar Innovatie en Regionaal Bestuur aan de Universiteit Twente, onderzoeker bij Necker van Naem en hoofdredacteur van Bestuurswetenschappen.

Franziska Eckardt
Dr. F. Eckardt promoveerde op 3 september 2021 bij de vakgroep Bestuurskunde van de Universiteit Twente op een onderzoek naar drie G-1000-initiatieven. Momenteel werkt ze als onderzoeker in Utrecht bij Citisens voor verschillende overheden aan projecten op het snijvlak van democratie, participatie en innovatie.

    Barack Obama’s autobiography ‘A Promised Land’, of which the Dutch translation was published in 2020, is a clearly and vividly written (political) life story devoted to the first term of his US presidency. Of course it also mentions the journey to the top and the efforts he had to make to achieve it. Not an easy task for a young, inexperienced newcomer, who is also African-American. The book is a candid account of what happened during the primaries and his first term in office. It gives the impression that it is based on diary notes, which he later processed, and then turned into a successful story by the editors of the publishing house. The book is also pedantic to a certain extent: it points out what is worth pursuing, how to approach things, and what you can learn from your experiences (and mistakes). By extension, it contains numerous (intended) messages and (life) lessons. Above all, it provides a fascinating insight into the immense struggle that Obama had to fight to be able and allowed to hold the highest office in his country as a black man. Nico Nelissen also discusses the question of what local politicians and local administrators can gain from this autobiography.


Nico Nelissen
Prof. dr. N.J.M. Nelissen is emeritus hoogleraar aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, redactielid en oud-hoofdredacteur van Bestuurswetenschappen.
Lokaal internationaal

Internationale tijdschriften en boeken

Auteurs Rik Reussing
Auteursinformatie

Rik Reussing
Dr. G.H. Reussing is onderwijscoördinator van de joint degree Public Governance across Borders aan de Universiteit Twente en redactiesecretaris van Bestuurswetenschappen.