Various authors have claimed that postmodern concepts of citizenship have become more important in contemporary Western societies. The new generation of citizens are said to be more critical toward the political system, less likely to participate in conventional politics, but they remain strongly interested in politics and social life (Norris, Inglehart, Dalton). Michael Schudson developed the concept of a ‘monitorial citizen’, who is interested in politics, with high levels of political efficacy and who turns to political action if needed, but does not participate in traditional political organizations. Based on the European Social Survey (2004) we investigate whether this type of citizenship actually occurs in Belgium, and found that approx. 9 per cent of all respondents can be labeled as ‘monitorial citizens’. In accordance with the theoretical expectations, most of them are young and highly-educated citizens. A multivariate analysis shows that, controlling for education, ‘monitorial citizens’ also score relatively high on political trust.

At least four criterions/methods to measure mechanical effects of electoral systems can be distinguished: measuring disproportionality, the reduction in number of parties, the party advantages and the threshold percentages. In this manuscript we focus on the thresholds. We first concentrate on a description of legal, theoretical, and empirical thresholds as measures of mechanical effects. Further, we analyse the relationship between (the natural logarithm) of district magnitude and the empirical threshold and between the empirical threshold and the effective number of parties. As starting point we take districts in Spain, Portugal and Hungary as the level of analysis. We clearly show that there is a negative causal connection between district magnitude and the threshold percentage and between threshold percentage and the number of parties.

The article deals with the relationship between Islamic fundamentalism and the political participation of women. Firstly, it is discussed at length which political role women play in theories on Islamic fundamentalism. According to some scholars, it is indeed paramount to eliminate where possible, existing stereotypes which state that women are solely ‘placed’ in the private domain by fundamentalists. Secondly, the article examines the extent of actual political participation in a context of Islamic fundamentalism, more specifically the Islamic Republic of Iran. Models of political participation are often implicitly based on formal (electoral) forms of participation. However, women often remain invisible in these kinds of models. Consequently, the article centres on a possible broadening of the notion ‘political participation’ and the incorporation of new forms of informal political activities in the analysis of political participation.

This article investigates the link between state decentralization and party decentralization. We study the impact of the type (dual, integrative, asymmetrical) and degree of decentralization on two dimensions of the relationship between a party’s central party organs and its regional branches: the autonomy of the regional branches to manage their regional affairs and the degree of participation of the regional branches in the central party. We compare the organization of five state-wide parties in two decentralized multi-national polities, Spain and the UK. Our analysis of their party statutes partly confirms the link between degree and asymmetry of decentralization and party organization. However, the impact of the type of distribution of powers between the state and its regions is much less clear. This article shows the need to investigate the influence of other factors such as regional party competition and electoral rules on the type of central-regional relationships within state-wide parties.