Using literature, documents and parliamentary debates in Britain, Germany, The Netherlands, Austria, and Switzerland, nine arguments for and against lowering the voting age to sixteen are distinguished and critically assessed. The assessment is based on criteria such as logical consistency and empirical validity. It is argued that most arguments can hardly be defended with these criteria. However, this does not mean that the case for lowering the voting age is weak. This would only be the case if a voting age of eighteen is considered as valuable in its own right.

In their book Diploma Democracy Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille state that positions in the field of politics are dominantly held by people with higher levels of education. Because of diverging political preferences between citizens with a higher level of education and those with a lower one this results in a lack of representation of the latter, they argue. De Lange replies to this position from a perspective of political science.

Some studies find that interethnic propinquity leads to ethnic tolerance, while others conclude that it underlies ethnic conflict. Using data on 50 Dutch cities in 2006 and 2010, this article assesses whether the consequences of interethnic propinquity for votes for Wilders’s PVV – the Dutch anti-immigrant party par excellence – are conditional on the economic and cultural urban contexts in which these contacts take place. In line with the ‘conflict hypothesis’ it is found that a higher level of interethnic propinquity leads to more support for the PVV in cities with a high level of unemployment and an intolerant cultural climate (as measured by the bohemian index and the gay-scene index), whereas the relationship is reverse in cities with low unemployment levels and a tolerant cultural climate (corroborating the ‘contact hypothesis’).