This paper deals with the linkage between changes in the political culture and changes in class-party alignments. First, we investigate how the political culture in Western countries has changed over time. Three views are tested using data on party-manifestos. The first predicts that only new-leftist issues will increase in salience. The second predicts that both new-leftist and new-rightist issues will emerge at the same time. The third, which is empirically corroborated, predicts that first new-leftist issues will emerge followed by a rise in new rightist issues.
Second, we investigate how the emergence of these new issues has affected the traditional class-party alignments. We show that the middle class increasingly votes left-wing as newleftist issues become more important and that the working class increasingly votes rightwing as new-rightist issues become more important. The middle class also appears to alienate from the traditional party of their class as new-rightist issues rise in salience.

This study reports the results of qualitative interviews with 28 extreme right wing activists in Flanders (Belgium). We focus on the (ideological) motives for activism (why did they become active?) and the trajectory followed in becoming active (how did they become active?). The results show that these activists are primarily motivated by ethnic nationalism. All other ideological stands (e.g. rejection of foreigners, authoritarian attitudes and rejection of actual politics in Belgium) seem to be derived from this core of ethnic nationalism. The trajectory followed is primarily one that relates to socialization and continuity: most interviewees grew up in a family in which nationalism was of primordial importance. A minority of respondents, however, followed trajectories that refer to compliance or to conversion (deprivation).

On December 1st 2005, Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt proposed the creation of a ‘United States of Europe’: a core group of Eurozone countries surrounded by a confederation of states. A European social-economic policy, technology cooperation, a common justice and security policy, a common diplomacy and army will make the EU stronger and less patronizing, said Verhofstadt. In this article, we look back over the main political and economic developments in the EU in 2005. This year will probably go down in EU history as the year in which the constitutional treaty was rejected. Yet, as demonstrated, despite a feeling of total malaise, a number of knotty dossiers came to a conclusion and new initiatives were taken.

This paper deals with the electoral and political consequences of urban region formation. The electoral geography of new political parties differs substantially from that of traditional ones. New parties are mainly successful in different parts of urban regions. The declining traditional parties have rather a regional pattern, although some of them show new spatial patterns too. These developments are interpreted in the context of the cleavage theory, in which old and new cleavages are linked with a different spatiality. Following the Anglo-Saxon literature an increasing process of polarisation is hypothesised between the welfare state orientated city and a neo-conservative and neo-liberal suburban fringe. This article examines and proofs the existence of these processes in the urban region of Brussels by means of individual-level and ecological electoral data.