List Pim Fortuyn Research Articles

Mainstream Sell-Outs? How Collaboration with the Radical Right Changes Perceptions of Party Positions on Immigration

AbstractEuropean mainstream right parties are increasingly choosing to include radical right parties in coalition governments or other types of stable and committed cooperation. How does this cooperation affect voters’ perceptions of party positions? This article examines whether coalition signals have a significant impact on voters’ perceptions of the specific policy issues that were at stake in the bargaining process. More specifically, does the issue ownership of the radical right cause voters to perceive mainstream parties as radicalizing on immigration issues pertaining to asylum and multiculturalism? I compare the perceptions of Dutch parties before and after two coalition formations that (formally and informally) involved a radical right party: the coalition with the List Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and the support agreement with the Freedom Party in 2010. Furthermore, I examine the long-term effects of the Danish mainstream right government's reliance on the support of the radical right Danish People's Party in 2001–11.

The Fortuyn Effect revisited: How did the LPF affect the Dutch parliamentary party system?

The List Pim Fortuyn (LPF) is a key example of a family of new right-wing parties that, according to many observers, have had a strong effect on European party systems. This article studies the effect of the entry of the LPF into the Dutch Parliament on the parliamentary party system. The article looks at two aspects of the party system: first, did the LPF affect the issue agenda of the legislature? And second, has the LPF been able to create a new significant line of conflict in the legislature, as Kriesi and Frey and Pellikaan et al observed for the electoral arena? Or, as Van der Brug and Bale have proposed, is the Dutch party system after Fortuyn essentially one-dimensional? The study looks at new, behavioral, data from the Dutch legislature: parliamentary voting behavior and the sponsorship of motions, to answer these questions. It employs Poole's Open Classification method to understand the patterns underlying voting behavior.

Explaining the Electoral Performance of Populist Parties: The Netherlands as a Case Study

This article provides an explanatory framework for the electoral performance of populist parties, using the Netherlands as a case study. The Netherlands is an ideal case, as several populist parties have entered the political scene in recent years with varying levels of electoral success. The most notable cases are the List Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders' Freedom Party. Whereas the former party did not sustain, Geert Wilders has, so far, managed to remain an important force in Dutch politics. The article argues that the performance of populist parties is dependent on a combination of causal conditions: the availability of the electorate, the responsiveness of established parties and the supply of credible populist challengers. As will be argued, especially this latter factor is vital to the (long-term) performance of populist parties. Further research should, therefore, not refrain from taking the agency of populist parties themselves into account.

Tussen establishment en extremisme: populistische partijen in Nederland en Vlaanderen

Populist parties are often associated with extremism. However, the term ‘extremism’ is usually ill-defined and value-laden. Conceptual analysis will help to define populism as well as extremism in a more precise and value-neutral sense. Empirical analysis of the programmes of six Dutch and three Flemish parties suggests that populism does not entail extremism, even if it can be combined with it. The Centre Party and Centre Democrats as well as the Socialist Party and the Flemish Bloc may have displayed extremist as well as populist tendencies at some point. Yet the (more or less) populist parties Liveable Netherlands (Leefbaar Nederland), the List Pim Fortuyn, the Freedom Party, the movement Proud of the Netherlands (Trots op Nederland) and the List Dedecker should not be considered extremist.

Populism in the Netherlands after Fortuyn: Rita Verdonk and Geert Wilders Compared

In the Netherlands, the rise of new parties such as the Lijst Pim Fortuyn (List Pim Fortuyn), the Partij voor de Vrijheid, led by Geert Wilders and the movement Trots op Nederland (Pride of the Netherlands), led by Rita Verdonk, have attracted much attention. In an attempt to interpret and explain the (temporary) advance of these parties, both commentators and political scientists have often used the notion of populism. In most commentaries, however, it remains unclear what exactly the term means and whether it has any explanatory value. The aim of this article is to investigate whether Rita Verdonk and Geert Wilders and their movements may actually be labelled as populist. By discerning the presence of the features of an ideal-typical populism in discourse and performance of both politicians their ‘degree of populism’ is measured. The differences in degree of populism also helps to explain why Geert Wilders and his party proved (thus far) more successful and durable.

Voting LPF: Stratification and the Varying Importance of Attitudes

Large differences exist between socio‐cultural specialists and technocrats in the extent they voted for the List Pim Fortuyn (LPF), showing us that support for the party was aligned by social class. Distinguishing between the two specialist types provided the opportunity to test Kitschelt’s hypothesis on the importance of communicative experiences and capabilities in the labour market and the importance of cultural and economic ethnic threats. Cultural ethnic threat explains social class differences in LPF voting better than economic ethnic threat, though we cannot claim that the latter is of no relevance. We show this using the Dutch sample of the European Social Survey (n = 2,260). Moreover, we show that socio‐political attitudes that affect voting for the LPF do so to a much smaller extent among lower‐educated people and non‐socio‐cultural specialists. The interactions between socio‐political attitudes and education and social class are significant.

‘Women and children first!’ Anti-immigration parties and gender in Norway and the Netherlands

ABSTRACT Immigration, multiculturalism and citizenship policies have deeply divided political parties in Western Europe. In Norway and the Netherlands these divisions have been exploited successfully by radical-right populist parties. Akkerman and Hagelund compare the ideas and policies of the Norwegian Fremskrittspartiet (Progress Party) and the Dutch Lijst Pim Fortuyn (List Pim Fortuyn) with regard to cultural diversity, immigration and citizenship policies. What initially puzzled them was that issues that are normally left out of the radical-right agenda—such as gender equality, liberal family laws and women's participation in the labour market—seem to have been moved centre-stage in the policies and discourses of these parties. This is a development worthy of closer scrutiny. In Norway and the Netherlands, one can observe a general shift away from multiculturalism and a growing emphasis on citizenship and social cohesion. The issue of women's rights seems to provide a key to developing a renewed understanding of the boundaries of cultural diversity in these countries. To what extent have the radical-right parties provoked a rhetorical turn and policy shift towards cultural unity in Norway and the Netherlands, and to what extent are the programmes of these parties based on a defence of liberal values and gender equality?

Understanding the Dutch “No”: The Euro, the East, and the Elite

The Dutch have been counted among the staunchest supporters of European integration ever since the parliamentary ratification of the European Community for Coal and Steel in late 1951. The major political parties—the Christian Democrats (CDA) and its forerunners, the Labor Party (PvdA), and the liberal parties VVD and D66—supported all important European treaties of the past decades. Only the smaller orthodox-Calvinist parties, some smaller left-wing parties, and, more recently, the List Pim Fortuyn (LPF) have opposed these treaties in parliament. This overwhelmingly large support in the Second Chamber of the Dutch parliament included the Treaty of Rome of 2004—the treaty establishing a constitution for Europe. One hundred twenty-eight out of 150 members of parliament favored the ratification of the European Constitution. This article draws on several chapters in Aarts and van der Kolk 2005.

Explaining the Rise of the LPF: Issues, Discontent, and the 2002 Dutch Election

Scholarly accounts of the dramatic breakthrough of the List Pim Fortuyn (LPF) in the 2002 Dutch parliamentary election have emphasized two structural factors behind the success of that party. It has first been argued that the LPF brought a distinct issue profile to the electoral arena, which made it attractive for voters with similar policy views. The second hypothesis, that feelings of discontent with politics also fuelled support for the LPF, remains contested because of the possible endogeneity bias of cynicism attitudes. We re-examine these questions using survey data from the 1998 to 2002 panel of the Dutch Parliamentary Election Study. Our approach’s novelty is to link respondents’ 2002 vote choice to their issue priorities and cynical attitudes as measured in the 1998 wave of the panel. The findings suggest that policy preferences and, to a lesser extent, attitudes of political discontent both contributed to the LPF vote, thus providing support for both interpretations of the rise of this party. These results are consistent with most existing works on non-established party voting which show that new salient political issues and a lack of confidence towards government and politics are fertile ground for these party movements.

Anti-immigration parties and the defence of liberal values: The exceptional case of the List Pim Fortuyn

The radical right parties that have emerged in Western Europe during the past thirty years have sometimes been labelled as anti-liberal. This is a puzzling qualification, considering the fact that the Flemish Block, the Austrian Freedom Party, the Northern League in Italy, the Danish People's Party, the Norwegian Progress Party and, above all, the List Pim Fortuyn have promoted themselves as uncompromising defenders of liberal principles. The leaders of these parties have embraced freedom of expression, separation of church and state, and the equality of men and women to build a case against immigration. Is the defence of liberal values a core concern of these parties or are these parties actually anti-liberal? This paper investigates the relations between populist, nationalist and liberal ideas, focussing on the exceptional case of the LPF.

In the Eye of the Beholder: The Perception of the List Pim Fortuyn and the Parliamentary Elections of May 2002

A commonly heard explanation of the results of the May 2002 parliamentary election is that the vote changes occurred because of a shift to the right within the electorate. Previously published results are summarized here to show that this hypothesis must be rejected. Instead, a second hypothesis is formulated which explains the vote shifts in terms of the new calculations that voters were forced to make when a new, credible party entered the electoral marketplace. The analysis here presents empirical support for this hypothesis by demonstrating that voters were aware of the positions taken by the List Pim Fortuyn (LPF), especially on those issues that Pim Fortuyn had placed at the forefront of the political agenda. Voters clearly saw the LPF as a party of the right on these issues. The positions that are perceived to have been taken by the electorate in the eyes of the voter are as important as the positions taken by the voters themselves in understanding the May 2002 results.