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Fortuyn's Legacy: Party System Change in the Netherlands

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Comparative European Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

This article argues that the entrance of the Lijst Pim Fortuyn in the Dutch Parliament after the May 2002 elections shows the relevance of the Schattschneider–Mair thesis of party system change. Fortuyn introduced a new line of conflict that restructured party competition in the Netherlands. The introduction of this new line of conflict has transformed the Dutch party system abruptly. The Dutch case differs from many other west European countries in which the rise of a successful radical right-wing populist party has changed the party system gradually.

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Notes

  1. On a left–right scale, the right-wing position of the LPF on the immigration question and the party's left-wing views on neo-liberal economic reform would simply cancel each other out.

  2. The notion of an ideological triangle is not new. Pappi has used the triangle as a model for explaining the German party system. According to Pappi ‘one should give up the simple framework of a left–right dimension underlying the German party system. I suggest instead the model of an isosceles triangle, where the point represents the three parties …’ (Pappi, 1984, 12). The three parties in Pappi's triangle also belong to the socialist, liberal and christian party families.

  3. See Pellikaan (2002, 2004) and Pellikaan et al. (2003) for the details of the positions of parties in the Dutch triangle.

  4. Party positions in this figure are based on content analysis of the party manifestos of 2002 by the confrontational method. In these manifestos, the political parties lay down how they wish to change society, and what they wish to keep. Based on these policy proposals, all parties were assigned scores on a number of pre-selected issues (10 issues for the economic dimension and 10 issues for the cultural dimension). For each issue, three scores were possible: +1, 0 and −1. On the economic dimension, parties scored positively on an issue by making a statement in favour of a free market economy, negatively by making a statement opposing a free market. On the cultural dimension, parties scored positively on an issue by making a statement indicating support for the monocultural society, negatively by making a statement in favour of the multicultural society. Finally, for each dimension the scores were added up, thereby representing the parties’ policy positions. The coding of the parties and the correspondence between a party position and the pages in the election programme can be found in Pellikaan, 2004.

  5. Before Fortuyn founded his LPF, he started his political career with LN. He was expelled from this party because he was deemed too extreme.

  6. The decline in the success of the LPF was the consequence of the party's loss of its political leader, as well as internal conflict within the party.

  7. The configuration of parties in our political space closely resembles the spatial positions measured by other scholars. The correlation between our configuration and the one that can be constructed on the basis of Benoit and Laver's (2006) recent expert survey is very high (0.95), and the correlation with the party scores obtained in the Dutch election survey of 2002 is also very high (0.92). This means that position of the parties in Figure 5 remains by and large the same, irrespective whether their location is based on the data of the expert survey, the placement of parties by voters or by our confrontational method of content analysis of the manifestos.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Peter Mair, Joop van Holsteyn and the reviewers of CEP for their suggestions and comments on earlier versions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, University of Leiden, P.O. Box 9555, Leiden, 2300 RB, The Netherlands

    Huib Pellikaan

  2. Department of Political Science, University of Antwerp, Prinsstraat 13, Antwerp, 2000, Belgium

    Sarah L de Lange

  3. Nijmeegs-Instituut voor Sociaal-Cultureel Onderzoek (NISCO), Postbust 9104, Nijmegen, 6500 HE, The Netherlands

    Tom van der Meer

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  1. Huib Pellikaan
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Pellikaan, H., Lange, S. & Meer, T. Fortuyn's Legacy: Party System Change in the Netherlands. Comp Eur Polit 5, 282–302 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.cep.6110097

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