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Elite-Mass Linkages and the European Community

Testing Consensus Explanatory Models

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Democracy, Socialization and Conflicting Loyalties in East and West

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Abstract

In this chapter, two questions are posed and answered: Is there a gap or a widespread consensus about the European Union in the Netherlands between the elites and the masses? How are we to explain any existing gap or areas of consensus between these two groups?

To answer the first question, we conducted a survey among Dutch members of Parliament and performed a secondary analysis with data from Eurobarometer polls of ‘the mass’ public. We observed a consensus between the two sets of findings on most issues and a gap in just two. To explain this resultant consensus and gap, several different models used in the political science literature were tested. Two new models were added to improve our analysis.

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Authors
  1. Henk Dekker
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  2. Rolf Willemse
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Connecticut, Hartford, USA

    Russell F. Farnen (Director and Professor of Political Science) (Director and Professor of Political Science)

  2. Leiden University, The Netherlands

    Henk Dekker (Associate Professor of Empirical Political Science) (Associate Professor of Empirical Political Science)

  3. University of Oldenburg, Germany

    Rüdiger Meyenberg (Professor and Head of Political Science) (Professor and Head of Political Science)

  4. Appalachian State University, USA

    Daniel B. German (Professor of Political Science) (Professor of Political Science)

Copyright information

© 1996 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Dekker, H., Willemse, R. (1996). Elite-Mass Linkages and the European Community. In: Farnen, R.F., Dekker, H., Meyenberg, R., German, D.B. (eds) Democracy, Socialization and Conflicting Loyalties in East and West. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14059-6_16

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