Waarneming van het stelsel van Nederlandse politieke partijen

Abstract

It is commonly assumed that the Dutch electorate views its political parties in terms of a progressive-conservative and a denominational-nondenominational division. This assumption was tested by interviewing a sample of 126 voters in a Dutch municipality. Respondents were asked to rank 12 political parties according to preference. Additional data were collected, a.o. progressiveness, frequency of church attendance, authoritarianism. Because of non-response and incomplete ranking the rank orders of 9 parties (N _ 46) were used. These data were analysed by means of a principal components analysis of the matrix of product-moment correlations between the parties. After varimax rotation of the two first components individual component scores were calculated. By means of additional data the two components, contributing 28% and 23% to the total variance, could be safely interpreted as representing a progressiveness dimension and a denominational dimension respectively.