Dus zelf beelden lekken van een zogenaamde drone die eigenlijk een politiehelikopter bleek te zijn?
En dat is dan onze minister van defensie?!?
Alleen in een bananenrepubliek kan zo iemand minister blijven.
#pano
Goed dat @stafaerts.be dit tot op de bodem zal uitspitten! 🙏
@groen.be

Hoe groot was de dreiging en waarom wees Defensie naar Rusland? Pano vindt geen bewijs van vijandige drones boven België | VRT NWS Nieuws Een half jaar na de dronecrisis zijn er nog altijd geen bewijzen van vijandige drones boven België. Dat blijkt uit onderzoek van Pano. Ook onderzoek in andere Europese landen naar vijandige drones lev...

Wie had dat ooit durven denken zeg, dat visa-fraude Theo de vriendjespolitiek organiseert in defensie.

www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/20...

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🙏 I thank everyone who gave feedback on this and previous versions of the article.

I am also very grateful to Michael Jankowski and @simonotjes.bsky.social for providing a Python script and support to analyse the party manifestos.

💡 Takeaways:
👉 Local parties are strategic actors making rational choices about which issues to emphasise and de-emphasise.
👉 Contrary to the frequently heard criticism by independent local lists branches of national parties do not act as out of touch subordinates.

🔍 What do I find?
The explanatory regression analysis demonstrates that both the issue salience of the national party organisation and place-based conditions, such as crime and unemployment, drive local parties' issue salience.

🔍 What do I find?
Based on the descriptive data it appears that the local branches put more emphasis on the issues their national party owns.

🌍 I study local parties in 36 municipalities in Flanders, Belgium.
📄 I measure emphasis on 17 policy issues in 262 local election manifestos.
🖥️ The manifestos were automatically classified at the sentence level using supervised machine learning.

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This article therefore examines the extent to which issue salience is determined by the national party ideology and place-based municipal conditions.

😊😔 This is a highly pertinent question, because local party branches are "Janus-faced" organisations that must balance two roles: acting as agents for their national party while simultaneously serving as actors within the municipal political arena.

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Although issue salience patterns are extensively examined at the national level, we know surprisingly little about local parties' issue salience.

Research has yet to fully explain the key factors that determine which issues are emphasised and de-emphasised.

😀 Very excited about my new article in Party Politics: "Determined by place or party? Issue salience in local election manifestos"

📖 Read it here in full: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

or this short thread 🧵👇

New #OpenAccess -

"Beyond Numbers: Ideological Motivations in Local Coalition Formation in Flanders" - cup.org/4cqqOF4

by @rafreuse.bsky.social & @martingross.bsky.social

#FirstView

🙏 Thanks to my academic bestie @martingross.bsky.social for the outstanding collaboration.

We are also grateful to the editors and reviewers for the valuable comments and smooth publication process.

And finally thanks to everyone who gave feedback on an earlier draft of this article!

💡 Takeaway: Ideology plays a limited - though not negligible - role, and other factors like the cordon sanitaire are very important too.

👉 Preference tangentiality alone does not predict coalition formation. However, it does matter in interaction with policy distance: among ideologically similar parties, coalitions are more likely when parties emphasise different issues.

🔍 What do we find?
👉 Left-right proximity does increase the likelihood of coalition formation but this effect disappears once Vlaams Belang is excluded.

2️⃣ Preference tangentiality - the extent to which parties emphasise different issues - is high.

Parties with diverging issue salience are actually compatible coalition partners because they can engage in logrolling.

We are the first to test this at the local level.

In our article we test two policy-seeking theories.

We argue that coalitions are more likely to form when:
1️⃣ Policy distance on the general, economic, and/or cultural left-right dimension between parties is small

Does ideology matter to coalition formation at the local level?

In our new article in @govandopp.bsky.social, @martingross.bsky.social and I explore this question by analysing coalition building across 30 municipalities in Flanders.

🧵

In tien jaar tijd verschoof 16 miljard euro van arbeid naar kapitaal De Belgische lonen hebben de afgelopen tien jaar geen gelijke tred gehouden met de economische groei. De kloof tussen beide is aangegroeid tot 15,8 miljard euro. “De verdeling van de geproduceerde rijkdom is radicaal veranderd.”

De vakbonden komen terecht op straat.

Het deel van de welvaartscreatie dat naar lonen gaat is stelselmatig gedaald.

Bovendien is 2/3e van de daling in het loonaandeel te verklaren door de relatieve afname van de socialezekerheidsbijdragen waardoor pensioenen etc. moeilijker te financieren worden.

[OUT] 'Les élections locales du 13 octobre 2024 en Wallonie et à Bruxelles. Une offre politique resserrée face à des dynamiques divergentes ?', nouvel ouvrage coordonné par Caroline Close et Simon Geshef, chercheurs à SciencePo ULB (Cevipol), avec Jehan Bottin et Min Reuchamps, publié aux PUL

Wie heeft de formatie gewonnen en verloren? - StukRoodVlees Als er een coalitieakkoord gepresenteerd wordt, bladeren de echte nerds naar de bijlagen met de begrotingstabellen. Papier is geduldig: fractievoorzitters kunnen pijnlijke maatregelen verbloemen in pr...

Wie heeft de formatie gewonnen? Wie heeft de formatie verloren? Ik dook in de financiële tabellen om te zien dat D66 een veel kleiner deel van hun beloften hebben gerealiseerd dan de VVD stukroodvlees.nl/wie-heeft-de...

Check out the full article: authors.elsevier.com/a/1mP2dxRaZr...

Key takeaway: Even at the municipal level, ideological party competition plays an important role in shaping voter choice.

We show that the importance voters assign to environment and safety is significantly associated with the emphasis those issues receive from the local party they support. However, no effect was found for the issue of education.

We find that the left-right position of voters is significantly related to the position of the local party they voted for: more right-wing voters vote for more right-wing parties.

We test proximity and issue salience voting in the 2012 & 2018 local elections in Flanders (Belgium). We link exit poll data with local party manifestos, focusing on left-right positions and the importance attached to environment, safety, and education.

Ideology is seen as a key driver of voting behaviour in national elections. However, what about the local level, where politics is frequently described as less ideological? In this paper we study whether voters' preferences align with the manifesto of the local party they support.

📢 New publication out in Electoral Studies!

Do voters care about ideology in local elections? Studying the 2012 & 2018 Flemish local elections, @dieterstiers.bsky.social and I find they do.

A little thread 🧵

Only a few days left to submit a paper proposal!