Simon Otjes
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Simon Otjes
@simonotjes.bsky.social

Political Scientist | Associate Professor of Dutch Politics at Leiden University | Editor Acta Politica | Political Parties | Voting | Parliaments | Interest Groups | Electoral Systems | Local Politics

Political science 71%
Business 9%
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10 Predictions about the coming five years:

1) All Palestinians will be forced to leave Gaza by the Israelis with US support. It will be occupied by Israeli colonists.

I could only smile and say: "No, we had not proven that yet in comparative politics but now we have".

"OK, so now you have showed that conservative parties vote more similarly on migration and differently from progressive parties. You did not already know this, I can see that when I read the news paper."

I can remember after all methodological and theoretical work, all the coding and data wrangling, I presented the paper at @polscileiden.bsky.social and a dear colleague who works on International Relations raised her hand and asked something like:

We wanted to offer a method that allows one to integrate all these different ideas into one analysis to really evaluate to what extent and under what conditions the coalition-opposition division, ideological considerations and ant-elitism matter more.

To sell the paper we focused on the division between anti-elitist ('populist') parties and apparent unclarity in the literature but that idea is not really the reason we wrote this.

b) based on the paper of Tom and me: on legislation anti-elitist parties vote differently from other parties.
c) based on my work in the EP: on specific issues (in the paper we look at new cultural, economics and EU issues) specific dimensions matter more.

The idea is that we now look at different characteristics of votes to see which features activate which divisions
a) based on the original paper of Harmen and me: opposition proposals elicit coalition-opposition voting in particular coalition unity.

This required quite some coding from Luc who did not know R before we decided that he would not just replicate Harmen's method but actually build on it further. Luc wrote a solid master thesis with me which we have now build on for this article.

For a while these ideas were separate but when Luc Vorsteveld wrote his master thesis with me, we developed the idea of bringing these streams together: the basic idea of the paper is what we originally dubbed "triadic" method but we renamed proposal-specific dyadic method.

Harmen and I worked on bunch of papers using the dyadic method in the EP. We looked at voting on institutional matters, foreign policy, trade (the latter two with @wolfgangwagner.bsky.social). We showed that on specific issues specific dimensions matter. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Party‐Political Contestation of European Trade Policy. An Analysis of Roll Call Votes in the European Parliament
We examine the dimensionality of the EU external relations space by analysing trade policy votes in the European Parliament (1999–2019). As it contains the EU's full geographical and ideological dive...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Harmen developed a way to look at voting in the European Parliament for his dissertation: The dyadic method. This offered a better way to look at voting patterns by looking at the extent to which two MPs (dyads) vote the same allowing for a regression based approach. dare.uva.nl/search?ident...
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In 2019, Tom and I showed that populist parties actually do vote similarly: on bills, which they vote against more often. We did not address this glaring difference between these two papers. They were just different projects. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
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I did write more papers on parliamentary voting, not trying to offer some grand theory but showing specific patterns. In 2015 @tomlouwerse.nl and I showed that ideological divisions are more important in understanding populist voting than their shared populism. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
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Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
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So in 2009 I wrote a paper with Harmen van der Veer about disentangling voting patterns. Essentially we proposed that the coalition-opposition dominates votes initiated by the opposition but not in proposals by the coalition. That paper was rejected. I focused on other projects but the idea stuck

Anyone who studies parliamentary voting in a parliamentary system knows that the coalition-opposition divide plays a major role and that if you do not account for this the votes will reflect this division.

This paper is about parliamentary voting (specifically in the Netherlands). I have been thinking about this since my dissertation where I used parliamentary voting to measure party positions.

I am incredibly proud that this paper with Luc Vorsteveld is out! I have been thinking about this paper in some form since 2009 (!). It integrates a bunch of work I have done before with dear friends and colleagues www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Rebels in the house: Do anti-elitist parties vote differently? | Political Science Research and Methods | Cambridge Core
Rebels in the house: Do anti-elitist parties vote differently?
www.cambridge.org

Maar die hogere ambitie stond toch in hun programma?

Kan je dat aan de hand van een voorstel illustreren?

Maar even zeer zijn er oppositiepartijen als Markuszower voor wie het dan weer gunstig is om hun constructiviteit te tonen door tegen zo'n voorstel te stemmen.

Oppositie stemmen vrijwel altijd volgens hun verkiezingsprogramma. Dat geldt zeker voor CU en SGP. Mogelijk dat JA21 opportunistischer is (zoals ze ook bij de AOW-stemming waren).

haha, dat is ontegenzeggelijk waar

Je vraag is wat als GL-PvdA en PVV een amendement indienen om het eigen risico te halveren?
GL-PvdA (20), PVV (19), FVD (7), BBB (4), DENK (3), PvdD (3), SP (3), 50PLUS (2) & Markuszower (7) zouden dat steunen = 68. Maar niet D66 (26), VVD (20), CDA (18), SGP (3), en SGP (3) & Volt (1) niet = 82.

gaat niet gebeuren superkostbaar

Nog een aanpassing. Nu met de staatssecretaris OCW. De VVD heeft nu drie bewindslieden in domein sociaal-onderwijs-zorg, tegenover twee van D66 en een van het CDA. De sloopkogel door de verzorgingsstaat komt van de VVD.

he ja je hebt gelijk

aangeven dat ze veel met elkaar te maken hebben

Figuur moet iets anders omdat VRO weer onder BZK valt

Je hebt gelijk!

J&V ipv A&M. en een minister meer (W&P)