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What? The central objective of this thesis is to identify determinants of candidate turnover in list-PR electoral systems. Why? Candidate turnover figures allow to map the degree of party change or stability, the extent to which political parties are open to new and inexperienced candidates, or the level of intraparty competition between candidates. Therefore understanding candidate turnover provides a crucial insight in the recruitment behaviour and nomination strategies of political parties, which are essential aspects of any substantial democracy. How? Building further on the seminal model of political recruitment developed by Norris and Lovenduski, I identify a number of party variables and election contextual variables that affect the supply and demand of new candidates on the parties’ lists. By means of a multilevel analysis of political party list renewal rates within 10 list-PR systems I contribute to this newly developing literature and aim to improve our understanding of the dynamics in candidate recruitment in general, and candidate turnover in particular. For this purpose I build an original dataset that contains 3344 electoral lists of represented parties in established democracies. Statistical approach? As I only have relatively limited higher-level units – electoral lists are clustered within 86 parties, within 52 national and European elections – I perform a fractional logit model with restricted iterative generalised least squares estimation (RIGLS). Inference is based on (multiple) Wald testing. Such I can have efficient estimators and accommodate for approaching the likelihood function via a Taylor Series. For robustness sake I compare these frequentist results with those of a Marcov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimated beta regression within the Bayesian tradition.

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What determines public officials’ support for technocratic decision-making? Governments’ increasingly rely on technically trained experts for the effective and efficient functioning of the public sector. This reliance has increased due to the outbreak SARS-CoV-2 virus and the subsequent measures to contain the pandemic. The formulation and implementation of technocratic policy measures taken by experts depends on public officials. However, we know very little about what determines public officials’ attitudes toward technocracy and their support for technocratic decision-making. To the best of our knowledge, no large-scale country-comparative analysis has been conducted in order to examine public officials’ attitudes toward technocratic decision-making before. In this study, we examine public officials’ support for technocratic decision-making using a generalized linear mixed-effects analysis (GLMM). We examine the association between public officials’ age, gender, education, trust in representative institutions, satisfaction with government, isolation of bureaucracy, and governments’ openness to engage with the public on the likelihood of average public officials’ support for technocratic decision-making (versus no support for technocratic decision-making) across m = 23 European countries. Data on n = 44,566 respondents, among them n = 16,099 public officials are obtained from the European Values Study (EVS), the Quality of Government (QoG) Expert Survey II, and the Bertelsmann Stiftung Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI). First, our results indicate that on average, public officials’ are significantly less likely to support technocratic decision-making than ordinary non-public officials are and that the effects of public sector employment on the likelihood of average respondents’ support for technocratic decision-making. Second, find that public officials’ support for technocratic decision-making varies significantly across countries. Our results indicate that public officials’ age, educational attainment, trust in representative institutions, satisfaction with government, and government’s openness to the public have a significant negative association with public officials’ support for technocracy, while bureaucratic isolation does not appear to significantly affect public officials’ support for technocracy. At the same time, female public officials appear more supportive of technocratic decision-making than men do. We find tacit support for the assertion that recent public management reforms could have increased public officials’ support for technocratic decision-making in a number of countries. The results underline the importance of political attitudes on support for technocracy. For public officials, classic democratic criteria such as popular consent and rule by a democratically elected government remain important. The inverse relationship between trust in representative institutions and satisfaction with government with public officials’ support for technocratic decision-making indicates that technocracy does not pose a threat to healthy democratic societies. Furthermore, we argue that technocratic preferences reflect respondents’ structural rejection of democratic decision-making as a whole, not the dissatisfaction with how a particular government functions. It is therefore unlikely that the SARS-CoV-2 virus poses an additional threat to the structural integrity of democracy in Europe.

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This research has sought to explain voting behaviour in Flanders from a cultural voting perspective, using the European Social Survey rounds 5-9. The cultural voting perspective is usually operationalized by education as a proxy or a dichotomy related to attitudes regarding personal freedom and social order. Attention can be made whether these attitudes are dichotomous at all. The research investigated the potential disentanglement of the cultural voting perspective into two value orientations: authoritarianism and traditional moralism. The results show that the disentanglement can be empirically made by testing these concepts on their relationship towards religious orthodoxy. The model explaining voting behaviour was insufficient to properly fit the data. Changes in results over time did show potential hints falsifying the idea that the disentanglement provides additional insights when it comes to understanding voting behaviour in Flanders.