The Listening Ear Understanding Listening in the Context of Political Representation from the Perspective of Politicians and Citizens
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2024-09-17
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en
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Abstract
“P.v.d.A. is een klote, klote klote klote, klote, partij”, sent by “ik” living in the Adrianastraat in Rotterdam. During the campaign for the municipal elections of 1990, the Dutch Labour Party (Partij van de Arbeid, PvdA) solicited two million citizens with the slogan ‘'De PvdA luistert voor, op en na 21 maart [1990] naar u!' to write them their thoughts, opinions and suggestions to the party through distributed postcards featuring a picture of a ‘Listening Ear’.1 As the words of the anonymous person writing to the party show, many of these responses were critical, while some were even plain aggressive.
Years before Pim Fortuyn brought populism to the political center stage in 2002, there was an increasing discussion about the ‘crisis of democratic representation’ gripping countries in western Europe, including the Netherlands.2 As an assembly of the four think tanks of the major parties (D66, VVD, PvdA, CDA) called ‘Thorbecke’ shows, this discussion centered on the role political parties played in democratic societies. Although opinions about the posed question - “are political parties out of date?” - differed, the scholars were unanimous in their criticism that parties had changed from mass parties with a strong connection to the people they aimed to represent, to cadre parties staffed by a small political elite and no longer ‘responsive’ to the people they aimed to represent.3 Nevertheless, the party organizations concluded, (perhaps unsurprisingly) “het valt wel mee met die oude politieke partijen.”4
The above critiques on the representative function of political parties were exemplary of a wider trend in the Dutch public debate. In the late 1980s a slow but steady stream of articles, books and opinion pieces started to appear on this topic, one more alarmist than the other, fostering a perception of a crisis of representation.5 Dutch historian Piet de Rooij wrote about this period: “[boeken verschenen over de staat van politieke partijen,] niet zelden met een titel waarin het woord ‘einde’ voorkwam, slechts voor de vorm nog voorzien van een vraagteken. Zowel kiezers als gekozenen[, zo klonk de analyse,] dwaalden radeloos rond in een ontzuild landschap.”6
This period has been typified by the French political scientist Bernard Manin as the transition away from ‘party democracy’ to ‘audience democracy’.7 Since the 1970s, the old and 1 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (IISG), Archief PvdA inv. nr. 2042-2043 ‘Stukken betreffende de evaluatie van verkiezingen, waaronder stukken van de Evaluatiecommissie verkiezingen 1986, en stukken betreffende reacties op verkiezingsuitslagen, waaronder ingevulde reactieformulieren 'Ons belangrijkste partijorgaan' met afbeelding van het luisterend oor van de PvdA in het kader van de actie 'De PvdA luistert voor, op en na 21 maart (1990) naar u!'.
2 See among others: Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter Democracy - Politics in an Age of Distrust (Cambridge, 2010); H. Kaal, ‘The Voice of the People, Communicative Practices of Popular Political Engagement in the Netherlands, 1950s 1960s’ 184-185 in: J.H. W. Dietz Nachf (ed.) Archiv für Sozialgeschichte band 58 (2018); Piet de Rooij, Ons Stipje op de Wereldkaert – De politieke cultuur van modern Nederland (2020).
3 Piet H. de Jong, ‘Het valt wel mee met die oude politieke partijen’ in: Nederlands Dagblad of the 27th of March 1993, p. 1.
4 Ibidem.
5 Herman de Liagre Böhl, Remieg Aerts, Piet de Rooij and Henk te Velde, Land van kleine gebaren – een politieke geschiedenis van Nederland 1780-2012 (2013), 359.
6 Ibidem, 359.
7 Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge, 1997), 193-234.
Pieter Beutler s1008536
15-08-2024
stable representative system of party democracy, which had dominated western politics for most of the 20th century and had been typified by a relationship of trust between voters and mass-parties based on loyalty, was being replaced by the new system of ‘audience democracy’. Within audience democracy, the relationship between represented and representative is unstable, and voters change party rapidly. Politicians were being elected more on their personality than their affiliation with a political party and politicians listened more to the broader electorate through polling than their own members. 8 This phenomenon is also examined by the political scientists Richard Katz and Peter Mair, who analyzed a shift in party organization in democratic countries. In their analysis, the ‘cartel party’ emerged after the decline of the mass-party model. In this new party organization, the American political scientists claim, political parties had lost their traditional connection with civil society specifically and with the people in general.9 At the same time, just as Manin states, cartel parties make a more direct appeal to the general voting public, rather than communicating to their core supporters. Faced with this unstable relationship, parties, Katz and Mair argue, started looking to the state for resource in a collusive manner with other political parties.10
This study examines the way political parties, at this crossroads of a perceived representative crisis, audience democracy and the ascension of the cadre- or even cartel party, sought ways to bridge the perceived representative divide and the ways in which ordinary citizens responded to these attempts. As the ‘Listening Ear’ action by the PvdA shows, this was often done by attempting to ‘listen better’ to ordinary citizens by initiating direct contact with citizens, without the intermediary of journalists, pollsters or the ballot box.11 The Listening Ear, with its slogan: “De PvdA doet geen beloftes die na de verkiezingen weer worden ingetrokken [en luistert] voor, op en na [de verkiezingsdatum] naar u!” can be considered a prime example of this pattern. Thus, this research examines how political parties incorporated ‘listening’ to ordinary citizens in their political and electoral strategies and places these attempts in the context of political representation. Using the Listening Ear action and the hundreds of responses to it by citizens as a case study, this study examines both sides of the representative divide: the PvdA and the people it aimed to represent. By looking at how the PvdA attempted to incorporate listening in the way it practiced politics and how ordinary citizens responded to this ‘new’ method, this research will thus provide new insights into how ideas about political representation were expressed in the Netherlands around 1990.
8 Ibidem.
9 Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair, ‘Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy’ in: Party Politics 1:1 (1995), 5-28, here 21-23.
10 Ibidem, 1.
11 Paul Lucardie and Gerrit Voerman, Populisten in de Polder, (Amersfoort, 2012), 37, 43.
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