The Political Representation of Left-Nationalist Voters

There is widespread agreement among scholars that political competition in Western Europe is multidimensional in nature. Most existing studies at the very least distinguish an economic from a cultural dimension of conflict. However, while large segments of the population are found to combine egalitarian and nationalist attitudes, parties adopting that ideological stance are exceedingly rare, if not completely absent. This has implications for the political representation of these so-called ‘left-nationalist’ voters and, more specifically, for their evaluations of the legitimacy of the representative system. In this paper, we put these expectations to the test using the 2017 Dutch Parliamentary Election Study. We show that evaluations of representative democracy vary for different combinations of egalitarian and nationalist attitudes. The findings shed further light on the link between substantive and symbolic representation and, more generally, on the functioning of representative democracy in the Netherlands.