Meindert Fennema

This article tries to answer two questions. The first is whether capitalist class formation is now taking place at a transnational level; the second is what regime of corporate governance was becoming dominant in the last quarter of the 20th century. The answers given are based on a comparison of the networks of interlocking directorates among the 176 largest corporations in the world economy as of 1976 and 1996. The analysis suggests that from the 1970s to the 1990s an Atlantic business system developed. However, Japanese firms were not integrated into this network while the European Union was indeed creating a European business community. The research lends support to the hypothesis that the network has become less a device for domination and control and more a device for building hegemony. This also suggests that corporate governance is increasingly based on exit strategies rather than on voice as has been common in continental European contexts.

In this article we address the question whether or not the votes for anti–immigrant parties can be considered as protest votes. We define protest votes by the motives underlying electoral choices, building on earlier research done by Tillie (1995) and Van der Eijk & Franklin (1996). That research showed that ideological proximity and party size are the best predictors of party preference. On this basis we designed a typology of motives for party choice and how these motives would manifest themselves empirically. Analyzing the 1994 elections for the European Parliament for seven political systems we show that anti–immigrant parties attract no more protest votes than other parties do, with only one exception: the Dutch Centrumdemocraten. Voting for anti–immigrant parties is largely motivated by ideological and pragmatic considerations, just like voting for other parties. In addition, (negative) attitudes towards immigrants have a stronger effect on preferences for anti–immigrant parties than on preference for other parties. Social cleavages and attitudes towards European unification are of minor importance as determinants of preferences for anti–immigrant parties. The overall conclusion is that a rational choice model of electoral behavior has strong explanatory power for party preferences in general, but also for the support for anti–immigrant parties in particular.