BBB is the most village party, don’t think so

ANPEan election board for the Provincial Council elections

NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 07:59

Of the national parties participating in the Provincial Council elections, BBB is by far the most rooted in the villages. An analysis of all candidate lists shows that half of the candidates live in a village with less than 5000 inhabitants. Only 13 percent of BBB candidates come from a large city with more than 50,000 inhabitants. Competitor CDA appears to be considerably less connected to the countryside: 36 percent come from a small village, 21 percent from the big city.

The party with the most ‘urban’ candidates is Denk: 84 percent live in a city with more than 50,000 inhabitants, only one candidate comes from a small village. The Party for the Animals and Volt are also strongly city-bound, with respectively 60 and 59 percent candidates from a large city. D66, which is often accused of representing the Randstad elite, has relatively few candidates from large cities at 37 percent.

NOS

In the parliamentary elections, you can vote for 6366 candidates, divided over 45 parties or party combinations, from Alliance to VVD. Twice as many men as women participate, but this cannot be determined exactly, because the gender of the candidate is unknown for about 10 percent. Forum for Democracy does not mention first names and gender, so we do not know whether the 385 candidates are men or women.

Of the national parties, the Party for the Animals is the only party with more women than men on the lists. At Volt, men and women are in balance and at GroenLinks the difference is not great either, but it is slightly to the disadvantage of women.

It will come as no surprise that the conservative Christian SGP is the most male party (93 percent male). What is more remarkable is that the still young party JA21 is such a male stronghold: 88 percent men against 12 percent women. The PVV is also fairly one-sided with 79 percent men, just like Denk (78 percent). All other parties are roughly around the national ratio of two thirds men, one third women.

First names

As in the municipal elections, the traditional Dutch first names dominate the lists of candidates. Of the 6366 candidates, 115 are named Jan. Another 81 men are called Jan-something else: Jan-Jaap, Jan-Willem, Jan-Dirk and so on. Peter is second with 81 candidates, followed by Henk, Hans and Wim.

NOS

The most common female name is Petra: she is in 25th place with 25 candidates. The highest-ranked foreign name is Ali, but of the five Alis, only three have a migrant background. The other two are presumably women with a Dutch background.

For the sake of completeness, we also looked at the surnames. The top three consists of De Vries (38x), Bakker (34x) and De Jong (33x).

The elections for the Provincial Council are therefore on March 15. What are the provinces about, what themes are there to choose from? A short explanation:

#PS23: a crash course on Provincial States in 4 minutes

Accountability

The database of candidates was created with the cooperation of the Open State Foundation and was analyzed by data journalist Just Vervaart. Not all parties specify the gender of the candidates. This is only the case for 67 percent of the candidates. An estimate of the gender has therefore been made for parties that do provide the first names of the candidates. In this way, the gender of more than 90 percent of the candidates has been determined. Forum for Democracy does not mention first name and gender and could therefore not be included in this analysis.

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