During the Belgian legislative elections on 13 october 1985, the Centre Liégeois d'Etudes de l'Opinion, University of Liège, polled voters leaving the voting booths. The objective was to determine the characteristics of electors of the various parties according to the usual criteria of identification. The motives and wishes of the voters were also recorded. The poll consisted of a representative sample of one thousand French speaking voters in the province of Liège.Most of the article presents the results obtained by cross-tabulating (...) various identifying and motive variables with the political parties. In this way, we measure and demonstrate the relative importance of all the independent variables on the distribution of votes, except for sex which seems have little influence. (shrink)

This article has two goals: 1° to illustrate certain methods which are completely new in their application and ; 2° to communicate and analyse the results obtained by these methods.The first part of this study concerns the application of a mathematical model to the nominal votes in the French-speaking electoral college for the European elections of June 1984. The statistical categories of the log linear model, logically translated, permit to isolate and to measure the effects of list, position, and personality (...) of each candidate.The second part of the article studies in more detail the results for the candidates Happart and Nols. This provides the occasion to introduce and to illustrate a method which permits the measurement of the nature of the performance of each candidate in terms of votes and percentages. The application of this method to the totality of French - and Flemish -speaking candidates, with an interpretation of the significance of themeasures, forms the last part of this study. (shrink)

At first view, the methodology of survey research may seem rather unsuitable to the study of such "holistic" phenomena as collective and social identities. That difficulty vanishes - at least partly - as soon as we consider social identity as the link between the individual and his belongings, as does the "social identity theory", developed from the work of Taffel and Turner. From there on, survey research may prove to be a useful device to cope with some main characteristics of (...) social identity: mainly its variability among groups and classes within a same society and its particular sensitivity to socio-political contexts. Survey research, combined with the social identity theory may help to test historical assumptions at a macro-social level. It may also give some ''flesh" and some additional realism to the micro-theories of social behaviour, which are too often limited by their conception of a strictly rational and interested agent. (shrink)

At first sight, the ecologist voters in Wallonia present some remarkable characteristics : they are much younger, better educated, less religious and less interested in polities than the 'average' voter.When one constructs three- or four ways cross-tables, the high level of education among ecologist voters appears mainly as a 'by-product' of their very low average age. On the contrary, general interest for politics and religious attitudes maintain an effect on their own. So the model that fits the data best is (...) the one that retains those three variables.Those characteristics bring some support to the idea that ecologist vote is mainly a protest vote. On the other side, it may be considered that Ecolo contributes to maintain in the 'electoral field' a potentialy abstentionist population. (shrink)