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In The Netherlands, the Socialistische Partij is a socialist party, founded in 1974, entered parliament in 1994, and presently one of the 4th largest party in parliament and the 3rd largest by members. The Partij voor de Dieren is a small party that has been represented in parliament since 2006, on an animal rights and animal welfare platform.

I have the impression that for all issues not directly related to animal rights and animal welfare, the Partij voor de Dieren agrees with the Socialistische Partij. And even for animal rights issues, quite often the Socialistische Partij and the Partij voor de Dieren agree.

Is this impression accurate? From parliamentary voting records, what are the most significant platform differences between the two parties, if any?

Of course, there are differences in style, focus, strategy, etc., but my question is limited to actual parliamentary voting records.

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  • One point: From the 2017 stemwijzer I remember PvdD favours a higher tax on meat and SP does not.
    – gerrit
    Commented Mar 17, 2017 at 14:11
  • watstemthetparlement.nl has some searchable-y voting records. Out of the 24,765 bills that the PvdD voted for, we see that the SP voted the same as PvvD in about 86% of the case. So yeah, they're pretty similar. Actually looking for differences in voting patterns is a lot of manual labour (too much for an answer here, sorry), so I can't answer that based on actual voting records.
    – user11249
    Commented Apr 22, 2017 at 21:25

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A good way of comparing this is by comparing voting records. partijgedrag.nl has a comparison matrix in which you select one party and compare similarity with other parties on a large number of categories. When selecting the Socialist Party, you immediately see which party is the most similar overall. As you may have guessed, it is the PvdD.

Since the matrix breaks votes down by category, we can actually go into investigate a bit further in which categories the most difference occurs. There are 17 categories in total and the similarity per category ranges from 80% to 92%. Unfortunately, I cannot link to the categories individually as they don't have dedicated URLs. The way it works is that you click on the percentages in the first column and then it shows the votes in that category. The votes seem to be fairly recent, ranging from 2009 until 2018.

The following categories are the most similar (90+%):

Migratie en Integratie (migration and integration): 92%, Internationaal (international): 91%, Onderwijs en wetenschap (education and science): 91%, Recht (law): 90%, Zorg en gezondheid (healthcare and health): 91%

Then slightly less (though still very) similar (85-89%):

Openbare orde en veiligheid (public order and safety): 88%, Sociale zekerheid (social security): 87%, Huisvesting (housing): 87%, Bestuur (governance): 86%, Economie (economy) 86%, Financiën (finance): 86%, Landbouw (agriculture): 86%

Then the categories on which the parties are the least (but still very) similar (80-85%):

Cultuur en recreatie (culture and recreation): 84%, Werk (labor): 84%, Natuur en milieu (nature and the environment): 83%, Ruimte en infrastructuur (public space and infrastructure): 83%, Verkeer (transport): 80%.

So especially those last categories are where the two parties differentiate themselves. Most notably I think are the transport and infrastructure categories.

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