Federal reform and the quality of representation in Belgium

Abstract

One of the ways in which ‘good’ representation can be measured and assessed is by the degree of congruence between the preferences of the population and the preferences and policies of the political elite. One of the arguments for defending decentralisation is that governmental institutions on a smaller territorial scale can be closer to the population, and that they can provide policies that are more responsive to the population of the sub-states. This argument is often made in Belgium, where voters in Flanders traditionally vote centre-right, while the voters of Wallonia vote centre-left, and where federal coalitions need to reflect the preferences of both regions whereas regional governments can be responsive to their voters only. Using data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, this paper tests this assumption and compares the left–right orientation of the population and of governments at the different institutional levels and regions. The findings suggest that sub-state governments are partially more congruent to their sub-state voters than federal governments. However, congruence gaps are less related to constraints in government formation than to changes in behaviour of key political actors.

Keywords:

• Representation
• congruence
• federalism
• Belgium

Notes

1. With the exception of short-lived governments in 1925, 1946, 1958, and from 1950 to 1954.

2. This does not apply to coalition formation in Brussels, which follows more or less the federal rule of parity. Unfortunately, Brussels is excluded from most electoral studies in Belgium due to the costs of running such studies in a multi-lingual region, and we do not have data for the position of the Brussels branches of the parties. Therefore, we do not discuss the case of Brussels in this paper. We would have expected to see a distinct interaction of our two dimensions of state level and government formation rules, whereby contrary to Lijphart’s expectation, this sub-state level displays a more complex set of rules regarding government formation than the other two regions of the country. We would expect the Brussels government to display congruence levels closer to those observed at the national level.

3. For further analyses of the effect of similarity or alignment across government levels, see Kleider et al. (2017).