Does multiple office-holding generate an electoral bonus? Evidence from Belgian national and local elections

Abstract

Traditionally, scholars have assumed that multiple office-holding (i.e. the combination of a local and national directly elected political mandate) leads to an enhanced electoral performance. Although the prospect of electoral benefits for such a mandate combination seems plausible, it remains unclear whether accumulating a national and local mandate does indeed provide an additional boost compared to holding either one prior to the election. Previous studies have only offered limited support for this assumption. For instance, they have focused exclusively on French national elections. This article, however, scrutinises whether dual mandate-holding pays off individually, for the candidate, as well as collectively, for the list as a whole in both Belgian national and local elections. The results here strongly suggest that cumul des mandats does not yield an additional electoral reward compared to single office-holders, contradicting both theoretical presumptions and normative beliefs.

Keywords:

• Cumul des mandats
• multiple office-holding
• national elections
• municipal elections
• personal vote-earning attributes

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Kristof Steyvers, Nicolas Bouteca and Tony Valcke explicitly for their continuous feedback and support. Furthermore, I am also grateful for the valuable feedback of Audrey Vandeleene and I also want to thank various colleagues of the CLP and GASPAR research groups for proofreading earlier versions of the draft. I would also like to express my gratitude to the reviewers, whose comments improved the article substantially.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The horizontal variant of multiple office-holding, which entails a combination of one elected position and other (semi-)public or private functions, is disregarded in this article.

2 Twenty-five representatives of the German-speaking community parliament were excluded due to a lack of information.

3 The individual votes were comprised of the preferential votes, before the distribution of the list vote. The number of constituency votes equals the turnout, thus including invalid votes but excluding abstaining.

4 The regional and federal tiers are both conceived as the national level of government. Flemish MPs that seek election in the federal parliament and vice versa are, therefore, also regarded as incumbents.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the Research Foundation Flanders [FWO grant number 16971].

Notes on contributors

Nicolas Van de Voorde

Nicolas Van de Voorde is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Local Politics (UGhent) and is currently preparing a thesis on the meaning and the consequences of multiple office-holding. [[email protected]].