Choosing Coalition Partners in Belgian Local Government

Abstract

Government formation is a crucial phase after elections. This article focusses on coalition formation in Belgian local government after the elections in 2006. Coalition theories have mainly been developed at the national level, but they are also applicable to the local level where there is no shortage of coalitions. This level offers the opportunity to not only test rather classic coalition theories such as minimum size theories or the coalitions’ incumbency status. In a federal state like Belgium we can compare the local coalitions with coalitions made at higher levels. The results show that the local political parties prefer to form minimal winning and minimum parties coalitions, but not the smallest coalition that is possible. Coalitions are also more likely to form when they represent the incumbent coalition. Finally, political parties prefer congruent coalitions with the federal and regional government.

Key Words:

• Local politics
• political parties
• coalitions
• elections

Notes

1. A local list is defined as a list that did not take part in the local elections with a national party name and/or national party list number.

2. For example, Bäck (2003) was able to gather these data, but she limited her study to one Swedish county (49 municipalities).

3. For a more detailed description of the conditional logit model as the most appropriate model when studying government formation, see Martin and Stevenson, o.c., (2001).

4. The number of potential coalitions is calculated as 2ⁿ−1 where ‘n’ refers to the number of parties. The maximum number of parties in a municipality is seven (127 potential coalitions), but we only looked at the potential coalitions with a majority of the seats.

5. The formula used by Pedersen and Bäck to calculate the electoral volatility of a system is .

6. Another reason to use a different formula was determined by the fact that all our other independent variables are dummy variables. Therefore, we decided to keep this continuation in type of variables.

7. The Belgian political landscape is characterised by unilingual parties and the absence of state-wide parties; therefore, the Flemish and Walloon regions consist of different parties.

8. Due to the electoral growth of the extreme-right Vlaams Blok, the other parties decided in 1989 to isolate Vlaams Blok. They opted for making every cooperation with Vlaams Blok impossible. In the centre and right-wing parties, not everybody agreed on this strategy. Some politicians were convinced that the exclusion of Vlaams Blok would make this party even more popular (Damen 2001). Thus far, however, no party has ever formed a coalition with them. This strategy is known as the cordon sanitaire. When Vlaams Blok changed its name to Vlaams Belang, the other parties held on to this strategy.

9. This first analysis is limited to the Flemish municipalities and does not include Walloon municipalities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ellen Olislagers

Ellen Olislagers is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science of Ghent University, Belgium. Her research is conducted in the Centre for Local Politics of the department. Her research focusses on the coalition formation process at the Belgian local level. She has published on local coalition formation and portfolio allocation.

Kristof Steyvers

Kristof Steyvers is an associate professor of political science at the Department of Political Science of Ghent University, Belgium. His research is conducted in the Centre for Local Politics of the department. He has a keen interest in local political leadership, parties and elections at the local level, local government reform, urban politics and policy and comparative local politics. He has published in books and peer reviewed journals on these topics and teaches ‘comparative politics’, ‘parties and party systems’ and ‘comparative local politics’.