The Future of Belgian Federalism: An Analysis of Party Preferences

Abstract

This article studies the political discourses regarding the future of Belgian federalism since the year 2000. Analysing party manifestos, it intends to identify patterns of preferences about the long-term evolution of Belgian institutions and the distribution of competences. The quantitative and qualitative analysis shows that the systemic duality of Belgian federalism largely explains the preferences of political actors: French-speaking parties overall oppose the broad state reform that the Dutch-speaking parties collectively support. Yet, each party has a specific position on the decentralization cleavage and a vision of Belgian federalism that cannot be reduced to its linguistic affiliation.

Keywords:

• Belgium
• federalism
• political parties
• party manifestos

Notes

The Volksunie in Flanders, the Front Démocratique des Francophones (FDF) in Brussels and the Rassemblement Wallon in Wallonia. The most extreme and nationalist (Flemish) party, the Vlaams Blok (now Vlaams Belang) appeared at the end of the 1970s, more or less simultaneously with the green parties (Agalev—now Groen!—and Ecolo).

We will not deal with European electoral manifestos, nor with manifestos concerning the German-speaking community (as they represent only 0.7% of the Belgian population and do not have relevant weight on the content of the political discussions on the future of federalism in Belgium).

Yoshikoder is an open-source software, officially defined as a ‘cross-platform multilingual content analysis program’. It has been developed by Will Lowe as part of the ‘Identity Project’ at Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. With this software, the researcher can construct and view keywords-in-context, and is able to input content analysis dictionaries. The outputs of the software consist of a summary of documents, either as word frequency tables or according to the content analysis dictionary made by the researcher. The method uses individual words as units of analysis and is based on a dictionary building (as in Laver and Garry, 2000), meaning that the words belong to (hierarchical) categories. Yoshikoder allows three levels of hierarchy. Ideally, every defined category that is associated with a policy direction and its opposition (its antithesis) is also part of the dictionary, transcending the pure saliency. This dictionary analysis can also be applied to the results of a concordance, i.e. a visualization of the words in their local contexts (semantic, grammatical, etc.). Yoshikoder basically allows two functions. The first one concerns the establishment of frequency counts of both keywords and categories of words (words can be clustered into different dimensions and that the categories themselves can be analysed in terms of relative frequency). The second function concerns the establishment of a ‘keywords-in-context analysis’. This type of analysis consists of a listing of all the occurrences where a particular word is mentioned in a text. This function is very useful for examining the word in its context, semantic sequence or even language.

The manifestos for the VB for 2007 and 2010 have a similar content.

Unsurprisingly, any reference to Flanders is also absent from the top 10 of these manifestos.

In December 2011, a reform of the Senate was included in the coalition agreement. It was adopted in the summer of 2012.

Note that the LDD did not draft such an exhaustive list in its manifestos and, therefore, renders the comparison more complex.