This book focuses on the triadic relationship between electoral candidates and the two other poles of the delegation and accountability triangle—political parties and voters. The chapters rely mostly on the Belgian Candidate Survey (CCS project), gathering about 2000 candidates belonging to 15 parties represented in Parliament and running for the 2014 federal and regional elections, and the authors’ conclusions serve at answering broad political science questions linked with elite recruitment, party and candidate electoral strategies, personalisation, party cohesion, and descriptive and substantive representation. Its multilevel semi-open electoral system, atypical federal structure, extreme party system fragmentation and volatility make Belgium an exceptionally rich but complex case that offers findings highly relevant to research on candidates in other democracies.
Mind the Gap is a book on the difficult times of modern representative democracy, and on the way in which political science is trying to make sense of it. Forecasting election results has become a very risky business, and explaining the often-surprising results must increasingly rely on case-by-case ad hoc interpretations. Old and formerly stable political parties now appear to be very vulnerable, because many of their traditional voters seem willing to desert them. If voters turn out to vote at all, they tend to be very volatile and send out complex messages, to decide later than ever what to do in the polling booth, to react to short-term factors and to follow candidates rather than parties. Low levels of trust in political actors and institutions reveal a gap between the elites and the people. Belgium is one of the countries where one can witness these debates. Yet Belgium is also a special case. Not only a gap between elites and citizens but also a gap between north and south animates the political debates. The territorial division of the country in two language groups has led to the complete split of the parties and the party system and to the transformation of the unitary state into a complex federal system. With on top of all that the European level the lines of representation and accountability in Belgium are extremely opaque. Decision making requires subtle compromises between party leaders and sometimes take a very long time to come about. Voting in Belgium is however compulsory, which means that exiting the scene of democratic representation is not an obvious option. Citizens do turn out to vote and do express their views and their discontent. Some political parties however do suggest that leaving Belgium behind altogether might be better than just muddling through. This book is based on ten years of research on political participation and representation in Belgium by the interuniversity research team PartiRep. Using several surveys among the population and politicians, voting aid applications, focus groups and experiments it draws a picture of a parliamentary and representative democracy that faces multiple tensions and multiple gaps. It discusses a wide range of political processes and actors, placing them in a comparative perspective, and exploring to what extent the Belgian case fits into the general picture. The chapters of the book deal with political socialization, political parties, representation, economic voting, preference voting and personalized voting, democratic preferences, identity politics and campaign effects and on the way in which elites and citizens try to find their way and make sense of this complex multi-level and linguistically divided country in the heart of the European Union.
This dissertation focuses on the balances and the representativeness of electoral candidate lists in Belgium between 1995 and 2019. While extensive research has been done in recent years concerning candidate selection, wanting to answer the question of who composes the candidate lists and how, this dissertation shifts the focus to the final offer of the political parties by extensively analysing out of who the candidate lists are composed. In this perspective the dissertation provides a comprehensive map of the electoral candidate lists on five major socio-demographic characteristics: besides the usual suspects of gender and ethnicity, residence (or localness), occupation, and age are tackled as well. The dissertation therefore unravels electoral lists and investigates their differences (over space) and evolution (over time). In a second time, we analyse the extent to which political parties take into account descriptive representation, by comparing the balances with those found in the population. Finally, the dissertation investigates the effect of the balances on the electoral performance of the lists.
This book offers the first comprehensive, comparative and coherent perspective on parliamentary candidates in contemporary representative democracy. Based on the unique database of the ‘Comparative Candidate Survey' project which interrogated parliamentary candidates in more than 30 countries, it fills a significant lacuna by focusing on the thousands of ordinary candidates that participate in national elections. It examines who the candidates are in terms of their socio-demographic background and political career patterns, how they were selected by their parties, what their policy preference are and whether these are congruent to those held by their voters, who they seek to represent and how they intend to do so once elected, and what their visions are on representative democracy and party government. Last but not least, it investigates how they go about reaching out to their potential voters during the election campaign. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of political parties and party politics, political elites, political communication, political participation, elections, theories of democracy and representation, legislative studies, voting behaviour and more broadly to European politics, as well as to political and policy professionals throughout Europe.
This book takes stock of Belgium’s exceptional and – for some foreign observers –schizophrenic position in the political world and explains its idiosyncrasy to a non-Belgian audience. Offering a broad and comprehensive analysis of Belgian politics, the guiding questions throughout each of the chapters of this book are: Is Belgium a political enigma, and why? Along which axes is Belgium "exceptional" compared to other countries? And what insights does a comparative study of Belgian politics have to offer? The book therefore provides a critical assessment of how Belgian politics "stands out" internationally, both in good and bad ways – including consociationalism, federalism, democratic innovations, Euroscepticism, government formation, gender equality, among others – and which factors can explain Belgium’s exceptional position. Based on cutting-edge research findings, the book will be of wide interest to scholars and students of Belgian politics, European Politics and Comparative politics. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
The Handbook of Political Representation in Liberal Democracies offers a state-of-the-art assessment of the functioning of political representation in liberal democracies. In 34 chapters the world's leading scholars on the various aspects of political representation address eight broad themes: The concept and theories of political representation, its history and the main requisites for its development; elite orientations and behavior; descriptive representation; party government and representation; non-electoral forms of political participation and how they relate to political representation; the challenges to representative democracy originating from the growing importance of non-majoritarian institutions and social media; the rise of populism and its consequences for the functioning of representative democracy; the challenge caused by economic and political globlization: what does it mean for the functioning of political representation at the national leval and is it possible to develop institutions of representative democracy at a level above the state that meet the normative criteria of representative democracy and are supported by the people? The various chapters offer a comprehensive review of the literature on the various aspects of political representation. The main organizing principle of the Handbook is the chain of political representation, the chain connecting the interests and policy preferences of the people to public policy via political parties, parliament, and government. Most of the chapters assessing the functioning of the chain of political representation and its various links are based on original comparative political research. Comparative research on political representation and its various subfields has developed dramatically over the last decades so that even ten years ago a Handbook like this would have looked totally different.
Orthodox reporting and conventional scholarship focuses on the factors that distinguish each presidential contest and then attempts to explain them. This book rather, demonstrates that the politics of presidential nomination has been remarkably stable in the United States since the 1830s and right through to 2020. A common bandwagon dynamic, rolling once through party organizations and now through presidential primaries, permits a simple measure that has predicted nominations well before the decisive threshold was reached, while allowing precise comparisons across the years. So it becomes possible to separate the handful of things that matter for winnowing a large and diverse society into two individual presidential nominees. This funnel of causality moves through the occupational and careers seedbeds of a field of presidential aspirants, squeezing these fields by way of a small set of structural shapers, until party factions and factional struggles—not rules of the game, not candidate characteristics, not nominating strategies, nor all the other ephemera so beloved of commentators and observers—actually choose a given nominee.
This, the third volume in a series that seeks to advance our understanding of Western European parliaments, explores the relationship between parliaments and citizens.
