Academic literature on the topic 'Coalition governments – Belgium'

AbstractUsing a role-playing simulation on government formation with pre- and posttest assessment format, I show that students developed a significantly greater capacity for precision and specificity in their answers about the process of coalition government formation in parliamentary systems; students changed their beliefs in the ability of institutional rules to causally affect the process of coalition government formation in parliamentary systems; and, finally, students, changed their views on whether office-seeking politicians are more successful than policy-seeking politicians in forming coalition governments in parliamentary systems.

In this article, we focus on manifest interparty conflict over policy issues and the role of coalition agreements in solving these conflicts. We present empirical findings on the characteristics of coalition agreements including deals over policy controversy and on inter-party conflict occurring during the lifetime of governments in Germany, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands. We analyze the ways in which parties in government were or were not constrained by written deals over disputed issues. Coalition agreements from all four countries include specific policy deals, one third of which are precisely defined. These policy deals concern both consensual and controversial issues. Our central finding is that, in the case of intra-party conflict, parties almost always fall back on the initial policy deals when these exist. As such, policy statements of the coalition agreement facilitate decision making in each of the countries studied.

The Christian-democrat/socialist government Martens IV resigned at the end ofMarch 1981, because the socialist party could not agree with an urgency plan to reorganize the public finances. Mark Eyskens, Minister of Finance in that cabinet, put together a new government as soon as April 6 of the same year. He succeeded as Prime Minister while all the other resigning ministers remained in their function. Minister Robert Vandeputte, an extra-parlementarian and honorary governor of the Central Bank, became the new Minister of Finance. Like the preceding governments, the Eyskens cabinet was strongly hampered by deep mistrust between the coalition partners, opposing views between the two communities of Belgium and by disagreements about the way to deal with the socio-economic crisis.The Eyskens cabinet was particularly confronted with the organization of the restructured steelmill Cockerill-Sambre and with the absolute low point of the economic crisis. The budget was strongly affected by the increasing unemployment benefits and the collapse of the fiscal revenues. Due to the continuing protest of the trade unions, Mark Eyskens did not succeed to adapt the automatic wage indexation in order to improve the competitive position ofthe Belgian enterprises. He did however manage to prevent the devaluation of the Belgian franc, which had come under pressure regularly on the financial markets.By the middle of September 1981 the Eyskens government fell as a result of disagreements between the coalition partners about the financing ofthe money loosing steelmill Cockerill-Sambre in Wallonia. Parliamentary elections were advanced to November 8, 1981. The Christiandemocrats lost a considerable number of seats. A Christian-democrat/liberal cabinet, again headed by Wilfried Martens, emerged by mid December. It would carry out a neoliberal policy. Mark Eyskens became the Minister of Economicaffairs in the new government.

This article analyses the impact of government prospects and government participation on party policy preferences. Comparing the content of manifestos of governing and opposition parties in Belgium during three decades, I observed that the relationship of a party to the act of governing influences the content of its manifesto. In that sense, party preferences are not only driven by ideology and vote-seeking arguments but are part of a larger party strategy: parties adapt their electoral platform when they are in government or are willing to enter into it. The conclusion of the article also discusses the literature on government formation. Such literature hypothesizes that parties that are ideologically similar would form a coalition. However, results for the Belgian case demonstrate that parties strategically adapt their electoral platform when wanting to enter the government. Coalitions are made up of parties with similar policy preferences, not because they ‘are’ alike but because parties strategically ‘make’ them alike.

Na de Eerste Wereldoorlog en de invoering van het enkelvoudig stemrecht voor mannen werd de socialistische partij bijna even groot als de katholieke. De verkiezingen verscherpten de regionale en ideologische asymmetrie. De katholieke partij behield de absolute meerderheid in Vlaanderen, de socialistische verwierf een gelijkaardige positie in Wallonië. Nationaal werden coalitieregeringen noodzakelijk. In de Kamer veroverden zowel de socialisten als de christendemocratische vleugel een machtsbasis, maar tot de regering doordringen bleek veel moeilijker. Die bleven gedomineerd door de conservatieve katholieke vleugel en de liberale partij, met steun van de koning en van de haute finance. Eenmaal het socialistische minimumprogramma uit angst voor een sociale revolutie aanvaard (1918-1921), werden de socialisten nog slechts getolereerd tijdens crisissituaties of als het niet anders kon (1925-1927, 1935-1940). Het verklaart een toenemende frustratie bij Waalse socialisten. Tevens bemoeilijkte hun antiklerikalisme de samenwerking van Vlaamse socialisten met christendemocraten en Vlaamsgezinden, zoals in Antwerpen, en dat gold ook voor de vorming van regeringen. In de BWP waren de verhoudingen veranderd. De macht lag nu gespreid over vier actoren: de federaties, het partijbestuur, de parlementsfractie en eventueel de ministers. De eenheid was bij momenten ver zoek. In 1919 was het Vlaamse socialisme veel sterker geworden. In Vlaanderen behaalde het 24 zetels (18 meer dan in 1914) en werd het met 25,5% de tweede grootste partij. Bovendien was de dominantie van Gent verschoven naar Antwerpen, dat met zes zetels de vierde grootste federatie van de BWP werd. Het aantrekken van Camille Huysmans als boegbeeld versterkte haar Vlaamsgezind profiel. In een eerste fase moest Huysmans nog de Vlaamse kwestie als een vrije kwestie verdedigen. Zelfs tegen de Gentse en de Kortrijkse federatie in, die de vooroorlogse Vlaamsgezinde hoofdeis – de vernederland-sing van de Gentse universiteit – hadden losgelaten. Naar 1930 toe, de viering van honderd jaar België, was de Vlaamse beweging opnieuw sterker geworden en werd gevreesd voor de electorale doorbraak van een Vlaams-nationalistische partij. Een globale oplossing voor het Vlaamse probleem begon zich op te dringen. Dat gold ook voor de BWP. Interne tegenstellingen moesten overbrugd worden zodat, gezien de financiële crisis, de sociaaleconomische thema’s alle aandacht konden krijgen. Daarbij stonden de eenheid van België en van de partij voorop. In maart 1929 leidde dit tot het ‘Compromis des Belges’ en een paar maanden later tot het minder bekende en radicalere partijstandpunt, het ‘Compromis des socialistes belges’. Voortbouwend op de vooroorlogse visie van het bestaan van twee volken binnen België, werd dit doorgetrokken tot het recht op culturele autonomie van elk volk, gebaseerd op het principe van regionale eentaligheid, ten koste van de taalminderheden. Voor de Vlaamse socialisten kwam dit neer op een volledige vernederlandsing van Vlaanderen, te beginnen met het onderwijs en de Gentse universiteit. Niet zonder enige tegenzin ging een meerderheid van Waalse socialisten daarmee akkoord. In ruil eisten zij dat in België werd afgezien van elke vorm van verplichte tweetaligheid, gezien als een vorm van Vlaams kolonialisme. Eentalige Walen hadden in Wallonië en in nationale instellingen (leger, centrale besturen) recht op aanwerving en carrière zonder kennis van het Nederlands, zoals ook de kennis ervan als tweede landstaal in Wallonië niet mocht worden opgelegd. De betekenis van dit interne compromis kreeg in de historiografie onvoldoende aandacht. Dat geldt ook voor de vaststelling dat beide nationale arbeidersbewegingen, de BWP vanuit de oppositie, in 1930-1932 mee de invoering van het territorialiteitsbeginsel hebben geforceerd. Een tussentijdse fase C uit het model van Miroslav Hroch.________‘Frenemies’? 2Communitarian tensions in the Socialist Party 1919-1940. Division, Compromise. Crisis. Part One: 1918-1935After the First World War and the introduction of simple universal male suffrage, the Socialist Party was almost as large as the Catholic Party. Elections sharpened the regional and ideological asymmetry. The Catholic Party maintained an absolute majority in Flanders; the Socialists acquired a similar position in Wallonia. Coalition gov-ernments were a necessity at the national level. In the Chamber, both the Socialists and the Christian Democratic wing of the Catholics had a strong base of power, but entering in the government turned out to be much more difficult. Governments remained dominated by the conservative wing of the Catholic Party and by the Liberal Party, with support from the king and high finance. Once the Socialist minimum program had been accepted out of fear of a social revolution in the years 1918-1921, the Socialists were only tolerated in government during crises or in case there was no other possibility (1925-1927, 1935-1940). This explains an increasing frustration among Walloon Socialists. At the same time, Flemish Socialists’ anticlericalism hindered their cooperation with Christian Democrats and members of the Flemish Movement, as in Antwerp, and that also held true for the forming of national governments.In the Belgian Workers’ Party (BWP), balance had changed. Power now lay spread among four actors: the federations, the party administration, the parliamentary faction, and sometimes, government ministers. Unity was sometimes hard to find. In 1919 Flemish socialism became much stronger. In Flanders it took 25 seats (18 more than in 1914) and, with 25.5% of the vote, was the second-largest party. In addition, the centre of gravity moved from Ghent to Antwerp, which with six seats became the fourth-largest federation in the BWP. Camille Huysmans’s appeal as the figurehead strengthened its profile with regard to the Flemish Movement. At first, Huysmans had to defend the treatment of the Flemish Question as a matter of individual conscience for party members, even against the Ghent and Kortrijk federations, which had abandoned the foremost pre-war demand of the Flemish Movement, the transformation of the University of Ghent into a Dutch-language institution. As 1930, the centenary of Belgium, approached, the Flemish Movement became stronger once again and an electoral breakthrough by a Flemish nationalist party was feared. An overall solution to the Flemish problem was pressing, also in the BWP. Internal divisions needed to be bridged in order to give full attention to socioeconomic questions, in light of the financial crisis. The unity of Belgium and of the party came first and foremost. In 1929 this led to the ‘Compromis des Belges’ (Compromise of the Belgians) and a few months later to the lesser-known but more radical position of the party, the ‘Compromise of the Belgian Socialists’. Building on the pre-war vision of the existence of two peoples within Belgium, this point of view was imbued with the right of each people to cultural autonomy, based on the principle of regional monolingualism, at the expense of linguistic minorities. For Flemish socialists this came down to a full transformation of Flanders into a Dutch-speaking society, beginning with education and the University of Ghent. The majority of Walloon socialists went along with this, though not without some reluctance. In return, they demanded the elimination of any form of required bilingualism in Belgium, which they saw as a form of Flemish colonialism. In Wallonia and in national institutions (the army, the central administration), monolingual Walloons had a right to be recruited and have a career without a knowledge of Dutch, just as knowledge of Dutch as a second national language was not supposed to be imposed in Wallonia. The significance of this internal compromise has received insufficient attention in the historiography. The same observation applies to the finding that both national workers’ movements – the BWP from the ranks of the opposition – forced the introduction of the principle of territoriality in 1930-1932: an interim phase C of Miroslav Hroch’s model.

During the second half of the 1930s, Belgium and its institutions were about to undergo testing. The first serious test came about after the shocking results of the legislative elections held on May 24, 1936. Léon Degrelle’s party, the Rex, gained 21 seats. Consequently, a new coalition government had to be constituted in order to safeguard political stability. In parallel with this, a redefinition of the European political landscape was taking place due to the effects caused by the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936. Vis-à-vis that new European scenario, the Belgian government decided upon a new foreign policy that aimed at liberating the country of its international commitments enshrined in the Versailles and Locarno treaties. Both political levels were narrowly connected, influencing each other. Given this connection the Belgian political debate was distorted when it was transferred to the realm of emotions provoked by the Spanish conflict.

This article analyses the election of the Speakers of both houses of the Belgian parliament, the House of Representatives and the Senate, in the period 1918-1974. According to the Belgian constitution, the election of the Speaker is a competence of each house. As can be expected in a system of parliamentary government, the Speakers belong to the government majority, as they did already before 1914. But with the disappearance of a homogeneous majority and the need for cabinet coalitions after 1918 - result of the proportional representation - someeffects which tended to erode parliamentary autonomy more substantially occurred. At several occasions the election of the Speakers was postponed until the result of cabinet formation was known. In addition, the coalition parties had to make an agreement for the partition of the two Speakers' positions. The coalition practice also affected procedure. Since agreements were less easily implemented in a secret ballot, the provisions of the parliamentary statute were put aside for an election by acclamation to strengthen party discipline. In this context a further shift in the election process occurs: from the parliamentary groups to the party leadership. Eventually, the appointment of the Speakers becamepart of the cabinet formation itself. This practice appears to be firmly established in the 1970' and has been criticized severely. It can be considered one aspect of the decline of parliaments in this period.

Belgium has recently undergone a 541-day period with no elected government following the 2010 general election. This has been called a government and cabinet crisis. This thesis aims to determine what is different about Belgium in 2010/11 compared to past years and what has contributed to Belgium’s difficulty forming coalitions recently. By using coalition formation theory and investigating institutional and sociological aspects of Belgian politics, this research project has found an initial explanation for why the Belgian government crisis of 2010 occurred. Several institutional and sociological aspects are now working against each other and hindering cooperative behaviour among the Belgian political parties. Belgium has become the victim of its own well-adapted and unique political system.

Defence date: 19 January 1996
Examining Board: Prof. Rudy B. Andeweg (Rijksuniversiteit Leiden) ; Prof. Stefano Bartolini (EUI) ; Prof. Jean Blondel (EUI, supervisor) ; Prof. Kris Deschouwer (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) ; Prof. Ernst ten Heuvelhof (Technische Universiteit Delft)
First made available online on 15 December 2016

Long gone are the times when class-based political parties with extensive membership dominated politics. Instead, party politics has become issue-based. Surprisingly few studies have focused on how the issue content of West European party politics has developed over the past decades. Empirically, this books studies party politics in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK from 1980 and onwards. The book highlights the more complex party system agenda with the decline, but not disappearance, of macroeconomic issues as well as the rise in ‘new politics’ issues together with education and health care. Moreover, various ‘new politics’ issues such as immigration, the environment, and European integration have seen very different trajectories. To explain the development of the individual issues, the book develops a new theoretical model labelled the ‘issue incentive model’ of party system attention. The aim of the model is to explain how much attention issues get throughout the party system, which is labelled ‘the party system agenda’. To explain the development of the party system agenda, one needs to focus on the incentives that individual policy issues offer to large, mainstream parties, i.e. the typical Social Democratic, Christian Democratic, or Conservative/Liberal parties that have dominated West European governments for decades. The core idea of the model is that the incentives that individual policy issues offer to these vote- and office-seeking parties depend on three factors, namely issue characteristics, issue ownership, and coalition considerations. The issue incentive model builds on and develops a top-down perspective on which the issue content of party politics is determined by the strategic considerations of political parties and their competition with each other.

This chapter examines parliamentary coalition governments. Leaders in coalition governments face great challenges, not least because members of the coalition will vary in their enthusiasm for the mission. As a result, most countries in this category have tended to place more significant restrictions upon their forces in Afghanistan. The chapter considers three key cases in detail. Germany has been the exemplar of a country viewed as being far more capable in theory than in practice due to the restrictions imposed by a series of coalition governments. The Netherlands illustrates the domestic consequences of a coalition government fighting a war, as the Dutch government collapsed over Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Denmark is quite exceptional: the Danes fought with few restrictions in the most dangerous part of the most dangerous province in Afghanistan. The chapter then briefly examines other coalition governments in ISAF (International Security Assistance Force): Belgium, Italy, and Norway.

While Belgium undoubtedly had the most complex coalition bargaining system in Western Europe during the period 1946–1999, it has become much more difficult for parties to form federal governments ever since. Contrary to a number of European countries, government formation complexity did not peak due the emergence of brand-new parties, nor of any new cleavage. Rather, in Belgium the main ingredients pre-existed: party system fragmentation—which was already high since unitary parties had split along linguistic lines—skyrocketed as the mainstream parties around which post-war coalitions were formed further declined in size, confronting some (in)formateurs with up to ten coalitionable parties. Their task has been further complicated by the growing saliency and Flemish radicalization of the community cleavage which led to the rise of the independentist N-VA, whose positions remain unacceptable for any French-speaking party. As a result, Belgium has often been left without a fully empowered government, the partisan composition of coalitions broke away from previous patterns, and the coalition compromise model, which was already solidly entrenched in the consociational norms and practices since the 1960s, was further elaborated. Coalition partners keep tabs on each other through compromise mechanisms and policy-monitoring devices such as long and detailed coalition agreements, the enhanced role of the inner cabinet composed of the PM and the vice-PMs of each coalition party, and strictly enforced coalition discipline in legislative matters. But, given the increasingly unbridgeable divides between Flemish- and French-speaking parties, the deadlock observed could well lead to the demise of Belgium.

This chapter examines the formal existence and actual use of resources relevant for policy analysis that individual parliamentarians, parliamentary groups and the parliament, as a whole, have at their disposal in the federal House of Representatives, the Flemish and the Walloon parliament since the mid-1990s. The use and effectiveness of these comparatively meagre resources are strongly constrained by the structural need of majority MPs and groups to offer continuous and unconditional support to inherently unstable coalition governments composed of four to six parties.

While in many Western-European countries the ascent of special advisors is a relatively recent phenomenon, Belgium has long engaged ministerial cabinets as structural interfaces between politics and administration. Relatively large by international standards, ministerial cabinets consist of political advisors who as “an extension of their minister” put pressure on the civil servants in order to ensure political responsiveness. At the turn of the millennium, the reduction and revision of ministerial cabinets in favour of strengthening the administration’s role in policy formulation gained a place on the agenda. In several of the Belgian administrations, the policy analytical capacity has been strengthened, and the relations between the administration and ministerial cabinets improved in the direction of greater complementarity of roles. This chapter makes comparative literature on politico-administrative relations, and of survey material on the policy analytical roles of ministerial advisors and civil servants to analyse how bureaucratic policy expertise is balanced with political control. The analysis will point at the enduring functionality of ministerial cabinets in a polity characterized by fragile coalition government and partitocracy.

Belgium, like Italy, is often considered a text book example of partitocracy. The dominance of political parties involves many functions and dysfunctions in a polity that is highly fragmented along linguistic and ideological lines. Political parties not only assert their institutional position as gate keepers to what demands and interests are aggregated for legislative and executive politics. They also play a dominant role in the policy-making process, by framing problems, ideologically promoting solutions, and negotiating compromises in the cumbersome formation and continuation of coalition government. Like other actors who play a role in the policy-making process, political party organisations too are faced with the increasing complexity of problems, and with the demand to back up their proposals with expert-based argumentation. In Belgium, each party organisation comprises a study service. Although their origin and history has been documented in general party organisation studies, this chapter is the first contribution to understanding the way these intra-party study units are organized and how they generate policy relevant advice. Findings concern all major political parties, across the language border.