Preference votes constitute one of the key features of (open and flexible) PR-list electoral systems. In this article, we give an extensive overview of studies conducted on preference voting in Belgium and the Netherlands. After elaborating on the definition and delineation of preference voting, we scrutinize studies about which voters cast preference votes (demand side) and about which candidates obtain preference votes (supply side). For each of these aspects, both theoretical approaches and empirical results are discussed and compared. At the same time, we also pay attention to methodological issues in these kinds of studies. As such, this research overview reads as an ideal introduction to this topic which has repercussions on many other subfields of political science.

In this article, we propose an in-depth exploration of blank and null ballots in the recent 2018 local elections in Wallonia (Belgium). In the official results, both blank and null ballots are merged together and are classified as invalid votes. After obtaining the authorization to access genuine electoral ballots, we study the votes which were not considered for the composition of local councils in detail. The dataset is a representative sample of 13,243 invalidated ballots from 49 Walloon municipalities. We first describe how many of these invalidated ballots are blank and how many are null votes, as well as the nature of the nulled votes (unintended errors or intentionally spoiled ballots). Second, we dig deeper into the differences between ballots that have been intentionally invalidated by voters (blank votes and intentional null votes) and ballots non-intentionally invalidated. Our results show that most of the ballots (two-thirds) are null ballots and that among them, half are unintentional null ballots. Finally, we show that contextual (socio-demographic and political) factors explain the variations in intentional and unintentional null votes across municipalities.

This article tackles the particular issue of split-ticket voting, which has been largely overlooked in Belgian election studies thus far. We contribute to the literature by answering two particular research questions: (1) to what extent and (2) why do voters cast a different vote in the elections for the provincial council as compared to their vote in the elections for the municipal council?
The article draws on survey data collected via an exit poll in the ‘Belgian Local Elections Study’, a research project conducted by an inter-university team of scholars.
Our analysis shows that nearly 45% of the total research population cast a split-ticket vote in the local elections of 2018. However, this number drops to one out of four if we only consider a homogenous party landscape at both levels by excluding the numerous votes for ‘local’ lists (which occur mostly at the municipal level). This finding underlines the importance of accounting for the electoral and institutional context of the different electoral arenas in research on split-ticket voting in PR systems. In the Belgian context, split-ticket voting in 2018 also differed between the different parties and regions. Furthermore, it was encouraged by a higher level of education and familiarity with particular candidates. This candidate-centred and strategic voting was matched by party identification and the urban municipal context favouring straight-ticket voting. Other factors such as region, a rural municipal context and preferential voting seemed more relevant to determine voting for local parties than using the instrument of split-ticket votes as such.

Until 2002, local government in Flanders and the Netherlands had a monistic approach. In both systems, the city council was formally the head of the board. However, due to the interplay of factors and evolutions, the influence of the council in practice was increasing. This contribution compares and evaluates the institutional reforms that have been implemented in Flanders and the Netherlands over the past decades in an attempt to reassess the role and position of the council. While Flanders opted for more limited reforms within the existing monistic system (e.g. its own chairman for the council, a special committee for intermunicipal cooperation, a procedure for restoring structural unmanageability), the Netherlands opted with dualism for a radical personnel and functional separation between council and board. Although the reforms in Flanders often seem half-hearted and councilors in the Netherlands attribute more influence to themselves, research also shows that the revaluation of the council in the Netherlands is (still) incomplete too. This theme will undoubtedly remain on the political agenda in the coming years. The authors are thinking of the development of a better statute for council members, or the functioning of the council as a democratic watchdog of the network society.

Studies have shown that multiple office-holding, a practice that denotes the simultaneous exercise of any directly elected municipal mandate and parliamentary seat, is more commonplace in European national parliaments than expected. However, research in Belgium, and especially in the Netherlands, is scarce and extremely fragmented. Therefore, our analysis provides a systematic comparison between the Low Countries with a longitudinal focus. In the first part of the paper, the frequency of the practice is described and its evolution in the last two decades tracked. In the second part, we provide aggregated explanations for the identified discrepancy. Indeed, our results show that after the most recent elections, more than 80% of all Belgian members of parliament held a local mandate, and this percentage increased by 10% during our reference period. In contrast, 9 out of 150 members of the Dutch Second Chamber were combining several offices at the beginning of their national mandate, while the degree of cumulards remained stable. Unexpectedly, the legislative framework and the party regulations are not the source of this deviation, as they are almost identical in both countries. We argue that the difference can be attributed to the role and position of the local government, the political culture and the electoral system.

This article investigates to what extent national and/or local factors influence the performance of national parties in the most recent Flemish and Dutch municipal elections of, respectively, 2012 and 2014.
Our analyses underscore the impact of local factors on the municipal election results, both in Flanders and in the Netherlands. The number of parties and previous election results have a negative effect on the vote share of national political parties. Contrary to the expectations, participation in local government does not have any influence on the national lists’ elections results.
Although local factors have to be taken into account to get a better estimation of the performance of national lists in municipal elections, national factors have significant effects as well. Parties doing well at the national elections, are less successful at the local level.

This article studies the extent to which differences or inequality in policy congruence between higher and lower educated voters are moderated by policy domains. Instead of measuring inequality across all areas of policy, this study takes a policy domain-specific approach. The analyses are based on a dataset containing voters and party positions on 50 policy statements, gathered in the run-up to the 2009 regional election in Belgium largest region, Flanders. We find, overall, only small and unsubstantial, though significant, differences, in policy congruence between higher and lower educated voters, in favor of the former. However, we find a much larger representational bias towards higher educated when we look at transportation, culture and media, immigration, taxand budgetary policy, and economic policy. At the same time, differences in policy congruence are lower as regards spatial planning. Studying inequality in policy congruence across policy domains thus hides more complex patterns of representational bias.

Previous research shows that the position on the ballot list strongly influences the electoral success of candidates. However, the underlying mechanisms of this effect remain unclear. The list position can have a direct influence through a so-called primacy effect, parties may anticipate on the success of candidates, or the effect can be mediated by factors such as media attention and campaign intensity. Using data from the Antwerp district elections in 2012, this paper disentangles these mechanisms. Our study confirms the direct ballot list position effect, providing evidence for the existence of a primacy effect. However, we find that part of the ballot list position effect is mediated by media attention, especially for the first candidate on the list. Campaign intensity also influences the electoral success of candidates, but does not mediate the list position effect. Finally, we find no evidence that parties successfully anticipate on the electoral success of candidates.

Presidentialization involves a shift in focus from collective actors (such as parties) to one person, in this case the mayor. It is a specific form of personalization which focusses on one rather than on several individuals. Electoral presidentialization, which constitutes one of the diverse features of this phenomenon, was studied at the local level in Flanders (Belgium). By formulating hypotheses based on theoretical and empirical insights on personalization (referring to several politicians), we have tried to figure out whether presidentialization differs from personalization. From our results, it appears that mayors indeed attract a huge share of preferential votes, but also that most factors that influence personalization have an impact on presidentialization too. These include both individual variables (such as media attention and incumbency) and municipal variables (such as size of the municipality and number of parties). Although both trends differ in nature, the factors influencing them appear to be similar.

While the international community tries to picture what the future of Belgium as a country will be, the different regions (Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels) deal with issues of territorial governance like amalgamations, the future of provinces, city-regions and intergovernmental collaboration. The article maps these issues, but also which facts, interests and arguments are brought to the table, and to what extent policy agendas in the three regions are similar or not. In Wallonia and Flanders, the existence of the provincial tier is questioned and intermunicipal collaboration should become more important. Amalgamation of municipalities is discussed openly in Flanders - with little success so far, while such a debate is absent in Wallonia. The authors zoom in on the debate in Flanders, showing how rich the landscape of intergovernmental and public-private collaboration is, which variations exist, how each policy sector creates and protects its ‘own’ regional turf, how political debate on ‘cleaning up the mess of regional organisations’ requires nuancing, and how the Belgian political culture shapes that sectoral regional landscape. The authors build on two regional mappings, combining descriptive information with input from the interactive processes with different stakeholders on issues of efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability.

Political parties normally compete in elections individually. Yet, sometimes they join forces and form pre-electoral alliances. This rather unusual strategy contains both costs and benefits. In this article we try to identify those costs and benefits by opening up the black box of internal party decision making in considering pre-electoral alliance formation. We start by assuming that parties of different electoral sizes could have different motives to face the voter as one electoral list. Through in-depth interviews at the local level in Flanders, we have studied pre-electoral alliance formation for the municipal elections in 2006. We find that the arguments of large parties mainly focus on becoming the leading formation and thus claiming the initiative in coalition formation. Small parties have more varied motives for forming or failing to form a pre-electoral alliance.

Compulsory voting does not only increase voting turnout; it is also expected to have positive spill-over effects. Supposedly, citizens who are obliged to cast a vote will be more engaged in politics than citizens who are allowed to avoid politics. This article reviews the main arguments for this expectation. A rival expectation is formulated based on the idea that enforcements, duties and sanctions are likely to decrease the willingness of citizens to participate politically. A cross-national multi-level empirical test – covering turnout and political participation in twenty established democracies – shows that compulsory voting indeed increases voting turnout. Yet neither positive nor negative spill-over effects for other modes of political participation can be detected. Apparently, the consequences of compulsory voting are restricted to turnout.

Belgium is one of the advanced Western democracies with compulsory voting. There is continuing scholarly and societal debate on this feature of the electoral system, however, both form a normative and an empirical perspective. One argument in favor of compulsory voting is that it more or less guarantees the inclusion of all citizens of the political system, at least at election time. This paper addresses this argument in an empirical way on the basis of a 2007 survey from Flanders, by analyzing the potential drop outs at various layers of the political system and in different geographical locations in the case of the abolition of compulsory voting. It concludes that without the system of compulsory voting some particular groups of citizens will turn out in lower numbers than other groups. In the explanation of these diverging levels of turnout individual level characteristics are most important, e.g. political powerlessness, level of education, gender, age, as well as societal involvement and political preference. As a result of the abolition of compulsory voting the Flemish electorate will show itself in a differing electoral order of battle.

This article examines the impact of the Flemish municipal decree on the administrative power of Flemish municipalities. The general goal of the Flemish municipal decree was the strengthening of administrative power by changing political-political relations, political-administrative relations and the supporting policy and management cycle. This article shows the limited meaning of the political component for this strengthening. Changes in the administrative organization of Flemish municipalities on the other hand are looking more promising, although scale and different types of municipalities continues to stay an important factor.

This special issue of Res Publica about administrative power of municipalities in the Netherlands and Flanders, Belgium, focuses in particular on the meaning of cooperation for the strengthening of administrative power. Until recently discussions on administrative power concentrated mostly on the possibility of the merger of municipalities. The three contributions to this issue demonstrate that different kinds of cooperation are a fair alternative for the strengthening of administrative power of municipalities.