This article scrutinises local-national linkage in Belgium to better understand territorial power relations in multilevel parties. Drawing on a survey of local chairs of national parties, it adopts an innovative, informal and bottom-up approach. The descriptive analysis reveals two central axes in the morphology of linkage: scope (downward support and upward influence) and surplus (benefits versus costs). However, (the valuation of) this interdependence appears as a matter of degree. The explanatory analysis therefore probes into the effect of macro- (between environments), meso- (between parties) and micro- (within parties) level factors. It demonstrates that variance is explained by different parameters. For scope, differences between parties trump those within them. For surplus, specific differences between parties as well as within them matter. The answer to our guiding question is therefore variegated: it depends on for what and for whom.

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.

Fiscal consolidation confronts federal states with a collective action problem, especially in federations with a tightly coupled fiscal regime such as Belgium. However, the Belgian federation has successfully solved this collective action problem even though it lacks the political institutions that the literature on dynamic federalism has identified as the main mechanisms through which federal states achieve cooperation across levels of government. This article argues that the regionalization of the party system, on the one hand, and the rationalization of the deficit problem by the High Council of Finance, on the other, are crucial to understand how Belgium was able to solve the collective action problem despite its tightly coupled fiscal regime and particularly high levels of deficits and debts. The article thus emphasizes the importance of compromise and consensus in reducing deficits and debts in federal states.

Collaboration between public actors and social partners is becoming increasingly important as an administrative solution for complex societal challenges in health care, spatial development, mobility management or water management. In this article we focus on the relationship between the central Flemish government and local networks that are set up by this government. In the scientific literature much attention is paid to the concept of metagovernance as analytical perspective to analyze the relationship between the government and networks. The concept offers the government a toolbox with roles and instruments from which it can choose to support and stimulate networks in order to achieve the desired network results. However, our research shows that such an approach is not sufficient to capture the relationship between the central government and local mandated networks in Flanders. We argue for a broader interpretation of the concept of metagovernance, in which the dynamics of local networks are viewed as the outcome of power relations between actors that are represented at both local and central level and that are intertwined with each other. Only in this way will we we understand why certain choices are made about local mandated networks, why local networks show a lack of dynamism and why local actors in local networks also do not want local networks to become more dynamic and effective. We do notice that the pressure on these arrangements is increasing, partly due to new actors who are not involved in these arrangements.

The focus of the diversity policy in the Dutch public sector has moved during the past decennia. In the eighties offering equal chances for the different target groups was the central policy goal, after the millennium this became the effective and efficient management of a diverse work force in order to arrive at a better performing public sector, also called the business case of diversity. This article investigates the question how far the Dutch cabinet has influenced the diversity policy of public organizations. The answer to the question is that there was limited influence from the Dutch cabinet on the arguments for diversity of public organizations, but there was greater influence on the diversity interventions, especially in three sectors: central government, municipalities and police. This influence on interventions of other (‘fellow’) governments is caused by the strong steering of the cabinet. The interventions undertaken therefore reflect to a more limited extent the business case of diversity and remain stuck in the old target group policy. However, public organizations with a longer history in diversity policy, that operate closer to society and see the necessity for diversity, are more inclined to embrace the business case and start interventions that are related to this new approach.

For the European Union to exhibit some ‘actorness’ in the world of international relations requires it to have a certain amount of autonomy from its constituent members. This article analyses, in this respect, the degrees of freedom the Council Secretariat and the European Commission enjoy in the context of the CFSP. While this EU policy is generally known to be intergovernmental, both institutions arguably do have some political influence over the substantive outcomes. This is not the result of formal competencies institutionalized in the Treaties, but rather of an accumulated process and content expertise in these institutions, which can be transformed into political influence via informal means.

In this article we examine the organisation of European policy-making in Belgium. The core question is whether the federal level is hollowing out in favour of the regional level, with respect to European preference formation and interest representation. From a theoretical point of view, it tests the propositions of liberal intergovernmentalism and multi-level governance in two critical cases: environmental policy and the European Convention. The article concludes that neither of the approaches is able to fully understand the complex system of joint preference formation that takes place in Belgium and that they would both benefit from incorporating historical institutionalist insights.

An important element in the debate on the hollowed State is the extent to which the subsidiary idea caused a decrease in dominance of the central State and lead to a multifaceted process of decentralisation. A case in point is the recent regionalisation of the competency to organise local government in Belgium. Based on Page and Goldsmith’s three dimensions in intergovernmental relations between central and local government (functions, discretion and access), we test the discourse of the reform of the local government in Flanders to its practice. It is argued that the principles of a subsidiary founded municipal autonomy, a growing fiscal and functional discretion and a personal disentanglement of local and central decision-makers was inspired by northern European models of government relations. These, however, are only partially being confirmed by the praxis of the reforms, as the main principles of the existing southern European models persist.