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.

The article analyses the internal coordination between the federal government, the Regions and the Communities in Belgium before and during the 2010 Belgian Presidency of the Council of Ministers. It starts from the observation that the absence of a federal government with full powers, the global financial-economic crisis as well as Belgium’s complex multi-level structure have, counterintuitively, not led to an ineffective internal coordination process. Based on interviews with people who were closely involved in the Belgian Presidency team, the article explains the effectiveness of the internal coordination by arguing that, on the one hand, the detailed and inclusive coordination before the Presidency semester has generated a culture of responsibility and joint ownership among the officials and diplomats and, on the other hand, the Belgian Presidency limited its role to being a facilitator of the European decision-making process in function of the rolling agenda of the Commission and the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty. Empirically illustrating these arguments with insights from the internal coordination in the environmental domain, this article demonstrates that an effective internal coordination, even in a difficult political context, can contribute to a successful Presidency.