By means of a re-analysis of the most relevant data source (Nieuwbeerta & Ganzeboom 1996), this paper criticizes the newly grown consensus in political sociology that class voting has declined since World War II. An increase of crosscutting cultural voting, rooted in educational differences, rather than a decline of class voting proves responsible for the decline of the traditional class-party alignments. Moreover, income differences have not become less, but more consequential for voting behavior during this period. It is concluded that the new consensus has been built on quicksand. Class is not dead – it has been buried alive under the increasing weight of cultural voting, systematically misinterpreted as a decline of class voting, due to the widespread application of the Alford index.

In this paper we investigate the effects of political dissatisfaction, political distrust and ethnocentrism on support to the incumbent coalition in three different municipalities in Flanders. Theoretically, we define the concept of political trust, at which it is differentiated from political satisfaction and political alienation. At the same time, four dimensions of political distrust are disentangled: competence, integrity, responsiveness and justice. Empirically, four research questions may be distinguished. First, we investigate whether political satisfaction, political trust and ethnocentrism have an independent effect on support to the ruling majority. Second, we check whether there are differential effects of the dimensions of political trust on the dependent variable in the different municipalities.Third, we try to connect the micro-level data with macro-level, by linking the results with the characteristics of the local government and the party system. Fourth, we examine the influence of the presence of extreme right.

The 2006 local elections in Belgium were the first one organised after the transfer of the local authorities competences from the federal to the regional level. This means by consequence that the different regions have as well the competence in designing the institutional framework of local government as the competence of changing electoral rules. The same elections were also the first ones after drastic reforms in the national political landscape (eg., the democratic Flemish nationalist party split in different groups, nearly all the parties changed their name and particularly in the Flemish part of the country, different kinds of alliances between parties emerged).
All over the country, the Christian democrats made progress and the ecologists suffered a declining trend. For the other parties, results depend from one region to another.
In the Flemish part of the country, the socialists and the extreme right wing joined the Christian democrats as winners of the elections. The other parties lost votes. This was particularly the case for the liberals and ecologists (the winners of the 2000 local elections). Liberals are however the winners in the Walloon part of the country, together with again the Christian democrats. In this region, socialists and ecologists were set back. In the Brussels region, we noticed progress for socialists and Christian democrats and declining figures for liberals and ecologists.
Analyses of political competition, number of groups in local councils and single party majorities point out that the fragmentation of local politics is not growing. The local political landscape seems to be more stable in the Walloons compared with the Flemish region.

In 2006, the European Union was still suffering from a legitimacy crisis following the ill-fated referenda on the Constitutional Treaty in 2005. Nevertheless, this overview of different internal and external European initiatives in 2006 presents a more ambiguous picture. On the one hand, EU policy-makers failed to gather momentum for new and ambitious European initiatives; on the other hand the EU did make some progress in a number of new and running dossiers.
The extended reflection period did not result in a solution for the institutional impasse, despite some limited proposals (‘Plan D’, a mini-Constitution) to turn the tide. In spite of clear signs of enlargement fatigue, two new member states (Romania and Bulgaria) acceded to the EU. The enlargement negotiations with Croatia and Turkey continued – even though the talks with Turkey were somewhat scaled down. In 2006 the energy issue reached the top of the European political agenda, with ambitious proposals from the European Commission, but this did not result in specific EU policy decisions. The EU did finally reach a compromise on other dossiers that had been stuck in the EU decision-making machinery for years, such as the Bolkestein directive on the liberalisation of services and the REACH regulation on chemicals. The EU’s external and foreign policies were characterised by the EU’s involvement in a number of crisis situations (Lebanon, Congo) and the elaboration of the European Neighbourhood Policy (Action Plans). EU initiatives in the areas of migration and energy also link up with Europe’s external policies – especially in relation to the EU’s neighbouring regions.

The 2006 provincial elections in Belgium were the first organised after the transfer of the bulk of competences on local and provincial government from the federal to the regional level. This means that the different regions have both the competence to redesign the institutional framework on provincial government and to change the electoral rules. The government has exercised its competence: some institutional and electoral rules are now different in the two regions. These elections were also the first after drastic reforms in the national political landscape (e.g., the democratic Flemish nationalist party split in different groups, nearly all the parties changed their name and different kinds of cartels and alliances between parties emerged, especially in the Flemish part of the country).
All over the country, the Christian democrats and the extreme right parties were the winners of the elections, while the ecologists suffered from a declining trend. For the other parties, results differ according to region. In the Flemish part of the country, the socialists joined the Christian democrats as winners, where in the Walloon provinces they lost votes. The Liberals however noticed declining vote shares in the Flemish provinces, while winning in the Walloon part of the country.
Because of the electoral design the evolution of the provincial political landscape offers an interesting electoral barometer of the upcoming federal elections. Provincial elections do not only ‘predict’ the political future of other levels however, they are path dependent in their own right as well. Historical, institutional, political and electoral forces all codetermine the actual outlook of current provincial events. The analysis for 2006 has once again confirmed this.

In national elections the results tend to become more ‘nationalized’: a homogeneous party offer all over the territory, less variation in the results per constituency and more homogeneous electoral swings. This article investigates whether this nationalization can also be witnessed at local elections. It focuses on two indicators: the party offer and the voting behaviour. The party offer is the presence of the national parties on the local ballot paper, while the voting behaviour looks at patterns of homogeneity across the municipalities.
The answer to the question of nationalization is mixed. The Flemish and Walloon local elections display the same long-term trend as the national elections, but they keep their own local character. The heterogeneity of the local party offer clearly demonstrates the local specificity of the local elections, and consequently the voting behaviour also differs from the voting behaviour at national elections. We also find that the local elections in Wallonia are less nationalized than in Flanders.
Although the local character of the local elections remains important, the newer parties – Ecolo and Groen! – show until 2000 a clear trend towards nationalization. Especially the extreme right Vlaams Belang shows positive scores on all indicators of nationalization since its first local appearance in 1982.

The article analyses the gender balance in local Belgian politics in the aftermath of the 2006 local elections. It offers a comparative perspective on the position of candidates, representatives elected and those holding office including data from the last three decades. The article also discusses the attitude of local party sections towards measures to foster a gender balance. The data show that local party sections more easily agree on parity at the level of candidates than that they support a real sharing of power at the level of the executive power. Local party sections do not support more than a guaranteed minimum presence of wo/men in the councils of eldermen. Furthermore, both at the level of candidates and at that of the executive the data reveal a final glass ceiling. Women have difficulties reaching the top positions on electoral lists as well as the top positions in the local executive power.

We analyse the presence of a cost of ruling and/or incumbency advantage in the municipal elections in Flanders of 1988, 1994 and 2000. The empirical work concentrates on vote share evolutions of the three main parties: CD&V, Sp.a and VLD. We find evidence that being in power leads to an incumbency advantage, especially for those parties who provide the mayor. The results indicate that this electoral advantage is not uniform among parties (the socialist party appears to benefit more) and, importantly, the incumbency advantage seems to dampen over successive elections. From the perspective of the local politicians, it is important to keep in mind that this incumbency advantage at the local level was insufficient to compensate for the general trend of the major parties to lose votes at all levels of government. Indeed, even in the 1988 elections – where a clear local incumbency (mayor) advantage could be identified for each of the three parties – it was the case that government parties on average lost votes.

With the local elections in 2006, new organisational schemes have been applied by the Flemish government to the 308 municipalities. These schemes included institutional reform aimed to change the outset of local government. In this article we studied the influence of these reforms in practice. Are they actually carriers of change? We thereby focused on the direct aspects linked to these reforms. While many instruments of reform had indirect intended effects, acceptance and action among key decision-makers (both voters and local governors to the extent of their discretion) to use them directly becomes crucial. Our analysis has shown that, with some exceptions, direct autonomous space for action was only limitedly used, hence reducing the chances for indirect change. While it is still too early to fully assess the foreseen indirect effects, in our opinion it is crucial to understand the nature of these local reforms within the central (Flemish) bargaining arena. The latter seems to have transformed the new schemes of local governmental organisation to the path-dependent art of the political feasible.

The number of preference votes for the candidates running in the October 2006 local elections in the thirteen main cities of Flanders is largely determined by the position on the list and the previous political mandate. A multivariate analysis shows that an executive function on the local level yields a comparable electoral bonus as a national mandate. The campaign expenditures also have a significant effect. There is a spending limit, but the candidates on average spend only 22% of what they are allowed to. Christian-democratic candidates generally spend the most, with the liberals ranked second. The gender, age and professional status of the candidates have at most a very marginal effect on their electoral score, controlling for the other relevant variables. Candidates with a foreign name obtain a somewhat better result on average, but this is particularly the case with candidates running for the socialist party.

Official results of local elections are especially interesting when collected at the lowest level possible, to enable analyses of voting behaviour on the smallest social unit. In Antwerp, together with the city-level results, the voting results for the city districts are public too. Yet, still no possibility exists to review the official results at the neighbourhood level. This lack of data makes it difficult to relate specific neighbourhood characteristics to voting behaviour in those neighbourhoods and to compare them. Thus, to collect the data on neighbourhood voting behaviour, we organised an exit-poll in 18 neighbourhoods of seven districts in Antwerp, during the recent county, local and district elections. This article briefly sketches the exit-poll and its organisation and presents the main results. These results will be compared with the formal results on district level, and the neighbourhoods will be compared to one another. The results are – as expected – slightly biased, although in some districts more than in others. Voting behaviour in neighbourhoods turns out to vary strongly. We try to explain the voting behaviour with the help of several neighbourhood characteristics, like the proportion of immigrants and unemployed. The analysis confirms some important correlations, but refutes others.

The last local elections in Wallonia were marked by the introduction of a new legislation concerning the way mayors are appointed. Before 2006, mayors were appointed by the regional government. Since the last elections, a new decree institutes that is automatically appointed mayor the candidate having most preferential votes from the list having most seats. In this article, we explore how the new legislation has affected the way voters behave in 2006 and also how it has affected parties when it comes to coalition agreements. What appears is that the new legislation has a fairly limited impact. Voters did not cast more preferential votes in 2006 than in 2000. The logics of coalitions have not been changed significantly. Finally, the only notable – even if not spectacular – impact of the new Walloon decree is that the elections have been much more focused on the candidates that were leading their list, the ones that were presented by their party as their candidate to become mayor. These candidates have more often been appointed mayors in 2006 than in 2000 and the proportion of preferential votes that they have received is higher in 2006. In that sense, even if the degree of change must not be exaggerated, Walloon local elections are slightly turning into a horse race between candidates leading their list.

It is often suggested that the nationalization of local elections has increased. As a result, a hypothesis could be that the mutual differences between policy programs of local divisions of the same national party decrease. In this contribution, we focus on the local election of October 8th 2006 in order to analyse these mutual differences. The aim of this contribution is to measure the homogeneity or heterogeneity of the policy positions of the local divisions of national political parties, on a range of substantive issues on which they have the freedom to differ. Therefore, we compare the opinions of local party agents within the different party families. We use the results of a survey among the representatives of the local departments of the different political parties in the run-up to the local elections. Our research shows that, regarding to the selected questions, in general the local divisions speak with one voice. Our analysis does not indicate that there is a large mixture of visions between divisions of the same national party. Besides, this analysis shows that in general, the size of the municipality can seldom be used in indicating the relative disagreement within political families. This level of agreement is the largest within the green party and the smallest within the liberal family. Those are also the two parties of which the local agents say that the influence of supra-local party levels is small, compared to representatives of other political families.

In discussing the results of the Belgian local elections of 8 October 2006 the media devoted most attention to Antwerp. Not only because it is Flanders biggest city, but especially because of the remarkable result of mayor Patrick Janssens and his socialist party (Sp.a-Spirit). They won over 35% of the votes and became the biggest party of the city, a position that was taken by the extreme right party for more than ten years. In this article we tried to map and explain the so called ‘Janssens-effect’. By analysing the election results and the data of an (inter-university) Internet panel we managed to prove that Patrick Janssens had a large share in the victory of his party. A lot of citizens of Antwerp that normally would not vote for the socialist party supported Janssens. To explain this personal success we suggested four plausible motives: the perceived qualities of Janssens as a mayor; his presidential campaign; the attention of and performance in the media; and finally the statement against extreme right. Our panel data suggest that a combination of these motives can explain the Janssens-effect. The appreciation for Janssens as a very capable mayor was present among the electorate long before the campaign started. This appreciation became the basis for his electoral success. The fact that many voters decided to switch to Janssens in the months and weeks before the election is related to his campaign and the media-attention it generated. The media strengthened the image of Antwerp as a polarised city. Especially the voters that changed their vote intention during the campaign were convinced that supporting Janssens was the most explicit signal against the extreme right image of their city.

Together with the city council elections, the citizens of Antwerp elected on 8 October 2006 for the second time their district councils. This new decentralised political level is primarily initiated to restore the confidence of the citizens in the city (and district) government(s). By analysing the results of the city and the district elections we try to find indications whether citizens feel closer to their new district governments or not. Firstly district elections resulted definitely not in less blank votes. Secondly, the number of list votes is higher on the district elections than on the city elections, while we would have expected a higher number of preferential votes. Thirdly, we see that the differences between the electoral results of the city elections and the district elections are becoming more pronounced. Although this last result seems to support the legitimacy of the decentralised district they merely reflect changes in the logic of the city elections. Mainly as a result of media coverage the city elections were direct elections of the mayor. Therefore voters used the district elections to vote for their preferred political party. This was not always possible at city level, because some parties did not have an eligible candidate for mayor. Generally spoken, we can conclude that the district elections do not give much proof of a closer connection between the citizens and the city government.