Breaking Free from Partitocracy (original) (raw)

2021, Belgian Exceptionalism

Belgium is said to be a textbook example of a partitocracy, that is an extreme case of dominance of political parties on all aspects of the social and political system (Dewachter 2002; De Winter, della Porta, and Deschouwer 1996a; Steyvers 2014). This happens through patronage in parliament, public administration, the judiciary, and even in civil society (de Visscher 2004; De Winter 2002; De Winter and Dumont 2000, 2006). Hence, one can assert that Belgian exceptionalism resides among others in her strong partitocratic nature. Belgian parties are powerful actors, if not the most powerful actors of the system (De Winter, della Porta, and Deschouwer 1996b). But is it exceptional compared to other partitocratic countries? Scholars point at the decreasing legitimacy of the partitocratic system, and of political parties in general (Mair 2013; Rahat and Kenig 2018), as attested by declining trends in party membership (van Haute et al. 2013), higher levels of electoral volatility (Dassonneville 2018), and the rise of parties with renewed organizational structures or ideology (Hobolt and Tilley 2016; Mazzoleni and Voerman 2016). One may then wonder whether these weakened party organizations still manage to hold a strong control on their representatives or if politicians are nowadays more often allowed to break with their party line. Building on the (contested) personalization thesis (Balmas et al. 2014; Karvonen 2010), this chapter proposes to disentangle parties' grip on a particular group of political elites, the candidates to elected office. Candidates are key political actors, first during the campaign, then as representatives once elected (André et al. 2017). Electoral candidates embody the party (Katz 2001) from the moment they have been officially selected by party selectorates (Hazan and Rahat 2010). Yet this is not to presume that candidates