Characterising Local Party Offer in Belgium: from Localisation to Nationalisation

Even though the study of local elections suffers from a relative underdevelopment in the literature, a better understanding of local-level political dynamics seems crucial. Local political institutions are the closest to citizens, have a specific role in interconnecting different tiers of government, while the local level often serves as the primary laboratory to experiment democratic innovations (Deschouwer 2003, Ladner et al. 2016). In this wake, this paper examines the way state-wide parties present lists and compete at the local level, by analysing the local party offer in Belgium. Firstly, the paper aims at uncovering the degree of “politicisation” (Rokkan 1966), i.e. the local versus nationalized nature of the local party offer. The latter is examined through classification tools, then through an index of local party system nationalization (Kjaer and Elklit 2010; Steyvers and Heyerick 2017). For that first research goal, we study the local party offer of 5.591 lists across three Belgian regions (589 Flemish, Walloon and Brussels municipalities) as well as across time (2012 and 2018 local elections). Using Wallonia as an exploratory case-study, we develop a second set of indexes to complementary investigate the organic nature of the “politicisation” of local party offer in terms of list composition (e.g. party members or independent candidates; candidates from various parties, alliances of parliamentary parties, etc.). Secondly, the paper assesses distinct determinants of the variance observed across municipalities (e.g. size of the municipality, urban vs rural, socio-economic diversity, presence of a national political leader, etc.). In this way, the paper intends to contribute to the on-going debate about the second-order or second-tier nature of local elections. More broadly, this paper aims at opening up discussion about how local level data on electoral offer could be collected on a larger scale and in a systematic way for every local electoral cycle.