Local Political Leadership in Times of Structural Reform. The Impact of Municipal Amalgamations on Local Leadership

It is often assumed that initiating a structural reform is not a very popular decision to make. It can hamper one’s political career, certainly at the local level. That was also said of the municipal amalgamations in Flanders, that were encouraged by the Flemish government, but only on a voluntary basis. Those who would opt for a merger of their municipality, would sign for their own political downfall. A very convenient way of checking this is the use or preference voting. Preference voting is often regarded as one of the typical features of local elections in Belgium (Ackaert, 1996; Wauters et al., 2010; Marien et al., 2015). In this paper, we aim to further develop our understanding of this phenomenon by examining local preference voting in the 2018 elections from two complementary perspectives, namely the reasons why voters chose to cast or not to cast a preference vote as such (RQ1) as well as the motives and mechanisms that inspired their specific preference vote in particular (RQ2). Finally, we try to assess the impact of some recent structural reforms on the use of preference voting during the last local elections of 2018 (RQ3). More in particular we analyze the role of incumbency and the obtained number of preference votes after a municipal amalgamation. In this way we want to analyze the impact of a structural reform (in the form of a municipal amalgamation) on the use of preference voting in Flanders and we hope to conclude whether initiating a municipal amalgamation is rewarding for the political career or not.