Unpacking Belgian citizens’ attitudes towards (de)centralization: an interplay of efficiency, identity and socialization?

How do citizens experience and assess the different territorial scales of their multi-level environment? What are the causal mechanisms at play to understand support for (de)centralization? When one considers that citizens are both the initial determinant and the recipient of devolution processes, studying their opinion is of crucial importance. In this respect, the Belgian case is of particular interest, as it faced a twofold process of political restructuring (Beyers & Bursens, 2013). While Belgium went through a process of decentralization where subnational authorities acquired substantial autonomy, competences were also progressively pooled at the EU-level which has far-reaching policy-making competences in areas such as agriculture, environment, trade, and finance. Previous quantiative work on Belgian citizens’ attitudes towards the different territorial scales of their multi-level environment have shown that support for decentralization is related to several factors such as regional identification, perceptions of regional economic gain from decentralization, youth socialization, and elite discourses on regionalization (Deschouwer et al., 2015; Dupuy et al., 2020; Henderson et al. 2014; Sinardet et al. 2018; Verhaegen et al., 2021). While these studies are well-designed to observe general patterns of association and allow for testing whether observed correlations are in line with theoretical expectations of these associations, additional research is required to fully understand the causal mechanisms underlying these theories and observations. The aim of the current paper is to get insight into how identification, perceptions of efficiency and regional gain, socialization and elite cues play a role when people discuss the multi-level government structure they are exposed to, and how this links to their attitudes towards (de)centralization. The paper draws on the analysis of novel focus group data (20 groups organized between 2019 and 2021) in Belgium. Relying on a semi-inductive content discourse analysis of the debates, the article starts by identifying the argumentative framed used by citizens to discuss the various territorial scales they live in (i.e., subnational, national and European). In a next step, the article discusses the interplay between various frames, and inquires how these are linked to participants’ support for (de)centralization.