No Accommodation without Respectful Interactivity: Incivility between Dutch and French-Speaking elite in the Belgian Federal Parliament (1961-2023)

Consociational democracies depend on elite accommodation to maintain stability, requiring leaders from different societal groups to engage in constructive dialogue across political and linguistic divides (Lijphart, 1968, p. 104). Yet the spirit of accommodation remains understudied, largely due to its conceptual vagueness and the difficulty of measuring it quantitatively (Van Schendelen, 1985; Steiner & Jaramillo, 2019). This paper seeks to address this gap by examining a crucial precondition of accommodation: respectful interactivity. First, we demonstrate that without respectful exchange across group boundaries, accommodation cannot take place. Drawing on Pedrini et al. (2013) and the Discourse Quality Index, we conceptualize reciprocity in parliamentary speeches as a measurable indicator of respectful intergroup interaction. We capture interactivity by identifying whom MPs refer to in their speeches, and we assess respect by analyzing the incivility present in these interactions. To measure incivility, we follow the “respect towards others” approach of Mariën et al. (2019), focusing on personal attacks, as well as the public-level incivility framework of Muddiman (2017). Focusing on Belgium, long regarded as a prime example of elite accommodation, yet increasingly seen as a case where it is under strain, we quantitatively assess this key condition using a new dataset of 22,236 speeches from the Belgian federal parliament, covering investiture and State of the Union debates between 1961 and 2023.