Pattern of Nationalisation in Belgium, 1946 – 2010

It has been demonstrated that in most of the countries electoral behaviour follows a pattern of nationalization, that is, national politics substitutes local politics (Caramani 2004, Alemán and Kellam 2008). However, in few countries (Belgium, Britain and Italy) where new federalizing tendencies created a local space for electoral competition an opposing trend towards some re-territorialisation of voting behaviour is observable (Caramani 2004). Differently from Britain and Italy, Belgium is a federal state in which from 1972 onwards the party offer was different for the two main regions: Flanders and Wallonia. In this paper we show (by using the Bochsler index) that the pattern of re-territorialisation of electoral behaviour observed in Belgium (Caramani 2004) is mainly due to the structuration of the electoral offer and when considering Flanders and Wallonia separately a clear pattern of nationalization emerges.