Party Crashers? How Belgian Citizens view Democratic Innovations within and Beyond Parties

In most Western democracies, the system of representation is undergoing growing discontent or disaffection (Blais et al. 2004; Dalton 2004; Norris 2011; Zelle 1995). As major links between the polity and the society and hence as nexus of this system, political parties directly suffer from these phenomena. Remedies have been put forward aiming at increasing citizens’ involvement in politics outside elections: more frequent use of referenda, experiments with deliberative democracy, as well as more inclusive candidate selection methods (Scarrow 2001). Candidate selection, in particular, touches a major paradox: while parties are central to the functioning of representative democracies, it is not entirely clear whether parties themselves, in their own internal functioning, need to be democratic. This issue is particularly salient in a consensual democracy like Belgium, where the elite of the ‘pillarized’ parties hold a strong control on the democratic process. There is hence a normative need to go beyond what the governing elite think about democracy so as to integrate those for whom, by whom and of whom democracy is supposed to be: the people. Empirically based on a new dataset, the PartiRep 2014 Voter Survey, this paper examines the opinion of Belgian voters regarding the role that they, as citizens, should play in the democratic processes. The paper interestingly links the issue of opening the procedures for selecting candidates to citizens’ broader view on how they should participate in the day-to-day policy making. More precisely, it tests the impact of three factors on voters’ level of support for more direct participation both within and outside the parties: the level of discontent with the current system; voters’ political preferences; and the nature of political activities voters are involved in. It thus asks a crucial question for the future of the system: what do citizens really want for democracy?