The Electoral Consequences of Committee Chair Nominations in Belgium

Congressional studies have long dominated our understanding of committee and committee chair assignments, concentrating on how congressional legislative organization best serves the re-election incentives of its members. By contrast, a fledgling comparative literature is emerging that focuses on political parties and the manner in which electoral systems affect their post-election nomination strategies (Stratmann and Baur, 2002; Carroll et al., 2004; Pekkanen et al., 2006; Crisp et al., 2009). Electoral systems, it argues, shape the manner in which parties seek to enhance the profile of incumbents by allocating to them key positions in the legislative arena – in particular, committee chairs. While it is assumed that the party may increase its electoral support and that of its incumbents through the key positions it gives, making them higher quality candidates in the next election, the proposition has not been extensively investigated. In particular we do not know the extent to which parties’ post-election assignment strategies yield electoral benefits. This paper contributes to the literature by bridging studies on electoral systems and legislative organization. Using new career data on the Belgian Parliament (1981 – 2014), we methodically investigate whether, and to what degree, incumbents benefit from obtaining a committee chair in terms of preference votes. The systematic comparison of incumbents’ electoral careers (i.e. their preference vote share in the district) before and after they obtain a committee chair allows us to comprehensively test the key assumption in the literature regarding the electoral utility of legislative posts – controlling for types of committees and alternative explanations. Belgium provides an interesting case in point, moreover, where party nomination strategies (in terms of a candidate’s list position) have long proved influential but at the same time previous studies have found electoral incentives to be sufficiently strong to induce personal vote-seeking on the part of incumbents.