One Country, two Democracies? Assessing and Explaining Approval Ratings of Political Representatives in the Belgian Multi-Level Democracy

Despite the successive devolutions of competences from the federal state to the federated entities (i.e. regions and communities), political elites who carry out their activities at the regional or the communitarian level are still often claimed to be less visible and less popular in Belgian public opinion in comparison to those politicians who hold a mandate at the federal level. Yet, there have been so far very few studies on whether the tier of government at which a politician is active might have an impact on his/her level of popularity. The present paper precisely aims to assess the influence of the various types of political mandates (i.e. federal, regional, local, European and partisan mandates) on politicians’ approval ratings in Belgium. Drawing on data from 50 successive quarterly opinion polls conducted between June 2004 and November 2016, we seek to determine the extent to which each type of mandate affects political elites’ popularity in each of the three regions of the country. The results of the analysis reveal that patterns vary considerably from one region to another. In Wallonia and in Brussels, federal mandates significantly increase politicians’ approval ratings, whereas regional and communitarian mandates make political elites much less popular. This observation demonstrates that Walloon and Brussels’ citizens still perceive federated entities as mere “second-order” political arenas fully subordinated to the “first-order” federal arena. In Flanders, by contrast, both federal and regional mandates have a significant and positive effect on approval ratings and the strengths of their respective effects are quite comparable. This finding seems to indicate that in the Flemish region, the regional level of government nowadays is regarded as a genuine “first-order” political arena on an equal footing with the federal arena.