This paper adopts a novel focus on the effect of a particular contextual determinant of individual candidate campaigns, i.e. the difference between normal and early elections. The two most recent two federal elections in Belgium were held under quite different contexts. In 2007, parties had ample time to prepare for a crucial battle between the outgoing liberal-socialist coalition, and its main contenders, the electoral cartel between the Flemish Christian-democrats and the Flemish-nationalist N-VA, a cartel that won the regional elections in Flanders in 2004. In contrast, the early elections of 2010 were triggered by the Flemish Liberals unexpectedly “pulling out the plug” of the coalition at the end of a long bargaining process between Flemish and Francophone parties on an old institutional issue, the splitting of the electoral constituency of Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde. This call for early elections caught most parties “offhand” (as they expected to face the voters only in 2011). In case of early elections, most party candidate selection statutory rules -- often allowing rank-and-file membership participation -- are not inapplicable, allowing the party to resort to more swift, oligarchic and exclusive candidate selection. Early elections also mean that parties have less time to find, motivate and select candidates outside of the traditional “inbreed” reservoir of candidates (local, regional & federal MPs and party officials) rather than to recruit non-political celebrity candidates that due to their media exposure and civil society renown are normally included to support the party electoral record (“surprise candidates”). Our analysis includes all the variables relevant to the topic included in the common CCS questionnaire, especially the use of pre-, modern- and postmodern communication instruments (Norris, 2002:135) and particularly of different media ICT-tools that permit targeting particular niches in their constituency (Gibson et al. 2013).
