Local Attempts of 'Small' Parties’ Implantation: Which Strategies for Which Success? A Comparative Analysis of Three French-Speaking Parties in the 2012–18 Cycle of Belgian Local Elections

How do "small" parties integrate the political competition at the local level? What are the main drivers and targets of their electoral strategies and how do they relate to the anchorage of mainstream “big” parties? Moreover, how do these strategies translate into the ballot box and are they successful in terms of electoral outcomes? If traditional parties rely historically on a very dense local embeddedness due to the historical pillarization of the Belgian society (Deschouwer 2012), which translates in a large representation of these parties in the local political offer, the present paper investigates rather the relationship to the local level of smaller and newer parties. Capitalizing on systematic data gathered during the 2012-18 cycle of local elections in the French-speaking part of Belgium (Brussels & Wallonia), the paper will test three different hypotheses by comparing three types of “new” parties: regionalist (DéFI), extreme left (PTB) and far right (PP). More specifically, the paper tries to explain the local successfulness of these parties’ strategies in the light of the features of the population living in the targeted municipality (H1), the anchorage of traditional parties and the degree of nationalization of the local political offer within the latter (H2), or still of their own recruitment patterns (H3 - list composition). After pointing out the main findings, the paper will conclude by discussing the interest of developing more systematic comparative exploration of new parties’ strategies in local elections, and so across regions, countries and time.