Is there more to it than that? A Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of intra-party democratic reforms in Belgium.

Among the organisational reforms that political parties have implemented the last decades, democratic reforms are probably the most scrutinized in the literature. It is generally assumed that one of the driving forces behind this ‘democratising trend’ is the erosion of party membership in West European democracies. Yet this paper argues that party reforms can only be fully understood by taking a broader view of the conditions that might cause them. More importantly, we understand reforms as being the outcome of a combination of conditions pressing the party to adapt. Hence, this paper seeks to identify which set of conditions are necessary and/or sufficient to explain intra-party democratic reforms. We focus on two key types of reforms: the leadership and candidate selection processes. We conduct a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs/QCA) based on the 6 traditional Belgian parties between 1987 and 2009. The analysis investigates causal factors that focus on structure (e.g. institutional reforms), context (e.g. government participation, electoral defeat, etc.) and personality (e.g. change of party leader). The paper relies on the use of three existing datasets (PPDB, COSPAL and MAPP) completed with extensive data on Belgian political parties. Preliminary results show that the decline in membership only explain democratic reforms when parties sit in opposition and when the party leadership remains stable at the time of the reform. Other results also underline the importance of contagion across parties in the case of the reforms of leadership selection processes.