Territorial Reforms and Party Competition in Belgium

In the last decades, Belgium witnessed different steps towards regionalisation / federalisation of the country. A significant amount of competences and policy issues have been gradually allocated to the different regions and communities. These territorial reforms and the resulting autonomy of the sub-national entities had a large impact on the ideological positions of the political parties. But the position of a party cannot be understood independently from the positions of the other political actors within the same party system. The determination of the agendas of the political parties consists in a competition over specific public policy issues and the arrival of a new competitor or new issue - such as the one of territorial reforms - often leads to a redefinition of this party competition. This paper therefore intends to demonstrate the importance of ethnicity and territorial issues in Belgian party manifestos and that this presence varies over time, across party families and regions. Given the fact that parties compete for issues, this variation will be explained by the surrounding party competition and the specific emphasis put on these issues by several political actors. Different patterns of competition will be identified, depending on the linguistic community, time frame and party system environment. Using original empirical data from the analysis of Belgian party manifestos between 1977 and 2007 that were coded according to the Comparative Policy Agenda Project framework and to specific Belgian categories, this paper intends to analyse the impact on party competition on party positions on ethnic and territorial issues. The main focus of this paper concerns ethno-regionalist parties, their demands for further regionalisation and their impact on other parties'' positions. Previous studies demonstrated that state reforms lead to a decrease of attention to territorial reforms demands and to the community conflict in both regionalist and mainstream parties. But, to which extent the positions of the ethno-regionalist parties influence the positions of the other (mainstream) parties ? This paper intends to prove that the pattern of party competition has a significant impact on the ethnic and territorial issues put forward by parties. Party positions on these issues are influenced by the success of the ethno-regionalist parties and by the positions of the other parties. This hypothesis will be tested taking into account variables such as electoral performance, the decreasing importance of the party families, the impact of the government participation at the federal and regional level, as well as a comparison between Flemish and French-speaking parties.