The cleavage structures of multilayered Belgium: An MCA-approach towards comparing political spaces

Decades of disconsonant electoral trends among Belgium’s two regions of Flanders and Francophone Belgium has left researchers speculating on the exact roots of their socio-political differences. Marked by discrepancies in occupational structure, political attitudes and electorally separated through the existence of two distinctive party systems, these deviations could be attributed to heterogeneity in either the dimensional, or the cleavage structures of both polities. This paper advances an innovative methodology of class-specific multiple correspondence analysis (CSA) to study both structural components in a single methodological framework. Thereby, CSA allows for a comparative study of political spaces; an approach which other spatial measurements of political spaces have been unable to achieve so far. Substantively, I find that, besides an overtly more economically left-wing orientation of Francophones, cleavage structures in both linguistic groups are largely comparable. Three pertinent exceptions go against this claim: (1) that the class cleavage is stronger, though less culturally connotated in Flanders, (2) that linguistic cleavage engenders higher intensity in Flanders and (3) that integration-demarcation cleavage is more orientated towards the economic dimension in Francophone Belgium. In addition, at the level of the spaces’ dimensionality, it is found that the cultural dimension’s capacity structure the political space is notably lower in Francophone Belgium. Combined, these five observations may account for the regional disparities of far-right support in Belgium.