Does Council Work Matter? Examining the Party Political and Electoral Rewards of Council Membership in the Local Elections in Flanders

Local elections are one of the most substantial political events in our democracy (Gendzwill et al., 2022). In this paper, we seek to enhance our understanding of a particular element of this process by investigating if, and how, incumbent councillors are rewarded for their work in office by their party and the voter in the context of Flemish local government. In Flemish local government, local elections are held every six years on the basis of a (semi-)open proportional list system (Steyvers & De Ceuninck, 2013). Citizens can vote for one party and several candidates from the same party. For incumbent councillors seeking re-election, the elections represent a double moment of appraisal. First, they have to pass the selection process from their party to get a favourable place on the ballot. Especially the upper spots and the final rank are highly regarded. Up to the last local elections of 2018, the list order was also used to distribute the party votes in descending order (Steyvers, 2022). Second, incumbent councillors have to compete with opponents and fellow party candidates for the vote of the citizen. Belgian local elections are characterized by their large share of preferential voting, which partly stems from notions of familiarity, competence and personality. To some extent, this appraisal also intersects with the place in the list order (De Ceuninck et al., 2018). In each of these arenas, councillors are judged on past and future actions. While they can profit from the well-known incumbency effect to this end, as layman politicians they also have to compete with mayors and aldermen, who are the most outspoken and professionalised political figureheads in the locality. Our paper examines how parties and the electorate reward the work of incumbent councillors compared to mayors and aldermen on one hand, and new candidates on the other. To do so, we analyse the list order of incumbents in 2018 compared to 2012, their respective number of preferential votes, and the voting motives of the electorate in the last election. Underneath the general picture, we look for additional variance on the municipal level (size), party level, and voter level (age, gender, education, political knowledge). Our quantitative analysis is based on two large datasets that were compiled amongst a sample of 24 Flemish municipalities. The first dataset (N=6386) contains the election data of all candidates of the 2012 and 2018 elections in this sample (i.e., their political function, list order and preferential votes). The other (N=956) contains the results from an exit poll carried out in 2018, in which preferential voting motives were listed for the candidates from the sample (see Dandoy et al., 2020).