The Spirit of Accommodation under threat? A Longitudinal Analysis of Belgian MPs’ Interactions in Parliamentary Speeches (1962-2023)

A very important, but understudied, part of the consociational theory of Lijphart (1968) is that stability in divided societies can only be attained when at the elite level politicians replace their competitive attitude with a cooperative one. Lijphart (1968) refers to this as ‘the spirit of accommodation’, in which the political elites of the different segments should commit to the unity of the country and be willing and able to cooperate with the leaders of the other segments (p.103). Some argue that in Belgium, once described as ‘one of the most thorough examples of consociational democracy’, this spirit of accommodation is threatened. Voters of the two main regions are increasingly growing further apart, there are almost no federal parties, and the political elites seem to live in their regional bubble. This makes it plausible that there is no more need to talk with the other region for the political elites. This is illustrated, for one, by the increased duration of government formation processes (De Winter and Dumont, 2021). Adding to this debate, this paper measures whether this regionalization of politics has been trickled down to the parliamentary speeches of MPs in the federal parliament. More specifically, the focus is on dynamics (speeches) in the federal parliament, the heart of interactions between representatives of the different segments. In consociational democracies like Belgium, the need to have intergroup interactions in parliamentary speeches is urgent as politicians' willingness to cooperate, compromise and collectively resolve political conflicts is typically seen as a crucial remedy against the threat of political immobilism and instability in political systems with deep-rooted social divisions. Accordingly, this paper investigates how intensive parliamentarians from both language groups in Belgium interact with each other in their parliamentary speeches and this from 1962 till now. Do politicians predominantly address and interrupt politicians from their own language group? And how is this evolved over time? The paper investigates the latter during a period of six constitutional reforms (1970, 1980, 1988, 1993, 2001, 2011) in which competencies have been transferred from the federal to the regional level. If MPs do not even interact with each other in the federal parliament, where politicians try to convince each other, leading to more consensual decisions, the spirit of accommodation could indeed be under threat.