Mind the Gap is a book on the difficult times of modern representative democracy, and on the way in which political science is trying to make sense of it. Forecasting election results has become a very risky business, and explaining the often-surprising results must increasingly rely on case-by-case ad hoc interpretations. Old and formerly stable political parties now appear to be very vulnerable, because many of their traditional voters seem willing to desert them. If voters turn out to vote at all, they tend to be very volatile and send out complex messages, to decide later than ever what to do in the polling booth, to react to short-term factors and to follow candidates rather than parties.
Low levels of trust in political actors and institutions reveal a gap between the elites and the people. Belgium is one of the countries where one can witness these debates. Yet Belgium is also a special case. Not only a gap between elites and citizens but also a gap between north and south animates the political debates. The territorial division of the country in two language groups has led to the complete split of the parties and the party system and to the transformation of the unitary state into a complex federal system. With on top of all that the European level the lines of representation and accountability in Belgium are extremely opaque. Decision making requires subtle compromises between party leaders and sometimes take a very long time to come about. Voting in Belgium is however compulsory, which means that exiting the scene of democratic representation is not an obvious option. Citizens do turn out to vote and do express their views and their discontent. Some political parties however do suggest that leaving Belgium behind altogether might be better than just muddling through.
This book is based on ten years of research on political participation and representation in Belgium by the interuniversity research team PartiRep. Using several surveys among the population and politicians, voting aid applications, focus groups and experiments it draws a picture of a parliamentary and representative democracy that faces multiple tensions and multiple gaps. It discusses a wide range of political processes and actors, placing them in a comparative perspective, and exploring to what extent the Belgian case fits into the general picture. The chapters of the book deal with political socialization, political parties, representation, economic voting, preference voting and personalized voting, democratic preferences, identity politics and campaign effects and on the way in which elites and citizens try to find their way and make sense of this complex multi-level and linguistically divided country in the heart of the European Union.
Rudy B. Andeweg is a professor of Political Science at Leiden University and a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research interests include political legitimacy and representation.
Audrey André is a F.R.S.-FNRS postdoctoral researcher at the Centre d’étude de la vie politique (CEVIPOL) of the Université libre de Bruxelles. Her research focuses on the impact of electoral institutions on parties’, legislators’ and voters’ behaviour. Key findings have been published in the European Journal of Political Research, Electoral Studies, Comparative Political Studies, Party Politics, Acta Politica and West European Politics.
Pierre Baudewyns is a professor of Political Science at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain, Belgium) and co-promotor of the Belgian National Election Study (French-speaking part). His main research interests are survey methodology and political behaviour.
Benjamin Biard is a F.R.S.-FNRS research fellow in political science at the Institute of Political Science Louvain-Europe. His main research interests include populism, the influence of populist parties on public policy and democracy. Benjamin is co-secretary of the Francophone Belgian Political Science Association (ABSP).
Didier Caluwaerts is a professor of political science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His book Confrontation and Communication: Deliberative Democracy in Divided Belgium (2012 Peter Lang) has won the 2013 ECPR Jean Blondel award. He has published in Acta Politica, Ethnopolitics, Politics, Res Publica, European Political Science Review, Government & Opposition, Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties, Religion, State & Society, Journal of Public Deliberation, and West European Politics.
Ruth Dassonneville is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Université de Montréal (Canada), where she holds the Canada Research Chair in Electoral Democracy. She is also a member of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship. Her main research interests are voting behaviour, dealignment and economic voting.
Marc Debus is a professor of Comparative Government at the University of Mannheim, Germany. His research interests include political institutions, in particular in multilevel systems, and their effects on political behaviour of voters and legislators, party competition, coalition politics and decisionmaking within parliaments and governments.
Sam Depauw is Assistant Professor and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His research concentrates on legislative and electoral studies. He has published extensively on political representation and party discipline in West European Politics, the Journal of Legislative Studies, Acta Politica, and Party Politics. Sam Depauw has coordinated the PartiRep comparative legislator survey in fifteen European democracies.
Lieven De Winter is a senior professor at the UCLouvain. His research focuses on the (comparative) analysis of government formation, legislatures, elections and political parties and political regionalism, mainly in Western Europe.
Jérémy Dodeigne is a assistant professor at the Universty de Namur. His research areas cover the study of elites’ career patterns in multilevel systems, parliamentary behaviour, regional and federal studies, local politics and mixed methods research designs.
Silvia Erzeel is an assistant professor and postdoctoral researcher at the Political Science Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her research interests include political representation, political parties, gender and ethnicity and comparative politics.
Marc Hooghe is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Leuven (Belgium) and a Visiting Professor at the universities of Mannheim (Germany) and Lille (France). He has published extensively on political participation and social capital, and holds an ERC Advanced Grant to investigate the democratic linkage between citizens and the state.
Louise Hoon is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Université Libre de Bruxelles and a PhD fellow of the Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek. Her doctoral research concerns Euroscepticism and party/voter realignment.
Vincent Jacquet is a F.R.S.-FNRS Research Associate Professor at the University of Namur. His main research interests are participatory governance, transformations of democracy, and local politics.
Camille Kelbel is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant at the ULB. Her doctoral project focuses on candidate selection for European elections.
Sjifra de Leeuw is a PhD candidate in political communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (University of Amsterdam). Prior to that, she was a student research assistant at KU Leuven.
Christophe Lesschaeve is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. His dissertation analyses the opinion congruence between political elites and voters in Belgium. His most recent work focuses on the differences in opinion congruence between lower- and higher-educated voters.
Sofie Marien is an assistant professor at the University of Leuven. Her research interests are focused on democratic legitimacy, democratic innovations and political equality.
Jean-Benoit Pilet is a professor of Political Science at ULB. He works on elections, electoral system, political parties and representation. He is the coauthor of Faces on the Ballot; The Personalization of Electoral Systems in Europe (with Alan Renwick – Oxford UP 2016) and The Politics of Political Party Leadership in Comparative Perspective (with William Cross – Oxford
UP 2015).
Min Reuchamps is professor of Political Science at UCLouvain. His teaching and research interests are federalism and multilevel governance, as well as participatory and deliberative methods. He is currently president of the Francophone Belgian Political Science Association (ABSP).
Benoît Rihoux is a full professor in Comparative Politics at UCLouvain, where he chairs the Centre for political science and comparative politics. His substantive research interests comprise, among others, political parties, organisational change, social movements and gender and politics. He plays a leading role in the development of configurational comparative methods and
QCA and coordinates the interdisciplinary COMPASS network in that field.
Giulia Sandri is an associate professor at the European School of Political and Social Sciences of the Catholic University of Lille. She was previously research fellow at Christ Church and at the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Oxford. Her main research interests are party politics, intra-party democracy and political behaviour.
Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck is Professor of Political Science at the University of Mannheim, director of the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), and one of the principal investigators of the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES). From the assistant professorship which he held in 1998 he moved to the Centre for Survey Research and Methodology (ZUMA) where he served as scientific director. From 2003 to 2008 he held a professorship for political science at the University of Duisburg-Essen. His main areas of research include electoral behaviour, citizen attitudes, political communication, and political campaigns.
Dave Sinardet is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His work focuses on political communication and on the relation between identities and territorial politics.
Peter Thijssen is an associate professor at the Department of Political Science and member of the research group Media, Movements and Politics (M2P) at the University of Antwerp. His research focuses on public opinion, political participation and the politics of solidarity.
Jan W van Deth is Professor of Political Science and International Comparative Social Research at the University of Mannheim (Germany). His main research areas are political culture (especially social capital, political engagement, and citizenship), social change, and comparative research methods. He was Director of the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), convenor of the network Citizenship, Involvement, Democracy (CID) of the European Science Foundation, and Series Editor of the Studies in European Political Science for ECPR Press. He is a Corresponding Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and national coordinator of the German team for the European Social Survey (ESS). Recent publications include New Participatory Dimensions in Civil Society (Routledge, 2012; edited with William Maloney).
Patrick van Erkel works at the Political Science Department at the University of Antwerp. He is also a member of the Research group M2P. His research focuses on electoral behaviour.
Emilie van Haute is an associate professor at ULB and deputy director of CEVIPOL. Her main research interests include party membership, intraparty dynamics, participation, elections and voting behaviour.
Virginie Van Ingelgom is a Research Associate Professor at UCLouvain. Her research deals with the issue of legitimacy at national and the European levels, with the link between public policies and citizens’ attitudes and behaviours, and with methodological issues concerning the use of qualitative comparative analysis.
Soetkin Verhaegen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science at Stockholm University. Her research focuses on public opinion about international and regional organisations, and tackles questions about legitimacy, identity and participation.
Stefaan Walgrave is a professor of Political Science at the University of Antwerp. He leads the research group M2P (www.m2p.be). His research interests are social movements, political participation, political communication and elections.
Bram Wauters is an associate professor at the Department of Political Sciences of the Ghent University, Belgium, where he leads the research group GASPAR. His research interests include political representation, elections and political parties, with special attention to diversity.
