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Project

Electoral Accountability in a Complex Federal System. The Case of the Regional, Federal and European Elections in Belgium.

Democratic governance requires that citizens can hold incumbents responsible for the policy they have pursued. In the literature, we can observe that investigating this mechanism remains limited to

  • economic voting
  • accountability in high-clarity context (e.g., two party systems)

The goal of the current project is to address both shortcomings in the literature. First, we allow the respondent in our survey to identify the most salient policy issues, so that on each of these topics we can investigate whether electoral accountability occurs. Second, we will conduct the study in Belgium, a highly complex federal system with a complicated system of power sharing and a fragmented party system. We believe this offer a hard and conservative test for the theory on electoral accountability. We seize the opportunity of the 2019 elections that are scheduled in the country. First, we observe different coalitions in the two main language areas of Belgium, which allows for variation in the clarity of accountability. Second, regional, federal and European elections will be held on the same day in 2019, thus offering a unique opportunity to observe whether institutional complexity limits electoral accountability. Furthermore, in a pre- and post-election design we include measures of political sophistication, to assess whether the complexity of the Belgian political system makes it more difficult for citizens with lower levels of political sophistication to hold incumbents accountable.

Date:1 Jan 2017 →  31 Dec 2020
Keywords:Electoral Accountability, Complex Federal System, Elections, Belgium
Disciplines:Other economics and business, Citizenship, immigration and political inequality, International and comparative politics, Multilevel governance, National politics, Political behaviour, Political organisations and institutions, Political theory and methodology, Public administration, Other political science