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Democratic legitimacy in multilevel political systems: The role of politicization at the polity-wide level in the EU and Belgium

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Abstract

The debate on democratic legitimacy of multilevel political systems such as supranational organizations and federal states has not yet been conducted in a comprehensive way. While there is a fierce academic debate on the democratic deficit of the EU polity, the Belgian political system has hardly been analyzed from this perspective, although some of the characteristics that are considered as problematic in the case of the EU can also be found in Belgium. This article questions whether diagnosis and remedies with respect to the EU are indeed applicable to the Belgian system. We focus on the possibility of democratically legitimizing these multi-level polities through the politicization of the polity-wide level, discussing the strategy of electoral engineering and party system reform, as well as mass media and public sphere issues. While not neglecting crucial differences, we conclude that similarities are of such a nature that some proposals for the EU level can be theoretically transferred to the Belgian federation and can contribute to our understanding of the specific issues of democratic legitimacy that multi-level systems have to deal with.

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Notes

  1. One nice example of this is how press conferences are organized during meetings of the European Council. With the exception of the rotating Presidency, all ‘chefs’ address their national journalists during simultaneous press conferences in separate rooms. This allows all 27 of them to spin the joint decisions as 27 separate negotiation victories. Their aim, of course, is that their national mass media reports this national victory ‘at home’. The side effect is, however, that this strategic behavior hampers the development of a European-wide public opinion.

  2. Eurobarometer 73 (http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/eb/eb73/eb73_vol2_en.pdf)

  3. Up until 2012, there was one electoral district which did cross the borders of the regions: the very controversial district of Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde (BHV) was composed of the 19 communes of the bilingual Brussels region and of 35 communes of the province of Flemish-Brabant in the unilingual Flemish region. For elections of the Chamber, voters in BHV could therefore vote for lists of the Dutch-speaking as well as the French-speaking parties. For the senate and EP election, this was also possible but the lists of the two colleges were presented separately: voters first had to choose between the lists for the Dutch-speaking or French-speaking electoral college before they could vote for one of the party lists (for more details on Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde, seeSinardet, 2010).

  4. Paul Vanden Boeynants, member of the French-speaking Christian-democrats and who led a ‘transitory cabinet’ during five months in 1978–1979, is the only exception.

  5. Quite comparable to how press conferences are organized after European Council meetings, those of the Belgian federal government are held by the Prime Minister, who is mostly flanked by at least one Dutch-speaking and French-speaking minister. After the joint conference, they both tend to cater for their own media.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Free University of Brussels, Pleinlaan 2, Brussels, 1050, Belgium

    Dave Sinardet

  2. University of Antwerp, Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, 2000, Belgium

    Peter Bursens

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  1. Dave Sinardet
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Correspondence to Dave Sinardet.

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Sinardet, D., Bursens, P. Democratic legitimacy in multilevel political systems: The role of politicization at the polity-wide level in the EU and Belgium. Acta Polit 49, 246–265 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2013.17

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