Suchergebnisse

In Belgium, the idea of 'openness' is a well spread notion in electoral political discourses and the 2012 local election in Wallonia is no exception to this trend. Despite a clear victory, it is indeed very common for local political leaders in Belgium to announce that they will open their majority to other lists. The idea of 'openness' is also part of the local electoral campaign in terms of recruitment: non-partisan candidates – who clearly want to distinguish themselves from the party – are recruited to figure on the lists as 'independent candidates'. They are called 'candidates d'ouverture' as a sign of openness towards the civil society, the opposition, or dissidents from other political parties. Actually, these candidates are recruited for various reasons: there are sometimes used to demonstrate the citizen character of the list, to enhance the fact that the list 'makes politics differently from established political parties', to underline the local roots of the list, and sometimes the 'candidates d'ouverture' are simply used to complete vacancies on a list.

The name of a party is an important dimension of its political position. Often, the label used by a political party in its name tells much about its ideology. But, since in most cases, only a few parties compete for each election it is difficult to undertake large qualitative and quantitative analyses of party names. Local elections can provide an interesting option, however. Indeed, in several cases, we find lots of different names, and not only the usual national party labels. In the last local elections in Wallonia, one of the three Belgian Regions, 1012 lists were in competition. Such data provide a fertile ground for analysis. To study the name of the lists, we proceed in two steps. First, we build a typology of the names. We classify the lists in different categories: lists with national party name, lists with a clear reference to a national party, lists with an ideological label, lists with a clear reference to the commune's name, lists with a reference to the communal level but also lists with a reference to democracy, to a union or alliance, to change and an alternative way of doing politics, to the future, with puns, and with a reference to a person. In the second step, using multinomial regressions, we show where the different types of lists can be found and above all we look at their electoral performances and thus test the hypothesis whether the party name matters or not.

What are the outputs and effects of deliberative mini-publics? This is probably one of the most critical questions for any deliberative endeavor. In the realm of large-scale deliberative experiments, the G1000 in Belgium holds a special place: it happened in the wake of the longest government formation ever, it sought to gather 1000 randomly selected citizens in Brussels to discuss key social and political issues, and, above all, it was a fully citizen-led initiative. Its organizers explicitly sought to avoid any political and institutional ties and their focus was much more on guaranteeing a high representativeness and a qualitative process, rather than generating strong political outcomes. While the G1000 did well in terms of representativeness and open agenda setting, the political uptake was very limited in the short term. In the longer term, however, it seems that the effects of the G1000 were larger than initially expected. A rich set of empirical data is used to analyze the interaction between the G1000 with the entire political system by looking at the relation with the media, public opinion, political parties and MPs, and other experiments in deliberative democracy. Such endeavor sheds light on the "so what" question which is key to the development of real-world deliberative democracy.

What are the outputs and effects of deliberative mini-publics? This is probably one of the most critical questions for any deliberative endeavor. In the realm of large-scale deliberative experiments, the G1000 in Belgium holds a special place: it happened in the wake of the longest government formation ever, it sought to gather 1000 randomly selected citizens in Brussels to discuss key social and political issues, and, above all, it was a fully citizen-led initiative. Its organizers explicitly sought to avoid any political and institutional ties and their focus was much more on guaranteeing a high representativeness and a qualitative process, rather than generating strong political outcomes. While the G1000 did well in terms of representativeness and open agenda setting, the political uptake was very limited in the short term. In the longer term, however, it seems that the effects of the G1000 were larger than initially expected. A rich set of empirical data is used to analyze the interaction between the G1000 with the entire political system by looking at the relation with the media, public opinion, political parties and MPs, and other experiments in deliberative democracy. Such endeavor sheds light on the "so what" question which is key to the development of real-world deliberative democracy.