Electoral systems across Europe increasingly invite candidates to build up a personal reputation to earn votes. In this article, we investigate whether parliamentary work can be considered as a personal vote-earning attribute for incumbent MPs based on data of the 2014 elections in Belgium. The results show that when parliamentary work is operationalised in a narrow way (i.e. as the number of bills and the number of oral and written questions of an MP), this has no influence on the amount of preferential votes. When parliamentary work is defined in a broader way (i.e. also including other aspects of the legislative and control function of MPs), parliamentary work has a significant positive effect for MPs from opposition parties. This supports the claim that the number of legislative and control activities is not sufficient to measure the impact of parliamentary work on preferential votes, but that also other aspects of the work should be taken into account.

Parties need to adapt their policy platforms in order to win elections, yet this is not without risk. Policy shifts can reduce credibility and foster intra-party conflicts. As a result, parties tend to proceed with caution when programmatic changes are made. In this article two risk reduction methods are formulated as hypotheses and investigated. First, we claim that parties will prefer making changes to the amount of attention issues get in a manifesto than to the positions they defend. Second, we argue that the amount of change is related to the ideological and electoral importance of the issue. In other words, we assume that parties are less likely to make positional changes on issues they own because this can possibly bring about loss in credibility and contradicts with the fact that politicians and party members are policy driven. These hypotheses are examined with new data gathered through the content analysis of the party manifestos of the Belgian Liberal party and the social-democratic party for elections held between 1961 and 2010. The article concludes that parties make smaller positional changes as opposed to changes in the issues they emphasize. Only weak evidence was found for the fact that the positional flexibility toward an issue correlates with the ideological and electoral importance of an issue.

Socio-economic Questions in the Liberal 156 and Socialist Party Programmes Between 1961 and 2010 Belgian political history was for a long time ruled by three fault lines, determined by religion, community and socio-economic issues. The political scenery was divided between the alternating powers of these three fault lines. This article studies the impact of the socio-economic fault line on the definition of Belgian political history and on the political discord reigning between 1961 and 2010. There has indeed been a discussion on national and international level about the waning relevancy of this fault line. The question is analyzed through the quantitative analysis of the party programmes of two major opponents on the socioeconomic fault line, namely the liberal and the socialist parties. The popular assertion that this fault line gradually had to make room has received some credit but is certainly not entirely relied upon. The attention given to socioeconomic issues has been weakening over the last 50 years in the socialist and liberal party programmes. Yet if we account for the positions taken on the socio-economic fault line, the situation appears blurred. The positional tensions on the socio-economic fault-line did not fade with the same regularity as the attention it was given. There were alternating periods of convergence and divergence. The declining attention for socio-economic issues was probably the result of increasing prosperity. The lessening of class differentiation brought nevertheless other fault lines to the forefront. The shifting tensions on the socio-economic fault line seem to have depended on the economic situation and the ruling economic paradigm. In this sense, the oppositions regarding content tended to increase in periods of economic crisis, and the tension became stronger during periods of paradigm shifts.

To what extent do interest groups adapt to a changing institutional environment? That is the central question of this article. KEATING [2014. Introduction: rescaling interests, Territory, Politics, Governance 2(3)] distinguishes three drivers that can force interest groups to rescale: a functional, an identitarian and an institutional driver. The focus of this article is on the last driver of rescaling and on the assumption that interest groups increasingly operate on a regional scale when regional governments acquire more power. This 'isomorphism hypothesis' is tested by analysing the adaptation of the principal labour and business groups in Belgium. We found that in Belgium, this hypothesis only accounts for a number of cases. The Belgian rescaling process is not only the result of institutional changes but also a response to economic differences between Flanders and Wallonia, as well as to the increasing salience of the language cleavage. Groups were rescaling even before the gradual federalization of the state started, but federalization has accentuated this process.

Insights from the representation literature were applied to industrial relations in order to study the representativeness of union officials. Based on a member-survey in a major Belgian trade union, we found that union representatives mirror quite well their followers in descriptive (except for gender) and substantive terms (issue congruence).

Family politicization remains a prominently present background feature of politicians in Western democracies. Largely related to politicized upbringing, this characteristic has mostly been studied from the supply-side of the recruitment process. In this article we intend to look at it from a demand-side perspective. Starting from the premise that political family candidates occupy a unique position among other first-time candidates because of an internal (within the party) and external (towards the electorate) name recognition advantage, we look for variation in Belgian federal candidates’ perception of their initial most important selection criteria. Results indicate that the more candidates’ families were politicized, the more they mention exposure-related criteria (especially name recognition) and the less they refer to skills-related criteria. Using a stepwise binary logistic regression model to test competing hypotheses and control for relevant background characteristics, family politicization appears to be an independent predictor of how candidates perceive their initial selection criteria. Keywords: candidate selection – selection criteria – family politicization – name recognition – Belgium

Left, right, left. The influence of party ideology on the political representation of ethnic minorities in Belgium Floor Eelbode a , Bram Wauters b , Karen Celis c & Carl Devos a a Department of Political Sciences , Ghent University , Ghent , Belgium b Business Administration and Public Management , University College Ghent , Ghent , Belgium c Department of Political Sciences , Vrije Universiteit Brussel , Brussels , Belgium Published online: 23 Jul 2013.

The scholarly literature on ethnic minority representation often points to the "political opportunity structure" - particularly that of political parties - to explain the prevalence of ethnic minorities in elected politics. Informed by the literature on women in politics, this article examines how the ideology of political parties affects the representation of ethnic minorities. This article is based on a qualitative case study of 2 major Belgian cities and includes 33 semi-structured interviews with ethnic minority councillors, candidates, members of ethnic communities, and party representatives. Interviews were analyzed using the grounded theory approach. We found party ideology to affect the support parties received from ethnic minority voters and candidates; party ideology does not, however, influence party strategies to enhance ethnic minority representation. Overall, political parties do not seem to invest in their ethnic minority candidates and councillors.

Why Historians should also keep their own Field of Study in Mind Historians must pay more attention to the meaning of the logic of management or managerialism in politics. However, interdisciplinarity does not simply mean that subjects and methods of other disciplines can be copied into the science of history. Historians have an important unique selling proposition that should not be underestimated – the power to put novelty in perspective by historical insight. The techniques and methods of the science of history cannot be weakened simply in order to study topics that are popular or to participate in public discussions that are mainly inspired by other disciplines. This article is part of the forum 'Manager Politics'.

In the literature, several contradicting views can be found concerning ruralurban differences in individual social capital. This study combines a literature review with an empirical examination of the different points of view, applying multilevel modeling techniques on data collected from 2,332 students living across 216 municipalities. In general, social capital appears to be higher among students from municipalities in central agglomerations than among those from more rural municipalities. This effect could not be observed with respect to social capital from the family, but was established regarding social capital from friends and acquaintances. In addition, we found that living in an urban environment is associated with more pronounced socioeconomic inequalities in social capital from friends.