This chapter presents the organizational structure and functionality of the Belgian parliamentary system within its unique federal setup, characterized by a three-tiered division among federal, regional, and community parliaments. It highlights the evolution of parliamentary organization and power dynamics, describing the impact of regionalization and partitocratic culture on legislative efficacy. The chapter first reviews key issues related to the organizational structure and position of Belgian parliaments, including the dominance of majority parties, the organizational role of committees, and legislative decline, all of which significantly limit parliamentary oversight. It also discusses the relationship of Belgian parliaments with the European Union, illustrating challenges in maintaining effective scrutiny in a multilevel governance context. The chapter next presents a number of future research avenues focused on comparative studies, methodological pluralism, and the impact of government crises on executive–legislative relations. In doing so, this chapter highlights areas where Belgian parliamentary studies can inform broader legislative research, especially in understanding the constraints that arise from multilevel governance and partisan control.

Pro‐EU MEPs pursue a strategy to further democratise EU governance through initiatives such as the Spitzenkandidaten and transnational lists. Doing so, they seem to follow a logic of what we call “trickle‐down democracy,” which entails the belief that the reproduction of domestic representative democracy at the EU level will increase popular support for the EU. However, despite extensive increases in power and authority for Parliament, popular support has not significantly increased, while Euroscepticism has become a mainstream phenomenon. When did pro‐EU MEPs commit to a “trickle‐down” logic of democratisation? And did they remain wedded to this logic despite strong counterindications? In this article, we adopt a historical institutionalist perspective to answer these questions. Based on a qualitative, interpretive thematic analysis of European Parliament (EP) debates and resolutions, we demonstrate that in the 1970s, when in anticipation of the first direct EP elections the blueprint of European democracy was debated, pro‐EU MEPs debated different models and ultimately decided to follow the path of trickle‐down democracy. We then show that this choice was reinstated rather than revisited following Maastricht, as growing Euroscepticism in EU politics did not trigger the critical juncture historical institutionalism could expect.

Fundraising is an essential part of the political enterprise. In almost all countries, parties and candidates rely on donations in order to collect sufficient resources to finance their political activities. While most of the existing research in the past has focused on the motivation of donors to contribute to parties and candidates, this article starts from the premise that the level of donations can best be explained by an interplay of supply-side factors (donors) and demand-side factors (political actors). This article specifically focuses on the demand-side: which policy and strategies do political actors develop to seek donations from various sources? To this end, explanatory factors on three main dimensions - institutional, inter-party, intra-party - were examined with regards to the fundraising strategies of European political parties and foundations. Based on a combination of a document analysis and semi-structured interviews, the article will show how the regulatory framework, the possibility of a public backlash, party ideology and the general income structure of political parties influence their donation policy.

Although specific rules were introduced in 2004 for the funding of political parties at the European level, the EU institutions have traditionally refrained from regulating political finance and electoral campaigns. Instead, this has largely remained the preserve of member states, which have very different political traditions and diverging regulatory regimes for campaign and party finances, including the digital and online aspects. Since 2019, the EU has started to take several regulatory steps to confine campaigning, particularly in the digital sphere. This case study examines the implications of these new EU rules for political finance, with a specific focus on online advertising.

Men are over-represented in the majority of national political parties. This article makes a significant contribution to the analysis of women's representation inside 'Europarties' that operate at the European level. It draws on new data, including interviews with Europarties' representatives. We focus on women's representation in party leadership positions, including Spitzenkandidat:innen. We show that more women have become part of Europarties' leaderships in recent years, but that overall, men remain over-represented, especially in right-wing parties. We explain this development by focusing on the role of gender quotas and women's organisations in enhancing women's representation. Whereas gender quotas have increased women's presence in leadership bodies, women's organisations have not. Drawing on feminist institutionalism, we also analyse some of the informal norms and practices that have (dis)empowered women. We argue that without statutory gender quotas for governing bodies, as well as formal and transparent decision-making processes, women risk being excluded from leadership positions.

The Treaty of Maastricht signified an end to the permissive consensus that had characterised the first decades of the European integration project: the European Union (EU) as a political issue not only became more salient, but also aroused more public discontent. From the perspective of the political elite, the 1990s were a decade of optimism focused on deepening and widening the European project, with, for example, the imminent introduction of the euro and the EU enlargement with central and eastern European countries. At the level of the general public, European integration became increasingly contested, and claims about a ‘democratic deficit’ of the EU became ubiquitous. Although the Maastricht Treaty was not the starting point,1 it substantially amplified the democratic debates about the EU.

Digital campaigns are an increasingly important facet of political campaigning. As a consequence, calls to regulate online political advertising have become louder. Yet, how digital campaigning and social media platforms should be regulated has been the subject of intense debate. In this paper, we combine a principal-agent perspective with a process-tracing methodology to examine the process of self-regulation of social media platforms. This developed mechanism is applied to the case of political advertisements on Facebook in the context of the 2019 European elections. We analyse the motivation of the European Commission to opt for self-regulation and explain the mismatch between the goals of the European Commission regarding online political campaigning on the one hand, and the deviating implementation of Facebook on the other hand. We find that both media-centric and politics-centric factors led the Commission to choose for self-regulation and identified how a combination of an incomplete contract and insufficient monitoring instruments prevented the Commission from tackling Facebook's deviating policy with regard to online political advertisements.

While the regulatory frameworks of most countries include some provisions on the transparency of political finance, the mere declaration of this principle is often not sufficient to guarantee a fair political competition or comprehensive accountability and integrity on the part of political actors. This Technical Paper provides a snapshot of current practices in Europe on political finance disclosure, focusing on the transparency of the annual accounts of political parties, the transparency of campaign expenditure and the transparency of donations. The analysis of 41 countries in Europe shows a clear trend towards a higher level of online accessibility and usability of political financial information, but the level of transparency varies across countries.

Transparency in politics—in particular with regard to political finance—lies at the core of every democracy. The availability of accessible, detailed information about the funding of political parties and candidates enables scrutiny by civil society organizations and the wider public, and ensures that all political actors can be held accountable. In Albania, transparency in political finance is enshrined in the fundamental principles of the Constitution. Despite the modest progress on party and campaign finance regulation achieved in recent years, however, lack of trust in politics and the risk of political corruption continue to be high. The digitalization of political finance has been one of the priorities of the Central Election Commission in Albania and can build on previous initiatives to digitalize the electoral process, such as digital voter identification, and electronic voting and counting. This report examines the existing disclosure systems in Europe, highlights best practices and identifies the main challenges for the development and implementation of such a system in Albania, taking account of the specific political and institutional context of the country.

In the run-up to the 2019 European Parliament elections, European political families nominated their candidates to become president of the European Commission, as they had done previously in 2014. Although this so-called Spitzenkandidaten system was claimed to have played a significant role during the election campaign, in the end none of the candidates became Commission President. In the political battle between the European Parliament and the European Council to decide about the EU's executive top job, the European Council was able to overrule the newly elected Parliament. As a way of Wiedergutmachung vis-à-vis the Parliament, Commission President von der Leyen promised to strengthen the EU's parliamentary democracy. The question is, however, what this means exactly, and what role the European political families, the true supporters of the Spitzenkandidaten, will play.

Does Europe's transnational party system contribute to EU democracy? Existing debates on this issue have conventionally revolved around conflicting assumptions on the feasibility of supranational democracy in general, rather than examining the party system's structure as it is set up and regulated. In this paper we evaluate to what extent the transnational party system contributes to the democratic qualities of the EU by studying the regulatory framework for European political parties. We establish an analytical framework based on studies of party system governance, and focus on two specific characteristics: the contestability of the Europarty system and the extent to which it promotes citizen participation in European political parties. Our analysis demonstrates that the governance structure impedes rather than bolsters the democratic potential of Europarties, since the rules work to prevent new parties from entering the party system, and fail to provide incentives for a more active political participation of European citizens.