Honors Theses
Date of Award
2019
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
Croft Institute for International Studies
First Advisor
Susan Allen
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
With the success of the Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (N-VA), a Flemish regionalist party, in recent federal and regional elections, the continued role of regionalism in Belgian politics has been made clear. This has occurred despite significant efforts by Belgian politicians to counteract this tendency. By analyzing the impact of the six state reforms that have drastically affected the political system within the country, this paper outlines how the reforms themselves have unintentionally incentivized the political parties to pursue regionalism as a winning political strategy, which laid the groundwork for the current success of the N-VA. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates how the institutional system known as consociationalism has been unable to implement the moderating tendency that it seeks to provide in the Belgian case and has instead contributed to stagnation in the federal parliament and to a centrifugal pull of the parties into separate linguistic communities. In examining this, the paper makes use of the devolutionary framework proposed by Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Nicholas Gill (2002) to show how the reforms have impacted the legitimacy of the subnational governments.
Recommended Citation
Brown, Elizabeth L., "Regionalism and Reform: The Consequences of Consociationalism in Belgium" (2019). Honors Theses. 1146.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/1146
Accessibility Status
Searchable text
Included in
French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons, International and Area Studies Commons
Comments
A thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for completion of the Bachelor of Arts degree in International Studies from the Croft Institute for International Studies and the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College.