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West European Politics

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Veto Players and Electoral

Reform in Belgium
Marc Hooghe & Kris Deschouwer
Published online: 11 Apr 2011.

To cite this article: Marc Hooghe & Kris Deschouwer (2011) Veto Players and
Electoral Reform in Belgium, West European Politics, 34:3, 626-643, DOI:
10.1080/01402382.2011.555987
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West European Politics,

Vol. 34, No. 3, 626643, May 2011

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Veto Players and Electoral Reform

in Belgium
MARC HOOGHE and KRIS DESCHOUWER

During the past two decades, various attempts have been made to implement changes in
the Belgian electoral system. While most of these attempts met with failure, some minor
changes were successful. This article considers three cases in depth: demands for the
abolition of compulsory voting; the ongoing discussion about splitting the Brussels
electoral district according to linguistic lines; and the introduction of an electoral
threshold. It demonstrates that legal barriers and veto players are instrumental in
explaining the odds that attempts at electoral reform will be successful. Belgiums
consociational system does indeed impose the use of supermajorities for some reforms
and the in-built obligation of power-sharing grants veto power to major but also to
smaller political parties in every language group. The case studies also demonstrate that
political parties often fail to estimate in a reliable manner the consequences of reform.

Implementing electoral reform is, at best, a risky endeavour since those

holding political power obviously have a vested interest in maintaining an
institutional status quo (Gallagher and Mitchell 2005; Lijphart and
Grofman 1984). Advocates of electoral reform face various barriers to
achieving their goals. In most cases, overcoming the veto power of elite
political actors can be considered as one of the main barriers that advocates
of electoral reform will face (Blau 2008; Katz 2005; Rahat and Hazan 2011).
This barrier will be even steeper in a political system where veto players are
abundantly present and where the use of veto power is endemic in the
political decision-making process (Nikolenyi 2011). In this article, our goal
is to apply the barriers model for electoral reform (or its absence) by
focusing on the hard case of a consociational democracy like Belgium. The
model assumes that various barriers will have to be surmounted before
electoral reform can be achieved, and these barriers can be cultural, legal,
or resulting from the opposition of vested interests or coalition partners.
The strength of the barriers model is that it summarises both institutional
and strategic decision-making approaches to political behaviour. It can be
Correspondence Address: marc.hooghe@soc.kuleuven.be
ISSN 0140-2382 Print/1743-9655 Online 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/01402382.2011.555987

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Veto Players and Electoral Reform in Belgium

627

assumed that not all barriers are equally steep, but empirical analysis is
called for if we want to determine in a more exact manner which barrier is
most important in preventing electoral reform. An added advantage of the
model is that it can equally be used to explain the success and the failure of
attempts at electoral reform (Rahat and Hazan 2011).
The theoretical relevance of this exercise is that it helps us to determine
whether the barriers model is indeed successful in explaining the fate of
attempts at electoral reform. The Belgian case is quite relevant in this
respect. We consider the consociational nature of the Belgian political
system (Deschouwer 2004, 2009; Lijphart 1977, 1981) as a good and
illustrative example of the way in which institutionalised veto players raise
the barrier of coalition politics. The need to maintain a coalition and in a
consociational system this is often a broad and power-sharing coalition
gives some parties the possibility to block reforms that they perceive as
possibly detrimental for them. Lowering that barrier means that all
governing parties must at some point agree not to use their veto. The
presence and proliferation of veto players is therefore the most crucial
barrier for electoral reform in Belgium. Furthermore a number of reforms of
the electoral system require a constitutional change and thus a two-thirds
majority in the two houses of the parliament, which means that the legal
barrier is sometimes quite high.
The political tradition of joint decision-making implies that even when a
supermajority is not legally necessary, the Belgian political elite aims for
oversized majorities. This means that every coalition partner can function as
a veto player, i.e. individual or collective actors whose agreement (by
majority rule for collective actors) is required for a change of the status quo
(Tsebelis 1995: 289). In practice, political decisions are very hard to take
without the approval of the major political parties in both language groups,
i.e. the Christian Democrats in the Dutch part of the country, and the
Socialists in the French part of the country. The Flemish Christian
Democrats (CD&V) and the Walloon Socialists (PS) are clearly the most
powerful veto players in the Belgian political system, even despite the fact
that their electoral power has eroded substantially during recent decades.
Both parties are almost automatically part of the governing coalition.
CD&V was a coalition partner in the period 195899 and again since 2007.
The PS has been a member of the ruling coalition continuously since 1988.
Surmounting both the legal and even more the veto players and
coalition politics barriers is thus crucial for electoral reforms to be
successful. If the barriers are not lowered, the status quo is the default
outcome. And Belgium indeed oers a prime example of non-decisionmaking as the basic layout of the Belgium electoral system (a two chamber
parliament with a DHondt system of proportional representation and
compulsory voting) was not changed at all since the year 1899, despite the
fact that various political leaders have labelled some provisions of the
system as outdated. Nevertheless, especially during the last two decades,

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M. Hooghe and K. Deschouwer

various minor reforms of the Belgian electoral system were implemented,

e.g. with regard to the establishment of an electoral threshold or
changing the system of closed electoral lists. These reforms can be
considered minor, since they do not have a direct eect on the key
dimensions of the electoral process, i.e. proportionality, inclusiveness, the
ballot structure and the electoral level or procedures (Jacobs and Leyenaar
2011). The barriers approach for explaining electoral reform leads to the
hypothesis that in those cases, the presence of veto players in Belgian politics
did not prove to be an insurmountable barrier for electoral reform. This
might be due to the fact that these veto players apparently did not have
sucient reasons to use their veto powers. If we consider veto players to be
rational actors, one can conclude that they hoped to benet themselves from
the proposed changers, or at least they did not consider their own interests
unduly threatened by the reform (Boix 1999; Dunleavy and Margetts 1995;
Renwick 2010).
In the next section, we present empirical material on the Belgian electoral
system before moving on to three case studies. In the case of compulsory
voting, institutional barriers prevented political parties from reaching a
supermajority in Parliament. The ongoing negotiations about the redistricting of the Brussels electoral district did not lead to changes either, because
the two language groups did not reach a compromise on the issue. Our third
case involves the imposition of an electoral threshold of 5 per cent in
the year 2003, when all relevant political actors nally did agree on a
negotiated package deal. We use these three cases to demonstrate that in a
consociational democracy, legal barriers and coalition politics will be very
strong barriers preventing the implementation of electoral reform. In our
conclusion, we return to the question whether the barriers model can be used
to oer a convincing explanation for the development of electoral reform
in Belgium, including both the failed and the successful attempts at reform.
Barriers in Belgium
In 1899, Belgium was the very rst country to move from a majoritarian to a
proportional electoral system. All subsequent changes in the course of the
twentieth century rmly remained within the basic logic of proportional
representation and the distribution of seats according to the formula
suggested by the Belgian mathematician Victor DHondt (Farrell 2011). The
1893 constitutional reform also introduced a system of compulsory voting,
to make sure that not only the new voters all male citizens had then
received at least one vote would massively turn out and produce too great
a success for the new socialist workers party. The multiple vote was
replaced by the one man one vote principle in 1919, and surage was
further expanded to female citizens in 1949.
In 1979, an electoral system had to be developed for the direct election of
the members of the European Parliament (MEPs). This had to be

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Veto Players and Electoral Reform in Belgium

629

according to the constitution a proportional system. Yet, since only 24

MEP seats would be available for Belgium, it was out of the question to
elect those MEPs in 20 separate electoral districts, as was usually done for
the Belgian Chamber and Senate. A proposal to have only one state-wide
district was rapidly vetoed by the francophone political parties. At that time
all Belgian parties had fallen apart in two unilingual parties only competing
for the vote in their own part of the country: Francophones in the south and
in Brussels; and Flemish in the north and in Brussels. With a Flemish
demographic majority of some 60 per cent of the population and with a very
strong Flemish Christian Democratic party (always having the prime
ministership), the Francophone parties feared to be on the losing side in
a single state-wide district. The solution found acknowledged the
linguistic divide and introduced two electoral districts a Flemish and a
Francophone with a xed number of seats to be distributed in each of
them: 14 Flemish and 10 Francophone.
Belgium was again confronted with the need to put in place new electoral
systems when in 1995 the parliaments of the regions had to be directly
elected for the rst time. That was, however, not seen as an opportunity to
thoroughly rethink elections in Belgium. On the contrary: the electoral rules
put in place perfectly reected the basic (proportional) logic of the country
and its more recent and increasing divide between two language groups.
For the parliaments of Wallonia and Flanders, the same electoral districts
were used as for the federal Chamber. The number of seats in the federal
Chamber was reduced from 212 to 150, and to avoid a weakening of
proportionality some smaller rst tier district were merged into larger
districts.
In the smaller Brussels region the voters have to make a choice between
Francophone and Flemish lists, and seats are rst distributed between the
groups and subsequently within the parties of each group. Since 2002, the
number of seats for each language group is xed: 17 Flemish and 72
Francophones. The same goes for the election of the new Senate, now meant
to be a house representing the language communities. It is composed of
several types of senators, but for those directly elected the system of the
European elections is used. There are two districts one for each language
community in which 25 Flemish senators and 15 Francophone senators
are elected.
Meanwhile, there have been quite a number of smaller but not
insignicant changes to the electoral rules in Belgium, gradually moving
away from the system of closed electoral lists. Since 1995 multiple
preferential votes for candidates are allowed, which would normally reduce
the impact of list votes. In 2001, the impact of the number of preference
votes on the chance of candidates to be elected was further increased by
halving the weight of the list votes. In 2000, local voting rights were granted
to citizens of the other European Union member states, and in 2004 the
right to vote in local elections was also granted to all non-Belgian citizens.

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M. Hooghe and K. Deschouwer

These two reforms were not easily achieved, since they raised among other
things debates about the possible disturbance of the linguistic balance in
Brussels where many European and other non-Belgian citizens live.
The large number of minor changes in the system are a perfectly normal
phenomenon and they are not at all typical for Belgium (Jacobs and
Leyenaar 2011; Pilet and Bol 2011). The reason why the Belgian case is
interesting in this respect is its consociational character. The rules of
decision-making have an impact on the way in which, and the extent to
which, possible changes to the electoral system can be achieved. We have
listed a number of changes above, but that does not mean that all proposed
changes have passed all the barriers and made it to the nish. Proposals to
abolish compulsory voting have been on the table for two decades, but
compulsory voting is still solidly in place. Since the 1960s, and increasingly
since 2003, the Flemish political parties have been demanding a split along
the language border of the central Brussels electoral district that not only
covers the territory of the (bilingual) Brussels region but also includes 35
municipalities of the (unilingual) Flemish region. Yet the central Brussels
district Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde or BHV remains in place because of
a veto by the Francophone parties.
The consociational logic of the Belgian political system has put strong
veto players into place and therefore raised a number of barriers for
(electoral) reform. Already since 1970, the constitution has clearly stated
that the only way to govern at the central (and later the federal) level is by
respecting the principle of power-sharing and therefore avoiding the
potential veto of one of the language groups. The typical consociational
principle of power-sharing guarantees each language group a presence in the
federal decision-making process. That is done by obliging the Belgian
government to be composed of an equal number of Dutch-speaking and
French-speaking ministers. For constitutional changes the thresholds are
even higher. Changing an article of the constitution requires rst an
agreement between the parliament and the (paritary) government on the list
of articles to be changed, after which the next parliament and the next
(paritary) government can change articles with a two-thirds majority. Rules
about the functioning of the federal institutions have an even higher
threshold, since they additionally require a simple majority in each language
group in both houses of parliament. All members of parliament do indeed
belong according to the district in which they were elected to one
language group only. MPs elected in the mixed BHV district decide
themselves to which group they will belong.
There are thus clear legal barriers in the Belgian system. Therefore
changing the electoral system of the Senate, for instance, or abolishing the
principle of compulsory voting is rather unlikely. The default situation is
the institutional status quo. Political actors can try to change the system, but
wide and language-border-crossing coalitions are necessary to lower the
barrier. These coalitions are, however, possible, and the high thresholds for

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Veto Players and Electoral Reform in Belgium

631

institutional reform put in place in 1970 have not stopped the transformation of the Belgian state from a unitary into a federal structure. Following
Rahat (2008) and Rahat and Hazan (2011), we can thus expect that when
changes in the electoral system require a constitutional change they are less
likely to be achieved.
It needs to be noted though that power-sharing mechanisms are also
present if there is no compelling constitutional reason to do so. Changing
the electoral law does not require a change of the constitution and a normal
parliamentary majority is sucient. Yet if one of the language groups
frames the reform as having a bearing on relations between the language
groups, the automatic result is that double majorities (i.e. in each language
group) are needed. That is indeed what happened with the debate about the
BHV electoral district. It was re-introduced onto the agenda in 2003 by
the Flemish parties and explicitly framed as a demand that was inspired by
the interests of the Dutch speakers. Splitting the district with a simple
majority of the Dutch speakers in the federal parliament is therefore out of
the question. The French-language community has become a veto player and
a settlement can only be found if both language communities agree with it.
If the language groups are both veto players, there is as a result of this
actually another important veto player in the Belgian system. Although it is
mathematically possible not to do so, governments at the federal level
normally include the largest party on each side of the linguistic divide. In
Flanders this has always been the Catholic and later the Christian
Democratic party, with an interruption only between 1999 and 2004. In
Francophone Belgium it has been the Socialist party, although it lost its
number one position to the Liberals in 2000 and recovered it solidly in 2009.
The obligation to form a linguistically balanced federal government thus
always produces two party actors that are the strongest veto players in the
Belgian system. Forming a federal government with an equal number of
ministers from both language groups in practice is almost impossible
without including the major party within each language group. If we know
that Belgian governments routinely include the major party from each
language group, coalition politics therefore implies that every language
group can use its veto power within the governing coalition, and again this
can be seen as a major barrier for electoral reform.
In the following paragraphs we will illustrate the functioning of these
barriers for three case studies of (attempts of) electoral reform. The cases
were selected because arguably they are the most important political
discussions with regard to electoral reform in Belgium. Introducing gender
quotas self-evidently might be considered as equally important, but since
this topic is discussed extensively in Meier (2004) and Celis, Krook and
Meier (2011), we will not expand on it here. First we consider the attempts
to abolish compulsory voting. This requires a change of the constitution,
but not a double majority within each language group. Here the veto
player appears to be the Francophone Socialist party, in power without

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M. Hooghe and K. Deschouwer

interruption since 1988. Second, we investigate the attempt to split the BHV
electoral district. It has so far failed and this can be explained by the fact
that it has to pass the highest barriers. Finally we look at the successful
reform in 2003 to enlarge the electoral districts and to introduce an electoral
threshold. That change could be implemented successfully because a strong
potential veto player the Flemish Christian Democrats quite
exceptionally did not take part in the governing coalition at that time.

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Compulsory Voting
Already since 1893 Belgium has had a system of compulsory voting, which
has not been changed since. While in various other countries in Europe, the
legal obligation to cast a vote has been abolished in the course of the
twentieth century, this has never happened in Belgium and it is now one of
the few countries in the world where compulsory voting is still being applied
in an eective manner (Birch 2008). Contrary to what happened in countries
like Greece or Italy, the application of the system has been quite eective,
with stable turnout rates of approximately 91 to 92 per cent of all eligible
voters.
Since the early 1990s, compulsory voting has been the topic of an
intensive political debate that started following the landslide victory of the
extreme-right party Vlaams Blok in the 1991 elections. Some politicians
had the idea that this success could partly be explained by the fact that
voters were obliged to go and vote, and that out of a sense of frustration,
they ended up voting for the extreme-right party. This causal logic, however,
seems unlikely as compulsory voting is equally present in the French part of
the country, where there is no viable extreme-right party (Hooghe and
Pelleriaux 1998). Immediately following the 1991 elections, most proposals
to abolish compulsory voting had the professed intention to curb the rise of
extremist parties. Only later on, the Liberal party also mentioned more
profound ideological reasons. A number of party leaders claimed that
citizens should have the right to decide themselves whether they go out to
vote. The argument goes that it is not the state that should impose an
obligation, since the decision to refrain from voting can just as well be seen
as a politically motivated decision.
Proposals to abolish compulsory voting have been going on for nearly
two decades now, and the topic has never really disappeared. At the same
time, however, since abolishing compulsory voting would require constitutional reform, in practice it soon became obvious that this legal barrier is too
high for the proposals to be successful. It is also clear that there is no
pressure from public opinion, as compulsory voting is not seen as a salient
topic and compliance with legislation is very high. The expectation among
the political elite is that the Socialist parties would lose as a result of
abolishing compulsory voting, since traditionally they have catered to a
labour constituency with lower levels of political interest and political

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Veto Players and Electoral Reform in Belgium

633

knowledge which would make them less likely to vote. While in theory, it
might be possible to abolish compulsory voting against the wishes of the
Flemish Socialist party, the Francophone Socialists eectively used their
veto power. It has to be mentioned here that they never did so in a public or
procedural manner. While some proposals for abolishing compulsory voting
have been introduced in parliament, they were never even discussed in the
appropriate parliamentary committee, as it was clear that they would never
reach a sucient majority. Applying a veto in this way does not mean that
one uses a negative vote during the parliamentary procedure, but it means
that the proposal is not even admitted onto the parliamentary agenda. The
most successful example of non-decision-making is when veto players
succeed in keeping a topic o the political agenda (Bachrach and Baratz
1962).
During the negotiations for the formation of a new governing coalition
in 2007, the by now familiar proposal to abolish compulsory voting was
tabled again. Socialists and Christian Democrats quickly made clear that
they were not eager to change their long-standing positions on the matter.
The Liberal party leader soon realised that the constitutional barrier was
too high to succeed, and therefore the party changed its strategy. In May
2008, the party leader tabled a proposal, leaving the constitutional
principle of compulsory voting in place, but abolishing the provisions of
the electoral law (amendable by a simple majority) that dene the
sanctions for failing to vote. The party hoped that in this way everyone
should realise that compulsory voting is no longer sanctioned, so
compliance with the constitutional rule would gradually erode as has
happened in other countries. This proposal, too, has never been debated in
parliament.
So basically the eort to abolish compulsory voting is a clear example of
a failed attempt at electoral reform. Despite the fact that the topic is on the
political agenda for almost two decades now, no progress at all has been
made, and it is very unlikely that this will be the case in the years ahead. The
legal barrier of a supermajority is too high and the Socialist party has
proven to be a successful veto player. Therefore, Belgium, together with
Australia, has become something of an exception, with an almost universal
implementation of compulsory voting.
Splitting an Electoral District
The electoral district of Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde is centrally located in
Belgium (Figure 1). It comprises the Brussels region (bilingual) and 35
municipalities of the Flemish region. It is the only electoral district crossing
the borders of the regions and thus the only one composed of areas
belonging to two dierent language groups. BHV serves as a district (with
22 of the 150 seats) for the election of the Chamber of Representatives. It is
also a district where for the elections of the Senate and the European

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M. Hooghe and K. Deschouwer

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FI G U R E 1
THE ELE CTOR AL DIST RICT OF BR U S S E L S - H A L L E - V IL V O O R D E (B H V )

Parliament citizens can choose whether they cast a vote for the Francophone
or for the Flemish candidates.
Splitting the electoral district along the language border and separating
bilingual Brussels from the unilingual Flanders is an old demand of the
Flemish political parties. It was already on the table in 1963, when after long
and dicult negotiations a compromise was reached about the language
border within the country. Until 1963, the border was adapted every decade
on the basis of a language census. The higher social and cultural status of
French did, however, make the border move up into Flanders and made the
bilingual Brussels territory constantly expand into formerly unilingual
Dutch-speaking territory. The Flemish parties therefore wanted to abolish
the census and to freeze the border where it was at that time. The agreement
reached did indeed include the freezing of the border and thus the damming
of the Brussels oil stain.
This 1963 compromise did not, of course, fully satisfy both language
groups and the compromise has ever since been the source of frustration.
For the Flemish parties, the survival of an electoral district that allows
Francophones to keep a clear link between Brussels and its Flemish
periphery was hard to accept. For the Francophones, the idea that the
Brussels region would now be locked up behind the hard language border
and unable to expand into its natural hinterland was equally dicult to
swallow. The request to split BHV has come back several times, and was on

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Veto Players and Electoral Reform in Belgium

635

the table whenever the state institutions were discussed. But whenever the
split of BHV was formulated as a Flemish request, the Francophone answer
was a clear no, unless the boundaries of Brussels could be discussed again.
And since the latter is unthinkable for the Flemish parties (We will not cede
an inch of Flemish territory!), the split of BHV remained an unfullled
dream, just like a larger Brussels region.
It is interesting to note that the existence of BHV for the elections of the
Chamber has objective advantages in terms of seats obtained for both
language groups. For the Francophone parties, BHV has the advantage that
its Brussels-based candidates can be on the ballot paper in Flemish Brabant,
allowing the Francophone voters in that region the full choice between
important candidates of all the Francophone parties. Splitting BHV would
mean, for the Francophone parties, a loss of one or two seats. Francophone
parties could possibly unite their forces and present one single Francophone
list in Flemish Brabant. That list could secure one or two seats, but it would
have to present local candidates (living in Flanders), which would reduce the
chances for obtaining a good result and it would make the choice less
attractive for the Francophone voters being obliged to vote for an identitybased list rather than for one of the ideology-based Francophone parties.
On the Flemish side there is also an objective advantage to the current
situation. By pooling the votes of the small minority of Dutch-speakers in
the Brussels region with the votes cast in Halle-Vilvoorde, the Brussels
Dutch-speaking minority can be represented by candidates of all parties on
the list for BHV. Splitting the district and creating a separate Brussels
district would greatly reduce the chances for Flemish parties to win a seat in
Brussels. Both language groups would thus lose something if the district
were to be split, but the argument is that territorial and linguistic principles
are much more important in this case than just a calculus of possible gains
or costs.
The introduction of provincial districts in 2003 (see below) reinvigorated
the debate on BHV. Since a split of the district was out of the question,
a complex compromise was needed for the organisation of the elections in
Brussels and the surrounding provinces of Flemish Brabant and Walloon
Brabant. The idea was to give Flemish parties the possibility to present lists
that would be the same in BHV and in the rest of Flemish Brabant, while
Francophone parties would have a list for BHV only, and with a second tier
distribution of the seats in BHV and in Walloon Brabant. This agreement
was annulled by the Constitutional Court, because it kept a district
Leuven, the rest of Flemish Brabant without guaranteeing that the voters
of Leuven would be represented by seven MPs in the federal Chamber of
Representatives. The Constitutional Court considered this to be against the
principle of equality. The annulment meant that the old system was
restored: a district Leuven, a district BHV and a district Walloon Brabant,
and no electoral threshold. Yet the Court added that this would also be a
violation of the principle of equality, since the rest of the country would use

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M. Hooghe and K. Deschouwer

provincial districts. The Court issued a warning that the 2003 elections could
still be organised according to the old rules, but that these could not be used
beyond June 2007.
The abrogation of the 2003 compromise by the Constitutional Court was
immediately seized by the Flemish political parties as an ideal opportunity
to suggest an easy and perfectly constitutional way out of the problem: split
BHV and introduce an electoral district Flemish Brabant. The Francophone
response was predictable and clear: an absolute veto, unless Brussels can be
expanded to include the Francophones that would be electorally lost if BHV
were split.
Although the electoral law is a federal matter, all Flemish parties
solemnly promised during the 2004 regional elections in Flanders that they
would rapidly implement this old Flemish demand. Especially the
Flemish Christian Democrats, in an electoral alliance with the separatist
N-VA (New Flemish Alliance), blamed the Liberals and Socialists (in
power at the federal level) for not having done it already and declared that
one needs only ve minutes of political courage to do what is called for.
This is a very striking example of the way in which the Belgian
institutional setting allows political actors parties and candidates in
particular to mobilise in a purely unilateral logic. Although powersharing is required at the end of the day, making radical promises as if no
power-sharing were needed is a normal practice.
Technically a reform of the electoral law including the split of BHV
does not require a special majority. It could therefore be imposed by a
majority of all Flemish parties against the Francophone minority. That also
explains why in this case the illusion of unilateralism is so strong. In
practice, though, it is impossible to enforce such a symbolically important
decision without negotiations with the Francophone parties. Even if
parliament approves a change of the electoral law, it has to be signed,
promulgated and implemented by the federal government. Since the
Francophone parties at every moment have the right to express their lack
of condence in the ruling majority, they eectively have the means to
prevent such a project from happening. Power-sharing is and remains
an essential and unavoidable device of the Belgian federation.
After the 2004 regional elections, the Flemish parties again forced the
issue onto the political agenda, as a follow-up to their electoral promises.
Federal Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt (Flemish Liberal) reluctantly
agreed to start negotiations. He reached a complex compromise that tried to
split the district for municipalities further from Brussels and to keep it for
those closer to Brussels, while giving citizens the choice to register in one or
both if they lived in between, but that was nally torpedoed by Spirit,
a small ally of the Flemish Socialists. The failure to bring home to the
Flemish government a split of BHV caused some troubles in the regional
coalition, but also an agreement not to raise the point any more before the
federal elections of June 2007.

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But for the formation of a federal coalition following the 2007 elections,
the split of BHV was again especially for the Christian Democrats and
their separatist ally a condition sine qua non. The Francophone parties
promised their voters in another unilateral illusion that they would not
even start talking about it anymore. The most direct consequence of these
two unilateral electoral promises was that six months after the federal
elections there was still no new government and the political crisis dragged
on well into 2008. The country found itself in a deep institutional crisis,
where gridlock was the result of overpromising in a context where powersharing is the only way out. There was one quite spectacular event though,
when in November 2007 the Flemish parties unilaterally voted in favour of
the split of BHV in the parliamentary commission. Francophone parties
subsequently started a number of constitutional procedures (declarations by
the substate parliaments of the French Community and the Walloon Region
that this was a conict of interest) that each suspended the further treatment
of the proposal for six months. But sooner or later the issue will come back,
among other things because the Constitutional Court warned that federal
elections due for 2011 under the old system are not constitutional.
The split of BHV is thus a very typical example of an attempt to reform a
electoral system that faces the existence of both legal and coalition politics
barriers. When one of the language communities uses the veto which it has
according to the consociational institutions and culture, it can prevent the
reform being implemented. The split of BHV along the lines requested by
the Flemish parties is therefore very unlikely to be introduced, unless a
Flemish veto on another matter for instance with respect to the boundaries
of the Brussels region or the ratication of the Convention for the
Protection of National Minorities can be negotiated away in a major
package deal.
Implementing an Electoral Threshold
A highly successful example of electoral reform, on the other hand, has been
the introduction of an electoral threshold of 5 per cent. The introduction
was remarkable only because of the speed of the reform (Hooghe et al. 2006;
Pilet 2007). While other attempts at reform dragged on for years, and
sometimes even decades, then Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt succeeded in
guiding through this reform very quickly. Partly this is due to legal reasons:
introducing the threshold did not require a constitutional reform, but could
easily be implemented by a change in the electoral law, and here a simple
majority in parliament is sucient. Verhofstadt was also clever enough to
frame the reform in such a manner that not a single coalition partner used
its veto power.
When the moderate Flemish nationalists of the Peoples Union split up in
two parties in September 2001, the spectre of a further fragmentation of the
Belgian party system loomed large (Deschouwer 2004). It was feared that

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M. Hooghe and K. Deschouwer

this would make the Belgian political system more unstable, by hindering
the formation of stable governing coalitions. It now already usually takes
ve to six parties to form a government coalition in Belgium, and as can be
imagined this is not always conducive to governmental stability.
Only a month after the split of the Peoples Union, Verhofstadt
introduced a proposal for a threshold, and already in April 2002 a global
agreement was reached. First, a threshold of 5 per cent was introduced.
Following the German example, it was hoped that this threshold would
make life impossible for the small parties. For the major parties, the
threshold would have no eect since their electoral support is spread quite
evenly across the country. Therefore, not a single potential veto player felt
even moderately threatened.
Second, larger constituencies were introduced, bringing down the number
of constituencies from 20 to 11. Here again, the major governing parties
stood to gain from the reform. For Socialists and Liberals it meant that their
best-known politicians could cash in on their popularity in a larger area.
Larger constituencies were generally considered to be detrimental to the
interests of the Christian Democrats, since a substantial part of the MPs
from that party have a very strong local constituency. The 19992007
period, however, is the only period in recent Belgian political history that
the Christian Democrats were not present in a federal government,
following their major electoral defeat in 1999 and their subsequent period
in opposition, so they did not have the possibility to use a veto right in that
period. Furthermore, the leading politicians within that party apparently
were willing to accept this loss which also allowed them to replace locally
successful politicians by politicians with a larger geographical appeal. In any
case, when the Christian Democrats re-entered government in 2007, they
never even made an eort to turn the clock back on this reform. Apparently,
leading Christian Democrats too had come to realise that larger
constituencies allowed the party head oce a stronger grip on campaign
dynamics.
Even the Green parties (at that time a member of Verhofstadts coalition)
supported the proposal. At rst sight, this runs counter to the expectation
that political parties will oppose electoral reforms that would harm their
own interests. Here, it is clear that parties can also be guided by wrong
perceptions about the likely consequences of electoral reform. The Greens at
the time did not envision it would lose voters: the 1999 elections had been
very successful for them with an all-time high of 14.4 per cent of the vote.
The Green parties did not imagine that they would ever fall into the danger
zone of a 5 per cent threshold. The larger constituencies another element
of the Verhofstadt package deal furthermore, were extremely important
for the Green parties. It meant that in every district they could be quite
condent whom they would get elected. This was not the case in the previous
system of small constituencies with a second-tier division. This second-tier
division did ensure proportionality, but it was extremely unpredictable with

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regard to who would actually occupy the seat. For a small parliamentary
party group like the Greens, this random assignment of members of
parliament has had some negative consequences. It soon turned out that the
Flemish Green party had seriously misjudged the consequences of the
electoral reform: in the 2003 elections, the party obtained 4 per cent of
the vote in the Flemish region and as a consequence of the new threshold the
party itself had approved, the Flemish Greens lost all their seats both in the
Chamber as in the Senate.
The only amendment the minor parties in Belgium managed to obtain
was the geographical level of the threshold. In the rst proposal, it was
mentioned that parties had to obtain 5 per cent of the vote in an entire
region of the country, and this would indeed curtail any hopes small parties
might have to gain a seat. Partly as a result of negotiations within the
Flemish regional government, this was softened to a threshold for every
district separately. If a party manages to gain 5 per cent in one district, this
is sucient to obtain a seat, even if the average in the region is less than
5 per cent. In this manner, the smaller parties hoped that they would still be
able to obtain seats in the districts where their best-known candidates lived.
While theoretically it could be expected that the implementation of
an electoral threshold would have negative consequences for small parties
(Cox 1997), these parties did not give in without a ght. Both Christian
Democrats and Socialists formed a pre-electoral cartel with one of the minor
nationalist parties that seemed to stand to lose as a result of the threshold.
Initially, these pre-electoral cartels were quite successful, as they were
instrumental in providing a new image of innovation to the major parties
(Gschwend and Hooghe 2008). Reconciling two dierent party platforms,
however, proved not to be easy. In the political turmoil of 2008, both cartels
were dissolved. The separatist N-VA went its own way, obtaining 13.1 per
cent of the vote in the elections for the Flemish regional parliament in June
2009. The more moderate Spirit party tried to do the same but under its new
name, Social-Liberal party, it obtained only 1.1 per cent of the vote and the
party soon disappeared as the result of a merger with the Green party. The
electoral threshold, therefore, turned out not to be a magical bullet for
the problem of party fragmentation. A small party like Spirit disappeared,
together with an even smaller liberal party that joined forces with the main
liberal party VLD. Simultaneously, a new populist party emerged centred
on the businessman and former Liberal MP, Jean-Marie Dedecker. List
Dedecker obtained 7.6 per cent of the vote in the June 2009 regional
elections in Flanders, and therefore rose comfortably above the new
electoral threshold.
Discussion
The purpose of the barriers model is to allow for a systematic study of
(attempts at) electoral reform in parliamentary democracies. In this article,

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M. Hooghe and K. Deschouwer

our aim was to use this approach to study electoral reform in a

consociational democracy, taking a hard case to ascertain whether the
model is indeed successful in explaining the odds that electoral reform will
succeed. In such a political system, the ubiquitous presence of veto players
renders it extremely dicult to change the electoral system. Since usually
electoral reforms are zero-sum games, there is always at least one party
that stands to lose from the reform. If, because of institutional or cultural
power-sharing arrangements, that party receives a veto right, implementing
reform is rendered virtually impossible. Major electoral reform, therefore,
has proved dicult to achieve. Various minor reforms, however, have been
implemented, and most often the impetus for these reforms originated
within the political elite itself, as there are very few examples of reform that
came into being as a result of demands from public opinion.
In this article we have focused on barriers as a result of coalition politics,
and, indeed, they proved to be dicult to overcome. Apparently it is not
just sucient to obtain a simple majority for reform, it is also necessary
that potential veto players do not use their veto power. From an analytical
point of view, the legal barrier proved relatively easy to detect and observe,
since the constitution itself lays out the procedures that have to be followed.
The role of coalition politics, on the other hand, proved far less easy to
observe. During the past two decades, a proposal has never reached a
parliamentary vote and been subsequently defeated, which would lead to a
visible use of veto power. The mechanism apparently operates in a much
more subtle manner, as proposals that run counter to the interests of a veto
player are usually not even discussed in a parliamentary committee. Since
the agenda of these committees is decided in a closed meeting of the
Speaker of the Parliament with the chairs of the parliamentary party
groups, it can be assumed that the proposal is blocked at this level.
However, since the minutes of this gathering are not available for scientic
research, this remains something of a black box explanation. The debate
about the split of BHV is an interesting case of a very open use of the veto
power. The strong Flemish demands and electoral promises to simply split
the district has met an equally strong refusal to do so by the Francophone
parties.
Our case study seems to demonstrate that barriers can indeed block most
attempts at electoral reform. Since there is very little research available
on the application of the barrier model for electoral reform, it is too early to
ascertain whether this is a consequence of the consociational character
of Belgian democracy, or whether our research ndings could also be
generalised toward other political systems. The successful example of
electoral reform we discussed was the 2003 implementation of an electoral
threshold by the Verhofstadt government. Verhofstadt managed to
implement this reform by building a broad package deal in order to
appease most potential veto players, either inside or outside the ruling
coalition. Nevertheless, the 2003 reform was an exception to the rule, since

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641

the Flemish Christian Democrats were not involved in the nal compromise.
It has to be remembered in this regard that the 19992007 Verhofstadt
governments were highly exceptional in the recent political history of
Belgium. In the 195899 period, the Christian Democrats had always been
part of the governing coalition, in a majority of cases even having the prime
ministership. For the other parties, the 1999 electoral defeat of the Christian
Democrats came as something of a relief, since for the rst time they could
envision a coalition government without Christian Democrats. Various
issues that were blocked by the Christian Democrats were quickly passed,
and Belgium became one of the worlds pioneering countries with regard to
euthanasia rights, gay marriage and adoption by homosexual couples.
Seizing the same window of opportunity, Socialists and Liberals managed to
get rid of small electoral circumscriptions. Technically, the Christian
Democratic party at that time did not have a real veto power. The strange
thing is that the Christian Democrats hardly made an eort to use their
electoral strength. In parliament their opposition was rather weak, and they
certainly did not use all other legal means at their disposal to block the
reforms of the Verhofstadt governments. Furthermore, when the Christian
Democrats re-entered federal government in 2007, the party did not make
any eort at all to reverse the reforms implemented by the Verhofstadt
governments. Theoretically, therefore, it could be suggested that the
Christian Democrats did not feel signicantly threatened by all these
reforms.
In this article, we have used these three cases to show that for political
parties it is extremely dicult to reliably assess the consequences of electoral
reform. Our three cases could best be summarised as a comedy of errors.
First, with regard to compulsory voting it is dicult to predict what party
would benet from its abolition. The argument that is most often invoked in
the political discussions, that compulsory voting leads to the success of
extremist parties, is not substantiated by the results of empirical research.
Second, with regard to the Brussels electoral district, both language groups
stand to lose from a simple split, as their own minority groups will lose
electoral clout. But, apparently, harming the other language group is a more
powerful incentive than pursuing ones own interests. Third, contrary to
expectations, the electoral threshold of 5 per cent did not prevent the rise of
new small parties. It did mean that the Green party, which had felt safely
above the threshold, lost all its seats in the federal parliament. In every case,
therefore, the judgement of leading politicians was clearly misguided. We do
not wish to question the claim that rational choice approaches can be quite
powerful in explaining the likelihood of electoral reform, as we did not study
these barriers in a systematic manner. Our case study has only demonstrated
that the presence of veto players can limit the odds that attempts at electoral
reform will be successful. Why exactly these veto players use their power,
and whether this decision is based on rational grounds, remains to be
investigated.

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