Belgian Exceptionalism Caluwaerts, Didier; Reuchamps, Min
2022, 20211124, 2021, 2021-11-24, Letnik:
1
eBook
Odprti dostop
This book takes stock of Belgium’s exceptional and – for some foreign observers –schizophrenic position in the political world and explains its idiosyncrasy to a non-Belgian audience. Offering a ...broad and comprehensive analysis of Belgian politics, the guiding questions throughout each of the chapters of this book are: Is Belgium a political enigma, and why? Along which axes is Belgium "exceptional" compared to other countries? And what insights does a comparative study of Belgian politics have to offer? The book therefore provides a critical assessment of how Belgian politics "stands out" internationally, both in good and bad ways – including consociationalism, federalism, democratic innovations, Euroscepticism, government formation, gender equality, among others – and which factors can explain Belgium’s exceptional position. Based on cutting-edge research findings, the book will be of wide interest to scholars and students of Belgian politics, European Politics and Comparative politics.
This book explains deliberative constitution-making with a special focus on the connections between participation, representation and legitimacy and provides a general overview of what the challenges ...and prospects of deliberative constitution-making are today. It seeks to provide a more complete picture of what is at stake as a political trend in various places in the world, both theoretically and empirically grounded. Distinctively, the book studies not only established democracies and well-known cases of deliberative constitution-making but also such practices in authoritarian and less consolidated democratic settings and departs from a traditional institutional perspective to have a special focus on actors, and in particular underrepresented groups. This book is of key interest to scholars and students of deliberative democracy, constitutional politics, democratization and autocratization studies, citizen participation and more broadly to comparative politics, public administration, social policy and law.
This article explores the prospects of an increasingly debated democratic reform: assigning political offices by lot. While this idea is advocated by political theorists and politicians in favour of ...participatory and deliberative democracy, the article investigates the extent to which citizens and MPs actually endorse different variants of ‘sortition’. We test for differences among respondents’ social status, disaffection with elections and political ideology. Our findings suggest that MPs are largely opposed to sortitioning political offices when their decision-making power is more than consultative, although leftist MPs tend to be in favour of mixed assemblies (involving elected and sortitioned members). Among citizens, random selection seems to appeal above all to disaffected individuals with a lower social status. The article ends with a discussion of the political prospects of sortition being introduced as a democratic reform.
Abstract
In recent years, an increasing number of scholars and politicians have called for institutionalising deliberative citizen participation within Parliaments. The Parliament of the ...German-speaking Community of Belgium has paved the way in this direction by institutionalising a permanent deliberative citizen assembly that is directly linked to the parliamentary process. It consists in a permanent Citizens’ Council drawn by lot, which can initiate Citizens’ Assemblies, also drawn by lot, whose mission is to deliberate and formulate recommendations on the subject that the Citizens’ Council had submitted to them. At the end of the deliberations, the recommendations are discussed in a joint committee between the members of the Citizens’ Assembly, elected representatives and the minister in charge. The latter two then need to indicate whether and how the recommendations will be implemented by parliamentary or governmental measures—with rejections requiring specific justification. This article analyses how such a far-reaching process of citizen participation and deliberation became introduced at the core of the parliamentary institution and what are its features.
There is a long tradition of linguistic research on political discourse, but little attention has been paid to what the concept of political discourse itself encompasses. With this in mind, this ...article aims to understand what types of discourse are categorized as ‘political’ in linguistic research and what their characteristics are (form, type of actors, policy domains, geographical coverage). To this end, we conducted a systematic literature review of 164 scientific articles from the Scopus database. Overall, the findings show that political discourse is generally limited to the discourses of (institutionalized) political elites and most specifically to oral monological speeches. The review also highlights discrepancies regarding the geographical scope and the policy domains covered by the empirical analyses, more specifically a bias toward the Western world and issues related to external defense policies, justice and home affairs.
Deliberative minipublics are often critiqued for being disconnected with mass democracy. This is problematic from the perspective of legitimacy. If ordinary citizens are not aware of the existence of ...minipublics, how can citizens consent to the process and outcomes of these processes? One possible design innovation is to widen the pool of citizens randomly invited to take part in minipublics. While not all invited individuals will be selected to join minipublics, inviting a large pool of people, at the very least, may trigger their curiosity to closely observe and scrutinise the debates and recommendations of their fellow citizens. Our article examines the viability of this design feature using the case study of the citizen panel ‘Make Your Brussels – Mobility’. We focus on a group of 336 people who accepted the invitation to participate in the citizen panel but were not among the 40 people selected to participate. We have two major findings. First, despite their initial interest in taking part in a minipublic, these citizens did not follow up on their interest in the minipublic. Second, these citizens do not perceive citizen panels as capable of delivering consensual outcomes. We conclude the article by drawing out implications for deliberative practice, especially in enhancing the legitimacy of minipublics.
The idea of a hybrid bicameral system combining election and sortition is investigated. More precisely, the article imagines how an elected and a sortition chamber would interact, taking into account ...their public perception and their competing legitimacies. The article draws on a survey of a representative sample of the Belgian population and Belgian members of parliament assessing their views about sortition in political representation. Findings are combined with theoretical reflections on election’s and sortition’s respective sources of legitimacy. The possibility of conflicting legitimacies and mutually detrimental interactions leads to considerations of the effects of different possible distributions of power between the chambers as a crucial determinant of their interactions and perceived legitimacy.
Variation in Political Metaphor Perrez, Julien; Reuchamps, Min; Thibodeau, Paul H
2019, 2019-08-06, Letnik:
85
eBook, Web Resource
The objective of this book is to understand variation in political metaphor. Political metaphors are distinctive and important because they are used to achieve political goals: to persuade, to shape ...expectations, to realize specific objectives and actions. The analyses in the book go beyond the mere identification of conceptual metaphors in discourse to show how political metaphors function in the real world. It starts from the finding that the same conceptual domains are used to characterize politics, political entities and political issues. Yet, the specific metaphors used to describe these conceptual domains often change. This book explores some of the reasons for this variation, including features of political leaders (e.g., their age and gender), countries, and other sociopolitical circumstances. This perspective yields a better understanding of the role(s) of metaphors in political discourse.
Belgium is often portrayed as a textbook example of gradual federalization. Today, however, a rather new debate among political elites has emerged: whether to refederalize some of the powers that ...have been devolved to the substate entities. Yet, little is known about how citizens see the issue. The objective of this article is therefore to explore and compare citizens’ arguments for more or less regional autonomy. To this end, three citizen forums focusing on federalism were organized in 2017–2018: one in French, a second one in Dutch and a third one in German. They were transcribed and analysed using thematic analysis. Our results suggest that citizen opinions are justified based on two major argumentative themes: identity and efficiency. While one would expect the former to be of traditional importance, our analysis revealed that considerations about efficiency have taken the lead. This can above all be understood given the advanced stage of the Belgian federalization process, for which considerations of identity are still latently important but explicitly not sufficient enough anymore to justify further dynamics. Finally, our analysis also outlined the existence of additional argumentative frames related to path dependencies and the peculiar situation of Brussels.
There is a long tradition of linguistic research on political discourse, but there has been little attention to what is meant by the concept of political discourse itself. In these studies, political ...corpora collected from discourses by political elites (presidential debates, presidential addresses, public speeches, …) often appear to be overrepresented, leaving aside other forms of political discourses such as media discourse on political issues or citizen discourse. In this context, this contribution pursues a twofold objective. First, we aim to understand what types of discourse are categorized as political in linguistic research and what their characteristics are (type of actors, themes, etc.). To answer these questions, this contribution provides a PRISMA bibliometric analysis on a sample of 172 scientific articles from the Scopus database. Secondly, this article explores to what extent the notion of political discourse refers to a coherent whole from a linguistic point of view. To answer this second question, we study the formal characteristics of three subtypes of political discourse (parliamentary debates, televised debates and citizen corpora) in order to assess their degree of divergence. The results of these analyses reveal a real difference between these three corpora and allow us to better understand what could constitute the political genre and its textual registers.
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