The Collateral Damage of Electoral System Design

Abstract

The number of Belgian political institutions and their complexity are inversely proportional to the country’s size. Belgium is a parliamentary monarchy with an asymmetric federal structure meant to balance varying power relations between the Dutch-, French-, and German-speaking communities. In the 1990s the number of institutional layers increased owing to the achievement of the federal state structure. To the former House of Representatives, Senate, and provincial and local institutions was added a supplementary level comprising the regions and communities. These institutions are organized along, respectively, territorial and ethnolinguistic lines. The three regions (Flanders, Wallonia, and the Brussels Capital Region) have territorial boundaries, and socioeconomic matters such as employment or mobility fall under their remit. The three communities comprise citizens of a specific ethnolinguistic group (the Dutch-speaking community comprises all Dutch-speaking citizens living in Flanders and Brussels, the French-speaking community all French-speaking citizens from Wallonia and Brussels, and the German-speaking community all German-speaking citizens from Wallonia) and deal with matters such as education or culture.