Min Reuchamps

Catholic University of Louvain | UCLouvain · ISPOLE

Si on souhaite comprendre le nouveau rôle des citoyens dans la législation, le cheminement des recommandations élaborées par les assemblées citoyennes devient un élément crucial à analyser. L’élaboration et le suivi des recommandations peuvent être considérés comme un processus en quatre phases. Tout d’abord, la phase de formulation (1), au cours d...

This article examines the uses of the words populism(s) and populist(s)—hereafter populis*—by Members of Parliaments from Belgium, France, and Spain in 2019. It presents noteworthy findings unexplored in the literature on the uses of populis*. First, when employed by MPs, populis* refers mainly to actions, discourses and elusive threats rather than...

This paper explores whether language shapes political culture by examining the case of French and a possible transnational francophone political culture. Using original survey data from Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, and France collected in autumn 2020, we find only small within-country differences between francophones and non-francophones and limit...

Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands are known as the BeNeLux countries and in the field of political science, but also in history, as the Low Countries. This expression is the English translation of the French Les Pays-Bas that refers only to the Netherlands and of the Dutch de Nederlanden that refers to Dutch and Flemish lands. Historians and...

Un nombre croissant de parlements expérimentent des modèles délibératifs permettant aux citoyennes et citoyens de participer activement à la prise de décision parlementaire. Leur institutionnalisation est particulièrement visible en Belgique, où quatre parlements ont instauré de manière permanente la démocratie délibérative. Nous étudions les raiso...

The one-year ‘Conference on the Future of Europe’ came to an end in May 2022. CoFoE is an unprecedented experiment in democracy at EU level. At its heart is the engagement of citizens in deliberative consultations on the future of European integration. This volume includes eleven contributions which examine the process and the results of this innov...

Après la sixième réforme l’État, décidée en 2011 et adoptée en 2012-2014, le fédéralisme en Belgique était susceptible d’entrer dans une phase de stabilité. Néanmoins, l’encre des textes constitutionnels et législatifs mettant en œuvre cette réforme institutionnelle était à peine sèche que des voix ont appelé à une septième réforme de l’État. Si de...

The framing impact of political discourses has long been attested for. Metaphors in particular are known to ease the understanding of complex concepts and processes. Yet, the question remains to what extent metaphors do work the same on different recipients? Based on an experimental design, we test a potentially key moderating variable in the study...

Voting motives are one of the most studied but still much contested question in political science. There has been much less concern at the local level although two main tendencies can be discerned. Some consider local elections as second order political contests. Others emphasize place‐bound patterns in voting motives. Still, more research beyond t...

Scandals that hit political institutions and their actors are likely to contribute to lowering political trust. However, few studies examine the accuracy of such relationship at the local level. This article aims to contribute to the field by assessing the impact of local scandals on trust in local government and the mayor in the context of a feder...

The 23rd edition of the Yearbook is designed as a compendium that offers readers an up-to-date overview of various aspects of federal and regional structure and policy in 34 contributions. In addition to German federalism, current research topics, regional cooperation, European integration and reports on select countries, two topics are the focus t...

Ever since the 1970s, Belgium has witnessed a process of constitutional reform. This transformation of Belgium from a unitary state into a federal state was propelled by the paradox of federalism (Erk & Anderson, 2009). After all, granting autonomy to the linguistic groups was initially considered a means of pacifying ethnolinguistic tensions, but...

In this Special Issue of Politics of the Low Countries several relevant aspects of the political implications of COVID-19 are empirically investigated. In the wake of an open call for papers and our usual peer-reviewed process, the Special Issue features four research articles, three with a focus on Belgium and one using a comparative framework, al...

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...

The 2019 elections in Belgium yielded contrasted results between the two main regions of the country, Flanders and Wallonia. It is often posited that at the core of this regional difference is the intermingled question of identity and state reform preferences. In this context, this article asks the following question: does the presence or absence o...

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...

The integration of deliberative democracy within larger schemes of policy-making of collaborative governance is a key challenge. Such integration potentially means changes in the role and in the power relationships between the actors of collaborative governance. Indeed, it brings in citizens – who were traditionally not formally involved – along wi...

Les résultats des élections de 2019 ont, comme d'habitude, été interprétés différemment par les partis politiques, les analystes et les commentateurs. Certains affirment que le vote combiné de la N-VA et du Vlaams Belang (VB), qui ont atteint ensemble plus de 40 % des électeurs flamands, était un choix pour le nationalisme flamand et plus particuli...

De resultaten van de verkiezingen van 2019 werden zoals gewoonlijk op verschillende wijzen geïnterpreteerd door politieke partijen, analisten en commentatoren. Sommigen beweren dat de gecombineerde stemuitslag voor N-VA en het Vlaams Belang (VB), die samen meer dan 40% van de Vlaamse kiezers bereikten, een keuze was voor Vlaams nationalisme en meer...

The 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 to which extent citizens and MPs actually endorse different variants of 'sortition'....

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 parl...

The decentralization of political power towards subnational entities is one of the major contemporary processes of territorial transformation in European democracies. Traditionally, research has focused on arguments related to nationalism and identities. Later, the strategic agency of political parties has been integrated as they typically play a m...

In this chapter, we study under which conditions dyadic federations—a genus of multinational federalism composed of two major communities—have ‘succeeded’ (i.e. survived) and under which they have ‘failed’ (i.e. broken apart). Through a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of all democratic dyadic federations, past and present, we show that d...

Despite the enduring importance of Lijphart’s work for understanding democracy in Belgium, the consociational model has come under increasing threat. Owing to deep political crises, decreasing levels of trust in elites, increasing levels of ethnic outbidding and rising demands for democratic reform, it seems as if Lijphart’s model is under siege. E...

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...

This article analyses the use of (deliberate) metaphors in political discourse produced by French-speaking Belgian regional parliamentarians during non-institutional political interviews. The article first investigates if the use of deliberate metaphor limits itself to a particular type of political discourse (i.e. public and institutional politica...

According to Rokkan’s nationalization thesis, national parties should dominate the realm of local politics over time as national socio-economic cleavages increasingly dominate local political life. Yet recent studies show that – far from declining – local lists have been growing in the local electorate of multiple European countries. This article s...

For the last twenty years, political scientists in French-speaking Belgium have been federated under the French-speaking Belgium Political Science Association (ABSP) which is the IPSA representative for Belgium and heir of the once unitary Belgian Institute for Political Science. ABSP just celebrated its 20th anniversary and published a book in Fre...

Les décideurs publics contemporains gouvernent des démocraties sous tensions. Qu’il s’agisse d’une crise, d’une fatigue ou d’une mutation, le lien qui unit gouvernants et gouvernés est aujourd’hui largement considéré comme sujet à transformation. Cet enjeu questionne la légitimité des décideurs publics ainsi que leur place dans l’architecture des d...

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 overrepres...

In order to capture how young people in northern Cyprus see the Cyprus Question, we asked more than 300 students to ‘draw Cyprus’ and surveyed their political attitudes, as well as their identities and preferences for the future of the island. The results show that the Turkish Cypriot students, in comparison with the students from Turkey and from t...

Using an experimental design, this paper tackles the question of the framing impact of metaphors by focusing on the opportunity to implement a basic income (BI) system in a given polity. We take advantage of the preliminary stage of the BI debate in Belgium to study the influence of discursive strategies on the opinion formation process of individu...

Congruence between masses and elites and the peaceful functioning of a state are key elements on which the legitimacy of a political system rests. In Belgium, it is often argued that both elements are missing. This chapter builds on candidate and voter surveys. It demonstrates that Belgian candidates show more radical feelings of identity and insti...

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 Belgi...

Federalism is often presented through metaphors, but little is known about the impact of such metaphors. Two experiments were conducted in Belgium presenting federalism as Tetris – with control and treatment groups – in order to grasp the influence of this metaphor. The first experiment reveals that being exposed to text with the Tetris metaphor in...

La consultation populaire et le référendum sont deux mécanismes de démocratie directe. Dans un cas comme dans l’autre, la population est invitée à voter directement sur une ou plusieurs questions bien déterminées afin d’exprimer sa volonté, et les résultats se mesurent en nombre de voix émises en faveur de chaque option. En revanche, la portée juri...

This paper focuses on a timely political issue by addressing the debate of the opportunity to implement a basic income system in a given polity.This is an ongoing debate in Belgium, both in academia and in the public sphere. We take advantage of this preliminary stage of the BI debate to study the influence of discursive strategies on the opinion f...

In order to capture how young people in northern Cyprus see the Cyprus Question, we asked more than 300 students to ‘draw Cyprus’ and surveyed their political attitudes, as well as their identities and preferences for the future of the island. The results show that the Turkish Cypriot students, in comparison with the students from Turkey and from t...

Résumé Il est un paradoxe démocratique régulièrement mis en avant : les peuples qui ne connaissent pas la démocratie l'appellent de leurs vœux, alors que, là où elle existe, la démocratie est fortement critiquée. Cela ne signifie pas que les citoyens qui vivent sous la démocratie veulent s'en débarrasser, mais que leur confiance dans le fonctionnem...

Le débat relatif à l’allocation universelle concerne la question de l’avenir des systèmes de sécurité sociale, point central qui favorise l’émergence de véritables clivages idéologiques, mais aussi plus généralement la définition et l’organisation de la communauté politique. Il est frappant d’observer dans ce débat que divers éléments de langage so...

Depuis 1996, l’Association belge francophone de science politique fédère les chercheur·e·s en science politique dans les différents champs qui l’animent en Belgique francophone et au-delà. Cet ouvrage, 20e volume de la collection « Science politique », marque le 20e anniversaire de l’ABSP. Ces deux décennies ont vu de véritables métamorphoses au ni...

This chapter seeks to analyse an often-unexplored policy level: the Belgian Municipalities. What is the state of policy analysis in Belgian municipalities? Which instruments and styles do local policy-makers adopt to deal with the complex choices they have to make? What are the interactions with the other policy levels? To tackle these three questi...

In Belgium, as in many other countries, there is a growth of diverse types of public inquiries and public consultation arrangements in policy-making. The rationales behind these consultation processes differ as to perspectives on democracy. Some inquiries and consultations are conceived from an instrumental perspective from which it is believed tha...

This book presents the first systematic overview of policy analysis activities in Belgium. Contributors from both sides of the Dutch-French language border use original empirical data to provide a comprehensive, comparative study of multi-level policy-making both within and outside government.

This chapter looks into the growth of diverse types of public inquiries and public consultation arrangements in policymaking. These arrangements bring to the table individual members of the public who otherwise have no direct policy – advisory – role, given the predominance of neo-corporatist style advisory bodies in Belgium (Van Damme and Brans, 2...

Massive open online courses (MOOC) have been considered by some observers as a powerful opportunity to improve distant learning. The Université catholique de Louvain was the first Belgian university to deliver a political science MOOC (Louv3x) in French, entitled ‘Discovering political science’ (Découvrir la science politique). This paper seeks to...

Le débat relatif à l’allocation universelle concerne la question de l’avenir des systèmes de sécurité sociale, point central qui favorise l’émergence de véritables clivages idéologiques, mais aussi plus généralement la définition et l’organisation de la communauté politique. Il est frappant d’observer dans ce débat que divers éléments de langage so...

This article analyses contemporary attempts at constitutional modernisation through deliberative democracy. The cases of Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Nepal are assessed through the lens of three different types of legitimacy: input legitimacy, throughput legitimacy, and output legitimacy.

Democratic deliberation is claimed to improve the legitimacy of democratic decision making. However, deliberation’s beneficial effects do not come about easily. If deliberative innovations want to contribute to the legitimacy of political decision making, they have to reflect the principles of legitimacy in their own functioning. In this paper, we...

What are the outputs and effects of deliberative mini-publics? This is probably one of the most critical questions for any deliberative endeavor. In the realm of large-scale deliberative experiments, the G1000 in Belgium holds a special place: it happened in the wake of the longest government formation ever, it sought to gather 1000 randomly select...

Thanks to crowdfunding, deliberative mini-publics can be funded bottom-up to reach a wider support in the population and secure financial autonomy for their design. But who are the people willing to pay for deliberative democracy and why? This article answers this twofold question using an original survey with crowdfunders of the G1000 in Belgium....

A sacred union or a forced union? Belgian parliamentarians facing the need for deliberative democracy In times of deep democratic transformations, it is useful to analyse how elected MPs conceive the notion of political representation and of citizens’ participation. This endeavour sheds light on the potential inclusion of democratic innovation in t...