
Thomas LegeinVrije Universiteit Brussel | VUB · POLI
Thomas Legein
Researcher in Political Science
About
25
Publications
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Introduction
Thomas Legein is a postdoctoral researcher in Political Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His research interests include party reform, party politics, citizens' and party elites' political perception and democratic innovations. He was part of the 'RepResent' project (Belgian consortium) and actively involved in the Political Party Database Project (PPDB). He is now involved in the PLEDGE Horizon Project focusing on the grievance politics.
Publications
Publications (25)
Politicians perceive their representative role in a variety of ways: as a delegate of their party, a delegate of voters, or a trustee who exercises their mandate independent of any external principal. Existing research finds that the tendency to adopt a specific style of representation depends on system-level institutions and individuals’ political...
This study applies process-tracing methods to understand the 2019 leadership selection process in the Belgian French-speaking liberal party, MR, which is the oldest and second largest party in French-speaking Belgium. We triangulate a variety of sources to assemble a rich qualitative material that is used to contrast the formal rules and outcome of...
Many West-European parties have responded to a changing and challenging environment by adopting multiple party reforms. In this article, we propose a comparative framework to study party reforms based on an adaptation of Harmel and Janda's (1994) Integrated Theory of Party Goals and Party Change and its application to three different features of pa...
This article introduces the concept of bundle as a new powerful tool in the study of party reforms. The intensive and intricate nature of the engineering political parties undertake to preserve the status quo amidst a challenging environment tends to be obscured by the focus on their so-called 'conservative nature'. Applied to the process tracing o...
Political parties are used to adapt in the face of political challenges, but little is known about how party elites actually perceive crises and ultimately opt for certain types of reforms accordingly. To address this gap, we focus on the complete transformation process of the Belgian French-Speaking Christian Democratic Party (cdH) in 2022 as a ca...
The literature on party reform highlights the extent to which political parties opened their decision-making processes or rely on digital participatory tools in key areas such as the selection of their candidates or leader. However, parties less frequently employ inclusive participatory processes and democratic innovations for internal reform. This...
Les réformes partisanes sont vues comme le symbole de la résilience des partis politiques face à leur déclin annoncé. Traditionnellement, la littérature traite ces réformes comme résultant de chocs contextuels auxquels les élites partisanes répondent dans le but d’améliorer leur parti. Mais nous savons finalement peu de choses leur raisonnement dan...
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...
For decades now, West European politics has witnessed radical changes. Mainstream parties, once oligarchs in remarkably stable political systems, are experiencing a profound challenge to their legitimacy so that the question of their decline, or even their death, has often been raised hand in hand with the question of the crisis of representative d...
Among the organisational reforms that political parties have implemented the last decades, democratic reforms are probably the most scrutinized in the literature. It is generally assumed that one of the driving forces behind this ‘democratising trend’ is the erosion of party membership in West European democracies. Yet this paper argues that party...
Within democratic systems, politicians running for and elected in office may hold different perceptions of their representative roles. Some tend to conceive their role primarily as the delegate of their party, others feel above all tied to their voters, and others ought to exercise their mandate independently from any source of authority-the truste...
Voters of Populist Parties and Support for Reforms of Representative Democracy in Belgium
Recently, studies have burgeoned on the link between populism and demands for democratic reforms. In particular, scholars have been debating the link between populist citizens or voters and support for referendums. In this article, we examine voters of populis...
Ce chapitre propose d’explorer ces deux thèses concurrentes en analysant l’ancrage
des sections locales et l’offre électorale des partis nationaux, à partir des
quatre principaux partis en Belgique francophone.
Cet article propose de revenir sur les choix stratégiques des partis lors de la dernière campagne électorale et d’analyser l’impact qu’ils ont pu avoir sur les mouvements d’électeurs. En mobilisant une analyse du débat public durant la campagne ainsi que les premiers résultats d’un sondage à la sortie des urnes organisé par le Centre d’étude de la...
Cette note apporte quelques éclairages sur les choix des électeurs, principalement à l’élection fédérale, à partir de l’enquête « Sortie des urnes ».
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...
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...
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...
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...