Look, this is an important book! Editions Bruylant has published a very comprehensive and up-to-the-minute evaluation of Belgium’s electoral systems, edited by two young researchers from Liège.

We might have expected with this title to get a bland treatise on an area of Belgian law, in which each section of the law is dissected to a fare-thee-well, in which every legal decision is picked over, along with all previous commentary concerning jurisprudence or legal philosophy. Well, we would have been wrong ! All right, it isn’t a novel. It is, most particularly, a legal work that explains the basic rules that govern election law in Belgium. But it doesn’t stop there. Frédéric Bouhon and Min Reuchamps, the two young researchers responsible for this book, wanted to focus both their disciplines – law for one and political science for the other – on the phenomenon of elections, taking a broad, interdisciplinary approach. In order to accomplish that, they gathered together thirty contributors, not just from the University of Liège but from other universities and research centres from the north as well as the south of Belgium. The result of this cooperation, some 600 pages, is a global vision of existing law and the political phenomena that underlie it, benefiting from the joint analyses of legal experts and political scientists, certainly, but also from the input of well-informed historians, sociologists, philosophers and geographers, drawn from the widest possible range of contexts. For the editors, only such a combination of different kinds of expertise and methods from this broad range of specialists could provide a complete and realistic explanation of the manner in which the electoral system functions in Belgium. But why does the title reference systems, plural, rather than the system, singular? Because there’s more than one system, that’s why! As Jan Velaers (University of Antwerp) says, “in the context of the Belgian system of institutions, at several different levels of power, representative democracy is a house that has many rooms.” Indeed: in addition to the two chambers of the Federal Parliament, there are regional and (linguistic) community-based parliaments and provincial and communal councils, eacn with its own set of rules. 

The book is divided into 5 sections. In the first section constitutional expert Hugues Dumont, professor at Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis in Brussels, explains the concept and the foundations of representative democracy  as expressed in Belgian law. In elections Belgians choose the people who will represent them in exercising political authority at the level of the commune, region, linguistic community, Federal state or European Union member state. The history of the Belgian election system is reviewed by Fr. Vincent Dujardin (UCL), who retraces for readers the main developments in a tapestry that includes many surprising events, and a few piquant ancedotes. Did you know (for example) that during the period of the revolution of 1830, no more than 46,099 men had the right to vote, being considered rich enough and/or educated enough to choose responsibly, out of a population of four million? These well-nourished gentlemen, on November 3 of that year, elected a national congress made up of 200 deputies, of whom about half were magistrates, bureaucrats or holders of degrees in the liberal professions. Lawyers alone made up a third of all deputies in this assembly. There were no women holding office. There was tension between Catholics and “liberals”, the latter forming the main bloc opposed to the still enormous influence of the clergy in society. A Belgian Workers’ Party (POB) was not formed until 1885; this party stood for the democratisation of the electoral system through the adoption of universal suffrage – though only for men. Think of that! Women’s suffrage was still politically unthinkable. Socialists and liberals alike considered women too easily swayed by priests and pastors, and thus too likely to vote Catholic. The Catholic Church also thought that was true, and the social-Christian political party that expressed the Church’s will campaigned at the side of suffragettes. Universal male suffrage became law in 1919, but universal suffrage for women did not become law until 1948. Before these events, however, in the year 1899, an important reform did occur in the electoral system: simple majorities for election were replaced by proportional voting, which made possible a more equitable division of political forces. Without this reform, the liberal party might have disappeared, crushed between two powers, the Catholics in Flanders and the socialists in Wallonia, where the POB, the Workers’ Party, had begun to take control. The change from simple majorities to proportional representation undoubtedly allowed the conflict between public opinion in the North and opinion in the southern part of Belgium, already perceptible, to be papered over and restrained for several more decades, according to Fr. Jean-Claude Scholsem (ULg).

(1) BOUHON F., REUCHAMPS M., (dir), Les systèmes électoraux de la Belgique, Bruylant, 2012.