Bringing the government closer to the people?

One of the ways in which ‘good’ representation can be measured and assessed, is the degree of congruence between the preferences of the population and the preferences of the political elite. Several institutional devices can limit the extent to which there is a match between these preferences. Majoritarian electoral systems perform less well than proportional systems in this respect. Proportional systems however often require coalition formation, which might then produce a governmental majority that does not reflect the population’s preferences as well as when a government is formed by the winning party in a majoritarian system.One of the arguments often used in the Belgian political debate, is that devolution allows for better policy congruence between people and politics at the regional level. Wallonia can have a more leftist government that fits the demands of the Walloon population, and Flanders can have a more rightist government. The federal government is believed to be too leftist for Flanders and too right-wing for Wallonia. In this paper we would like to test this assumption. We will use the election survey data from 1991 to 2009 to compare the left-right distribution of the population in Belgium and in the regions with the left-right position of the governmental coalitions at the federal level since 1991 and at the regional level after devolution in 1995. Especially the formation of different coalitions at the regional level from 2003 on should increase the degree of congruence between the government and the population.