50 years of Belgian federalism: Analyzing political discourse across six State reforms

The paradox of federalism lies at the heart of linguistically divided democracies: it is both a solution to reach compromises and yet it can foster additional tensions. With a long-started opposition between Flemings and Francophones that led to six State reforms in fifty years, Belgium provides a case in point to study how discourse and political change interact. Building on an interdisciplinary political science and linguistics approach, this paper draws on discursive institutionalism and investigates discourses on Belgian federalism, relying on 81 television debates from the 1970's until 2016 (22 hours of video data) from the francophone public broadcaster in Belgium, RTBF. Our corpus is a solid indicator of the progressive - albeit not without political tensions - transformation of the Belgian system. A quantitative and qualitative content analysis helps identify the selling points used to defend/criticize the complex and technical State reforms, and present them to the public to make it more or less desirable. Our analysis (1) considers the evolution of discourses on Belgian federalism longitudinally and thus allows questioning if and how elite discourses evolved alongside State reforms and also, if and how discourses vary depending on the kinds of actors (journalists, politicians, representatives from the civil society) and across actors (Flemish vs. French-speaking politicians and between political parties). (2) It compares the discourses before and after the main reform phases and discusses how discourse may influence change (and vice versa). The paper offers an original approach to analyze how political elites communicate on and perceive evolutions of federalism