Isles of Policy Expertise? Belgian Political Parties and their Study Centers

Belgium is often considered a text book example of partitocracy. The dominance of political parties involves many functions and dysfunctions in a polity that is highly fragmented along linguistic and ideological lines. Political parties do not only aggregate citizens’ demands and preferences, participate in elections and select personnel for the legislature and the executive office. They also play a dominant role in the policy-making process, by framing problems, promoting ideologically-inspired solutions, and negotiating compromises in the cumbersome formation and continuation of coalition governments. Like other actors involved in the policy-making process, political party organisations too are faced with the increasing complexity of problems, and with the demand to back up their proposals with expert-based argumentation. In Belgium, each party organisation comprises a study service. Although their origin and history has been documented in general party organisation studies, a systematic and comparative analysis of these study centres is still lacking. This paper is the first attempt to understand the way(s) in which these intra-party study centres generate policy relevant expertise, how this expertise feeds into the elected politicians’ policy proposals, and how party organisations adapt to the expertisation of politics. In this paper, we first analyse the morphology of the study centres of 11 political parties, covering all major political families across the language border. Based on recent document analysis, interviews, and survey material, we will analyse the parties’ demand for policy advice, the advisors profile and background, the generation and products of advice. Next we will discuss the comparative production of policy advice within party organisations against the backdrop of three questions : How does the instability of the Belgian political system, and the absence of electoral peace impact upon the nature and quality of advice production ? How does the expertisation of politics impact upon the intraparty production of advice ? And what explains the variation of advice production across parties ?status: publishe