Uncommon reservoirs? Patterns, trends and consequences of ministerial selection in Belgium

In Belgium political parties have remained the predominant actors of the delegation chain of parliamentary democracy (Strom et al. 2003). By channelling the delegation of power from voters to MPs, from parliament to the cabinet, from this collective body to individual ministers, and from ministers to their civil servants, they are the effective principals in the polity (De Winter and Dumont 2006). As a result, institutional functions such as executive ministers are filled by individuals reduced to mere party agents. Like in other countries where parties monopolise legislatures and government formation, a parliamentary background is therefore still largely privileged. Here, in addition, the strength of party organisations and other party-related structures that can be used as other pools to choose from makes it very difficult for individuals with a ‘pure’ technocratic and party-independent background to be selected as ministers. Given their reach in all the public sector and society in general, Belgian parties keep a large number of members interested in benefiting from patronage. The pillarized structure inhereted from a deeply divided society through multiple cleavages has led to a consociational system in which strong parties can rely on the support and expertise from close organisations such as trade unions, employers’ unions, mutual insurance companies etc. In addition, ministers can rely on specialised staff in their large ministerial cabinets. These are pools for ministerial selection that may be more uncommon and make for a (still rather weak) degree of injection of extra-parliamentary experience in cabinets. In this paper we give a first overview of how Belgian cabinets are formed and composed of and argue that some developments such as the federalisation of the country has further enhanced the position of political parties in the Belgian polity, and in particular party leadership (De Winter and Dumont 2006; Deschouwer 2009). With the increasing need of multilevel coordination, party presidents are stronger than ever when deciding on who to fill an increasing number of available ministerial positions and move ministerial personnel around (Dandoy and Dumont 2012). As a sign of greater autonomy of party presidents with regard to party’s organs (including therefore parliamentary party groups), we see a tendency to recruit ministers outside of parliamentary ranks. Party presidents can rely on personal loyalty and have a firmer hold of ministerial careers when the parliamentary and party experience of their agents is lower, but given the strength of parties this does not mean that we observe a clear increase in the selection of pure independents. Our analysis suggests that public level of confidence in institutions and parties, as well as critical junctures may be used as by party presidents as window dressing for asserting their power even further. With regard to the latter argument, even though we can find instances in history of technocratic recruitment in times of need for independent/neutral and specialised expertise, one easily sees that cabinet formation and composition in recent times has been much more influenced by community conflicts than by European and worldwide financial crisis. But this context of internal pushes for greater subnational autonomy appears to have led to the will by parties (none of the parties are nation-wide anymore; De Winter and Dumont 1999) to develop distinct political classes and have their own region ‘perform’ best. This has led to the recruitment of less partisan profiles in order to mimick the alleged greater efficiency of the private sector.status: publishe