Explaining Intra-Party Reforms: Party Engineering in Mainstream Parties in Belgium (1987-2022)

For decades now, West European politics has witnessed radical changes. Mainstream parties, once oligarchs in remarkably stable political systems, are experiencing a profound challenge to their legitimacy so that the question of their decline, or even their death, has often been raised hand in hand with the question of the crisis of representative democracy. Political commentators and scholars generally assume that party changes such as those made by many mainstream parties are simply to be seen within the context of structural changes in political demand. However, the literature overlooks an e... Mehr ...