Direct and deliberative democracy as potential remedies for partitocracy in Belgium

The golden age of party democracy may have passed (Mair, 2013), but political parties are still the central actors organizing governments and opposition in most democracies. Belgium is no exception in this respect. The country has actually his- torically scored quite high on the scale of partitocracy (De Winter, della Porta, & Deschouwer, 1996) or, less pejoratively, “partyness†(Katz, 1986), understood as the degree of control exercised by parties over policy-making and the selection of (major) public officials. The persisting dominance of parties goes accompanied with quite some popul... Mehr ...