To federalize or to refederalize: exploring citizen preferences towards more or less self-rule autonomy in federal Belgium

Belgium is often portrayed as a textbook example of peaceful federalization. Indeed, while the country was for over a century a unitary state, it went through a deep process of federalization in a few decades of time to form a federal state where substate entities enjoy substantial autonomy. Today however, a rather new debate among political elites has emerged: whether to refederalize some of the powers that have been devolved to the substate entities, the Regions and Communities. Such an idea has long been a taboo in federal Belgium, especially among Flemish elites, but the debate seems now m... Mehr ...