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 popular and theoretical discontent. Many citizens consider that parties lock democratic procedures and thereby reduce the opportunities for citizens who are not party members1 to weigh on collective decisions. According to scholars, the logic of partisan antagonism is often perceived as making public debates predictable and non- or weakly deliberative (Leydet, 2015). To overcome these problems, democratic innovations such as popu- lar initiatives, referendums or citizen assemblies are often put forward with the aim of bypassing traditional partisan procedures and enriching representative institutions (Smith, 2009). The aim of this chapter is to take stock of the support for such direct and deliberative democratic procedures among the population and to relate this support with citizens’ perception of political parties. We want to analyze to what extent these innovations can be a remedy for the ills of partitocracy. To this end, we start with a brief overview of the challenges raised by the centrality of parties in the Belgian political system. Then, we analyze the demand for non-partisan politics by Belgian citizens and link it with their perception of parties. Finally, in the third section, we compare the demand side with the supply side, i.e. what kind of democratic innovations are supported by Belgian parties. We conclude with a discussion of the prospects of partitocracy and democratic innovation in Belgium.