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The evolution of the Belgian polity from its unitary and stable period up until mid1960s to the present of high fragmentation of the party system, the centrifugal tendencies of parties and electoral behavior is examined. Findings suggest that the splitting of the Belgian party system into two still fragmented party systems has complicated the problems of coordination within a polarized multi-cleavage and multilevel system that undermines the stability of the entire political system because of the deeply entrenched differences.

ABSTRACT/RESUME The main purpose of the present paper is to develop the scientific concept of citizenship. In this article, we present two recent research projects concerned with the simultaneous measure [...]

In this article we look into the relationship between associational membership and political involvement in the case of the two largest groups of non-EU citizens in Brussels, Moroccans and Turks. [...]

The notion of constructing social space was developed by Bourdieu and can help explain why some migrant groups are seen as threatening. This can be applied to Jews in the 1930s and Muslims in the 1980s. Immigrants were seen as synonymous with Jews in the 1930s and Turks and Moroccans in the 1980s in Flanders, Belgium. The background in both these cases has been economic and social change. Religion has been used, and ethnic nationalism legitimises cultural racism.

Following the shift towards an activating role of the European welfare states, there is increasing scholarly interest in public support for demanding activation policies that impose obligations on welfare recipients. Borrowing the classical theoretical frameworks used in welfare attitudes research, we aim to disentangle the effect of self-interest and ideological beliefs on support for demanding activation. Using data from the Belgian National Election Study (2014), we find that support for demanding activation is strongly related to authoritarian dispositions, work ethic and rejection of egalitarianism. For the social-structural variables, we find direct as well as indirect (that is, mediated by the ideological dimensions) effects. Controlling for ideology, social categories that are potentially most affected by welfare obligations – i.e. those currently unemployed, with a previous experience of unemployment and low-income individuals – are more likely to oppose demanding policies, which can be interpreted as a self-interest effect. The effects of educational level, conversely, are primarily mediated and should be understood in terms of ideological preferences rather than self-interest. Our results indicate that, when analysing support for specific welfare policies, attention needs to be paid to the interplay between self-interest and ideological preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to compare the core ideological beliefs of the Flemish Vlaams Blok and the French Front National. The analysis focuses on these parties' attitudes towards [...]