The Belgian Government Shutdown

This week, certain journalists have been comparing the American government shutdown to that of the Belgian government that ended just a few years ago. This comparative article explains that conflicting ideologies, rather than fiscal policies caused the rift between parties in Belgium, primarily between the North and the South. The Flemish prefer a laissez-faire system while the Walloons strongly believe in government intervention and regulation

The article explains: “Those two opposing political philosophies collided in June 2010, when the national election gave the New Flemish Alliance (NVA) 27 seats in the Chamber of Parliament with the Socialist Party (SP) in the south getting 26 seats. Ten other political parties divided up the remaining 150 seats, guaranteeing a political impasse and inevitably a government shutdown.”

Downs’ model of voter distribution can help explain this result. Originally, Belgium had a two-party system. The introduction of the Socialist Party (and then nine other parties) shifted it to a multi-party system with a multi-modal voter distribution. Voters in a multi-party system are more likely to vote according to matters of ideology than they are in the two party system because they are given a variety of choices that are more likely to be close to their ideological preferences. However, there is a limit to the number of new parties that can be successfully introduced in the multi-party model. A party cannot survive in the long run if it cannot get its members elected- in Belgium’s case, no single party won the majority, therefore in the long run, some parties that are close to each other on the scale might need to merge in order to receive more votes until they have a high enough chance of receiving a majority.

(Belgium has a fascinating political system. I would highly recommend reading a little bit about it! I spent most of my life living there, including the 589 days where there was no government- public services still ran very smoothly because of local policies and efforts.)