Co-ethnic, cross-ethnic or non-ethnic overarching claims? The political representation of ethno-linguistic groups in the Brussels Capital Region

Consociational democracies rely on a system of power-sharing between groups to manage ethnic conflict and nationalist strife. Elections by proportional representation allow ethnic groups to be represented by their respective elites (Lijphart 1977; McGarry & O’Leary 1993; Norris 2008). By creating a direct electoral link between ethnic group members and their representatives, each representative is institutionally incentivized to represent their co-ethnic group members’ interests. In other words, consociationalism is premised on the assumption of co-ethnic group representation. However, even though Lijphart’s consociational theory is over 50 years old, hitherto little is known about the process of political representation of ethnic groups in deeply divided societies. Much research has focused on the institutional features of consociationalism with a particular emphasis on federalism, but much less effort has been devoted to understanding the process of ethnic group representation, and in particular the link between the descriptive and substantive representation of ethnic groups. Hence, the extant research has not yet tested the hypothesis that members of ethnic groups behave as substantive representatives of their co-ethnic group interests. To test this hypothesis, we study the process of representative claim-making (Saward 2010) on behalf of ethno-linguistic groups in the Brussels Capital region of Belgium. The Brussels region is divided into two official language groups, Dutch and French speakers, and the Brussels Parliament has proportionately reserved seats for Dutch- and French-speaking MPs (Deschouwer 2012; Janssens 2018). However, the Brussels case is particularly interesting because Brussels voters can hold MPs from the other ethno-linguistic group electorally accountable. Contrary to the rest of Belgium, where voters can only support parties and candidates belonging to the same ethno-linguistic group, cross-ethnic voting is possible and does occur in Brussels (Blanckaert, Caluwaerts & Erzeel 2021). Hence, while we would expect co-ethnic claim-making to be the norm in Brussels, at least some MPs receive electoral incentives to make representative claims on behalf of the other ethno-linguistic group (i.e. cross-ethnic claim-making), or make claims transcending the particular interests of either ethnolinguistic group (i.e. non-ethnic overarching claim-making). An exploratory claim-making analysis of parliamentary questions between 2009 and 2019 in the Brussels Parliament will reveal (1) to what extent Brussels MPs engage in co-ethnic, cross-ethnic or overarching claim-making, and (2) how this varies according to the partisan and ethno-linguistic identities of the MPs as well as the incentives they receive from the electoral and institutional context.