Party Manifesto Strategies in Simultaneous Elections in Belgium

Recent comparative and empirical analyses criticized the second-order election model and highlighted some of its shortcomings and its poor applicability in the Belgian case has been demonstrated. Yet, few alternatives to this model based on the demand-side explanations (i.e. the observation of aggregated voting patterns) have been suggested.

This paper analyses relationships between elections across levels of government from the supply-side, i.e. from the party perspective, and focuses on the characteristics of the manifestos drafted by those parties. In 2014, simultaneous elections were organised at the European, national and regional levels in Belgium and almost all major political parties drafted a common manifesto for these different policy levels. This paper investigates the way these multi-level manifestos can be analysed and how different policy levels can be distinguished from the same electoral platform.