When Democratization Helps Reactionaries: The Strange Case of Belgium's PR Adoption

The transition to democracy in much of 19th century Europe came in fits and starts. Conservative incumbents tried to pre-empt revolutionary outburst by making democratic concessions while at the same time experimenting with various strategies that sought to contain the full emancipatory effects to these concessions. The introduction of proportional representation provides interesting but little analyzed insights into the peculiar dynamic of democratization while simultaneously containing their effects. It turned out that the adoption of PR was one of the few institutional reforms that both had an democratizing as well an anti-leftist containment effect. The paper plans to explore this dynamic more closely by looking at Belgium's PR adoption in 1899. Belgium was the first country to introduce national PR and the final adoption of PR was preceded by three failed electoral reform bills. The paper explores more closely the three failed reform bills as well as the final successful to explore more closely how the larger democratization struggle shaped the dynamics of electoral system reform.