par Legein, Thomas
Président du jury Tomini, Luca
Promoteur Van Haute, Emilie ;Erzeel, Silvia
Publication Non publié, 2022-08-31
Thèse de doctorat
Résumé : For decades now, West European politics has witnessed radical changes. Mainstream parties, once oligarchs in remarkably stable political systems, are experiencing a profound challenge to their legitimacy so that the question of their decline, or even their death, has often been raised hand in hand with the question of the crisis of representative democracy. Political commentators and scholars generally assume that party changes such as those made by many mainstream parties are simply to be seen within the context of structural changes in political demand. However, the literature overlooks an essential part of the story by taking the profound structural changes in the environment in which political parties operate as the main argument to explain their evolution over time. This dissertation argues that it is possible to better understand the when, why and how mainstream parties evolved over time through the use of the concept of (bundle of) party reform(s) and by bringing together lessons drawn from the literatures on party change, institutional reform and political marketing.This dissertation proposes a research strategy based on a mix of innovative methods. Three empirical steps were followed in order to provide ground for the new theoretical approach I propose to party reform as well as to help explain party engineering in mainstream parties. The structure of this dissertation builds in particular on the opposition between the rational-institutionalist approach to party change and its constructivist variant. I decided to focus this study on the six mainstream Belgian parties because of the distinctive context Belgium offers for comparatively examining the resilience of political parties that are particularly rooted at the core of a political system but which consistently face strong challenges. The first empirical part of the dissertation consist in building a descriptive inventory of all the reforms implemented by the Belgian mainstream parties on their political product between 1987 and 2014. It engages with two crucial questions: how to identify and how to measure the reforms that are at the core of parties’ political engineering. It also answers the question of when the Belgian mainstream parties reformed. This inventory is also the first to gather together longitudinal data about the evolution of the Belgian mainstream parties on the four dimensions of their political product. The second empirical part of the dissertation engage with the why question by mobilising an innovative methodology, the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), to identify the causes that led the parties to reform the four components of their political product over the period studied. The third empirical part of the dissertation uses the process tracing of a large bundle of party reforms implemented by the Belgian French-speaking liberal party (the MR) between 2019 and 2022 to fuel an analysis of party reforms that focuses not only on their causal factors but also on their mechanisms.Most notably, this dissertation puts our current knowledge of the explanation of the causes of party reform into perspective. On the one hand, I show that reforms are less rare than generally assumed and that Belgian parties have continuously, but not evenly, implemented multidimensional reforms throughout the period under study. I also show that reforms are always the result of different complex combinations of causes specific to each type of reform. Finally, the qualitative analysis allowed the construction of a new analytical tool, the Three-phases model of party reform, which allows to locate causal factors intervening all along the reform processes. Five categories of causes - linked to specific causal mechanisms - were identified. In particular, the analysis demonstrates the existence of a snowball effect that has a strong influence on why and how a bundle of party reform can unfold.

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