Particracy has been widely used to describe Belgian politics after World War II. Yet, Belgian politics has changed. We examine five changes – the federalisation of the state architecture, diversification of the demos, erosion of political support, party’s dealignment and personalisation of politics – to evaluate how they have affected particracy in Belgium. The answer is twofold: particracy is still very strong, but it has changed. The three traditional party families that had institutionalised particracy in Belgium (Christian-democrats, socialists and liberals) had to face new challengers. They co-opted the most moderate ones (greens, regionalists), while excluding others (radical right/left). Intraparty democracy/participatory/transparency reforms, or changes to the electoral system, all of them opening the political system, were also implemented, but parties were able to overcome them. Yet, the ever-growing gap between traditional parties and citizens and the growth of new parties building upon voters’ dissatisfaction with traditional parties, may put particracy more radically into question.

There is a growing consensus that politics have become mediatised. News media have become more independent and are more guided by their own routines and standards and less by what political actors deem important. However, this paper argues that this has not led to a decrease of the power of political parties. In Belgium, particracy and mediatisation seem to go hand in hand. There are mainly two reasons for this. Firstly, media attention focuses heavily on politicians with power and in that sense, media logic and party logic overlap. Secondly, parties have adjusted well to the media and their logic, among others by integrating journalists in the party organisation. We expect that social media will gradually become more important for politicians, but that this evolution too will change little to the central position of political parties in our democracy.

Lobbying by interest groups and the formation of governments both are established themes of empirical research, but not much is known about their linkage. This article presents an exploratory study of organizations and groups with interests seeking influence on the political agenda at the earliest stage of a governmental life cycle: its formation. From the theoretical perspective of the politics of attention, an empirical study is made of the lobby papers that government informateurs receive from business, non-profitorganizations and ngo’s, public organizations and citizens or citizen groups. By comparing the lobby agenda of these diverse organizations and groups to the coalition agreement, it is possible to draw some preliminary conclusions about whose issues and themes become visible and prominent on the governmental agenda, and whose topics obtain lower priority. This research is a basis for further analysis of the impact of lobbying on the policy agenda.

In this paper we look at the way in which a wide range of interest groups have tried to influence political parties in Flanders. In order to test both aspects of the historic-institutional perspective and the rational choice perspective on party-group relations, we have analyzed the dissemination of in total 1569 memoranda by 616 interest groups over the six represented Flemish political parties in the 2013-2014 election year. We find that interest groups are very selective in the distribution of their memoranda to the different parties. Traditional parties seem more popular than new parties and political effectiveness seems to be the driver behind the selectivity of the large majority of the interest groups studied in this paper.