How does your case study of the Flemish Nationalist Party, the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), inform the study of nationalist and regional political parties?
Our aim in this article, which is a collaboration with Koen Abts and Rudi Laermans from the University of Leuven, was to explain more explicitly than it is usually done in the literature how stateless nationalist and regionalist parties (SNRPs) concretely carry out a strategy called “issue diversification”. This means that SNRPs move beyond their centre–periphery niche and build up more developed ideological profiles, dealing with socio-economic and cultural matters that they did not use to address in order to attract a wider audience (not primarily interested in the centre–periphery cleavage). The current literature on SNRPs is dominated by studies that, using quantitative text analysis, do track such a change over time in a wide range of parties, but do not show how SNRPs concretely effect this strategy in discursive terms. 

Your article starts by highlighting an “interesting paradox” in the Flemish voting behaviour. Can you describe it?
The main paradox when looking at N-VA – but this is the case with other SNRPs – is that, between 2001 and 2010, it went from being a marginal force to becoming the biggest party in Belgium without major changes in support for Flemish independence (N-VA’s main goal) and only ambiguous ones concerning demands for more regional autonomy (another of its main objectives). Demand-side studies have confirmed that issue diversification can explain this apparent paradox, since the party was able to attract voters not only from the other most important Flemish separatist party (Vlaams Belang) but also from non-nationalist centre-right Flemish formations such as the Liberals and the Christian Democrats. Yet, these studies do not explain how N-VA has been able to avoid for about a decade another dilemma that SNRPs are usually confronted with. When effecting issue diversification, these parties gain more “moderate” voters, but they also usually alienate part of their core nationalist constituency. To use a nice expression coined by Sonia Alonso, “the more the party wins at the centre the more it loses at the extreme” (p. 221). We suggest that, although probably not exhausting this question, our approach helps explain this this puzzle.

Can you tell us more about your approach, which brings together historians and sociologists in order to enrich the political science concept of “issue diversification”? 
When I was working in Leuven with Koen and Rudi, I noticed that the best accounts of how SNRPs moved beyond an exclusive focus on the centre–periphery cleavage came from historical monographs on specific SNRPs, rather than from the relevant comparative literature in political science and political sociology. Yet, these historians were not focusing on issue diversification and did not cite (and probably were little aware of) such comparative literature. In other words, there was little communication between these two (or rather three) disciplines. We thus decided to try to bridge this gap by carrying out an in-depth qualitative and historical analysis of N-VA’s discourse. Our main contribution consists in a refinement of the concept of issue diversification. N-VA has not only gone beyond its niche in centre-periphery matters (as issue diversification has been understood so far), but it has also used the centre–periphery conflict as a frame to be cast on political, socio-economic and cultural matters. We have called this a “strategy of issue communitarisation”, by which we mean “the systematic construction within the fields of economy, politics and culture of an unresolvable antagonism between the Flemish and the Walloon/francophone community”. This allows explaining, at least in part, how the party could “win at the centre without losing at the extreme” between 2004 and 2014. Its diversification strategy is permeated by nationalist language. For instance, contrary to its predecessor, the Volksunie, which argued to be “neither left nor right”, N-VA has created a clearly centre-right profile in socioeconomic matters. Yet, its calls for lower taxes and a leaner state are always coupled with criticism of the Walloons’ welfare-dependency and the wastes of the Belgian federal administration, which allows the party to conclude that the solution to the economic problems of Flanders is not cutting welfare, but rather splitting the Flemish social security system from the Walloon one. 

What is the broader intellectual interest that drove your research in this direction? Is it that historical approaches are all the more necessary for understanding contemporary European politics now that foundational notions of Europe are being challenged?
Beyond the focus on issue diversification of this specific article, the main red thread of my recent publications (alone or with other researchers) is the interaction between economic and cultural arguments in the discourse of West European nationalist parties. In political science and political sociology, there is a tendency to consider economic and cultural issues to be independent from each other. Parties are often believed to specialise in either of these two axes, usually represented as “orthogonal” in visual representations of party positioning. This has been a very useful approach for a long time and has the undeniable advantage of favouring comparisons, hypothesis testing and generalisation. Yet, the recent breakthrough of radical right and populist parties dealing with socio-economic (mainly welfare) issues by means of chauvinist arguments based on (culturally defined) nativist claims has brought home to many observers that, as concluded by Hanspeter Kriesi and Silja Häusermann, “the boundaries between both dimensions have become blurred to the extent that it does not make sense to talk about a cultural versus an economic dimension of party competition anymore” (p. 227). Such an outcome is generally considered to be the slow outgrowth of the “crisis of welfare” begun in the mid-1970s. With their focus on slow historical processes, attention to detail and freedom from the parsimony required by theoretical modelling, historians can make a great contribution to the study of contemporary European politics and thus complement (rather than compete with) the work of political scientists and political sociologists. 

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Full citation of the article:
Abts Koen, Emmanuel Dalle Mulle, and Rudi Laermans. “Beyond Issue dDiversification: N-VA and the Communitarisation of Political, Economic and Cultural Conflicts in Belgium.” West European Politics 42, no. 4 (2019): 848–72. doi:10.1080/01402382.2019.1576407.

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Interview by Aditya Kiran Kakati, PhD candidate in International History and Anthropology and Sociology. Edited by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.
Illustration by yui / Shutterstock.com.