Door de aanhoudende commotie over de parlementaire pensioenen komt het debat over politieke vernieuwing opnieuw op gang in de Wetstraat. Daarbij wordt gesproken over een soberdere politiek, zowel qua verloning als qua aantal volksvertegenwoordigers.

18 comments

  2. Very interesting to see those numbers side by side. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing though. Seems costly, but also feels more fair and democratic I think?

  3. De onvermijdelijke conclusie is dat Belgie veel democratischer wordt geregeerd dan Duitsland, Nederland, Frankrijk, en de VS.

  6. Also depends heavily on your region, Brussels and German Speaking Belgium has way more parliamentarians per capita compared to Flanders.

    Not taking into account the federal level:

    25 MP’s for 80.000 inhabitants (1 per 3200 inhabitants) in Eupen-Malmedy for just the communal competencies, for example skews the ratio quite a bit. Same for Brussels where the Brussels capital region has a parliament of 89 members for 1.2 million inhabitants (1 MP per 13793 inhabitants) For only the “Regional” competencies.

    Whilst Flanders has 124 for +- 6875000 inhabitants. (including Dutch speaking Brusselaars) thus 1 MP for 55453 inhabitants. And takes care of both the Regional and Communal competenties. For Brussels to compare it evenly you would need to add the 25 MP’s in the Dutch and French speaking community that represent Brussels to get the correct comparison landing you at about 1 MP per 10526 inhabitants.

    ​

    This is not to say, ha you see Flanders is doing better. Those numbers are, to some extend, a consequence of the smaller size (Eupen/Malmedy) and larger complexity (Brussels) but they do skew the national numbers.

  7. Unpopular opinion probably but I don’t really get this obsession about cutting the number of parliament members. Federal states will always have more of them, so no use comparing to the notably centralised countries France and Netherlands. Instead we should focus on how our system can increase political participation and involvement, something that’s notably poor in Belgium while federal systems should actually be good at those. Right now it just feels like we pay for a federal system without getting its merits.

    I think it would be better if we would just simplify the federal system by abolishing the communities so that the regions are the only federal entities. Additionally, I would make the electoral districts for regional elections a lot smaller. In that way you’ll have cut the number of MP’s a bit while also getting people closer to their representatives.

  11. Ok, is veel maar nergens ter wereld is een land georganiseerd zoals het onze.
    Een reorganisatie zal voor zo veel discussies zorgen waar enkel extremen (PVDA en VB) van zullen profiteren.

  13. Als Nederlander kan ik het zeker niet aanraden om zo weinig leden te hebben, wij hebben een enorm burn-out probleem erdoor.

  14. It is widely believed that the US may have **too few** members of congress for the population, leading to a situation where each representative represents “too many” people which can lead to a democratic deficit: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/05/31/u-s-population-keeps-growing-but-house-of-representatives-is-same-size-as-in-taft-era/ The “commotie” about Belgium supposedly having too many parliamentarians is misguided. You want to have many representatives, so each one serves a smaller community, providing better representation that is “dichter bij de mensen”. It’s a bad idea to cut down on democratic representation and institutions. The costs associated with a working parliament are negligible compared to the federal and regional budgets.

  15. Afslanken, vereenvoudigen en terug daadkrachtiger worden. Zoals een bedrijf op de rand van faillissement ook zou doen.

  17. Dit betekent op papier een directere deelname van de burgers aan de politiek. Dat is wel als je buiten beschouwing laat dat er hier stemplicht is. Hoeveel parlementsleden zijn er in in die andere landen in verhouding met het aantal stemmen?

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