Role-Switching and Thematic Reallocation in Belgian Parliamentary Committees: A Longitudinal Research Note
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54195/plc.26691Keywords:
Parliamentary committees, Role theory, Issue competition, Belgian politics, Text-as-data, Thematic salienceAbstract
Do parties change what they discuss when they move between government and opposition? This research note compares French-language interventions by francophone parties in the Belgian federal Interior and Justice committees across four matched first-year government windows between 2011 and 2026. It examines whether changes in institutional role coincide with recurring shifts in thematic attention, focusing on the Parti Socialiste’s (PS) emphasis on budget and finance while comparing six parties across five themes. PS used about 2.7 times as many budget- and finance-related terms in opposition as in government, averaging 7.65 rather than 2.82 relevant terms per 1,000 words. Across the latest change of government, eight party-theme combinations showed statistically reliable shifts after correction for multiple comparisons, most involving parties whose institutional role changed. The findings suggest that moving between government and opposition does not transform parties’ agendas across the board. Instead, it selectively increases attention to themes that fit a party’s established profile and can be used for scrutiny in the relevant committee arena.
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Data Availability Statement
The corpus is derived from publicly available CRIV parliamentary reports (Belgian Federal Parliament). Replication scripts and the processed dataset are available from the author upon request.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Vittorio Poppe (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
