Belgium’s experiment: 590 days without government
In the current issue of Governance (25.2, April 2012), four distinguished Belgian academics discuss what happened when the country’s parties spent almost six hundred days after the June 2010 elections negotiating over a new government. “Surprisingly,” , say Carl Devos of Ghent University and and Dave Sinardet of the Free University of Brussels”life without a government has been pretty normal.” They explain why in their commentary (open access). Meanwhile Geert Bouckaert and Marleen Brans of the University of Leuven argue that the crisis was actually a period “when two types of transitional governments operated together: a caretaker one, which was disappearing, and a ‘constituent’ one, which was emerging.” Open access to their commentary.
