Why do political parties use democratic innovations for internal reforms? The case of the Belgian French-speaking Christian Democratic Party

This chapter examines why party actors choose to use (or accept the use of) participatory and deliberative tools to conduct internal reforms. The literature on party reform highlights the extent to which political parties open up their decision-making processes or rely on digital participatory tools in key areas such as the selection of their candidates or leader. However, parties less frequently employ inclusive participatory processes and democratic innovations for the purpose of internal reform. The chapter addresses this gap in the literature and focuses on the Belgian French-speaking Christian Democrat party (cdH) and its internal reform process (2020-2022). The analysis of interviews with party actors, party materials, and press reports, along with direct observations, emphasises a strong steering of the process by the party leader and close collaborators. These tensions between the normative ideals of decentralisation, openness, and the promotion of democratic innovations and the instrumentalisation of the latter to sideline the parliamentary group and to circumvent traditional barriers to party change in a context of centralisation and the disintermediation of intra-party dynamics.