Why do party actors use democratic innovations to conduct internal reforms? The case of the transformation of the Belgian French-speaking Christian Democratic Party

The literature on party reform highlights the extent to which political parties opened 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 internal reform. This chapter examines why party actors choose (or accept) to use participatory and deliberative tools to conduct internal reforms. To explore this question, we focus on the Belgian French-speaking Christian Democrat party (cdH) and its internal reform process (2020-2022). Our cross-analysis of interviews with party actors, party materials, press reports and direct observations emphasizes a strong steering of the process by the party leader and close collaborators. It generated tensions between the normative ideals of decentralization, openness, and promotion of democratic innovations and the instrumentalization of the latter to side-line the parliamentary group and to circumvent traditional barriers to party change in a context of centralisation and disintermediation of intra-party dynamics.