Referendum Against Sortition? Debates on Institutionalization of Democratic Innovations in Belgian Parliaments

Since the 2010s, several Belgian parliaments have begun institutionalizing participatory
democratic mechanisms, most notably sortition—through the creation of deliberative commissions— and popular votation, supported by a constitutional revision enabling regional-level popular consultations. Yet the relationship between these two instruments of democratic innovation remains undertheorized: are they mutually reinforcing components of a broader participatory turn, or do they rest on competing, even incompatible, conceptions of democracy? This article addresses this question by analyzing how Belgian parliamentarians simultaneously engage with sortition and referendums across parliamentary debates in four legislatures—the Walloon and Brussels Parliaments, legally
empowered to organize non-binding popular consultations since 2014 and progressively
institutionalizing sortition since 2019, and the Federal House of Representatives and Senate, where proposals for randomly selected bodies have circulated since 2013 alongside ongoing discussions on constitutional referendum provisions. Through a comparative qualitative analysis of parliamentary proceedings and legislative proposals, the article identifies four distinct political imaginaries structuring parliamentarians' positions: an antipolitical/dégagiste imaginary, a deliberative imaginary, a radical democratic imaginary, and an imaginary of electoral fundamentalism. It shows that references to the referendum are strategically mobilized in each of these imaginaries—either in combination with or in
opposition to sortition—to legitimize, postpone, or contest the integration of random selection within representative institutions.