Abstract

The main point developed in this paper is the demonstration of the attitudes characterizing the major Belgian political parties. This is achieved through a factorial analysis applied to a set of data resulting from the answers given by the major parties leaders to various specific questions regarding bath the prevailing economie as well as institutional issues at the eve of the election of December 17th, 1978. From that point it has been possible to compare those results with the one obtained from the data concerning the 1974 programmes.The results of the statistical analysis show that white in 1974 the strongest positive associations between parties corresponded to tht traditional ethical and socioeconomic cleavages, four years later the linguistic dimension was predominant with a stronger homogeneity characterizing the Dutchspeaking group than what could be observed for the Frenchspeaking one.The factorial analysis allows for a graphical representation of the respective positioning of the parties along the statistically significant factorial axes. Applied to two sets of data, the first one on purely institutional matters, the second one on both institutional and economic policies, the analysis reveals clearly through the various graphs presented the linguistic cleavage as well as the divergences about the extent of regional competences and minorities protection, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the degrees of regional economic autonomy and of public intervention in the business life.