Abstract

Political science in the West has long dealt quasi-exclusively with the experiences of the stable two-party systems of the Anglo-American type and the so-called continental European polities.The smaller European democracies have been neglected. Belgium too was terra incognita to most political scientists.In the late sixties the tide has turned. A vast literature on the political processes of countries such as Belgium has come into being. This article deals with studies on Belgian politics which have been published in the United States and in Britain between 1965 and 1975.Two themes in particular were selected: «verzuiling» and « he politics of accomodation». The main conclusion is that the studies under review have added a considerable amount of insights, findings and hypotheses to our knowledge of political processes in Belgium. We might impute this positive balance to three characteristics which mark most of these studies : a strong tendency towards comparative analysis, the use of fruitful theoretical concepts, and the use of sophisticated techniques for handling empirical data.