Holding together or tearing apart? Exploring cross-ethnic voting and vote-seeking in Brussels
Even tough Belgium is a textbook example of a consociation, having almost perfected the electoral logic of separation, it is possible in the Brussels Capital Region (BCR) to vote and seek votes across the ethnolinguistic divide. However, only little is known about such crossethnic voting and vote-seeking in the BCR. Most studies on crossethnic voting and vote-seeking focus on the party-side and lead to contradictory results. Moreover, the literature almost exclusively focuses on a limited number of cases (such as Northern Ireland or Bosnia-Herzegovina). This is why this research project aims to explore and explain to what extent and why voters and parties/candidates in the BCR cross ethnic lines in the electoral arena. In order to answer these research questions, the project applies a multi-method design. On the one hand, a quantitative/deductive approach allows us to explore patterns of cross-ethnic voting/vote-seeking and test our hypotheses. On the other hand, a qualitative/inductive approach enables us to understand the causal mechanisms at play and conduct an in-depth study of the motivations and strategies of voters and parties/candidates. The key objective of this project is to make a theoretical, methodological and empirical contribution to the scholarship on cross-ethnic voting and vote-seeking in consociational democracies. By doing so, this research will generate novel insights into the dynamics of ethnic conflict and how divided societies can be governed.
