Voting for ‘the other side’? The curious case of the Brussels Capital Region

This chapter turns our attention to the special case of Brussels. Benjamin Blanckaert, Didier Caluwaerts, and Silvia Erzeel focus on voting patterns in the Brussels Capital Region (BCR). Unlike unilingual Flanders and Wallonia, the BCR is officially bilingual and both Flemish and francophone parties can field candidates. Therefore, Brussels voters can vote for a party of the other ethnolinguistic group (i.e. cross-ethnic voting) if they so desire. However, very little is hitherto known about the extent to which cross-ethnic voting takes place in the Brussels region, and which parties benefit most from cross-ethnic voting? The authors argue that cross-ethnic voting does indeed take place, contrary to all expectations because the political institutions incentivize co-ethnic voting. Moreover, they find that voters who engage in cross-ethnic voting, are primarily ‘unserved’ voters, more precisely: francophone voters who vote for Flemish right-wing regionalist and radical right arguably due to a lack of ‘offer’ of such parties on the francophone side.

ISBN:978-0-367-61027-2

Keywords:Cross-ethnic voting, Brussels, Consociational democracy, Belgian exceptionalism