Faire campagne pour le parti, mais jouer ses cartes : enquête ethnographique d’une personnalisation « décentralisée » et « encadrée » du jeu électoral au sein du Parti socialiste en Région Bruxelles-Capitale (scrutins communaux et régional 2018-2019)

Kalaï, Inès
(2026)

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Authors
Supervisors
Roginsky, Sandrine  
Abstract
(en) This dissertation offers a study from below of the personalization of politics, based on an ethnographic investigation conducted among candidates of the Brussels Socialist Party during the 2018 municipal and 2019 regional campaigns. In a semi-open list electoral system, candidates must simultaneously embody the partisan collective and distinguish themselves individually in order to attract preference votes. Moreover, in a Brussels context marked by deep social, economic, and cultural divides, these electoral practices can only be understood in context, at the intersection of institutional, partisan, and territorial logics. Drawing on one year of participant observation, twenty-eight interviews, and the collection of campaign materials, this research sheds light on the ordinary making of electoral work. It shows that the personalization of politics is a process both structured and unevenly decentralized: while the electoral system theoretically encourages all candidates to run person-centered campaigns, the party remains the main organizer of internal competition, acting as a mediating device between the structural constraints of the electoral system and the candidates’ practices. Personalization, however, takes diverse forms depending on the trajectories and resources available to candidates. Through their communication practices, they unevenly mobilize economic, social, and symbolic capital, which shape the forms and styles their campaigns take. By articulating the institutional, organizational, and individual levels, this dissertation highlights two transversal puzzles: first, how personalization reconfigures the relationship between the individual and the party collective; and second, how this collective and individual making of the electoral process contributes to shaping political representation in Brussels.
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Kalaï, I. (2026). Faire campagne pour le parti, mais jouer ses cartes : enquête ethnographique d’une personnalisation « décentralisée » et « encadrée » du jeu électoral au sein du Parti socialiste en Région Bruxelles-Capitale (scrutins communaux et régional 2018-2019). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/279713