ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates to what extent voters in the Brussels Capital Region (BCR) cast votes for parties of the other linguistic group, and shows that a fair number of voters do vote for ‘the other side’. It discusses the consociational nature of the Brussels political system, and focuses on the previous literature on cross-ethnic voting, before outlining the methods and the results. The chapter explains voters’ support for parties on the other side of the ethnolinguistic divide; hence, French-speaking voters’ support for Flemish parties and Dutch-speaking voters’ support for francophone parties in Brussels. Even though the motivations of voters are still unclear, what the results do show, however, is that a logic of separation is not a conditio sine qua non to turn a divided society into a stable democracy. Even though cross-ethnic voting does take place, the BCR is quite stable.
