Crossing boundaries: How political parties use constructive appeals to shared identities in the Brussels Capital Region

Consociational theorists have hypothesized that consociational power sharing would ease the path for the development of a shared identity, that transcends ethnic divisions and traditional group identities (McGarry & O’Leary, 2007; 2009). However, empirical research on shared identities in consociations leads to inconsistent findings. While some studies seem to corroborate this claim (Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000; McNicholl, 2018), others see few signs of a genuinely shared identity (Noor et al., 2010; Wenzel et al., 2007) or question its political and societal significance (Jarrett, 2016a, 2018; Tonge & Gomez, 2015). This paper aims to contribute to the literature by examining the different ways in which political parties appeal to shared identities in a consociational democracy, with a specific focus on the Brussels Capital Region of Belgium (BCR). The BCR presents an exceptional case, in which the power sharing institutions may be losing relevance. Although initially created in 1989 to pacify linguistic and political divisions between Dutch and French speakers, these institutions no longer fully represent the diverse Brussels constituency, among whom linguistic tensions appear to have been overcome. Based on a thematic analysis of the party manifestos for the 2019 regional elections in Brussels, and 30 interviews with elected representatives, conducted between November 2022 and March 2023, we find that shared identities can be approached from an institutional and a societal perspective. Moreover, we show that the different political parties leverage shared identities for different purposes, in line with their political agendas.