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Compared with other major European cities, the Brussels-Capital Region has a unique configuration in terms of the political representation of elected representatives descended from diverse ethnocultural groups, and in particular Muslim elected representatives. Nearly one out of five members of the Parliament of the Brussels-Capital Region is of Muslim origin. This is all the more unusual given that, for the first time in Brussels and in the entire European Union, one of the seats in the Brussels Parliament is held by a Muslim member who wears a headscarf. The present chapter is based on documentary work as well as an empirical approach carried out using interviews which were conducted with Brussels MPs and community stakeholders mobilised before the elections as well as an ethnographic observation of the election campaign. Its objective is to understand the explanatory factors regarding this political representation which is quite unusual in Europe, by formulating the hypothesis of the deciding influence of institutional parameters combined with the demographic evolution and community mobilisation of Muslims in Brussels.

A range of contemporary European societies have witnessed a decline in formal political participation. In many countries, turnout at elections, and membership of political parties and trade unions is in decline. Yet there seem to be counter trends, with an increase in activist political participation (marches and demonstrations). In this chapter we will examine these developments to assess how citizens in contemporary Europe express themselves politically, and investigate whether declining engagement with formal politics should be seen as a problem for citizenship. To a large extent, the answer to this question depends upon how one views citizenship theoretically.

Chapter 3 provides an analysis of voter turnout by black union members. In this chapter, high union participatory trends become quite apparent—particularly due to the SSEU’s political history and union leadership in New York City politics. In addition to evaluating black union member participatory trends, this chapter assesses and compares the overall participatory tendencies of black groups using national data sources. Participation rates of blacks are also compared to those of nonblack union members within the original SSEU Survey as well as with nonblack populations from national data sets. Utilizing multiple data sources both illuminates the extensive variation that exists in participation rates at the local and national levels and highlights the differences between voter turnout rates among union members and across the larger US population.

In Chapter 3, I thus argue that we can locate in Deleuze, Guattari and the Zapatistas a participatory strategy for creating a revolutionary body politic that is able to sustain these prefigurative transformations. A participatory body politic does not simply establish new conditions for political life based on a ‘more just’ sphere of political action whose foundational principles are still controlled by political representatives. Nor does a participatory body politic merely aim to establish anti-institutions, whose sole purpose is to undermine all forms of representation and await the possibility that something new, and hopefully better, may emerge. Rather, a participatory and revolutionary body politic is built and sustained through an expressive process whose founding conditions are constantly undergoing a high degree of direct and immanent transformation by the various practices and people who are also transformed, to varying degrees, by its deployment.

Chapter 5 uses the theory laid in chapter 2 to test the Colombian case. It begins by documenting the particular nature of Colombian migration, specifically how it differs from both Mexican and Ecuadorian migration. The chapter find that communities with higher levels of migrants are more likely to have increased electoral competitiveness, more political participation at the local level, and vote for a more varied number of parties at the national level. It also shows that these localities played a key role in the election of Juan Manuel Santos and the success of the 2016 peace referendum.

The 2007 general election was the first opportunity for Irish prisoners to cast their ballots. This chapter examines their voting behaviour and political engagement. The first part sets out the research process, briefly sketches some key characteristics of the Irish penal landscape, and gives a description of the three institutions where prisoners were surveyed. Using data collected in these institutions, the second part outlines the results of the first survey of its kind among prisoners. It examines voting behaviour, party preference, political involvement and wider issues around levels of trust in political institutions and concludes with an analysis of who votes in prison. The final section examines the level of voting among prisoners in subsequent polls, to try to determine preliminary trends.