Acceso usuarios
Éric Fassin
This article presents the results of a field study carried out over seven years in a social housing complex in the northern suburbs of Paris. One of the conclusions of the study is that individual and collective identities as well as social relations are, in a neighborhood of this sort, largely structured by categories of race and ethnicity. We find that ethnicity itself, as understood and produced by voters, is one of the determinants of identity-based voting.
The subjective relationship to national origin, and, more broadly, the “ethnicization” of cognitive frameworks, are keys to understanding why French citizens of African origin (who make up about half the population of the housing project in question) vote almost exclusively for the left, while a significant proportion of “native” French voters vote for the National Front or, in the most recent presidential election, for Nicolas Sarkozy.
