Vote or Party Strategy? Understanding the Electoral Success of Ethnic Minorities in Brussels

European democracies have grown ethnically diverse in the recent years. Still, ethnic minority groups remain underrepresented in politics in general. Despite the theoretical argument asserting that ethnic minorities should perform better in systems allowing voters to cast intraparty preferences, empirical studies bring mixed results. In particular, scholars highlight the role of both parties and voters in explaining the electoral success or failure of ethnic minority candidates. Using data on regional elections between 1995 and 2014 in Brussels, our study shows that even though parties have made gradual efforts to include ethnic minorities on their lists, voters appear to be an important force behind the election of ethnic minorities in Brussels. However, the positive impact of preference votes seems to decrease overtime, as parties themselves become more inclusive and tend to allocate more realistic positions to their ethnic minority candidates in recent elections. Nevertheless, this study highlights strong variations between parties. On the one hand, some parties are more prone to nominate ethnic minority candidates, and at the same time voters of these parties are more likely to support these candidates via preferential voting. On the other hand, there are fewer ethnic minority candidates on other party lists and if elected, they tend to owe their election to their list position rather than to their preference votes. With these results in mind, we will pay further attention to candidates themselves in a longitudinal perspective in order to understand the dynamics of candidate nomination strategies in both type of parties.