My paper proposal starts from the methodological assumption that in order to study political rallies as key events, it is first and foremost necessary to understand how parties are grounded in peculiar urban spaces, from which they draw cadres and resources and that they politically shape. Specific modes of belonging to given urban networks indeed nurture party identities and allegiances. Meetings are, furthermore, privileged sites of observation of the “partisan environment” and of parties’ ethos. Ethnographic fieldwork, combined with in-depth interviews with party cadres and activists, may provide us with a better understanding of the reconfiguration of militancy in Mexico: the role of local civic organizations (the “territorial structure”) in relation to the party corporatist structures in the case of the Partido revolucionario institucional (PRI) ; the emergence of independent entrepreneurs of mobilization in the case of the Partido acción nacional (PAN) ; and in spite of the strength of the party apparatus, the diversity of militant networks and their loose relationship to the party label in the case of the Partido de la revolución demoracitica (PRD). Drawing upon the as-yet unpublished results of a collective quantitative survey led during the 2006 presidential campaign mass-meetings, this study also highlights the variations of militant sociability in relation to the organizational peculiarities of parties as well as to the importance of family links and networks of affinity. Finally, this study of rallies also gives occasion to once again focus on the tricky issue of the “moral economy” of mobilisation in contemporary Mexican politics. Hélène Combes is a researcher at the CERI, Sciences Po Paris. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III),and is an expert on political parties and social movements in Latin America. She also teaches in the political science masters program at Sciences Po Paris and has taught in France, Chile, Dominican Republic, Spain, Argentina and México. She is currently writing a book on the history of the PRD (Partido de la revolución democratic) in Mexico (1989-2000) and is working as a coordinator, together with Sergio Tamayo (UAM-A),on a collective research on political rallies in Mexico City. She also heads the Study Group on Organizations and Political Parties at the Political Science French Association: www.geopp.org
