“Tomar partido”. Para una sociología de los militantes desde los cierres de campaña

Abstract

In order to study political rallies it is first necessary to understand how parties are part of the partisan identity of urban spaces and how belonging to the urban space in turn produces party identity. Meetings are, furthermore, privileged observation points of the partisan milieu and the ethos of activists. Ethnographic analysis, combined with interviews, has allowed a better understanding of the reconfiguration of militancy in Mexico: the affirmation of local party organizations (the “territorial structure”) in relation to corporatist structures in the case of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the emergence of independent entrepreneurs of mobilization in the case of the National Action Party (PAN), in spite of the strength of the party apparatus, and the diversity of the militant frameworks and the loose relationship to the party label in the case of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). This study also highlights the variations of militant sociability in relation to parties as well as the variable importance of family or networks of affinity. Finally, this study of rallies is also the occasion to once again consider the political habitus of popular population in Mexico.