Richard Banegas’s scientific contributions

Commercialisation of the vote, citizenship and democratic consolidation in Benin. In Benin, democratic consolidation and the creation of new systems of political subjectivity are taking place, paradoxically, in the melting-pot of clientelist practices and the more general matrix of the «government of the belly ». We can thus see that the «political migration» of electors, who «eat up» indifferently the money of the candidates, has become a means of asserting the rights of the «individual-citizen». The hypothesis of the commercialisation of democracy is then examined in order to understand the complex and ambivalent methods for «taming» the pluralism of the modem world. The repertoire of the belly, which is generally used to stigmatise the injustice and greed of politicians, is now being used as an expression of equity, social justice and democratic accountability. In order to explain this, we must go beyond the utilitarian approach to electoral dealings and analyse the moral systems in which representations of power and money are set and take a deeper look into the «internal architecture of civic virtue» of ordinary citizens. As long as we can distinguish the registers of cunning from those of the trust, humility and «self-respect» which compose the moral capital of the «xomé» (the belly, interiority) , we can see that in the melting-pot of «government of the belly», decisive changes are taking place in the representations of political accountability.