Ethnic minority party formation and success in Europe

ABSTRACT

What causes ethnic minority parties (EMPs) to emerge, and why do only some of them become electorally successful? I test commonly offered explanations for variation in EMP emergence and success with a large-N, cross-national quantitative analysis on an original dataset of European legislative elections in the period 1990–2012. Using generalized linear mixed and Heckman selection models, I find that ethnic groups that are native to their state and that have previous experience with autonomy are most likely to establish and support EMPs. These historical factors eclipse the influence of variables like electoral rules, the state’s party system and political culture, and support from kin states and international organizations.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic politics
• ethnic parties
• Europe
• quantitative analysis

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Carol Leff, Robert Pahre, William Bernhard, Milan Svolik, Rachael Koev and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For instance, it is quite common for Russophile parties in former Soviet republics to work with Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party. EMPs throughout former Yugoslav republics often go as far as to share the name of one of the dominant political parties in their ethnic group’s kin state (consider, for instance, the Bosnian-minority Party of Democratic Action parties in Serbia and Kosovo, or the Serbian Radical Party in Bosnia and Herzegovina).

2 I elected to exclude Belgium’s Walloons from my analysis since the two major ethnic groups of Belgium constitute a majority of the population in their respective regions. Further, Belgium’s political system, which contains dual Dutch and French-speaking parties of every major ideological affiliation, is quite unique in Europe. I do not conceive of such parties as ethnic minority parties in the sense that I am considering here, but rather as ideology-based parties in the proto-states of Wallonia and Flanders.

3 These historical variables are, of course, often related to each other. Historical presence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for territorial attachment, and states that have enjoyed dominance or autonomy are also likely to have the other historical characteristics as well. However, these are still distinct variables; there are several cases of native but not territorially attached ethnic groups (e.g. Germans in Hungary and Roma minorities in a number of states). There are also some cases of formerly dominant groups that are not coded as native (e.g. Russians in the Baltic states, Serbs in Solvenia). Moreover, each of these factors can plausibly be expected to exhibit an independent influence on the dependent variable, as theorized above.

4 One problem with using minority population share as a measurement of ethnic group strength is that it does not tell us how many of these residents are also citizens of that country and therefore in possession of full voting rights. However, it proved difficult to obtain accurate and comparable data on the citizenship status of most groups in my analysis. To remedy this, I constructed three alternative measurements of the population share variable, each of which reduces the population of predominantly migrant groups by 25, 33 or 50 per cent, while keeping native group population the same. I do not argue that any one of these numbers accurately captures this effect, but the broad range serves as a sort of sensitivity analysis in controlling for the disparate citizenship statuses of the two types of groups. When I employed these citizenship-adjusted measurements of population share, I discovered that the effect on the results was negligible.

5 An alternative logistic regression model with fixed effects for country, county-ethnic group and year did not produce substantially different results.

Additional information

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Dan Koev

Dan Koev was born in Yambol, Bulgaria. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014. He has taught at Regent University since 2015, currently serving as Associate Professor and Chair of the Government, History and Criminal Justice Department. His research interests include nationalist and right-wing populist parties, the political strategies of ethnic minorities, the role of international organizations in the protection of human rights, and the intersection between religion and politics.