Electoral Incentives and ‘Shape-Shifting’ Representation: Representative Claims of Ethnic Minority MPs in Kosovo and Serbia

ABSTRACT

This article explores how members of parliament (MPs) from minority backgrounds in Serbia and Kosovo use institutional incentives to perform as elected minority representatives. In contrast to the previous research that has viewed political agents as simply being acted upon or reactive, this article develops a less deterministic view of the effects of electoral incentives on political agents. It argues for a more dynamic analysis that focuses on the ways in which political actors mobilise institutions for strategic purposes.

KEYWORDS:

• Shape-shifting representation
• minority representation
• electoral system
• representative claims
• Balkans

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Mónica Brito Vieira, Nina Caspersen, Netina Tan, Dušan Spasojević and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions in different stages of this research. I would like to thank the Open Society Foundations Scholarship Programs for funding this research through their Civil Society Scholar Award.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 In the North of Kosovo, Serbia’s government still manages and funds parallel institutions (education, health care, social services). Since 2008, Serbia has also organised local elections in the northern Kosovo municipalities with a majority Serb population. The Serb National Council was supposed to be replaced by the Association of Serb Municipalities, a self-governing association of all municipalities in Kosovo with a majority Serb population. Although the formation of the Association was part of the 2013 Brussels Agreement, the agreement has still not been implemented.

2 Since the Albanian minority boycotted the 2011 Population Census, the data used here is from the 2002 Population Census.

3 While both Serbia and Kosovo were involved in ethnic conflicts during the Yugoslav wars (see Jović, 2009), the war was fought upon Kosovo’s territory. Inter-ethnic tensions throughout the 1990s between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, followed by war and NATO bombing, resulted in many casualties, hundreds of thousands of refugees and internally displaced persons, burned homes and devastated villages. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, after international negotiations to determine the final status of Kosovo failed. The Ahtisaari Plan, which was the result of these negotiations, was later incorporated into the new constitution and legislative framework of Kosovo adopted after 2008. The implementation of the Ahtisaari Plan was, until the end of the supervised independence phase in 2012, monitored by the International Civilian Office (ICO) in Kosovo, whose representative had the power to impose laws and remove political officials from office. Although several EU member states still do not recognise Kosovo, the EU has contributed significantly to the Kosovo statebuilding processes. In particular, its EULEX mission, established in 2008, has aimed to address the rule of law and corruption in Kosovo. The mission is still active, but handed over many of its responsibilities to the Kosovo institutions (van der Borgh, le Roy, & Zweerink, 2018).

4 Half of the guaranteed seats are reserved for the Serb national minority; four seats are reserved for the representatives of Ashkali, Egyptian and Roma minorities; three are guaranteed for the Bosniak minority; two for the Turkish minority in Kosovo and one for the Gorani community (Constitution of Kosovo, 2008, Art. 64).

5 This approach to representative claims analysis is open to the criticism that it is not sufficiently applicable to empirical research (de Wilde, 2013, p. 280). de Wilde, for instance, criticised a distinction between maker and subject of representation as being of no use in an empirical analysis. However, here it was found to be of great benefit, since it facilitated an analysis of how MPs portray themselves and their parliamentary positions. For instance, when MPs claim: “My political party serves as the only legitimate representative of minority interests”, they construct themselves as merely a voice of the party, which allows them to shift the blame to the party for any controversial decisions. For other useful empirical operationalisations of representative claims analysis, see Guasti and Almeida (2019).

6 Democratic Party, which was at that time a ruling party in Serbia.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Open Society Foundations: [Civil Society Scholar Award].

Notes on contributors

Jelena Lončar

Jelena Lončar is an assistant professor at the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Political Science. She holds a PhD in Politics from the University of York, UK. Her research interests include political representation, ethnic politics, quotas and civil society. In recent years, her research has focused on the performance of minority representation and the performativity of the representative claims about and for minority groups. E-mail: [email protected]; https://www.linkedin.com/in/jelena-loncar/