Paradoxes of minority representation: a comparison of Russophone political attitudes in Estonia and Latvia

ABSTRACT

While Estonia’s Russophones have had comparatively little presence in national-level institutions yet have been subject to accommodative policies, Latvia’s Russophones have enjoyed consistent descriptive representation in parliament but have gained relatively less on policy outcomes. Given that existing theory suggests that descriptive and substantive representation should be associated with both heightened political efficacy and regime approval, this presents a useful comparative puzzle. Our analysis of Eurobarometer public opinion data suggests that, while Russian-speakers evince less political efficacy and democratic satisfaction than others in both countries, Latvia’s Russophones are less satisfied with their political regime than are their Estonian coethnics.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic politics
• representation
• Estonia
• Latvia
• democratic satisfaction
• political attitudes

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Both ethnic Estonians and Latvians have traditionally been Protestant while ethnic Russians are largely Orthodox, with a more significant proportion of the titular nationality in both countries self-identifying as secular (Duvold, Berglund, and Ekman 2020, 41).

2. Contrary to these policy gains, however, salient elements of the Constitution remain largely unfulfilled, including Articles 51 and 52, which provide for the use of minority languages in local administration.

3. Latvia uses a proportional representation system for parliamentary elections with five regional districts. Cianetti 2015, 63) writes of the Latvian parliament, ‘The routine exclusion of [Harmony] from governmental coalitions has meant that the large [Latvian] moderate and nationalist parties have an almost mathematical guarantee to end up in government. It has been noted that this situation of guaranteed power might weaken these parties’ accountability toward the electorate.’

4. While Duvold, Berglund, and Ekman (2020) is an invaluable resource for understanding political culture in the Baltics and the influence of ethnic background, one improvement made in this article is regression analysis with control variables, which the mentioned work employs only sparingly.

5. It would be informative to disaggregate data on the Russophone population into citizen and non-citizen respondents to understand the effects of citizenship on political efficacy among this group. No such data, however, exists in the Eurobarometer surveys.

6. Russophones are underrepresented in the data relative to their overall population proportions, which are 30% in Latvia and 27.9% in Estonia, according to the most recent census data. In the 2016 Eurobarometer, only 21.9% of respondents in Estonia and 21.8% in Latvia responded in Russian; in 2017, these proportions were 19.7% and 18.4%; and in 2018 they were 17% and 18.7% (European Commission 2017).

7. The wording for the survey item on voice is the following: ‘Please tell me to what extent you agree or disagree with each of the following statements [four-point scale]: My voice counts in (OUR COUNTRY).’

8. The wording for the survey item on satisfaction with democracy is the following: ‘On the whole, are you very satisfied, fairly satisfied, not very satisfied or not at all satisfied with the way democracy works in (OUR COUNTRY)?’

9. The wording for the survey item asking about the discussion of local and national politics is the following: ‘When you get together with friends or relatives, would you say you discuss frequently, occasionally or never about [local politics; national politics]?’

10. The bivariate correlation between Russophone and Conservative is r = −.29 in Estonia and r = −.20 in Latvia. For a description of the ideological and ethnic character of the party systems in both Estonia and Latvia, see Cianetti (2019, 48–59).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Chereson

In Memoriam for Dr. Peter Chereson, Peter was passionate about politics and international events, especially in Eastern Europe and the Baltics. He was a first generation American with Latvian and Ukrainian roots. He spoke Latvian, studied at the University of Latvia, traveled extensively throughout Latvia, and worked with the Joint Baltic American National Committee for two years after obtaining his master’s degree. He spent a semester in Kyiv gathering research and conducting interviews for his doctoral thesis on the Maidan Revolution. Peter was a true scholar with wide-ranging interests, including music, politics, film, and literature. He traveled extensively throughout the US and Europe, experiencing each country’s culture and traditions. He was fervent about the freedoms offered by a democratic form of government and was dedicated to understanding the motivations of people fighting for that same freedom. Rasma Chereson

Kyle W. Estes

Kyle W. Estes is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He completed his dissertation, entitled ‘Post-Soviet Ethnic Politics and Public Goods Provision,’ and received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in August 2019. He is currently expanding this into a book project comparing the ties between ethnic and distributive politics in Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, and Latvia.